Reading this:

Ohio by Stephen Markley

TIL on Upgrade that older iPads are going to get Stage Manager after all, which I am glad to see:

Apple made the surprise announcement this week that Stage Manager is expanding to older iPad Pro models with A12X and A12Z chips released in 2018 and 2020. The multitasking feature is available to test on those models in the latest iPadOS 16.1 beta.

Stage Manager will not have external display support on older iPad Pro models, limiting its versatility. Apple has also delayed external display support for the feature on iPad models with the M1 chip — it will be reimplemented in a software update later this year.

So no external display support for my still-very-capable 2018 13″ iPad Pro, but I’ll take it. Installing Beta 9 now, in fact.

Stage Manager Expands to Older iPad Pro Models, No October Apple Event?

Spark is a great email client that heretofore has been free for a long time unless you needed team features. Thew new release is a considerable redesign and, in my opinion, a smart move towards sustainability by requiring a subscription for non-free-tier features. (What some people consider non-free-tier is the subject, as you might imagine, on Twitter, where the usual move-to-subscription mutiny is taking place). Spark is my go-to on iOS and iPadOS, and the dearth of good alternatives on Windows excites me as well. I wrote about it some time back here.

Introducing the all-new Spark, a new approach to productivity and email

M.G. Siegler, on (finally) getting Covid:

And so I started to buy into the notion that perhaps I simply wasn’t going to get it. Friends joked that I was clearly naturally immune. Sure, I was cautious — more than most, though less than many — but it was just everywhere. And then, just when it stopped seeming like it was both everywhere and inevitable, it found me.

This was me, too. I recall (daftly) thinking, while enjoying a swim on vacation in a pool while boardwalkers strolled by, that maybe I was going to get out of this waning epidemic without catching it. But that was not to be.

On Sunday, August 28th, I woke up feeling like I had the flu. A surreptitiously self-administered rapid test, delivered previously by Uncle Sam, denied my suspicion. That feeling went away and I felt mostly normal all day. But during dinner, I felt cold and didn’t want to eat. Within an hour or so I took another rapid test and learned that I was no longer one of the people who was gonna get it… I got it.

I spent the rest of the week experiencing, serially, each of the symptoms of your standard viral infection: fever, sore throat, congestion, cough, and fatigue. It was a viral Advent calendar. I tasked licorice in my tangerine-flavored rehydration drink. I worked from home and stared at my computer screen, agape, wondering what, moments ago, I had planned to troubleshoot.

Now? I have a lingering cough and I get tired. I hope they both go away soon.

Nineteen. COVID finally found me… | by M.G. Siegler | Sep, 2022 | 500ish

Astral Codex Ten:

[I]f someone tells you that people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything, please politely correct them that this is only true until the point where they 100% accept scientific materialist atheism, at which point they go back to mostly not being that gullible again.

Will Nonbelievers Really Believe Anything?

I’m looking forward to this episode of MPU, as it’s timely for me: I started playing around with Craft a bit just to see what this Mac-centric, Notion-like PKM works. Some quick observations:

• support for wikilinks: unlike the emerging standard of using double brackets to link to an existing file, Craft uses the “@” character to show a pick list of links, or offers to create a new file. Bonus: hovering over linked Craft notes in a document shows a preview window
• “Focus Mode” isn’t the same as macOS’s full-screen mode; you can still see the menu and title bars. Another bonus: Focus mode, like just about everything else with Craft, works great on iPadOS.

Craft Preview of a Link on Hover

I’ve been trying Craft out as a repository for college visit information for my oldest son, and I started using it for work a bit today during a presentation. One of the things that I liked most about the wikilink angle was that, during the training today, it was easy to spin off a definition of a term or a legal case into a separate document, kind of a Zettle. This aspect of Craft is very Obsidian-like, but the experience is pure macOS (and the iOS derivatives are similarly joyful to use). And you can link to text blocks in the document you’re working in, or other documents.

#650: Craft Deep Drive

Classic Zippo to light the grill. Nothing worse than those plastic sealed grill lighters giving up the ghost without warning.

I find, weekly, sick deals on books I either want to read or discover on Book Bub. Usually USD 1.99. This week’s find: Made in America by Bill Bryson.

Bryson was featured prominently in A Common Reader, one of the best book resellers ever, with a (paper) catalog that was worth reading all by itself. I suspect they fell to Amazon.

Via Medium’s Coach Tony, a link to a New York Times article on decision fatigue:

Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.

This topic isn’t new, but I find the notion of mental energy and the finite store of it for people who must make decisions to be an evergreen topic. The case study mentioned at the beginning, whereby people were granted or denied probation purely due to time of day, is fascinating–and cautionary.

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

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.

Mullica Hill Toy Show

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.

Wikilink in Action on iA Writer

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).

Writer

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.

Rising From The Ashes: Stage Manager

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:

• Launchbar
• Hook
• PopClip
• TextExpander
• SoundSource
• Bumpr

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.

Paletro

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.

iPadOS 16: These are the new features exclusive to M1 iPads

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.