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.

Send Me Back to the Country I Came From

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.

The MacBook Error

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.

Jony Ive is Leaving Apple

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.

Jony Ive is Leaving Apple

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.

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