I tried a 30-minute beginner ride. I really liked the hardware and the software. Two yellow sliders give you constant feedback about pace and resistance. I liked it a lot.
I tried a 30-minute beginner ride. I really liked the hardware and the software. Two yellow sliders give you constant feedback about pace and resistance. I liked it a lot.
I saw this video on YouTube last night and it was definitely a mind:blown moment. One of OmniFocus’s most powerful (pro) features are perspectives, which allow you to narrow your (ahem) focus to tasks you are able or willing to complete. I have created a dozen or so of my own perspectives in OmniFocus, including several in my attempt to organize my tasks in the Eisenhower Matrix, a “weekends” perspective, and some others to separate work from home open loops.
The idea, however, of using the Focus feature on iOS/macOS/iPadOS to accomplish a similar thing blew my mind. I immediately updated my Work and Home Focus settings on my iPhone to include the Work and Home folders exclusively when the Focus is applied, and it works just as described. I could certainly use a bit more granular there, but that may come in time. Also: that’s what perspectives are for.
This was a great opportunity for me to explore the Focus feature in the Apple Ecosystem once again. I had restricted contacts in the same Focus settings depending upon the Focus mode, but it’s cool to see how many app notifications you can turn off, app by app, with this feature.
New in iOS18 (and iPadOS and macOS) are collapsible sections in Notes. This is a nice feature to have in what has always been a bit staid in the note taking department. Notes is really great for taking handwritten notes.
I was wondering when this feature bowed, and I came across these cool guides that Apple publishes. They generally just note new features from device to device, which was helpful for my purposes, but I can see checking them out in the future, too.
I remember when TextEdit had an outlining feature.
This is what’s left of the wooden grill scraper I bought years and years ago. It was flat at the business end when I purchased it. These things came out of nowhere after some reports about the dangers of metal grill brushes. I remember telling a relative about it and he joked that instead of metal filings, you get splinters. I have never encountered anyone injured from a grill brush (and boy have I used them), but no one has gotten splinters from this tool, either. I will certainly be replacing it with another wooden one.
I guess it’s middle age talking, but I got to thinking about what I’d do if I didn’t work for a living (or work as much). And I thought pretty quickly that most of what I’d do would be more of what I do now, when I have time: write for Uncorrected, play guitar and sing, take lots of pictures, and exercise. I do have a notion that one day I’d like to take golf lessons and play at the public courses around here, too, but that’s probably only aspirational.
And partly inspired by a bottle of rosé but in an authentic, clear-headed sense, Rhonda and I were talking about what life would be like for us without certain encumbrances, and we agreed that it would look pretty much like it does for us now. I let that ring in my skull for a bit; she can be perceptive and wise at just the right times, and this was one of those moments. It put me in mind of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return or Recurrence: would you will this moment to happen again? That is his invocation for our existence.
I wrote back in June of 2020 about my increasing rate of photo-taking, mostly due to having a smart phone.1 I thought it would be fun to go back and update my photo-taking activity after a couple of device upgrades.
Phone | Photos | Videos |
---|---|---|
iPhone 3G | 927 | 0 |
iPhone 4 | 1780 | 268 |
iPhone 5 | 2048 | 135 |
iPhone 6 Plus | 1974 | 27 |
iPhone 7 | 1802 | 57 |
iPhone X | 2122 | 47 |
11 Pro Max | 1435 | 38 |
12 Pro Max | 2707 | 115 |
14 Pro | 7187 | 818 |
I wrote back then that I take about a thousand pictures a year. That was generally true; at the time I wrote the original post, I was on track to take around 3,000 pictures a year, as I only had the iPhone 11 for one year before opting to upgrade to the 12. I took around 2700 with the 12… but over 7k with the 14 Pro. I took a lot more video with the 14 as well, by a significant margin.
I don’t expect the 16 Pro to bear the same load.
1I have no question that the evolution of the cameras in modern smartphones, and in my case, the iPhone, is directly related to the trend in my photo taking.
Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
Mums: Nothing says fall quite like the harvest of fresh vegetables, pumpkins everywhere, and of course, mums. Rhonda always stocks up on them at a local farm and makes a pretty display on our side porch. I would live like a bachelor were it not for her touch.
Martha Stewart’s Pickled Cabbage recipe: Related to number two, cabbage is always available, for a cheap price, in the fall. We have a small stand down the road that employs the honor system and treats the locals in the know to dirt-cheap lettuce, cabbage, beets, peppers, sweet potatoes, and other seasonal veggies. I’ve long wanted to try quick-pickling a head of Napa cabbage. We sometimes have quick-pickled asian-style cucumbers with dinner, and I love it. I also love sauerkraut and asian pickled vegetables when they’re featured in a dish. As such, I have been pickling different cabbages, most recently (as in today) a head of regular old cabbage. I’ve tried a few recipes, but Martha’s seems to be sticking. My first batch featured way too much dried red pepper flakes, entirely an accident, but it was delicious and spicy.
I’ve been using Todoist for a solid year across all of my devices: Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and Windows. This was after using OmniFocus exclusively since the fall of 2016 (and for many years before that–I even beta tested the first version, excluding forays into both Asana and Things). Last night, while setting up a new machine, I decided to reinstall OmniFocus 4, with the possibility of switching back (I think I am). So this is a good time to consider the differences between them, and ultimately what makes me choose OmniFocus.
Feature | OmniFocus | Todoist |
---|---|---|
Natural Language Input | No | Yes |
Cross-Platform | Web | Yes |
Hookmark | Yes | Web only |
Defer | Yes | No |
Weekly Review | Yes | No |
Project Sections | No | Yes |
Shortcut Support | Yes | iOS only |
The one great strength of Todoist–and the feature I miss the most when I don’t use it–is its natural language input. For example, I wanted to be reminded at 4 pm today to text my son to turn on the sous vide machine. I opened Todoist and created a new task like this:
text Aaron today at 4 pm @phone #Home
One line, with autocomplete in the app. It’s fast and great.
Consider the same operation in OmniFocus:
You can type in the meat of the task, but getting those other parameters requires mousing, tabbing, or tapping around in a number of fields. It’s not as fast as Todoist and far more fiddly, especially on iOS.
The most frequently requested Todoist features on the Todoist Subreddit are defer or start dates. These requests must come from people with demanding jobs, because a good task management app for busy people ideally includes the ability to capture action items that you will need to deal with in the future. That could be in a week, a month, or a year. Defer dates, in OmniFocus, allow you to push off a task or project to a future date, but more importantly, to obscure it from your OmniFocus window until you need to see it.
There are some tricks you can use to achieve a workable version of this on Todoist. Different people have come up with clever workarounds to this missing feature, using tags (“labels” in Todoist), or in my case, moving lists into a folder and using filters to overlook them when I don’t want to see them. It’s fiddly (and fun) to build these workarounds in Todoist, but you never get over the nagging sense that this app/service wouldn’t be elevated by the addition of defer dates.
Another benefit of Todoist is it’s available on just about every platform: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, web. OmniFocus is a first-class citizen in the Apple ecosystem, but is only otherwise available on the web. The features are identical on Mac and Windows, but the app really shines on iOS.
But really, Todoist is an example of how cross-platform isn’t necessarily better. Sure, it’s great to have the app running on any OS you want to use. But you’re really just using a web wrapper on Mac or Windows; the experience is identical whether you’re using the Electron version or loading a page in Safari. And on the Mac, Todoist just doesn’t look right.
OmniGroup, the makers of OmniFocus, have been developing for the Mac since the NeXTSTEP days, before that OS became Mac OS. It is, in the truest sense, a Mac-Assed Mac App. OmniFocus feels tightly integrated into the system on macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. It is an example of the benefits of full commitment, of narrowing your options, for the good.
Take Hookmark as an argument for eschewing cross-platform solutions in favor of a tightly integrated app. Hookmark is only available on the Mac, and allows you to link all kinds of data. Integrating Hookmark into your OmniFocus workflow allows you to link emails, documents, and other files to projects or single tasks. Called “Ubiquitous Linking,” it’s best described in its manifesto:
We also recognize that humans work best in psychological flow. Switching contexts, even to search for information, interferes with flow while consuming precious mental capacity, brain energy and time. Activating an aptly-placed link to information is easier and faster than searching for the information — and more protective of flow.
We affirm that the ability to copy a link to a resource is as important for cognitive productivity as the ability to copy other types of information. This applies to all persistent digital information.
Hookmark does work in Todoist… but only in the web interface. And there are some linking affordances available in Windows, but not to the extent that Hookmark enables. It might be the utility I miss the most when using Windows. I don’t want to overstate Hookmark’s utility, as it’s a unique app with a similarly unique feature set, but if you spend some time getting to understand how it works, you will likely find it indispensable.\1\
GTD is, on the surface, about collecting to do items, organizing them by project and context, and working from your lists. An essential feature of implementing the method, though, is regularly reviewing your tasks and projects. You can’t effectively do this using only your todo list app, but it’s a central part of the process. Without a proper review, a good app can only help you so much.
There’s nothing about Todoist that prevents you from reviewing, in the GTD sense of the word, your open loops and obligations. It is, however, a manual affair, and you have to sit down and comb through your projects. It is easy, in this instance, to dig into something and tick some action items off your list, but then forget where you left off in Todoist.
This is not the case with OmniFocus, which is the only todo manager I’ve ever used that bakes the weekly review into the app itself. Each week, OmniFocus collects all of your projects–overdue, current, and future–and presents them to you in a pane for you to review. You mark off your progress per project, and there’s no question about where you left off if you get distracted or attend to something else emergent. The review is one of the features I miss most when I’m not using OmniFocus.
Todoist lacks some of OmniFocus’s organizational elan. Most notably, Todoist was designed initially to support one canonical list of projects. You can create one sub level of projects, which is helpful in the way that folders are in organizing projects in OmniFocus, but for anyone who at least splits their projects into “Work” and “Home” categories, you know that you will chafe at Todoist’s limitations here.
A big however, though, are sections in projects in Todoist. You can create phases or stages within a project, and in addition to making these sections meaningful dividers between project subsections, they clean up your projects considerably. Additionally, you can use natural language to assign tasks to sections of projects, and search on sections. OmniFocus has no such affordance, leaving you only the option to create tasks with subtasks to subdivide your projects. Sections are a more attractive and sophisticated feature.
Another neat trick that Todoist offers is to present your sections within a project as a Kanban board. I have tried Trello and never found that particular mode of organizing and viewing my tasks to my taste, but I did enjoy using the feature in Todoist to separate projects into things I can do now (or should do sooner) from things I can wait on. Similarly, it’s a great way to divide up my Car Maintenance project, where each section (or board) corresponds to one of the family vehicles. In this case, I find it helpful to focus on one vehicle at a time. Very flexible, very cool. OmniFocus is stuck in outliner mode at all times.
Both Todoist and OmniFocus offer support for Apple’s Shortcuts app/utility, but Todoist shortcuts are not available on the Mac. OmniFocus has a nice collection of shortcuts in the app, and in addition there are hooks in the app that allow you to make some useful shortcuts of your own. This highlights again how Todoist is well integrated on mobile, but a second-class citizen on the Mac.
Speaking of, a cool workflow around OmniFocus and its shortcuts support, in addition to LaunchBar, is using the latter to browse and execute the former. Once you’ve collected some shortcuts, you can browse them using LaunchBar, and fire the shortcut you want.
I was using OmniFocus not so long ago that I could have dug into the Shortcuts support. I’m having a blast with this now, though.
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\1\ I readily agree that Hookmark support is super-niche, and likely not a consideration for a lot of people comparing the features of these two apps.
On the weekend of Rhonda’s 52nd birthday, which we did indeed celebrate, here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
1 There is another placed where I’m boringly repetitive in my dinner order: The Knife and Fork in Atlantic City. I always–always–order the lobster Thermidor. There are a few reasons, including the fact that it’s an uncommon dish, and we don’t go there often.
I almost included watermelon in my Serial Sunday Pro Max post last night. Watermelon is ubiquitous and cheap in southern New Jersey all summer long. I’ve always loved watermelon, but not more so than these last two summers. Last summer, my rowing schedule kept me plenty thirsty, and there is nothing more refreshing when you’re thirsty than watermelon. It’s also low calorie relative to the bulk you can serve yourself, even being careful with your calories: a decent bowl of watermelon won’t even net you 100 calories. I eat watermelon first thing in the morning when I get up, just before rowing and coffee, and eat it throughout the day. I can eat a quarter of a melon in a day when I’m really in the mood.
Sadly, like all great seasonal things, it seems like the supply is drying up locally. Rhonda and I tucked in to Shop Rite and came up empty, and subsequently rolled out to a local farm stand in the hopes of securing one there. Nothing.
I did, however, score a nice small cantaloupe, which I cut up this afternoon. It’s delicious.
It’s iPhone Preorder week! Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
Simon J. Levien, writing for The New York Times:
Former President Donald J. Trump has gone to great lengths to distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a future Republican administration that has outraged Democrats. He has claimed he knows nothing about it or the people involved in creating it.
“I’m not going to read it,” Mr. Trump said at his first presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. “Everybody knows what I am going to do.”
I don’t think anyone thought he was literally going to read it.
I wrote about making this a while back, but we make this dish pretty often. Last night’s effort was a success. I kept the bath at 122 and then charred the steaks up over the charcoal.
Fall: I suppose this should be its own post, but I was outside walking the dogs, pondering a third topic for this weekly listicle I am fond of writing, and it was unmistakable: fall is upon us. It’s been cool all day, but as the sun bows in the west, the air is downright crisp. Fall is paradoxically inviting and foreboding. It signals the end of summer, culturally a time we consider fun and light. But it’s a slow ramp up to the holidays, when its cooler but not cold, and there’s lots of merriment. The colors, the dishes, the waning daylight: these are all things I like about fall. It is, of course, foreboding in that it signals the denouement of another year, another spin on the globe, and the slow roll of winter.1 The grim steeliness of winter lies just over the crest of the holiday season. Memento Mori, as the Stoics advise.
If you are given to reflecting, fall is hard to resist.
1We have, in some sense, licked the problem of winter; we live in hospitable indoor climes and temper the limits of the shorter days with interior delights, be they cooking, watching, reading, or something else. But the memory remains.