Timothy Egan returns to his native Ireland and finds a welcome contrast to the United States… and realizes what’s going on at home:
Back home in America, the unimaginable is the new norm: a fully blossoming fascism. We’re stuck in a hideous loop of hate. But it’s also an idiocy loop.
MG Siegler on the MacBook’s premature retirement:
But also likely true is that Apple is closing in on their first ARM-based MacBook. The big question is: what will be the first machine to get Apple’s own chip? The current thinking has been the MacBook.² So perhaps this is just the MacBook going away for a bit, in order to be reborn as the first ARM Mac!
I love this line of conjecture. My current computer provided by work is a MacBook m3, and while I don’t love its power or battery life, it is astonishingly small (and that’s very useful for me in my current position). It is, in fact, smaller than the iPad Pro 12” in the Smart Keyboard Folio. It simply doesn’t feel as powerful. But an ARM chip like what’s in the iPad Pro running the MacBook? That would be a great device.
Interesting take on Jony Ive’s departure by John Gruber:
This may be good news. Ive is, to state the obvious, preternaturally talented. But in the post-Jobs era, with all of Apple design, hardware and software, under his control, we’ve seen the software design decline and the hardware go wonky. I don’t know the inside the story, but it certainly seems like a good bet that MacBook keyboard fiasco we’re still in the midst of is the direct result of Jony Ive’s obsession with device thinness and minimalism. Today’s MacBooks are worse computers but more beautiful devices than the ones they replaced. Is that directly attributable to Jony Ive? With these keyboards in particular, I believe the answer is yes.
Interesting take on Jony Ive’s departure by John Gruber:
This may be good news. Ive is, to state the obvious, preternaturally talented. But in the post-Jobs era, with all of Apple design, hardware and software, under his control, we’ve seen the software design decline and the hardware go wonky. I don’t know the inside the story, but it certainly seems like a good bet that MacBook keyboard fiasco we’re still in the midst of is the direct result of Jony Ive’s obsession with device thinness and minimalism. Today’s MacBooks are worse computers but more beautiful devices than the ones they replaced. Is that directly attributable to Jony Ive? With these keyboards in particular, I believe the answer is yes.
Brett Terpstra:
Every time I realize how much an app affects my workflow I want to hug it, so this is my big thank you to 20 apps on my system right now that make my life better every day. None of them run in my Dock — most of them are in the menu bar, some are completely background tasks on my machine where it’s easy to forget that they’re an integral part of my workflow. I see you, apps.
Good list of utilities here. So many of my most essential applications are on this list.
https://brettterpstra.com/2019/06/19/the-top–20-apps-not-in-my-dock/
Veteran software developer Brent Simmons, of Radio Userland, NetNewsWire, and OmniGroup fame:
That’s not the thing about iOS devices. They’re great for a whole bunch of other reasons: convenience, mobility, ease-of-use.
You can do some surface-level automation, but you can’t dig deep and cobble together stuff — crossing all kinds of boundaries — with some scripts the way you can on a Mac. They’re just not made for that. And that’s fine — it’s a whole different thing.
In a way, it feels like iOS devices are rented, not owned. This is not a criticism: I’m totally fine with that. It’s appropriate for something so very mass-market and so very much built for a networked world.
Meanwhile, the iOS triumphalists are saying that we should welcome the end of the revolution.
People will probably tell me it’s generational. And maybe it is. But if we don’t have this power that is ours, then I don’t actually care about computers at all. It meant everything.
Jason Snell, famously of MacWorld and now an independent media producer, on the convergence of iOS and macOS:
This is the way it’s always been, more or less—but all of a sudden it’s started to feel archaic. I value my Desktop as a collection of in-progress files, and some manual organization feels useful, but for the most part using the Finder feels like fiddly non-work, like rearranging your desk or reorganizing your bookshelf as a way to procrastinate before getting back to your actual work.
Using iOS has made me appreciate its more app-centric view. To access my current story list on the Mac, I generally go to the Finder, make a new window, and click on a shortcut in the sidebar to view a particular Dropbox folder. Yes, I could place an alias out on the desktop, or use a tool like Default Folder to force the default view of BBEdit’s File > Open command to the proper folder… and, come to think of it, I might start doing that, since it is closer to how iOS does things. On my iPad, I open 1Writer (my iOS text editor of choice) and use a sliding pane that displays the contents of that same Dropbox folder. Tapping the icon to create a new file creates it, by default, in that folder. I never need to leave 1Writer to open, create, rename, or email a file.
The Mac is becoming more like iOS–and I like it (Macworld)
It’s hard for me to land on one side of this or the other. Every time I use iOS on the iPad Pro, I think how much I like it and how it could–with some tweaks and additions–become my everyday platform.
But every time I come back to the Mac after an iOS jag, I realize how much I value using macOS, like LaunchBar, which extend the mac’s core power, to using applications such as DEVONthink and MailMate, which don’t have directly reproducible experiences on iOS.
Accessing the Emoji (or any other) keyboard using an iPad is a straightforward affair if the keyboard is iOS-specific (such as the Logitech Keys-To-Go, with its dedicated media keys) or Apple’s excellent Magic Keyboard, where the Eject button serves to bring up an alternate keyboard.
But what if you want to use a mechanical keyboard, like the excellent Poker II I just started using? Turns out, it’s a key combo. From Six Colors:
How can [users] still access Apple’s emoji picker from said keyboard, without resorting to tapping the screen? Apple’s own Smart Keyboards have a dedicated key for switching the onscreen keyboards, but others, not so much.
Good news! There is a way. On any Bluetooth keyboard, just hit Control-Spacebar to bring up an onscreen keyboard switcher. (Make sure the cursor is in a text field; it doesn’t seem to work otherwise.) You can then either hit Control-Spacebar to switch between various keyboards, or use the Up and Down arrows on the keyboard.
Quick Tip: A keyboard shortcut to bring up the emoji keyboard on iOS – Six Colors
Agenda, a clever new take on productivity software, is adding Reminders support. The text-centric (or text-friendly) affordance they show on the website reminds me of TaskPaper or Folding Text by Hog Bay Software: you can keep your fingers on the keyboard to create a reminder, which I find enticingly nerdy.
My interest since trying Agenda was how I could integrate it with OmniFocus. Reminders is of little interest to me, but it’s always been a good conduit to get things into OmniFocus. I think, based on how it appears to work, that action items created in Agenda would be imported to OmniFocus; the link, however, created by Agenda to Reminders would break once OmniFocus imports the tasks. We shall see.
The latest beta of Reeder for macOS is out and it introduces a feature called Bionic Reading.
And this feature is just bananas.
My first look at it was utter puzzlement. I tried it again when I got home and realized that I was scanning an article far more quickly than I normally would.
I hope someone studies Bionic Reading to determine if it works. It would be interesting to measure comprehension/retention using the feature relative to reading speed.
Kudos to the app’s creator, Silvio Rizzi, for taking a chance on something in an RSS reader.
Great article by Dr. Drang on returning to using LaunchBar after trying Alfred:
Launchers, especially their ability to dig though a folder hierarchy in one step, are one of the main reasons I find certain types of work much easier on a Mac than on an iPad. Once you get acclimated to using one, you find working on a device that doesn’t have one like working with mittens on.
I’ve been a LaunchBar user since 2002 and have happily upgraded every time. Like Dr. Drang, I used it primarily to launch applications (instead of Spotlight), but other uses are immeasurably time saving:
That does’t even scratch the surface of what the application can do. It’s a credible snippet manager for those who don’t need (or want) TextExpander, too.
From the Atlantic–marriage adapts to changing norms:
These individualized wedding rituals come along with a collective shrugging off of certain traditions, including religious ceremonies. The number of American adults not affiliating with any religion is on the rise, and young adults are less likely to attend church than older adults (though most Americans still believe in some kind of higher power, if not in the context of a formal religion).
When I got married, we hired a priest who left the Roman Catholic Church but essentially presented himself as “Father Chris.” He wore the kit and read scripture, but he wasn’t a priest. It was a novel way to solve the problem: a nod towards respecting the old ways but knowing inside that I wasn’t religious anymore myself. It’s fascinating to see our culture adapt without throwing in the towel on such norms, customs, and institutions.
A compelling explaination for the why of procrastination:
The particular nature of our aversion depends on the given task or situation. It may be due to something inherently unpleasant about the task itself — having to clean a dirty bathroom or organizing a long, boring spreadsheet for your boss. But it might also result from deeper feelings related to the task, such as self-doubt, low self-esteem, anxiety or insecurity. Staring at a blank document, you might be thinking, I’m not smart enough to write this. Even if I am, what will people think of it? Writing is so hard. What if I do a bad job?
With the release of Drafts for macOS, I’ve reconsidered how I’ll store information across iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices.
I initially looked at Drafts as a way to replace apps like Notes or the Editorial > DropBox > SimpleNote flow I’d cobbled together for a while, but it was evident that this was not an app that you only use for simple note taking. It was a kind of processor of data, most typically in text format. Drafts, it seemed to me, wasn’t really a notes repository; rather, it was a starting point.
Honestly, I didn’t get it at first. Why would I enter text into a blank page and sent it to my notes app? Why not just start in my notes app?
But Drafts is different. Drafts is way different.
How is Drafts different?
In a word: Actions.
Classically, data doesn’t really stay in Drafts. Drafts can be used, for example, to record a list of to-do items that you want to send to OmniFocus or Things. You don’t have to think about fiddling with these apps’ particular UIs; rather, you can simply create a list of possible actions items, gathered under the rubric of a larger project, and fire them off into your to-do manager. It allows for immediate capture, but minimal reprocessing on the back end.
And that’s how you really need to think about Drafts. I have a to-do item; I’ll open Drafts. I need to email so-and-so; I’ll open Drafts. I have an appointment next Friday at 2 pm; I’ll open Drafts. I need to message Bob; I’ll open Drafts. Drafts parses your input into your favorite app and does so in a way that is scary-smart.
And once it’s done? It archives the input.
This means, if you used it religiously, that you could see the genesis of most of your digital undertakings inside of Drafts.
Does this lend to fiddliness? Sure, it can. You can find many different actions, for example, to take input from Drafts into OmniFocus. And you can spend a day caterogorizing actions. You can create workspaces that show drafts based on tag, status, or other criteria. But you can settle on about five Actions and be pretty damn happy with Drafts, reap the benefits, and catch up with Twitter, all in the same day.
To be clear, Actions aren’t included with Drafts for Mac today. The system-wide share sheet is the current alternative, and while that’s exciting to hard-core Drafts users over the long haul, having Drafts everywhere means a lot.
One of my main problems, as I’ve noted in posts prior, is finding One App to Rule Them All: digital shoebox, a la my beloved but abandoned Yojimbo, and now DEVONthink; and text-intensive, lightweight apps such as iA Writer and Bear. I don’t like writing in Yojimbo or DEVONThink, but I like having info there. I like writing in iA Writer and Bear, but they will require a considerable amount of review if you’re going to treat them as a place to park odd bits of data.
Drafts is perfect in this regard. You can easily start in Drafts, enjoy the low-chrome, text-only, Markdown-friendly writing environment, but then send the text off to a place where you can search for it. There’s nothing that keeps you from leaving notes in Drafts, even in the iOS-only days, except that the information isn’t available to you using Spotlight when you’re in front of your Mac. And let’s face it: when you’re getting work done, you’re often in front of your Mac.
Drafts, as an iOS-only application, mean that you would have to switch to your phone (or iPad) to find a snipped of information. But that’s no longer the cast; Drafts for the Mac syncs across all of your devices, so irrespective of which device you used to create the draft, it syncs to all of your devices.
So Drafts for the Mac allows me to quick-input text data using a quick input panel reminiscent of that used my OmniFocus or Things. This is perfect.
Unlike other apps, Drafts takes a kind of GTD-inbox approach to file organization; notes are created in the Inbox, and are sent, depending upon how you like to use the application, to an Archive. I like this very much, as it comports with how I use email: the inbox is for processing. I don’t leave email there that requires my attention. I either send it off to OmniFocus, act on it, or delete/archive it.
Archived input after an action has been applied means that you never lose anything. Like a good email system, you can easily go back and find an entry. Drafts supports Spotlight integration as well, so you don’t have to remember that you saved something in Drafts.
Drafts, therefore, will afford me the means to write in a text-centric environment that favors Markdown and Taskpaper, and then send those notes where I will: Taskpaper to OmniFocus and Markdown to a text file, or Bear, or DevonTHINK. MailMate makes it easy to send messages to DEVONthink, as does Safari.
Truth be told, though, with the elevation of Drafts to the Mac, there’s no reason that it can’t replace Bear, iA Writer, or Notes. I’ll leave active notes in the Inbox, but otherwise, the text goes elsewhere (ie OmniFocus or Fantastical) or exists as reference material in the Archive. I can tag each Draft, indeed; but I suspect I’ll let search handle retrieval for me.
Workspaces are a welcome addition to Drafts, as they add a feature that users of apps like Yojimbo, Bear and SimpleNote would be looking for: tag groups. You can tag drafts in Drafts, and then create a Workspace to show you just the drafts that meet your criteria.
You might, for example, tag drafts with the tag “draft,” and then another tag for a specific website you write for, or perhaps Twitter. So my “Blog Drafts” Workspace shows me drafts tagged “draft” and “uncorrected.net,” while I could create another Workspace for draft Tweets that shows me items tagged “draft” and “Twitter.”
You get the idea.
Drafts, parked in your Dock, is the place to start: blog posts, emails, recipes, novels… you name it. Drafts will store text for you, but that’s not really the point. Drafts is the quick and easy place to start; its powerful features help you refine and send your writing to its next destination.
James Hamblin takes a medical, by-the-numbers look at President Trump’s diagnostic fit for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder in an article for The Atlantic. This great bit, though, emerged:
In the late 1980s, the satirical magazine Spy began to use Trump as a symbol of the gaudy decadence and ostentatious vulgarity of New York City during the era. Editor Graydon Carter noted at one point that Trump had small fingers, and the magazine—known for inventing pithy epithets for people and using them repeatedly—came to introduce Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.”
Cheeky.
iA writer is an excellent example of a markdown-centric, text production powerhouse that allows you to focus on your writing and forget about formatting. Like BBEdit, Byword, Drafts, and many other applications, iA Writer excels at giving you a place to start writing without much fiddling.
By default, iA Writer saves to an iCloud folder that you can sync between your devices. This is early iOS/iCloud behavior, where applications share a folder of documents specific to that application. This made a lot of sense for casual computer users who related documents created within, say, Excel, to the application itself, rather than an application stored somewhere in the file system. For some people, opening Excel was how you got to your spreadsheet; you didn’t dig around on the (cluttered) desktop or your documents folder, because you didn’t really pay attention to where you put it after hitting save.
This iOS convention makes perfect sense for the purpose of presenting a simplified user experience, but users familiar with the notional spatial location metaphor present in file systems chafe at its limitation. Pages documents shouldn’t have to live alongside Pages documents exclusively; sometimes, the right place for a file is in a folder full of related files, creator type be damned.
The Files app on iOS opened the door to storing files in the location of your choosing; iCloud and Files now present users with the option of browsing, opening, editing–and, yes, creating–files in locations long-time Mac users know and love, including macOS’s Desktop and Documents folders, as well as other cloud-based storage (Dropbox, Google Drive).
iA Writer supports adding locations from the Files app right in the main application window. This isn’t just open and edit in place; you can navigate to any location you like in Files, and create a new file for editing right there in iA Writer. You can open it later on another device using another app, or in another app on the same device.
Take an example: I can create a draft for Uncorrected in iA Writer in the Byword folder in iCloud. Then, when it’s time to publish, I can switch over to Byword for publishing (I like Byword’s handling of WordPress publishing better than iA Writer’s). Similarly, I can create a TaskPaper file on my Mac on the desktop, and later fetch it for review or editing using iA Writer.
https://uncorrected.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/720p.movThe old way of doing things in iOS–iCloud silos–remain and can present a simpler experience by eliminating file management. For those of us with the know-how or need to manage files, though, Files gives us a little more legroom. And iA Writer takes it a step further by allowing users to specify locations right in the application. It’s a great reason to keep Writer in your Dock.