I’ve tried a thousand utilities for tab switching; I generally use Safari as my primary browser, but I have always liked the tab search feature in Chromium-based browsers.

Witch by Many Tricks handles tab search and switching, but it required a little setup before I could use it the way I wanted. Here are my settings:

Invoking Witch (I used command-shift-k) opens the Witch window, and I can immediately start typing to search for tabs. Safari doesn’t even have to be active for me to search for tabs. Which treats open windows in other apps as tabs, too, so you can search for documents you’ve been working on.

We’re in the first day of Daylight Savings Time, the switch to which is always perilous for my sleep hygiene. I do prefer DST to Standard Time, though, so it will be a welcome change once my body adjusts. Rhonda and I have to pick up the groceries at 2 pm, and then it will be spritzes and cheese before dinner; we hit Rocco’s last night for dinner, and the prime rib was delicious.

Interact Scratchpad

I’ve been subscripting to Drafts for iOS (and eventually the Mac) for a long time. Drafts’ developer, Greg Pierce, has created a number of incredibly useful small apps over the years besides Drafts, including Tally, which I use to track my calories when I’m out and about, and Simple Scan, which is my go-to app for scanning documents on my phone.

Interact Scratchpad solves a problem I didn’t know I had, but after one use, I realized what an itch it scratches. You paste some text into Interact Scratchpad that contains someone’s contact information (an email is the obvious use case), and the app parses the text and creates a new contact in your Mac’s Contacts app.

Apple: The First 50 Years

I preordered David Pogue’s new book, Apple: The First 50 Years. Apple’s never been a company to look backwards, and are famously willing to axe entirely successful products in favor of new directions. It’s a perfect match, having Pogue do the looking back. I read the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, and Brent Schlender’s and Rick Tetzeli’s biography as well, the latter being better, in my opinion. I hope there’s some good stuff about NeXT’s acquisition of Apple in this one.

Inkwell

Micro.blog recently offered a new feature/app, called Inkwell. It’s an RSS reader that’s connected to your Micro.blog account. It offers “Today,” “Recent,” and “Fading” views of your feed. I uploaded a subset of my RSS subscriptions from FeedBin to Inkwell to see how it works. It’s browser only for now. The Mac is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to RSS readers, and this is another (platform agnostic) cool option.

Me, writing about the Beats Case I used for my iPhone 16 Pro Max:

As you can see, the case can take a beating. But unlike a nice leather case, which will only be more charming with a blemish, the Beats case looks like ass after a few falls. I’m going to try magic padding the blemishes to see if the shit-brown discolorations will come off.

Aaron remarked the last time we saw him that my case looked pretty beat up. And that’s true: you can see the sidewalls delaminating from the backplate. it still seems to work fine but looks like it might give up the ghost any second. I guess a blue pen exploded in one of my pockets, the only evidence of which are blue smudges on the Beats case.

And a new phone case is like a new keyboard, mouse, or monitor for your computer: it makes you feel like you have a new device. So I started looking for a new case.

I considered a mainstay in our house (amongst the men): the Rhinoshield bumper case. I had one or two of these myself, and while I like them, I do find them bulky. I tried a cheap carbon fiber back panel + bumper kind of case I found on Amazon, but it did not appear capable of protecting itself, let alone my phone, in the event of a gravity-fueled tumble.

The OtterBox Symmetry case was on sale for 13 bucks on Amazon, so I gave it a shot. I have to say. I’m very impressed. Texturally, It feels like the Caudabe Sheath I had on my 14 Pro. Instead of shielding the Camera Control button using capacitive materials , the Symmetry sports a capacious cutout. And I like it! It shows off the color of the iPHone’s rim, so you would do well to consider your phone color _and_your case color if you order one.

The OtterBox adds a little bit of bulk and heft to the phone; it weighs about 5 grams more than the Beats case, and the edges protrude past the boundaries of the Beats case. It’s got a nice grippy texture to it, though, unlike the Beats’ slick surface. Hopefully this will keep the phone in my pocket, as I suspect the Beats case met its demise over a slow but steady accumulation of tumbles to the ground when I alight from my car.

I purchased Hector Simpson’s Aqueux wallpapers a while ago, and they’re pretty much all I use on my Macs, save for some of the Apple ones, like Sequoia’s classic Mac collection. The Aqueux collection recreates classic desktops from Mac OS X and macOS from Panther to Tahoe. They’re dynamic wallpapers, so they’ll change depending on the time of day and your system’s mode.

I recently found his next collection, called Hej, which bring the iMac’s dynamic wallpapers to your MacBook, Mini, or Studio. Hector added an application to manage your wallpapers, called Dizzy. Two bucks for the wallpapers! I love these.

Monroe — Hej

This was the announcement this week that I was most curious about. Would the new MacBook replace the MacBook Adorable, a Mac I used for a number of years at work? It was not the fastest Mac I’ve used by a mile, and it suffered some pretty serious limitations, but its size? It was perfect.

The Neo is a great release, and I can’t wait to see one in person. I’m disappointed that it still has a 13” display, because the Adorable’s screen, while small, created a uniquely portable device whose size limitations were, of course, addressed at your desk with an external display. On the other hand, it is a 13” display, while the Air–the next smallest MacBook–is 13.6.” It’s a bit thicker than the Air, but weighs the same, and offers both smaller length and width .

The colors are great, too.

The Adorable was not the cheapest Mac in the lineup by a stretch, so while the Neo (barely) offers the smallest overall footprint of Apple’s MacBook lineup, it’s not a successor to the Adorable. Alas.

The Neo does, however, place the Air back into its role in the lineup as the mid-tier Apple portable–the Air was initially an aspirational device, a more expensive option for those craving the smallest possible MacBook, with some tradeoffs. The Adorable assumed this spot when the Air shifted to the lowest-end Mac for a time, offering a featherweight MacBook (true, there was an 11″ Air at the time) and a better screen than the air–but at a price.

Burst Notes, from publicspace.net, makers of the excellent A Better Finder Rename, adds the deliciousness of a command palette, as you might see in Obsidian or Raycast, to your Mac for munging Markdown files.

Burst Notes lets you add any number of Markdown documents to the utility. With a click of command-shift-b, you are greeted by a handsome palette:

Burst Notes displays all of the headings in your markdown file and lets you quickly append text, a to-do, code block, or list of text to your specified file. If you have a “Today” or “Todo” file on your desktop that you append throughout the day, Burst Notes is a clever, tasteful way to add data to your file without stepping out of your level of focus.

I have often tried the Today.md file trick as a place to add some quick information on my Mac, most recently trying Sindre Sorhus’s Scratchpad, and then keeping a Bike file on my desktop for quick reference. As noted on Burst Notes’ webpage, though, you can skip the step of switching to the application you’re using and editing via Burst’s panel. It’s a fully keyboard-centric mode of interaction, allowing you to keep your fingers on the keyboard if you like.

And hey: Bike handles markdown files with style (and grace), so Burst Notes is a win in my book.

It was a beautiful day yesterday, hitting 50 degrees for the first time since I can remember. It’s been a cold winter and a lot of snow for South Jersey. We go some years with none. Might see 70 degrees next weekend!

I preordered Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionarywhen I read about it while lazing in bed yesterday morning. In reading the Walter Isaacson biography, as well as the excellent Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader,I find the NeXT and returning to Apple stories the most interesting. I’m always curious about how NeXTStep came to be Mac OS.

Another book I’m planning to read is A World Appears by Michael Pollan. In doing some “mesearch,” I discovered Sam Harris’s book Waking Up, which was not the direction I expected to go into. (I’ve got a series of posts in the works on consciousness and meditation, but I think I’ll inhale Pollan’s book first.) I don’t wince at the concept of mindfulness or the practice of meditation like I once would have, and I deeply interested in the subject of human consciousness as a result.

This week’s Serial is wholly comprised of apps I’ve been digging lately. Enjoy!

Quick Exposé

Quick Exposé is a utility that improves the Exposé feature in macOS. I’m incline to command-tab to switch between apps in macOS, but sometimes you want to see all of the windows open in a specific app. Among other tweaks, Quick Exposé lets you option-hover over an icon in the Dock to show an application’s open windows. I realized I liked it enough when one of my Macs wasn’t running it, and I couldn’t figure out why the mouse gesture wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do.

Textovert

Developer Howard Oakley describes Textovert as “a drag-and-drop wrapper for text conversion using the command tool textutil and for converting text and Rich Text content of PDFs.” You drag a file onto Textovert’s main window, specify your output format, and bingo: you’ve got an editable text, rich text, Word, or other file format to work with.

Gestimer

Brett Terpstra mentioned Gestimer in a recent episode of the Overtired podcast. It’s a clever little app that lets you set a timer by dragging a slider out of your Mac’s menu bar. It helpfully adds the timer to the Reminders app, which in my case, means it shows up in OmniFocus, too.

Silt

I played Silt this week for the first time. It looked a lot like Limbo, which is a great game that even Aaron go into, so I couldn’t help but try it. It’s an undersea platformer, and combines platforming and puzzle solving elements with an angle cribbed from the excellent Ghost Trickgame from Capcom: possession. To make your way through the undewater mazes, you need to possess sea creatures to chew through obstacles and smash boundaries. It’s a lot of fun, and like Limbo, dark and moody.

Wow is it cold out there! Rhonda and I stayed in yesterday after running a thousand errands and taking Moscato to and from the groomer yesterday (they did a very nice job on her). We guzzled some of Bellview Winery’s 2024 Chardonnay and Rosé from the growlers I filled while out and about once we settled in and had some cheese. It’s spritzes and burrata time before the Super Bowl.

I finally got the Mustang unstuck from the ice in the driveway. It’s hard to imagine that such a powerful vehicle could be rendered helpless by a few blobs of ice, but there you have it. I was able to drive Aaron’s Mini Cooper all week, so there’s nothing to complain about. It’s fun to drive different cars and have an appreciation for their differences. I get to drive the WRX on the weekends and when we travel, and the Mustang to work most days. Driving the Mini is a neat change of pace.

Bookmark Managers!

Why use a dedicated bookmark manager? In addition to the features that each one brings, the main reason is that it’s a great way to indulge in trying out different browsers, if you’re just browser curious, or if you actually need to use different browsers depending upon what you’re doing. I have long used both Safari and Chrome, because both of the last two school districts in which I’ve worked were Google shops, and Chrome is a better fit for Google suite apps. So with a bookmark manager, you can hop between different browsers but keep all of your bookmarks in one place. This is especially helpful if you switch between operating systems and browsers, and your manager supports multiple platforms.

Raindrop.io

Raindrop.io is exactly what I just mentioned above: a multi-platform bookmark manager. Getting bookmarks into Raindrop is dead simple, and it supports a number of organizational features, including folders, tags, and pile of filters. It is organized like an email app, such that new bookmarks show up in an inbox, and you can organize them for later use.

Raindrop.io recently added an LLM feature for paid users, which will organize your bookmarks, suggest tags, and excise broken links. This is an exciting feature that perfectly envisions what AI should be doing for us: making our lives easier by removing the drudgery of organizing and maintaining data by leveraging our practices and preferences.

ExtraBar + Shiori

I found ExtraBar when Louie Plummer posted about it on Amerpie. I tried it out, thinking that it might be a replacement for Bartender, which has gotten a little wonky since Tahoe came out. It is decidedly not a Bartender replacement, and appeals to uses who enjoy employing links across macOS in apps that support them.

There’s a lot you could write about ExtraBar, and maybe if the utility finds some traction in my life, I’ll do so, but for now, I’m just going to focus on Shiori. It’s a paid plugin for a paid app, which I find a little odd, but maybe the developer is on to something. You invoke ExtraBar as you normally would, but can then jump into Shiori, where you can search your bookmarks. You can include specific folders to in ExtraBar’s presets, so that you could have a preset for work, and another for home, for example, and only show the links you want to see depending upon the context. The animations are whimsical and fun, to boot.

URL Manager Pro

URL Manager Pro has been around for a long time; my dad has always used it on his Macs, even back in the class Mac OS days, prior to NeXT’s acquisition of Apple. I never really got into it, but for the purposes of this post, I downloaded it and gave it a spin. It’s available for the iPhone and iPad, too, which is not something you can say about ExtraBar + Shiori.

URL Manager Pro, bookmark manager for the Mac

Matthew Weber on changing notes apps:

I have almost 1400 directories and an untold number of notes. That’s just here, so there are more on other platforms. The way I see it, I can do two things:

I can spend the next year of my life (probably) going through these notes, taking out the ones that can be tossed and then properly organizing them into a directory structure that makes sense.

Or, I can make an old notes directory, shove everything in there, and start the fuck over.

A Mess of Notes

MacRumors:

Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 27, 2010. Designed to fill the gap between smartphones and laptops, the original iPad featured a 9.7-inch LED-backlit multitouch display, Apple’s first custom designed chip, a 30-pin dock connector, and up to 64GB storage. With a starting price of $499, it offered users a new way to browse the web, read eBooks, watch videos, and interact with Apple’s growing app ecosystem. Jobs described it as “a magical and revolutionary device.”

I managed to wait until September of 2010 before buying my first iPad, and I have some photos of it on my desk at work from the time.

I get a kick out of seeing an old iPod in the background, attache to the Altec Lansing speaker dock I used at work. I wrote about my experience with it here.

The first iPad was a good bit of fun, although if you think feeling hamstrung by the OS is a limitation now, the original was really just a big iPod Touch. The criticism at the time was that it was just a “consumption” device, and couldn’t be taken very seriously because you couldn’t get much done with it. I got plenty of writing and email done with the first iPad, and every one after that, too, but it was not a laptop replacement. Things have gotten better, of course, but iPad’s still not a Mac.

The original iPad lasted me until the iPad 3 came out, which was a heavier device thanks to the Retina display. The original had, for me, been so RAM constrained that just reading a web page in Safari would often cause the app to crash. And unlike the Mac, the system didn’t give you a reason why.

I got the original Mini when it came out, too. Here’s a pic from the parking lot when I bought it, still in the box.

I’ve had a rotation of iPads since then: the original Air, a few pros, 10″ and 11″ and even 13″ models. While they’ve never been able to replace my Mac, I have always found a lot of use for them.