It’s a warm, sunny Sunday here in South Jersey. I’ll be grilling some shrimp in a bit. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be updating this post, or just adding an addendum, to celebrate Stokelan’s new Myra release, which has been settling in the pantry since we got a bottle.

Aaron comes home Wednesday; I’ll pick him up at school after his final and we’ll roll back home after a quick dinner. I’m also considering Bahn Mi in the dorm before the drive home.

Christmas comes a few times a year for Mac software nerds thanks to BundleHunt. There are a few other titles I’m curious about in the current bundle, but I did try a few this week.

Application Wizard

I figured I didn’t need yet another application switcher, but something about the utility caught my eye when I clicked into the description.

After fiddling around in the preferences, I realized that Application Wizard effectively recreates what I loved about an old application I used in the PowerPC days on my PowerBook G4: MaxMenus.

Application Wizard has four menus: Open, Quit, Switch, and Special. These are exposed in the menu bar, if you like, and in a similarly designed panel that you can float on the edges or corners of your screen. Each menu is represented by a colored dot.

MaxMenus similarly exposed its menus in the four corners of the screen, but my favorite use case was to create my own menu with everything I wanted in it, and then use a hot key trigger to invoke the menu. Application Wizard allows you to do exactly the same thing! I’m looking forward to setting this up and using it.

Integrity Pro

Integrity Pro will check a site for broken links. I was able to point Integrity Pro at Uncorrected and it found a bunch of broken links: 404s and more. It reports Cloudflare blocks, generates a sitemap, and gives SEO data as well.

It looks like Network Utility for your websites.

Supasidebar

Yet another tab manager!

The Arc browser made a splash in the tech world a while back, with its interesting take on tabs and bookmarking. I tried out Arc but never found it much to my liking. To be fair, it requires relearning a lot of the habits you’ve picked up over the years using browsers, and if you’re as old as I am, that’s entails all of the browser evolution since the early Netscape and Internet Explorer days.

You can use Supasidebar to manage bookmarks, create workspaces with specific links, a sidebar for your browser (a la Arc), and a minimal launcher. It’s like a browser-independent Arc-inspired sidebar that appears in all of your browsers.

But it was the launcher that grabbed my attention. Supasidebar has a built-in tab-searching that lets you search your open browser tabs. It looks great and has some additional search parameters you can trigger.

In a previous Sunday Serial, I wrote about Keyboard Maestro’s Application Switcher, and its affinity, in my mind, with the Classic Mac OS’s tear off application switcher. Another utility emblematic of restoring classic functionality to macOS is SwitchGlass from John Siracusa.

SwitchGlass looks like the Dock, but unlike the Dock, only shows you apps that are currently running. Depending upon how you use your Dock, this bedrock OS feature is not necessarily a useful piece of visual information about which apps are running.

Command-Tab is Apple’s official app-switching solution, and it’s great. You can mash away on the tab key to move serially from application to application, or hold the Tab key down to scrub through the list. You can even mouse the list–and why not? You can even activate App Exposé with the tap of an arrow key.

SwitchGlass supports a ton of customization options. In addition to visual tweaks, it offers a bevy of keyboard modifiers. Read the FAQ for a full list.

Best of all, you can drag files to the app icons in the menu, and they’ll be opened in the app that you chose.

I set things up so that it’s not very Dock-like: small icons, auto-hiding, with tooltips (this was key for me). I love it.

It was a blast to listen to this recounting of the early and mid-life struggles of Apple, with, to my mind, a recognizable era: when the Mac of the 90s was an exciting line. As Siracusa pointed out, there were many lines, but there were great machines. My college roommate lusted over the Quadra; I nearly bought an early PowerPC model, but went with a Performa 630 CD and a SCSI drive for additional storage (to my regret).

It’s wild to think that there are people who are using Apple devices who didn’t experience this period, and then again people who weren’t even born at the time, who are doing same.

If you, like me, can’t get enough of this kind of chatter, the Verge’s How Steve Jobs Saved the Macintosh episode of Version History is a great watch (or listen).

This is a fine April Fool’s Prank indeed. “Inspired by casinos. Approved by no one.”

Joe Kissell, in an email today announcing Glen Fleishman’s new book, Take Control of Focus:

Glenn Fleishman is back with a brand-new book that helps Apple users manage notifications and the many varieties of audible, visual, and tactile alerts across their devices. Take Control of Focus shows you how to use Apple’s Focus feature to impose order on the many beeps, buzzes, and “Pay Attention to Me Now!” doohickeys we encounter all day long.

On a related note, an Applescript I found to clear notifications on the Mac:

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "NotificationCenter"
        try
            perform (actions of UI elements of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of group 1 of window "Notification Center" whose name starts with "Name:Close" or name starts with "Name:Clear All")
        end try
    end tell
end tell

You can run this as an Applescript, of course, or make a Shortcut, Keyboard Maestro macro, or ExtraBar action.

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