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.

Freedom

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:

• navigating folders/finding files
• calculator
• performing actions, such as emailing a file, after “grabbing” a file using cmd+g
• running Applescripts
• clipboard history
• initiation web searches
• showing running processes

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.

Link

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.

Link

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?

Link

Think Different

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.

Action!

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.

Do I really need another application in my life?

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

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.

Wrapping it all up

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.

Link

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.

Writer’s Locations

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.mov

Adding Locations in iA Writer

The 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.

DevonTHINK is where I store all kinds information: lots of PDFs, emails, documents, etc. I find it specifically helpful as a kind of digital junk drawer, but I do sometimes use it for storing project support. For example, each year, I consult with high school administrators on building the school schedule. I receive a lot of input from people in the form of emails regarding schedule requests, so I can drag those into a folder for this project. I create some lists and other text-intensive materials as well, which I can either drop into DevonTHINK, or create in the applications text-creation suite.

I just don’t really like creating content inside of DevonTHINK. It supports Markdown, for example, but it’s utterly bare bones.

I do, however, like popping open TaskPaper or BBEdit (or another text editor) and whipping up a list. Until today, I figured that any list I created outside of DevonTHINK would have to be edited on creation and then preserved in virtual amber once I imported it into DevonTHINK

But it turns out that by command-option dragging a file into DevonTHINK, you can create an alias of the file in DevonTHINK’s database, but leave the file where it is. So if you like working in iA Writer, you can always go back there when you edit information that you’re linking to inside of DevonTHINK. It’s another example of this application’s crazy flexibility.

Much of what I use routinely on iOS has a Mac counterpart. And as a Mac user since 1993, long before the release of iOS, that’s to be expected. But in reviewing my usage, I realized that some applications have come into my life the other way: they started as iOS apps, and later became Mac applications. Hence the organization of this post; in section one, I list the applications that I have used on iOS that moved from the Mac to iOS. Section two is “Back to the Mac,” as the keynote went. Two apps I chose because I wanted both iOS and Mac coverage, which will increasingly and by necessity be the way many applications are released. Lastly, I list apps that are iOS only.

Mac > iOS

1Password: I went from someone who didn’t understand how a password manager could help me to a person who relies on it. It’s probably the most valuable app to me. What’s more, iOS now allows it to serve as the password database on your devices at a system level, which has improved the experience markedly. Prior to iOS 12, you had to use iOS’s version of Keychain if you wanted password management across the device.

TextExpander: Once indispensable, TextExpander is probably on the chopping block for me. I write less in volume and boilerplate these days, so it does little more than expand dates and my signature. Because it’s the only third-party snippet manager that enjoys wide application support, however, I’m reluctant to give it up.

OmniFocus: I’ve tried many others and have always come back. OmniFocus looks good, is continually improved upon, and is as simple or complex as you like.

Mail: I think it’s the best app for email on iOS for serious users. Others look nice and offer some clever features, but nothing helps you get through the crush like Mail.

Byword: I start most posts in Drafts but I publish from Byword. It has great WordPress and Medium support, and it looks great too, although it’s long in the tooth and possible abandoned. I used iAWriter for a while and I like it for most of the same reasons, but the WordPress support is different (and I don’t prefer it).

DayOne: I started writing some in MacJournal, then tried DayOne. This app syncs across devices, supports various media, and generally makes it easy to jot down ideas and thoughts. You can lock it up nice and tight, like a diary or journal.

GoodReads: I signed up for GoodReads a long time ago as a place to see what others are reading and to share my own reading list. Amazon’s purchase of the service led to integration into its Kindle device and Amazon’s ecosystem, making the service (and concurrent iOS app) far more useful to me as a wishlist aggregator primarily, but also a place to see what I’ve read, and when. The ability to maintain concurrent Kindle store wishlists and GoodReads leads to some inconsistency, though; it would be nice to be able to choose one or the other in the Kindle’s system settings.

Google Apps: As we use Google instead of MS Office at work, I have installed Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides on my iOS devices. Using the apps on iOS is not a great experience; knowing that your work is always accessible, however, is hard to beat.

Flickr: Another webservice-come-app.

iOS > Mac

Drafts: Drafts makes your life simple by letting you start there for almost everything: calendar entries, email messages, tweets, to-do items, blog posts… if it starts in text, you can start it in Drafts. As it grows in features, it will be a thing unto itself. There’s a Mac version in beta now, and it threatens extinction of my installation of Bear.

Unread: Unread syncs with Feed Wrangler, but the interface is pure iOS. It’s a great example of the difference between iOS and macOS. You swipe where you should swipe, and tap where you should tap. It’s a great example of a well thought out iOS app.

Notability:The only thing that compares to writing with a nice pen is writing with the Apple Pencil on an iPad in Notability. With the iPad Pro, you get pressure sensitivity, and with Notability, you get a fine writing experience with sync to the Mac version. It OCRs your text for easy search, too. The Mac version is really just a window into the iPad version for me; I don’t use it for note-taking on the Mac, as the metaphor is pen on paper. See my Making the Most of Notes post.

Tweetbot:This app has some strange touch affordances and the navigation gets a little mysterious sometimes, but it looks better than the rest of the third party apps. I was happy with the official client for the Mac for a while, but I like the reading sync between devices.

News: I check News on my phone throughout the day; since I skipped installing FB on my iPhone X, it’s my habitual tap. I don’t use it nearly as often on the Mac, but I do appreciate that the content is there.

So Happy Together

Bear: Bear keeps text notes all together. One day, it might give way to Drafts, I think, but for now, nothing looks quite so nice. The best feature is the pretend/append feature. It puts me in mind of Quicksliver and text files.

DEVONThink: I would have stuck with Yojimbo on the Mac if Bare Bones made a credible iOS version. Together’s Keep It is a serious contender in this space, but DEVONThink was already established when I made the move. Evernote is probably the king of this genre, but I’ve never much cared for it outside of the sheer convenience.

iOS Only

Dark Sky: I don’t need a weather app on the Mac; I just click the link to NOAA or Dark Sky’s web page. Dark Sky provides hyper-local forecast data. (We were on vacation once and Dark Sky informed me that it was going to stop raining in seven minutes. And. It. Did.)

Calcbot: Looks good, but the conversions make it worth every penny.

Downcast: This has been my podcast catcher for probably a decade.