It’s a hot Sunday here in South Jersey. We were going to steam some crabs, but they’re still pricey this early in the season, so it’s chicken thighs on the grill with rice and broccoli any minute now.

Joey and Sorayah are going on a trip to Kentucky for her work, so we’ll be a three-person household for the week. I am thinking about using Joe’s car to get around while I get some necessary repairs done on the Mustang. I was sorely tempted to test drive both a Subaru BRZ and a Mazda MX-5 Miata, as the old girl is not only getting up there in years, and requires some maintenance. But I don’t think I want to part with the Mustang, and a comparable replacement would be a tad rich. But then he slashed his own tire driving today, so I’ll have to get that replaced, too. Sheesh.

Designed in California: An Apple History Podcast

Jason Snell and Myke Hurley launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a podcast covering Apple’s history:

The two of us, Myke Hurley and Jason Snell, have been discussing Apple in depth every week for more than a decade on the Upgrade podcast. We want to go further, creating a podcast series that’s dedicated to telling stories from across all five decades of Apple history.

Jason has done some amazing work since leaving MacWorld; his “20 Macs for 2020” series was a blast, and I’ve been a longtime listener and subscriber of his Six Colors newsletter and podcast. He’s a great voice on MacBreak Weekly, too, which I’ve been listening to since its inception.

One of the things I appreciate about his coverage of Apple is that his Mac usage has traverses the same trajectory as mine: he’s been using a Mac since the early days, and has seen the evolution of the Mac from the classic OS through the transition to Mac OS X, and then the move from PowerPC to Intel, to the introduction of the iPhone, and more. He’s an enthusiast but to a fanboy..

There’s every reason to expect that Designed in California is going to be great.

More BetterTouchTool

I mentioned BetterTouchTool in my last Sunday Serial, and I’ve been using it since to learn more about it. I set up a couple of actions:
– Toggle Mission Control: command-option-mouse wheel scroll up/down
– Two-finger rotate right/left: adjust volume

I had always looked at BetterTouchTool as a way to hack the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, and also a way to add gestures to the Magic Trackpad. I don’t generally use a trackpad with my Mac at home or in the office, because I plug into a Thunderbolt dock at both locations and use an external display, keyboard, and mouse. (I do like using it instead of a mouse with my iPad, though.) If I’m at home, I don’t use my laptop that much after dinner, which is more iPad time. And I am a Logi MX Master mouse user.

The announcement of the new launcher feature, a la Apple’s Spotlight, was a nice surprise and made me peek at this tool again. I realized how many features are included, and how it’s a competitor to another deep and complex utility, Keyboard Maestro. BTT can do everything BetterSnapTool can do, and then adds a ton of customization options. You can effectively replace text expansion utilities like TextExpander with BTT–as you can (and I have) with Keyboard Maestro.

Bellview Winery’s Gemini Blend

Described on their site as “a light dry white blend of Caygua, Gruner and Traminette.” It’s bright and crisp, less velvety than the outgoing Viognier we’ve been drinking. Perfect on a hot summer day.

It’s a long weekend here in the United States; we are celebrating Memorial Day, which is a holiday to remember those who have died in military service. Like many federal holidays, it has been associated with retail sales, and is the informal kickoff of the summer season. As such, barbecues (lots of outdoor grilling, more accurately) are a feature of the weekend. The boys have been working this weekend, and the weather is crummy, so we’re not doing anything special. I do have a grocery store prime rib in the oven right now, though, so that will be a fun meal later today.

I got home a little early Friday, so I stopped at Bellview to fill up our growlers. We took Aaron out for Indian food Friday night, his first visit since’s he’s been home from college. They had these laminated cards on the tables encouraging diners to try their chicken lollipops, which are frenched drumettes.

Last night, we tried a new Turkish place, Wandering Rose, that opened up in a spot previously occupied by a diner; we had it delivered via DoorDash. It was really good, and we’re excited to go back.

Steve Jobs in Exile

I preordered Steve Jobs in Exile a while back when I learned about its impending release. I’m perennially curious about how NeXT evolved into Mac OS X. On a recent Upgrade episode,author Geoffrey Cain spoke with Jason Snell about the book. Jason pointed out that Steve Jobs in Exile fills the hole from David Pogue’s recent history of Apple, where Steve Leaves before returning to Apple. As Pogue’s book is about Apple, he doesn’t wander into the NeXT era save for how Apple came to acquire it (also a great story).

Steve Jobs in Exile

MarkEdit

MarkEdit is a Markdown editor for the Mac; the developer bills it as TextEdit for Markdown. It has a great set of themes to choose from, including an excellent Cobalt theme, which is usually my favorite for such applications. I used TextMate for a long time with a Cobalt theme, and MarkEdit’s looks even better.

Claude Code for JXA Scripting

I downloaded Claude’s Mac app to try it out; I’ve been using assorted AI tools to help me cobble together AppleScripts for a while now. Since Apple has elevated JavaScript to have first-class support in macOS, and added the ability to write and run JXA in Script Editor, I’ve been asking Claude to build JXA scripts for me.

One simple script grabs both the URL and title of the current tab open in Safari and makes a link for me. Little scripts like this are a great time saver.

const safari = Application("Safari");
const tab = safari.windows\[0].currentTab();

const url = tab.url();
const title = tab.name();

const formatted = `[${title}](${url})`;

app = Application.currentApplication();
app.includeStandardAdditions = true;
app.setTheClipboardTo(formatted);

formatted; // return value shown in Script Editor

I like to fire these from Launchbar.

What a difference a day can make! It was hot enough for shorts yesterday, and we hit 90 degrees mid-last week. It’s a much more seasonal 45 degrees today, and it’s entirely possible that I can get a few more days of sweater weather this week.

Rhonda and I treated ourselves to dinner at the Savoy on Friday night. They had fried squash blossoms on the menu as an appetizer, and we split those. I love squash blossoms; they’re a perfect vehicle for delivering something fried and unctuous in an exotic, time-constrained wrapper.

We used to frequent a restaurant around the corner called Brassie’s, which was a bar that was famous for serving crabs in the summer. A fellow named Keith took it over after it had been around for a long time, and he brought in a new, more upscale menu. He was talking to us one night about how a purveyor was tryin to get his business, and Keith delivered a challenge to him: get me squash flowers and I’ll use you. The purveyor came through, and we were treated to his treatment of the dish.

Shortly thereafter, one of the farmers who property borders ours started growing zucchini, and kindly offered us our pick of whatever we saw growing in the field. So for a couple of weeks, Rhonda was frying up blossoms every night, sometimes with ricotta and sausage, and other times with… well, I don’t remember. But it was delicious, and made all the more special by the fleeting availability of the flowers. Like our local Jersey tomatoes and watermelon in the summer, zucchini flowers are a seasonal treat.

Tear-Off Application Switcher Using Keyboard Maestro

One of my favorite features from the classic Mac OS is the ability to “tear off” the application palette from the application switcher. You didn’t have to have the switcher open all the time; it was there if you wanted it, and the mouse gesture was intuitive and a joy to use.

Mac OS X removed this feature, as it offered the iconic Dock in place of the application switcher. The Dock is a great bedrock feature, but it’s not the same thing.

DragThing, a utility created for the Mac by James Thompson, the same developer who created the original Dock, did have a feature that harkened back to the classic Mac OS application switcher–or at least allowed you to create a palette in the same vein.

Months ahead of DragThing’s retirement, Keyboard Maestro introduced the Application Palette, which allows users to create all kinds of versions of the application switcher. In its default form, it looks very much like the Dock, although it’s a highly customizable palette. Enter my tribute to the tear-off application switcher or yore:

I like to keep it near the top right corner of the screen, which was where I usually left it in the classic Mac OS.

HeyNote

Andy Inhatko sung the praises of Heynote on MacBreak Weeklyearlier this month, and I was compelled to try it out for myself. It’s such a clever notes app for software nerds. It introduces the concept of a buffer as an organizing principle; each buffer is a tab in the app. You add text blocks to a buffer, which you can review vertically in each buffer. Programmers can change the language in each buffer, and happily, Markdown is supported for basic note taking. It’s most certainly worth checking out.

PaperTrail–TaskPaper Client for iOS

TaskPaper developer Jesse Grosjean helpfully recommended PaperTrail to his rabid base of TaskPaper users via email over the weekend. PaperTrail implements the TaskPaper format for iOS and iPadOS, and it’s been a long time coming: Like Jesse’s excellent Bike app, TaskPaper has been a Mac-only affair, despite some interesting support from Agile Tortoise’s Drafts and some other apps.

OmniFocus, my to-do manager of choice, even supports importing and exporting from and to the TaskPaper format, which is helpful if you like to start planning in apps like Drafts, or even TaskPaper the app.

TaskPaper and OmniFocus, however, approach task manager and project management in different ways. OmniFocus is a database of tasks, organized by project; TaskPaper is a document-based system, and isn’t intended to be one giant document with all of your projects in one document (I suppose the flexible nature of TaskPaper makes this negotiable). It’s a flexible format for sure that lends itself to varied workflows.

PaperTrail isn’t a barebones viewer and editor of TaskPaper files: it brings some of its own ideas to working with this amazing document format. It supports due dates with a cool due date picker toolbar command, introduces “progress” tags, and offers outline-level formatting, which is customizable by the user. It has a helpful tool bar (or tool belt) that runs along the bottom of the document, which is user-customizable.

It’s a new app, so the otherwise first-class presentation on an iPad is limited somewhat by the lack of menu bar items. But boy does it look good, and finally offers a native, first-class TaskPaper experience on the iPad and iPhone. Typing command-p on your iPad’s extended keyboard will bring up a the Go To Anything palette, while option-command-p opens the Go To Project palette. Very nice.