Speaking of Spark Desktop’s Command Center, Quick Open in Craft is an affordance that I’ve come to love and rely on. I was looking at doing a big write up on Craft, but I think I might just take a whack here and there to highlight some of the things I like about it.

In Craft, smacking command-o on the keyboard, a la Obsidian or Dendron, opens the Quick Open menu. Unlike those two solutions, however, Craft’s Quick Open menu initially searches document titles. It does, however, expose one of Craft’s superpowers: block searching and linking.

Searching in quick open will allow to select a matching document or block of text; finding no match, it will offer to create a new document with the string you typed into the quick open menu.

Quick Open in Craft

Craft, Finding No Document of Block of Text Titled “Detroit Style Pizza,” Helpfully Offers to Create Said File for Me

Searching for the term “cannabis,” which was the subject of a recent legal training we sat it on here at work (as it applies to public school students), revealed no documents with that title, but did show me the location (navigable, to boot) of blocks where the word appeared. Tremendous. Contrast this to Dendron, where content search and file name search are two different key commands.

I have plenty more to say about Craft.

Moving to the new Spark on iOS and iPadOS isn’t much of a reach; the app largely works (and looks) like it did before. I would say the more assertive grouping of inbox messages into Notifications and Newsletters (Smart 2.0) changes things a bit (and, to my mind, for the better; messages that I would normally see in my inbox on MailMate are held in a category with limited visibility, but not moved completely out of sight). I also like Spark’s aggressively approach to asking me if it should block messages from potential spam senders. This dialog isn’t modal and I can respond when I have the time and inclination.

On the Mac, though, Spark Desktop is a considerably different animal from its predecessor. There are some serious limitations that early adopters will run into, but I’m forging ahead. I did email Readdle and ask them to let users turn off avatars. I have never been a fan of them in email, because they almost never impart any useful information. Companies that have bothered to create an avatar, and (internally) Gmail users who have set up an avatar have a visual identified that helps. But mostly I just see a garish blob of color with two initials. And this is why I always turn them off. Readdle’s response to my request was quick and it sounds like it’s already a feature request, so I remain hopeful.

Spark Desktop 3’s Avatars, There Whether You Want Them or Not

What does delight is the amount of time you can keep your fingers on the keyboard and just munge mail. I have been very happy with MailMate but Spark’s Command Center feature exposes keyboard shortcuts, with visual prompts to help you remember them. I am looking forward to some design changes to the Command Center, but this is a great start.

Spark Desktop 3’s Searchable Command Center

Updated for iOS, iPadOS, and the Mac is Spark, a longstanding email client. Their move to a subscription model is having all the expected effects. Spark has, for a long time, been my choice for iPhone and iPad email, but I’ve never been a heavy desktop Spark user. I wrote about Spark a bit here, here.

Currently in development, though, is Spark Desktop, and that may change things.

Following the current hotness that we enjoy in Craft, Obsidian, and Dendron is the Actions menu: Command+K opens a searchable menu of actions, from which you can type to select the action acted upon. It’s just great.

Here’s a quick video of me shoving an email from my son’s Physics teacher into a Gmail label/folder:

Spark

Last Sunday, Toyshows.org returned to the Nur Shrine Center in New Castle, DE for the Octoberfest Toy show. We really missed going to these during COVID. Note the delicious Shake Shack lunch and Octoberfest beer enjoyed afterwards. I took the boys and a friend.

My younger son, Aaron, and I were talking about movies he’s never seen, and one of them was Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s one of those movies I’ve seen so many times that I didn’t even think to make a fuss about showing the boys, but here we are. So today, with him convalescing from a stomach bug, I figured, let’s watch one of those flicks.

Toward the end, there’s a scene where Belloq (Harry Freeman) is yelling at Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, for those of you who don’t know anything) and a fly shows up on the screen. It looks like it disappears into Belloq’s mouth.

We both sat up and were like “Did you see that?” Upon a scrub back, we could confirm that it was not an organic fly in the room with us, but something playing out onscreen.

So here’s the deal:

Did Bellow eat a fly in Indiana Jones? Answer: No, it just flew away but movie magic made it look like it did. The fun continues though, if you watch the video below and listen very carefully you will notice that the sound effects department added the sound of the fly landing on Belloq’s face and a second later you can hear the sound of it flying away. The crew were definitely having fun with this one.

Did Paul Freeman Accidentally Eat A Fly In Raiders of the Lost Ark?

I’ve been meaning to try this for a while: Detroit-Style Pan Pizza. I can’t say that I’ve ever actually had it outside of home, but the description sounded interesting and it reminded me of the deep-dish pizza I used to get as a kid at Pizza Hut, in a way.

I followed Kenji’s recipe, but I see there are many more on YouTube, including Sam Zein’s version. I even got the requisite pan.

Detroit-Style Pan Pizza Recipe

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?