I’m not much of a gamer, but I finally got around to finishing Metro: Exodus on the Mac Studio, using the time afforded by The Week Between. Here are some screenshots:
Author: Alex Nonnemacher
Essential Mac Software for 2023
Following with my updated tradition of naming the software I see myself using in the new year (instead of looking back)
Newcomers
Spark Desktop (Beta)
I wrote about the newly released Spark Desktop, here back when it came out, and I’ve continued to use it daily over my beloved MailMate.
The beta crashes a fair bit, without warning and without any indication of why, but it is generally stable enough for daily use. It maddeningly lacks keyboard shortcut support right now, which is almost a deal-breaker, for system-level actions like copy and paste.
App-level keyboard support, however, makes for a productive email environment, and the Command Center is a familiar affordance borrowed from PKM software that puts almost every command at your finger tips… mouse not required. I am shocked sometimes by how quickly I am able to winnow down a few crowded inboxes, and the emerging AI features are making it even faster.
Spark Desktop Beta Spash Screen
Spark Desktop’s Actions Menu
Yoink
I’ve been using Yoink for some time now; I purchased the Mac and iOS versions near the end of 2018. I saw it as a great way to share bits of data (URLs, text snippets) between iPhone and Mac. Oddly, though, Yoink doesn’t sync (a strong competitor, Gladys, does).
Yoink sits on the side of your screen, hidden, until you start dragging something towards it. A shelf then pops out, and you drop content into the shelf. The shelf remains exposed until you drag the content back out.
A common example for which I use Yoink is taking a screenshot on the Mac, grabbing it in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and then dragging it into the shelf. Switch to Messages or Spark, and drag the screenshot into the next app. I do this with links a lot, too. Yoink remains onscreen until you’ve done something with the content you dragged into it, which I initially saw as a limitation, but have come to appreciate, as it keeps Yoink from getting clogged up.
Raycast
Raycast is an example of a utility that highlights how the Mac is, and will likely always be, a tool completely different from iPad and, to many users, more interesting and flexible. Raycast is, broadly speaking, a competitor to launcher apps like Launchbar and Alfred. But interested users might find enough about Raycast to use it alongside their preferred launcher.
Raycast can easily become a Spotlight replacement for finding files. Like Spotlight, it can look up words in a dictionary. It can do so much more, though: it can be Paletro, search Craft, create drafts in Drafts, and resize windows. Raycast will search DEVONthink, YouTube, and Google. It’s a calculator. You can use it to store and expand text snippets.
Raycast
Related: Raycast Does Window Management Too
Tabby
Tabby acts like command-shift-a in Chrome, but for all of the browsers running on your Mac (save FireFox, if you happen to use it). You invoke Tabby via keyboard shortcut or menubar icon, and you are presented with a list of open browser tabs, organized by browser. You can search the list or mouse to the tab you want to activate.
If you hop between multiple browsers during the day, this is a must-have utility.
Tabby
TextSniper
TextSniper cops Apple’s default screenshot behavior but instead of taking a screenshot, it applies OCR to the text on-screen and performs OCR on it. If you have a JPEG or PNG scan of text, for example, that someone sent you, you can use TextSniper to convert sections of it into text you can paste into an email, text editor, or email. It’s amazing and always useful.
Craft
I’ve been writing about Craft here as I’ve been using it for a while; it’s a different kind of text editor and page layout application that has more in common with services like Google Docs than tried-and-true word processors like Nisus Writer. In addition to being available everywhere, Craft offers PKM features in a rich-text environment. Hard-core text editor fans are not likely to find Craft compelling, but the ability to drag anything into your Craft document is powerful and liberating.
Taking notes during a Zoom meeting? Grab a screenshot or download a file and drop it into the document. Want to create a nested outline? You can do that. Like to keep your hands on the keyboard? Type a “/” and you will see a menu with commands to change formatting, insert tables, and more. And the linking within Craft is a PKM enthusiast’s dream.
A Craft Document Collecting Links
DayOne
I’m trying to journal more, and DayOne makes it easy to add data to your journals as you go, is present on all of your Apple devices, and is safe and secure. It’s easy to use Apple’s Share Sheet to put something you find into your journal for later retrieval.
Related: Why You Should Keep a Journal and Why Keeping a Diary Can Save You.
DayOne Entry Back During the OG Quarantine
Bike
Jesse Grosjean of HogBay software has made some of the most compelling productivity software for the Mac, most notably TaskPaper, and invented said file format along the way. Bike is an outliner that artfully blurs the line between plain and rich text formats. And the text animations, to my eye, look a bit like Word on Windows–which I like a lot.
As with TaskPaper, Bike isn’t an application that exists on iPhone or iPad.
Bike Outline
TextSoap
For about the last year, I have been editing and preparing my state professional organization’s online newsletter, and the article body font–set in 15-point Helvetica–is most easily set to large swaths of text using TextSoap. It’s been a long time since I’ve used it, but it works as well as ever.
HookMark
I had gotten out of the habit of using HookMark (previously Hook) but their recent update and beta, plus a couple of stress-inducing projects, have me at it again. HookMark provides a Mac-level means of linking data. My particular workflow involves linking all manner of resources to OmniFocus projects and tasks so that OF is always the hub of what I’m working on.
HookMark Showing Files Related to OmniFocus Project
Related: Hook: A Quick Look
Evergreen
I still use these apps nearly everyday:
- Omnifocus
- DEVONThink
- Drafts
- Safari
- NetNewsWire
- MarsEdit
- iA Writer
- 1Password
- Bartender
- Arq
- PopClip
- Mosaic
- Fantastical
- Drafts
- Soulver
Anthony Bourdain’s Rabbit Hole
Heartbreaking. Ben Rhodes, reviewing Down and Out In Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, for the Atlantic:
In the end, that’s also what is most disturbing about his suicide. Leehrsen has an eye for the devastating detail. And to me, the most devastating of all is the fact that Bourdain had an “as-it-happens” Google alert for his own name, and that he spent the final hours of his life Googling Asia Argento hundreds of times, presumably staring at the same paparazzi photos over and over. How sad it is that Bourdain, who offered the promise of escape from the mundane social-media addictions of our time, spent his last days triggering himself while staring at screens. After a life of exploration, his last journey was down an online rabbit hole about his own failed romance.
White Lotus and the Trappings of Entitlement
As with anything worth watching or listening to, I was late to White Lotus. I found it bewitching, but unsure why. The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert lent a hand:
Across all six episodes, a convincing thesis emerges: The curse of the privileged is that they would rather be miserable than lose even a tiny fraction of the things they’ve been given.
…
Every interaction in the series is an exchange of power, and even when people try their hardest to use that power in benevolent ways, or to redistribute it, things go awry. “Nobody cedes their privilege,” Mark tells his wife and kids during a tense dinner debate. “That’s absurd. It goes against human nature. We’re all just trying to win the game of life.”
“The Idea of Happy Work Is the Genius, Malevolent Invention of the Bourgeoisie”
Alain de Botton’s School of Life takes a different approach to resolving the notions and paradoxes we hold that make us unhappy. Regarding work:
The modern meaning of life is that our deepest interests should find external expression in a form that others will find useful, and that will bring in sufficient funds for a bourgeois life. The ambition is enormous, beautiful and worthy of solemn respect for its trickiness. It is only in very recent history that we’ve even attempted not just to make money at work, but also – extraordinarily – to be happy there as well. How deeply peculiar the idea would have sounded to most of our ancestors: especially the aristocrats who never worked and the working classes who would mostly strongly have wanted not to. Happy work is the genius, malevolent invention of the bourgeoisie.
There is something to be said for work that has discrete fences and boundaries, one that does not intrude on your vacation, your evening, or your sleep.
More on Making Hard Decisions
More Ruth Chang on the issue of choice:
The key thing about parity is that it opens up a new way of understanding rational agency that is a substitute for the usual Enlightenment conception according to which we are essentially creatures who discover and respond to reasons. On that view, our agency is essentially passive – our reasons are ones given to us and not made by us. Our freedom as rational agents consists in the discovery of and appropriate response to reasons given to us and not created by us. Parity allows us to see that our agency may have a role in determining what reasons we have in the first place. So we might be free in a deeper sense – we are free to create reasons for ourselves under certain conditions.
Dr. Chang’s TED talk and NY Times article are written for a more general viewer/readership. This interview is far more academic in its content, but interesting if you have a philosophical bone in your body.
Reevaluating Resolutions, Philosophically
Philosopher Ruth Chen, on making big decisions:
When we choose between options that are on a par, we make ourselves the authors of our own lives. Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do. In those cases, we can create value for ourselves by committing to an option. By doing so, we not only create value for ourselves but we also (re)create ourselves.
“On a par,” for Chen, means that options are not helpfully considered by consulting facts or input from the outside world, but rather, “you can look inward to what you can stand behind, commit to, resolve to throw yourself behind.”
We’ll Always Feel Like We Missed Out
Soren Kierkegaard:
“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it…. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
I (Now) Have the Power
My boys got me this He-Man action figure for my birthday. I remember discovering He-Man figures at the local KB toy store, walking to the back of the aisle where the cool stuff was stocked and seeing what I recall as a wall of Masters of the Universe figures before me. The figures at the time came with mini comic books that told a decidedly different story than what would come from Filmation some time later.
Masters of the Universe were wildly popular back then, and as with many toys, are enjoying a resurgance as those of us who had them as children reach middle age. This particular He-Man is a bit of a masterpiece: it nods in every appropriate way at the original Mattel figure, while introducing all of the things about modern action figures that make them enviable to people my age.
Masters figures were cool in that they were larger than GI Joe or Kenner’s venerable Star Wars line, but they stood in odd squatting positions like wrestlers about to pounce. Their rubbery legs were fixed in a 45-degree bend, and their brick-shit-house physiques were common across most every buck. They were such an unusual mix of Conan-style swords and sorcery and sci-fi, though–with horror-movie-monster characters thrown in–that it was impossible not to appreciate them.
The Filmation cartoon, to my mind then and now, cast a corny light on the line, but it didn’t seem to hurt it one bit.
But all that is just some typing; it charms me to no end that my nearly adult children took a moment to hit Target and present me with a piece of plastic in the very same way that I have, and still do, for them.
There’s a Bat in My Basement
I was removing a window unit air conditioner today and saw this on the sill in the unit’s absence:
It was a bat; this much I knew.
So what are you supposed to do with a bat that you think is injured? Two things:
- Call a wildlife rescue expert and,
- Give the critter a bat box.
My younger son willfully donned gardening gloves and a dishtowel, and moved the bat from the sill into a Clark’s shoebox into which I’d put a plastic dish with some water and drilled holes. Son #1 snapped this picture:
I left a voicemail with Shaw Wildlife Sanctuary and Crystal Shaw called me back within minutes. She offered to take a look at the bat, but that would have been a bit of a ride.
A friend sent me a list of of rehabilitators from the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife, and from there I texted Jackie Kashmer of the New Jersey Bat Sanctuary. She texted me back within seconds asking for a picture of the bat.
Jackie said that it’s a Big Brown and that they are “pretty hardy.” She advised that I release him at night, from a high point, as he would get eaten by a bird if relased during the day, and that he’d crash into the ground if released from the ground. (I don’t know if the bat is a “he”.)
So the bat remains, for now, in a box downstairs, until it’s time to say farewell.
Update: The bat took wing on Nov 14th in the early evening.
Raycast on The Sweet Setup
Matt Birchler talks Raycast:
The uninstall action is one I’ve really grown to appreciate. It will show you all the files it will delete from your system, and it does a pretty good job of finding the right files and purging your system of whatever app is causing you grief (not Fantastical, of course 🙂).
I haven’t tried the uninstall option yet, and that’s what’s kind of neat about Raycast: features and functions hide out and await your discovery.
Raycast Does Window Management Too
There are a handful of great utilities on the Mac for managing how much of your screen a window takes up: Moom, Mosaic, and BetterSnapTool, to name a few. (I use Mosaic on my Mac at home, and BST on my work MacBook.)
Here’s a short video showing how I use Mosaic regularly to split my display’s real estate between two applications.
The ever-evolving Raycast, interestingly, can be used for the same purpose. There are a number of pre-configured extensions that you can invoke by typing the name of the action, including splitting the open windows between the right and left halves of your display.
Misunderstanding Brokeback Mountain
At a recent Halloween party, an attendee (who was ironically dressed up like a cowboy) reeled in horror at the mention of Brokeback Mountain and that someone there, whom he’d never met, liked the film.
It was evident why he didn’t like it: to him, it was a movie about gay cowboys. That’s too on the nose, though, and a gross simplification.
But it’s not because of Jack. It’s because Ennis and Jack love each other and can find no way to deal with that. “Brokeback Mountain” has been described as “a gay cowboy movie,” which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups–any “forbidden” love.
He was an artless turd and proud of it.
Music Remote for Macintosh
Via Macstories, I found the Soviet-sounding Music Remote. I can’t stand how great this little app is.
Linking in Craft
Craft excels at providing a seamless linking feature… just type the “@“ symbol and you will be greeted by a pop-up menu from which you can choose documents to link to (a la Obisidan or Dendron)… or, more impressively, discrete text blocks in other Craft documents. This is where Craft gets specific and, dare I say it, downright crafty.
Here’s a short video showing an example of linking to a section of notes I took in our legal update at work over the summer.