Sunday Serial: Bookmark Managers!

Wow is it cold out there! Rhonda and I stayed in yesterday after running a thousand errands and taking Moscato to and from the groomer yesterday (they did a very nice job on her). We guzzled some of Bellview Winery’s 2024 Chardonnay and Rosé from the growlers I filled while out and about once we settled in and had some cheese. It’s spritzes and burrata time before the Super Bowl.

Bellview Winery’s 2024 Chardonnay and Rosé

I finally got the Mustang unstuck from the ice in the driveway. It’s hard to imagine that such a powerful vehicle could be rendered helpless by a few blobs of ice, but there you have it. I was able to drive Aaron’s Mini Cooper all week, so there’s nothing to complain about. It’s fun to drive different cars and have an appreciation for their differences. I get to drive the WRX on the weekends and when we travel, and the Mustang to work most days. Driving the Mini is a neat change of pace.

Bookmark Managers!

Why use a dedicated bookmark manager? In addition to the features that each one brings, the main reason is that it’s a great way to indulge in trying out different browsers, if you’re just browser curious, or if you actually need to use different browsers depending upon what you’re doing. I have long used both Safari and Chrome, because both of the last two school districts in which I’ve worked were Google shops, and Chrome is a better fit for Google suite apps. So with a bookmark manager, you can hop between different browsers but keep all of your bookmarks in one place. This is especially helpful if you switch between operating systems and browsers, and your manager supports multiple platforms.

Raindrop.io

Raindrop.io is exactly what I just mentioned above: a multi-platform bookmark manager. Getting bookmarks into Raindrop is dead simple, and it supports a number of organizational features, including folders, tags, and pile of filters. It is organized like an email app, such that new bookmarks show up in an inbox, and you can organize them for later use.

Raindrop.io recently added an LLM feature for paid users, which will organize your bookmarks, suggest tags, and excise broken links. This is an exciting feature that perfectly envisions what AI should be doing for us: making our lives easier by removing the drudgery of organizing and maintaining data by leveraging our practices and preferences.

ExtraBar + Shiori

I found ExtraBar when Louie Plummer posted about it on Amerpie. I tried it out, thinking that it might be a replacement for Bartender, which has gotten a little wonky since Tahoe came out. It is decidedly not a Bartender replacement, and appeals to uses who enjoy employing links across macOS in apps that support them.

There’s a lot you could write about ExtraBar, and maybe if the utility finds some traction in my life, I’ll do so, but for now, I’m just going to focus on Shiori. It’s a paid plugin for a paid app, which I find a little odd, but maybe the developer is on to something. You invoke ExtraBar as you normally would, but can then jump into Shiori, where you can search your bookmarks. You can include specific folders to in ExtraBar’s presets, so that you could have a preset for work, and another for home, for example, and only show the links you want to see depending upon the context. The animations are whimsical and fun, to boot.

URL Manager Pro

URL Manager Pro has been around for a long time; my dad has always used it on his Macs, even back in the class Mac OS days, prior to NeXT’s acquisition of Apple. I never really got into it, but for the purposes of this post, I downloaded it and gave it a spin. It’s available for the iPhone and iPad, too, which is not something you can say about ExtraBar + Shiori.

URL Manager Pro, bookmark manager for the Mac

Door #2 Please

Matthew Weber on changing notes apps:

I have almost 1400 directories and an untold number of notes. That’s just here, so there are more on other platforms. The way I see it, I can do two things:

I can spend the next year of my life (probably) going through these notes, taking out the ones that can be tossed and then properly organizing them into a directory structure that makes sense.

Or, I can make an old notes directory, shove everything in there, and start the fuck over.

A Mess of Notes

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity

Greg Morris, on running:

That’s the thing about these moments. The anticipation is always worse than the act. Your brain builds a wall of reasons not to do something, and every single one of them evaporates the moment you start moving. It’s a pattern I recognise now, having gone through it week after week in marathon training blocks. The dread arrives, I entertain it for a bit, then I go out and run anyway. Afterwards, I wonder what I was so worried about.

It’s true about so many things.

A correlate: discipline beats motivation.

The Fear Was Real But Pointless

Lightroom, Darkroom, Pixelmator, Photomator, and Creator Studio

I’ve been excited to see what was going to come of Apple’s acquisition of Pixelmator. I’ve been a Pixelmator user for a very long time, and really love editing photos, especially on the iPad, with it. It has great Apple Pencil support.

For a long time, my wish was to have a polycarbonate MacBook in Black with a DSLR and Apple’s own Aperture. I never got the DSLR, and the serial improvements of the iPhone camera decreased my desire for a DSLR. Aperture was eventually shuttered, but the Photos app has gained a lot of its functionality. I’m not really in that headspace anymore, though; I very much enjoy taking pictures with my Olympus and OM System cameras and the small but engaging collection of glass that I’ve accumulated. And so my interest in some “prosumer” photo editing has remained.

I was reading Joe Rosensteel’s article on Six Colors about the acquisition, and he brought up a great point: What about Photomator? That app was a lot of fun to use, and I realized that it’s effectively a Lightroom competitor. Rosensteel thinks that it could end up being a prosumer add on to Apple’s Photos, which sounds like a smart idea, especially to the degree that it would add a subscription revenue stream. I could see Apple bundling it into their Creator Studio, too, such that if you subscribe to ACS, you get the Photomator features in Photos. That’s my predication and hope, anyway.

Peripheral to the holiday, I picked up Darkroom on sale. It works like Photomator, and I like it a lot. I suspect it’s a familiar experience for Lightroom users. Photomator is 30 bucks a year, and while I have it on my iPad from a long time ago, I’m not inclined to subscribe just yet. Hopefully something will come out of the Creator Studio integration soon; I don’t need many of those apps, but I do intend to keep supporting Pixelmator’s development. I like how both of the applications work by exposing your Photos library, allow you to make edits, and then replace or copy the edited image back into your library.

OmniOutliner To The Rescue

Speaking of the snow, Rhonda and I found ourselves unable to put in an order at ShopRite for pickup last weekend due to the impending snow. She put in a fair bit of effort construction the order, and it was a pisser to learn that we couldn’t actually order anything for days. Talk about poor user experience.

Anyway, we needed what we needed for the week, and the internet connection in the store can be flakey, so I logged into the account on my Mac, copied the order, and pasted it into Kagi Assistant, which I asked to strip out everything except the items.

This list went into OmniOutliner, and I was able to pull it up on my phone while we shopped. It’s the simplest version of OmniOutliner use there is, but it’s still magical to me all these years later. It’s a great app.

Sunday Serial: Quick Soulver, Breathe Right Strips, and Aeronaut

My poor Mustang is stuck in the driveway; there’s really no amount of snow so minuscule that won’t stop it from moving. It’s crazy making. I tried to rock her out of her spot yesterday, but to no avail: she remains stuck.

I bring this up because it’s still terribly cold out, and even this week’s predicted 30+ degree temps are pretty cold by South Jersey standards. I’m hoping for a thaw soon to get rid of the treacherous sheet of ice that we all have to shuffle across like drunken retirees on a s cruise ship every morning and afternoon.

Quick Soulver

Chris Bailey joined David Sparks on Mac Power Users last week and mentioned how he binds Soulver’s Quick Soulver feature to a keyboard shortcut, namely alt-space. I’ve been a Soulver user for a very long time, and this was not a use case I’d ever considered. Launchbar, of course, has a built-in calculator feature that I use, but this is a cool application. The problem I have is that the excellent Calcbot is no longer available for the Mac, and I have some serious muscle memory to break when I need to do some math on my Mac.

Breathe Right Strips

I’m pretty sure I have a deviated septum. I learned this because I noticed that one of my nostrils is significantly narrower than the other. I did a high scientific test by pulling the skin on each side of my nose outward and inhaling, and the effect was noticeable. Fun fact: I’ve always been a bit of a mouth breather, a habit Rhonda has pointed out mirthfully to me.

I saw an add for some kind of magnetically actuated nostril dilator, and I thought that I should try it immediately. Then the next instagram reel loaded and that was the end of that. But you know when the universe is trying to counsel you when the thing you were about to impulse purchase pops up in conversation on a podcast.

Instead of the magnetic device, though, I got a pack of Breathe Right Strips from Amazon and have been using them for sleep and morning exercise. I forgot to apply one Friday night, and I woke up with a major dry mouth. This is all highly unscientific, but I’m here in the spirit of inquiry, and am happy to share my selfless experimentation with you.

Aeronaut

Aeronaut is a very nice Mac app for Bluesky. I’ve been waiting for Tapbots re release something for Bluesky; their Ivory client for Mastodon is excellent and checks all the boxes that Tweetbot did for so many years.

Leaning Into It: iPad usage Notes

Considering today’s anniversary of the iPad, I thought I’d cobble into a post some notes I’ve been keeping regarding my iPad usage in Ulysses. My affinity for the device has always been at once a sine qua non of my tech nerdiness, and a source of vexation about why, exactly, I find it so appealing.

On the Weekly Review in OmniFocus

Weekly review in OmniFocus… lack of keyboard can be painful when you know how easy it would be on the Mac. But… the position, the posture. It doesn’t eliminate the friction on a Sunday night, but it’s nice.

Note to self: don’t do this on Sunday nights!

I would argue that one of the greatest use cases for the iPad is a weekly review, if you’re a GTD and OmniFocus user. OmniGroup has done such a great job with the iPad versions of their apps.

On the Lack of a Clipboard Manager and History

Copy and pasting links…. it’s painful cause no clipboard history. Maybe the worst part. On a Mac, you can copy all kinds of stuff and use whatever clipboard manager (or managers) you like. For me, it’s most often Launchbar, but I like Pastebot a lot. It reminds me of Windows excellent clipboard plus that comes with PowerToys.

On Having Too Much of a Good Thing

Don’t take it everywhere I thought I might (mini with cell)

On the Extravagant Keyboard

From 2022:

What the iPad Pro got right, among other things, is the expensive keyboard. If you’re sitting or lounging on the sofa, the keyboard pushes the naked robotic core towards you, in a way that is so useful.

Not Using the iPad for Work During COVID

I don’t use my iPad very much for work, which I kind of miss; however…

I was really getting back into a desktop Mac setup at home.

Thoughts on Working from Home

High Hopes Pre-COVID

The iPad is nanometers away from replacing laptops for so many users. I could probably walk away from a computer myself save for specific work tasks.

iPads Pro

A “Third Category of Device”

As quoted by John Gruber in an article on how many Apple users have an iPad:

Phone remains the most dominant product, with 94% of recent Apple customers owning one. iPads are next, with 78% owning one. Mac computers have much smaller penetration, at 36% of recent customers.

This surprised me; I’d think that the next obvious step would be from iPhone to Mac. The iPad sits in the middle and is in my mind the third least-essential of the trio. That’s increasingly less true for me, but remains so. I’d miss having an iPad sorely if I didn’t have one, but I’d miss having a Mac more.

The iPad can feel like work, but it doesn’t. Sitting on the sofa, iPad on my lap, I just accept the tradeoffs of using the touch-driven interface and accept that I’m going to move a bit more slowly, but it’s intimate and casual feeling in its way. I still use the hell out of my Mac, especially for work, but I do love the iPad. It’s pretty great just as it is.

It’s the perfect device for reading news and RSS feeds.

I still want a clipboard manager, though.

For as fast as I am on the Mac, I love using gestures. I can be pretty fast with those too.

iPad: 16 Years and Counting

MacRumors:

Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 27, 2010. Designed to fill the gap between smartphones and laptops, the original iPad featured a 9.7-inch LED-backlit multitouch display, Apple’s first custom designed chip, a 30-pin dock connector, and up to 64GB storage. With a starting price of $499, it offered users a new way to browse the web, read eBooks, watch videos, and interact with Apple’s growing app ecosystem. Jobs described it as “a magical and revolutionary device.”

I managed to wait until September of 2010 before buying my first iPad, and I have some photos of it on my desk at work from the time.

IPad 16 years my first.

I get a kick out of seeing an old iPod in the background, attache to the Altec Lansing speaker dock I used at work. I wrote about my experience with it here.

The first iPad was a good bit of fun, although if you think feeling hamstrung by the OS is a limitation now, the original was really just a big iPod Touch. The criticism at the time was that it was just a “consumption” device, and couldn’t be taken very seriously because you couldn’t get much done with it. I got plenty of writing and email done with the first iPad, and every one after that, too, but it was not a laptop replacement. Things have gotten better, of course, but iPad’s still not a Mac.

The original iPad lasted me until the iPad 3 came out, which was a heavier device thanks to the Retina display. The original had, for me, been so RAM constrained that just reading a web page in Safari would often cause the app to crash. And unlike the Mac, the system didn’t give you a reason why.

I got the original Mini when it came out, too. Here’s a pic from the parking lot when I bought it, still in the box.

I’ve had a rotation of iPads since then: the original Air, a few pros, 10″ and 11″ and even 13″ models. While they’ve never been able to replace my Mac, I have always found a lot of use for them.

Sunday Serial: CoTypist, Witch for macOS, and Typinator Extensions and Sets

There’s some stormy weather out there today; when I got up, I’d say we had about 4” of snow already. It’s still coming down, too. Rhonda and I both did some sweeping and shoveling to keep up on things, and I wanted to lift the windshield wiper arms on the cars up so they don’t get frozen to the windshields. We could’t even put in an order for groceries for store pickup yesterday; we had to drive over and prowl the aisles at Shop Rite like animals. We’re both off work tomorrow, too.

Aaron sent a picture from campus:

Stay safe and warm, and I hope you don’t have to do any driving today. Rhonda made a bolognese sauce yesterday while we were home, and we’ll be having that for dinner.

CoTypist

CoTypist is a macOS app that suggests words and sentences based on what you’re writing. It uses AI to learn your style and make suggestions. I found it during one of the Mac app bundle deals earlier this year. It’s in beta, so it’s free right now. It’s pretty interesting to try out; a trail of suggestions follow your cursor as you type, and you can accept words or sentences as they appear.

You can opt to let CoTypist learn from you as you accept suggestions, which (the app says) is stored locally on your Mac. Like TextExpander, it calculates the time you’ve saved using CoTypist. I ran into an issue where CoTypist’s default behavior–expanding suggestions as you type using the tab key–conflicted with OmniFocus’s behavior of using the tab key to move to the next field. Thoughtfully, though, you can exclude CoTypist from any app you want, or just disable the tab key per app.

Witch vs TabTab

I wrote about Witch in a previous Sunday Serialpost. It’s a utility for the Mac by Many Tricks that extends the default command-tab keyboard shortcut to let you switch between apps, yes, but also documents and browser tabs. As Many Tricks describes Witch, it lets you “command-tab everything.”

One of my favorite features is the ability to search for open documents or Safari tabs. I’ve been using TabTab for a while and I love it, but there’s been an issue with the license manager and it thinks I’m using all of the seats I purchased (when I should have one seat left).

So I’ve been using Witch on my desktop Mac, and having to fart around with it a bit made me realize how useful (and customizable) Witch is. I set it up so that the keyboard shortcut I would normally use to invoke TabTab is now a shortcut to Witch. Once invoked, I tap the s key to search for browser tabs or documents. It’s really handy.

Typinator Extensions and Sets

For no particular reason, I replaced TextExpander with Typinator a while back. It’s in the same class of app or utility, but I find it a little more Mac-like, which breaks my heart a little because TextExpander started out as a really simple, light Mac-only utility.

I installed the version 10 beta today, and setting things up, starting poking around their “sets” feature and the web page dedicated to their collection. I love the Dates 1.0 set. There’s a cool emoji set, too; as with so many other things, though, I’m very used to using Launchbar for emoji.

Ergonis is coming out with an iPhone version of Typinator soon. One of the pain points of relying on utility apps like this is their either total absence on the iPhone or iPad, or in this case of text expansion apps, they’re available as keyboard applications. I don’t find the act of switching keyboards on the iPhone to worth the effort, so I don’t generally use them.

Notes on AI in Notes and Outlines

John Gruber, writing about Google’s “Personal Intelligence” feature:

But a big one for me — an inveterate note-taker — would be my notes app. I’d rather have an AI assistant know everything in my notes app than everything in my email.

I’m eagerly awaiting AI on the Mac/iPad/iPhone to be able to look at my files, calendar events, tasks in OmniFocus, and notes to provide assistance with traversing my day and synthesizing my collected knowledge. My version of the library in the Knowledge Navigator video is the driver seat of my 2013 Mustang GT, but pretty much everything else is aspirational.

I’ll go a step further and say that I’d like to for Notes to itself turn into a kind of chatbot. I created a Shortcut that uses Apples Private Cloud Compute to take a query and copy the results to the clipboard. I had originally set it up to create a new note in Notes.

And that’s partly how I think it should work: You open a new note in Notes, ask a question, and you can keep the whole conversation in the note, adding metadata later.

Another neat application of Private Cloud Compute is featured in a the new version of OmniOutliner, which is version six. One of the automations you can add to Outliner is to create an outline from your clipboard. My shortcut is perfect for getting an outline started on a new topic.

Second Semester Begins at Szechwan House

We dropped Aaron off at school today; the original plan was to take him up yesterday, but the snow delayed our trip. We kicked off Aaron’s second semester with lunch at Szechuan House near Trenton on the ride up.

I read about the place years ago and added it to my bucket list back then. Since I find myself up near Bordentown in between home and Rutgers, I always wonder about it when we’re nearby.

It was a great lunch. The restaurant strikes me as authentic, to the degree that I would be able to identify such. Here was the specials menu when you came in the door:

We ordered some apps to try: dumplings in chili oil, scallion pancakes, and fungus with chili vinaigrette.

Wontons in spicy sauce dish 2026 01 19.

Asian food black mushrooms dumplings 2026 01 19.

The fungus was the surprise hit for me. The dumplings were awesome, though: big, pillowy, and floating in some spicy chili oil.

I tried the dry fried shredded beef from the specials menu. It had that great numbing burn you get from Szechuan peppercorns. It was really salty, though. Rhonda had a roast duck special from the lunch menu.

Spicy fried meat with peppers.jpg 2026 01 19.

Aaron ordered the Ma Po tofu with minced pork, which is one of his occasional orders from the joint around the corner (without the minced pork). It too was excellent: the tofu was soft, and the sauce, spicy and salty. Lots of salt at this lunch!

Mapo tofu spicy asian dish 2026 01 19.

So we’ll miss Aaron again now that he’s back at school, but we made a good day of his return trip.

Stop Beatifying Reading

Adam Kirsch:

If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy. You do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out.
Reading is a Vice

Logging Expenses with Shortcuts

I’ve tried a number of different ways to harness automation to logging expense. Drafts has, for a long time, been the place I went for this kind of thing: I’ve used Drafts to log my rowing sessions, blood pressure, and activities while I was taking classes and completing internships. Drafts excels at this kind of thing.

Dan Moren at Six Colors wrote a post about how he updates a Numbers spreadsheet using a Shortcut, and thought it might make a good starting place for this task. My struggle with Drafts is inputting the information in the correct order; I wanted to record the transaction total, account I charged it to, the date, and a brief description of the purchase. The problem with that on Drafts for me was recalling the order of the fields, and inserting commas (it went to a CSV file).

Shortcuts is perfect for this kind of thing, and of course it works on all of my devices. I’m very likely to be out and about when shopping, such that my phone is the obvious place to capture an expenditure. But I do like having this on my Mac, too, because I often do purchase things while using it.

The modal dialog boxes prompt me for the correct input field, reducing the friction of logging an expense. Best of all, I can fire the shortcut after searching for it using Spotlight on any device.

A Shortcut to Rename Photos for Posts Using Private Cloud Compute

One of the central improvements that computers bring to us is the ability to automate repetitive tasks. As a school psychologist, I did a lot of cobbling together applescripts and templates using merge features to automate some of my writing of reports, and to reduce the likelihood of mistakes. TextExpander similarly helped me with the massive writing burden of the job as well.

My job as a manager requires much less repetitive writing, although I still rely on a text expansion utility (currently Typinator) for a lot of repetitive writing (phone numbers, addresses, and some other things),

Writing here at Uncorrected, though, introduces some repetitive tasks that I sought to address using Shortcuts, and most recently, the support for Quick Actions in macOS Tahoe.

Rename Photos for Blog Posts

One of the coolest new features that employs AI that’s baked into macOS is harnessing the power of Private Cloud Compute. Entirely inspired by Jason Snell’s post on Six Colors, I put this shortcut together to use Private Cloud Compute to rename screenshots and photos I intend to post based on a description of the photo. Is it hard to rename a file so that the file name matches the content? Not really. But it can be repetitive. This one is specific to my Sunday Serial series, and it appends the date to the graphic asset, which is a practice I’ve been applying for a while now.

Update: this was a helpful video, too.

Shortcut using Private Cloud Compute to Name Photos

Sunday Serial: Bellview Boreath, Hookmark Pal, and Hiraeth

We were fixing to take Aaron back up to New Brunswick today, but the snow in the forecast is forcing us to wait until tomorrow. I am thankful for the all-wheel drive on the WRX. Our original plan was to roll up to New Brunswick yesterday and spend the night; I found a Marriott in Somerset and a nice little French bistro, Sophie’s. Aaron preferred getting in another day at home, though, so I cancelled the reservations and we hung around. He was hard at work on a model for his fraternity yesterday. We did the required errands and had cheese and salami at home with a growler of rosé. Rhonda and I have off from work tomorrow, so it’s no trouble either way.

Bellview Boreas Red Wine

It would be easy to let the merriment surrounding Bellview’s release of their new rosé overshadow a new dry red blend, but ahem: I draw your attention to their new Boreas. They describe it thus:

A medium bodied dry red blend of Cabernet Franc and Regent with an herbal taste on the tongue and a long, lasting finish.

It’s pretty fruity up front, with a nice dry finish. We got a 500 ml growler last weekend and it was really good with dinner last week.

Hookmark Pal: Hookmark for iOS

Hookmark is a fascinating utility for the Mac. In short, it allows you to copy links from one file or application to another, and it is invaluable if you spend a lot of time managing various bits of data across applications on your Mac.

I’ll give you a simple example: Here’s my “Car Maintenance” project in OmniFocus:

You can see in the project’s notes field, there’s a link to a folder on my Mac, “Maintenance.” There are lots of different files in that folder that I might need access too, including some how-tos, reference materials, and maintenance logs.

Similarly, you can link to files (even blocks of text in PDFs) using Hookmark. Here’s a screenshot of some specific files I linked (I linked the project to the files); invoking Hookmark shows the files I’ve linked to the project.

I can link emails from MailMate to tasks or projects, link Google Suite links to projects and tasks, and more. You can even send links to Instapaper. It’s a great service for keeping yourself organized, and I’m not sure I’m even scratching the surface of what it can do.

One of the central frustrations of being a Mac user who likes to use an iPad, though, is that many of the utilities that make the Mac so great aren’t available on the iPad. And that was a central limitation of using Hookmark until very recently, when CogZest introduced Hookmark Pal.

The upshot is that your Hookmark links work on your iOS devices. It’s called a “pal,” I suppose, because it’s not a universal app that works across all of your devices; Hookmark Pal gets you some of the features you depend on, without the full experience of using Hookmark on your Mac. It’s a welcome addition for sure.

Hookmark Pal for iPhone and iPad – Hookmark
App Store

Hiraeth

it’s bittersweet when they leave, but a joy to watch them grow.