Post Category → not-labs

Mac Power Users 679: Our Menu Bars, Docks & Startup Apps

Join us on this episode of Mac Power Users as Stephen and I take each other on a tour of our Mac setups, stopping at the Dock, Menu Bar, and startup items.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • TextExpander: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander.
  • Indeed: Join more than three million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast.
  • Electric: Unbury yourself from IT tasks. Get a free pair of Beats Solo3 Wireless Headphones when you schedule a meeting.

Automators 121: Hardware Launchers

After diving into software launchers in episode 120, Rosemary and I are using this episode of Automators to take a look at doing things with real physical buttons, in all the forms that can take.

This episode of Automators is sponsored by:

  • Electric: Unbury yourself from IT tasks. Get a free pair of Beats Solo3 Wireless Headphones when you schedule a meeting.
  • LinkedIn Jobs: Find the qualified candidates you want to talk to, faster. Post your job for free today.
  • Docparser: Extract important data from Word, PDF and image files. Send to Excel, Google Sheets and 100’s of other formats and integrations.

HomePod 2 Repairability

The iFixit Teardown is up for the HomePod 2, and it contains some good news. The original HomePod was full of glue and other bits, making it difficult to repair, but the new one is much better. “The most significant change is that the HomePod 2 can be opened without destroying it.”

We all wonder why Apple pulled the original HomePod before the second-generation HomePod was ready. I can’t help but think their tendency to fail and near-impossibility to repair played a role. Apple has made significant improvements in repairability with the new one. Hopefully, they will be more reliable as well.

Turn Any Website into an App with Unite 4 (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Unite 4, the best app for turning websites into apps. These days, many of us are using web services that require us to navigate a website to interact with them. This creates all sorts of issues. When you close your browser, you are closing your tools. When you want to jump straight to the tool, there is no easy way. Some of them are Electron-based and use up your Mac’s resources. Moreover, they often don’t follow conventional macOS standards.

You can fix all of that with Unite 4. Unite 4 takes a website and turns it into an app. It’s dead simple. You type in a URL, and you get a Mac app. It even creates an attractive Mac-friendly icon. 

Of course, people use Unite 4 for productivity apps like Gmail, Hey, Slack, Basecamp, and every other web-based productivity app. But you can also make entertainment apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Disney+. Unite 4 goes a step further with the ability to put these apps in your status bar (which, by the way, is an excellent place for Slack) and create floating windows. It also lets you take a “slice” of a website and put it in your Dock for quick reference.

Best of all, MacSparky readers are getting 20% off this week. Stop going to web pages to get your work done. Check out Unite 4.

Dipping Your Toes in Conversational Artificial Intelligence

There’s a Mac and mobile application, Poe, giving you an easy way to kick the tires on artificial intelligence. I’ve been playing with it for the last day, and I recommend it, particularly if you’ve never tried this kind of thing before.

The application is as simple as download, open, and start talking to it. It’ll give you a good idea about the state of conversational artificial intelligence. It is easy to make fun of this stuff; AI gets a lot wrong. But it’s constantly learning. Like it or not, this stuff is coming, and it’s time to wrap our heads around that.

While we are not at the point of robot overlords just yet, we are getting to the point of helpful robots.

Main window for Poe, an AI chat application on iPad, showing a question and answer.
Poe for AI Chat (main window)

The Six Colors Report Card

Jason Snell just published his annual Six Colors Apple Report card, where he asks folks writing about Apple to score the company in different categories. Jason has been doing this long enough now that you can see some interesting trends and get a feel for how Apple is doing with its various products and services. I like how the report card is focused on the products, and not the finances. It’s always a privilege for me to participate in this, and fascinating to see how Apple appears to be doing from the outside.

Mac Power Users 678: Sales and Studies, with Kerry Provenzano

Relay FM’s VP of Sales Kerry Provenzano drops by Mac Power Users to talk about her Apple gear, keeping multiple projects going at once, and why she has built much of her workflow around Airtable.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Never forget a password again.
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
  • Indeed: Join more than three million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast.

Timing: Track Your Time Without Timers; Now Even on iOS! (Sponsor)

Time is the most valuable resource you have. It’s the only resource you can’t get more of.

Yet, many of us don’t track our time. And the reason is usually simple: it’s cumbersome, and it’s way too easy to forget.

Not anymore! Timing is an app for your Mac that automatically tracks your time, no timers needed. It’s smart, it’s beautiful, and it’s easy to use.

Just download and install Timing and it’ll start recording how much time you spend on each app, document and website you use.

And with the latest update, Timing will now import your iPhone and iPad usage from Screen Time as well! This means you’ll get the full picture of how you spend your time, across all your devices.

I use Timing because of how easy it is to get good data. The app is smart. It learns how to categorize time for you (with a bit of help from you), and the reports are beautiful. I put screenshots of my Timing reports in my weekly/monthly reviews in Day One.

If you’ve tried time-tracking before and gave up on it, give Timing a try. It literally does the work for you.

The Omni Group Roadmap and A Few Thoughts on OmniFocus

The Omni Group has published its latest road map. As a fan of their software, I love reading these. They are committing to release OmniFocus 4 this year and they are also working on an update to OmniGraffle. I’ve heard from a lot of folks about the OmniFocus 4 release, and I’ve got a few thoughts:

  • Many readers tried the early betas and didn’t care for it. If that’s you, I’d encourage you to give the current, later betas, another look. A year ago, they were focused on features. They’ve done a ton of UI polish since then.
  • The Omni Group is the first company I’ve seen emerge from the morass of Swift UI with a high-end productivity app. I expect this will pay dividends going forward. Just like we’re now seeing Apple release major new features across all platforms at once, I expect we’ll see the same from the Omni Group.

I went into the wild over the last six months looking seriously at other task manager options including Reminders, Things, and some of the emerging online tools. I started that survey willing to move to another app, but ended up right back where I started. My takeaway is that OmniFocus is still the only option for me. (Perspectives are so powerful and you can link anything, anywhere.) While Reminders is a lot better, on a scale of 1 to 10 it goes to 7, whereas OmniFocus goes to 11.

Finally, now that I’ve finished my survey, I’ve committed three months to making an entirely new edition of the OmniFocus Field Guide once the new version ships.