John Siracusa returns to Mac Power Users to discuss his iPhone usage, window management philosophies, best practices for troubleshooting, and a lot more.
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Join Mike and me on this episode of Focused as we revisit the topic of toxic productivity, discuss choosing apps and tools that support your intentions, and share our plans for the last quarter of 2023.
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Tyler Stalman joins Mac Power Users to share the details on the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro camera systems. Tyler also shares some of his favorite tips for better iPhone photography and videography.
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On this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I cover some of our favorite Apps that add additional features to Shortcuts.
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This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Hoban Cards, where they use a 1902 letterpress machine to make cards that your colleagues, clients, and customers will never forget. I sure love mine.
Evan and the gang at Hoban Cards are masters at the craft of designing and making letterpress calling cards and stationery. They have some beautiful templates to choose from, or you can roll your own.
I love handing out letterpress cards. It is always a conversation starter. Hoban Cards is where I go to buy them, and it is where you should too. Throw out those ugly, conventional, mass-produced, soulless business cards and reach out to Hoban Cards.
If you’re set on calling cards, I also recommend going to Hoban for your stationery. I bought stationery from them years ago, and I love sending it to friends and family. In a world full of text messages and email, personal stationery sends a whole different message altogether.
Best of all, use ‘MacSparky’ to get $10 off any order. Get yours today.
On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I discuss macOS Sonoma, which brings with it Desktop widgets, a new screen saver and desktop experience, more powerful video conferencing tools and updates to Safari, Messages, Notes, Reminders and more.
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Here’s what I sent out to Labs Members in September of 2023:
If you’d like to be a part of the MacSparky Labs, you can join right here.
Jesse J. Anderson is back on Focused to talk about troubleshooting productivity systems and his new book for helping adults with ADHD find focus.
Hooray! It’s macOS Sonoma release day. This new operating system has some great features, including better dictation, small (but nice) improvements to the Apple productivity apps (Kanban in Reminders!), a bunch of messaging and video conferencing updates, PDF tools, and desktop widgets. Stephen and I will cover them in depth on this weekend’s episode of the Mac Power Users.
But there is a more significant point here. Apple had an extraordinarily successful beta season in 2023. They promised some solid updates in June at WWDC and delivered on them from the beginning. None of the new features required a “boil the ocean” effort by Apple, but all of them provided a lot of bang-for-the-buck, quality-of-life improvements.
Moreover, they got it all out with very little drama. They didn’t have to delay the iPadOS launch until weeks (or months) after the iOS release. Moreover, this macOS version is shipping just a week after the iPhone. At the same time, they are also going full tilt at an entirely new operating system with visionOS.
I am impressed with the effort all of that took. I would love to know the story behind all of this. I’ve got four pet theories, none of which have a lick of evidence:
They’ve been updating multiple major operating systems for over a decade now. I expect they’ve learned quite a bit.
That experience also gives management a better idea of what to expect and aim for while giving engineering a better idea of what they can pull off in the time allotted.
Apple has taken on some big tasks over the past decade as they’ve moved to SwiftUI and made significant architectural changes to the programming interface and the chipset. All of that is behind them now, which should make things easier from this point.
This theory is probably a stretch, but I think the fact that Apple has looming deadlines related to visionOS gave the company even more focus across the board. That showed up in the decisions and work done on everything else.
I expect all of these factors (and probably a few more) played a role in Apple’s success this year, but I hope their management is paying attention and figuring out how to make this the new norm.
Merlin Mann comes back to the Mac Power Users to talk about task management, iOS 17 improvements, and wisdom.
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