Toyshows.org brought their brand of whimsy and magic back to New Jersey with this year’s first-ever Mullica Hill Toy Show. It’s not the first outdoor toy show that we’ve attended, but it was a great venue on a day boasting some of the best weather this year.
DEVONThink. Drafts. Dendron. All of these productivity powerhouse apps support Wikilinks. And with version 6, so does iA Writer.
The interesting part of how iA Writer uses Wikilinks is that it seems to find any Markdown file on your Mac. In apps like Workflowy, and those I listed above, Wikilinks will only search within themselves. Workflowy Wikilinks will only reference nodes within Workflowy, for example, and likewise with Drafts. But on my Mac (and iPad), iA Writer will look outside of it’s own iCloud folder to any location you’ve added to iA Writer’s Locations feature in the sidebar. So if you add your Desktop as a location, iA will look for documents there once you type “[[” to open a Wikilink.
You can only link to text files that iA Writer will read and edit, however; Wikilinks can’t point to PDFs, for examples. (You can make a Markdown link and point to the file using Hook, however).
Via Daring Fireball, cricket, a former Apple employee, recognized State Manager as a project he worked on for the Mac called shrinkydink:
Both [shrinkydink and Stage Manager] took over the positioning and size of all windows. Back then, we saw this as a huge win for novice to intermediate users who struggle with window management.
Stage Manager appears to be positioned as a power-user feature which I think is a shame. I’d much prefer to see it as something you pick in Setup Assistant or choose in Settings rather than hidden in a menu somewhere. I think this is something that would be especially appealing to a new Mac user. On the iPad, I don’t see any reason to use the existing multi-tasking UI anymore.
So the power user feature we’ve been waiting for on iPadOS–window management–was conceived as a novice user affordance. I remain hopeful, but this wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for.
Every once in a while, a utility comes along that makes you realize that while you might be able to live on an iPad, you wouldn’t want to. I can name names:
Paletro, available directly from the developer or through SetApp, is a modern twist on an existing idea: instead of mousing for commands and features in the menu bar, and instead of memorizing keyboard shortcuts, you invoke Paletro and search, using text, for the command you’re looking for.
Apps like Many Tricks’ Menuwhere offer a similar feature; with Menuwhere, a key command invokes a floating version of the macOS menubar, and the user can mouse (or navigate from the keyboard) from there. An old favorite utility of mine, MaxMenus, was a more customizable utility, but I used it largely in the way that I would use Menuwhere now.
Paletro’s inspiration comes from VSCode’s Command Palette, which you invoke–in the case of both apps–on the Mac by typing Command-Shift-P. In VSCode, the Command Palette exposes features specific to the application and the extensions you’ve installed. For example, in Dendron, which I wrote about most recently, the Command Palette is where you go to winnow down the list of notes to traverse the naming hierarchy, rename notes, refactor, and more.
Paletro exposes the menu bar options that are available to you in a specific application by typing Command-Shift-P (the hotkey is user modifiable). So if you’re typing away in Bike, for example, and can’t remember the keyboard shortcut to hoist or focus, you can invoke Paletro, and type “focus.” In Safari, it’s an easy way to see your browser history, browse your favorites, or open a bookmark.
If you know an app inside and out, and have the keyboard shortcuts committed to muscle memory, Paletro isn’t going to be a faster or smarter way to work. But it’s great if you find yourself mousing for features, and like the help menu’s feature that searches for commands, the utility helps when you don’t know where to look.
Paletro is also extensible; programming types can attach scripts to extend the built-in features of the application itself. There are a number of color themes built in, and the developer promises more to come. A $6.99 license is good for two machines.
Following up on my last post, while iPadOS 16 will bring Stage Manager, and a purportedly more Mac-like experience for using multiple apps at the same time and managing windows, not all iPads will benefit:
Stage Manager will be available exclusive to the M1 iPad Air and M1 iPad Pro. Here’s what you can do with this iPadOS 16 feature:
- Resizable windows: Resize your windows to make them the perfect size for your task;
- Center app: Focus on the app you’re working with without going full screen;
- Fast access to windows and apps: The windows of the apps you’re working in is displayed prominently in the center, and other apps are arranged on the left side in order of recent use;
- Overlapping windows: Create overlapping windows of different sizes in a single view, giving you the control to arrange your ideal workspace;
- Group apps together: Drag and drop windows from the side or open apps from the Dock to create app sets that you can always to get back to.
So you really need an M1 iPad to reap the power-user-focused benefits of the new OS. This makes some sense to me; the default behavior of an iPad is, at its heart, a (welcome) simplification for many users. Window management bedevils even competent people to this day, and smaller screens invite full-screen usage. iPads even have a single app mode that we use in public education for students who need iPad apps such as TouchChat as communication devices; errantly swiping away from your communication app would defeat the purpose of the iPad’s function in this use case.
If you want to manage windows on an iPad, you know who you are: and you quite possibly already have an M1 iPad. 1
1If you bought a 2020 iPad for the mini LED screen, you’re probabaly a little hot right now.
Stage Manager is the feature of iPadOS 16 designed to bring those of us looking for a more Mac-like experience to the iPad. It looks like we’re going to be able to use iPad with multiple displays; mirroring will no longer be the only option when connecting an iPad to an external display.
Interestingly, Stage Manager made it to the Mac too, whether first as a Mac feature, or as an iPad feature brought back to the Mac. It makes sense, too: as we’ve fallen more in love with laptops and smaller screens, we’ve lost the tendency to use multiple windows (I noticed a long time ago that I tended to use my Macbook not in full-screen mode, but with the main application window fully maximized. It took working from home during COVID and a really big display to change my habits).
I don’t think Stage Manager will be interesting, on the Mac, for me, but I can see it being incredibly useful for someone who tends to drag windows half way out off the screen to make space for what they’re seeing. Will it be another Launchpad? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.1?
iPad finally gets floating windows in Stage Manager on iPadOS 16
1And by “another Launchpad,” I mean something no one uses.
Despite what you see on Facebook from frothing-at-the-mouth 2nd Amendment paranoiacs, the Right’s favorite shape-shifter didn’t always support personal deadly arsenals:
On Aug. 3, 2019, a far-right gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart store in El Paso. Early the next morning, a man shot and killed nine people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Both assailants used semiautomatic rifles.
At the White House the next day, Mr. Trump was so shaken by the weekend’s violence that he questioned aides about a specific potential solution and made clear he wanted to take action, according to three people present during the conversation.
“What are we going to do about assault rifles?” Mr. Trump asked.
“Not a damn thing,” Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff, replied.
“Why?” Trump demanded.
“Because,” Mr. Mulvaney told him, “you would lose.”
After El Paso shooting, Trump pushed again on gun control. His aides talked him out of it.
Laura McKenna, with a clickbaity headline at NJ Education Report:
If I had a wishlist for a streamlined school system, it would include the prioritization of academics over fad curriculum, a commitment to equity, efficiency of administration, and improved teacher education. A return to basics, if you will.
I want kids to go to a building where they read books for seven hours a day and talk about those books with people, who are hundred percent in love with books and ideas. Kids who have trouble reading would get extra help. And then everybody would go home.
Methinks McKenna longs for a yesterday that didn’t exist. In many ways, schools are more emblematic of the qualities she supposes have been forgotten, or perhaps more to her thinking, extirpated.