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.
Via One-Foot Tsunami, Scientific American on the evidence that gun control measures are not only supported by the data, they are popular with Americans:
As we previously reported, in 2015, assaults with a firearm were 6.8 times more common in states that had the most guns, compared to the least. More than a dozen studies have revealed that if you had a gun at home, you were twice as likely to be killed as someone who didn’t. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that states with higher gun ownership levels have higher rates of homicide. Data even tells us that where gun shops or gun dealers open for business, killings go up. These are but a few of the studies that show the exact opposite of what progun politicians are saying. The science must not be ignored.
I’ve always fancied the Chemex coffee brewer; it has an iconic, minimalist design, and functionally is unique in that you’re dropping a paper filter into the opening of a carafe… there’s not plastic basket or anything else to use. I don’t have a Chemex, though, and am loathe to bring another method of brewing into the house right now.
But… there is the office. I recently schlepped an Aeropress in, as it’s small and easy to clean. (K-Cups are nothing if not simple and easy to clean up.) And that’s been a great addition; I can brew a nice cup in a couple of minutes, and the Aeropress makes great-tasting coffee (assuming you start with good, fresh beans).
I have a Bodum pour-over that I bought years ago, which works fine but is limited by the fact that its metal screen filter lets plenty of undissolved solids into the brew, so you get a lot of body. In this case, I’d rather go the immersion route and brew with the French press. I like pour over for producing a different cup of coffee. <^1>[I use a porcelain Melita pour-over with paper filters when not having French press, Aeropress, or espresso.]
I got to wondering: can I use a paper filter with the Bodum?
I first tried dropping a Melita #4 filter into the metal basket. That did not work, as the coffee steeped too long/drained to slowly, producing an over-extracted cup.
But what about a Chemex paper? Could I use one of those to make a cup and jettison the metal basket?
It turns out, yes, you certainly can: the paper filter works in the Bodum carafe. The only modification, I learned, was that you have to put a straw or something in between the glass lip and the filter paper to allow gas to escape. This bit of physics may explain what happened with the basket and paper filter method I tried.
Pictured here are my two Henckels knives, a Santoku and classic chef’s knife. The former was a purchase, the second a gift.
I remember reading in Kitchen Confidential that German steel knives are fussy and require frequent sharpening. That’s probably true, but I have a basic two-grit electric sharpener that has worked just fine for the last 20 years, so they’re easy to keep sharp. And boy: sharp they are.
YANA: Dendron is Yet Another Notes App, in the style of new hotness such as Obsidian. It requires Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Code, a monster IDE that’s available on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Why did I try it? I continue to cast about for a means of taking notes that I can stick with; I tend to prefer text files flavored by Markdown, but I want a few things, such as cross-platform sync (Windows and Mac, plus iOS), and, most recently due to my dabbling with Workflowy, backlinks. I tried Obsidian out and I liked it generally, but found it a little hard on the eyes on the Mac. Some Git troubles (i’m not really that technical) had me slink away after some brief experimentation.
I’ve been trying out Dendron on the Mac and Surface for a couple of weeks now. I had installed it and played around, but hadn’t messed with sync much. My notion was to sync via iCloud or a combination of that and OneDrive, and maybe pull everything into DEVONthink (link to artcile). But the idea of exploring GitHub again got the best of me. What I have now is a very workable setup that features VSC running Dendron on my Macs and Surface Pro 7, along with mobile sync plus iA Writer via Working Copy on iPhone and iPad. There are some caveats to using this solution on mobile that I’m still working out (and which may be the death of this setup), but it’s otherwise pretty solid.
Dendron uses a fistful of VS Code extensions, in combination with a file name structure entirely of your device, to help users categorize Markdown notes. It’s local first, meaning that your notes sit on the device before you; you can use Dendron on your one and only machine, if you like. There’s more–way more–but at its heart, Dendron is a Markdown notes app.
Dendron Main Window
Dendron does the Obsidian graph-view-thing, which in Dendron is called Note Graph. Note Graph is a visualization of how your notes are connected. It resembles, entertainingly, an actual map of the mind; it’s a digital approximation of how your thoughts are connected.
Is this useful? I don’t know. But it’s cool.
Dendron Note Graph
You use Dendron to create Markdown notes within a single folder; your naming sturcture determines how these notes are organized, whether you are searching or using the Note Graph. Do you like typing notes into a text editor? If the answer is yes, then Dendron might be your bag.
In the PKIM world, backlinks are all the rage: Drafts on the Mac finally got on board, Devonthink (kinda) has them, and Workflowy all come to mind. The excellent Hook utiliy on the Mac is a bolt-on backlink system for macOS, and we’ve all been trying callback URLs and other ways to link data together since iOS added support for them.
Dendron Backlinks
In Dendron, backlinks work just like Workflowy, where you start a double bracket and then can choose (and search for) any item in your vault. This is because, of course, all of your Dendron files are sitting in that singular vault folder. (Applications like Drafts and Workflowy are databases.) Linking your notes via backlinks contributes to the construction of your Note Graph; in addition to your naming scheme, backlinks are visualized in the Note Graph.
There’s more for me to discuss: sync, PDF preview, and more. Stay tuned!
Hog Bay Software’s Jesse Grossjean just released Bike, a “tool for thought.” The title is a great play on Steve Jobs’s “bicycle for the mind” riff. It’s Mac only, like TaskPaper. Grossjean releases thoughtful, Mac-assed Mac apps, and Bike is worth a spin, even if you’re an OmniOuliner or Zavala devotee.
Amazing to me that this Griffin PowerMate still works.
It does require another oldie-but-goodie, USB Overdrive, to work, but hey. The build quality is amazing.
Although it’s in beta, Universal Control on macOS Monterey has been working well for me. One of the most delightful touches is how you interact with the setting to control how the Mac conceives of your iPad’s location. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple bakes this feature into the Displays setting in System Preferences.
Here’s my setup in Displays: Mac, attached display (extending the Mac’s display), and the iPad to the right:
Clicking on each device’s tile allows you to drag it into the space you’d like it to occupy relative to the main device:
Each device’s name is shown on hover. Nicely implemented, building on your previous knowledge.