It’s that time of year again. If you haven’t already subscribed to my Yule Playlist, you should check it out. I’ve been curating it for over a decade, and it’s full of excellent holiday music, primarily in the jazz genre. Over the years, I’ve received messages from people using this playlist for their holiday parties, while decorating the tree, and otherwise being festive.
I hope you are among them.
I often hear from listeners and readers looking for a research solution in the Mac ecosystem. My favorite app for this, without a doubt, is DEVONthink. DEVONthink is the most professional document and information management application for the Mac. It’s the one place for storing all your documents, snippets, or bookmarks, and working with them.
The integrated AI engine assists you with filing and searching, while the extensive search language includes advanced Boolean operators.
DEVONthink features a flexible sync system that supports many cloud services — or lets you synchronize over your local network — with everything securely encrypted. This gives you the choice for whichever syncing works best for you!
It has Smart rules and flexible reminders that let you automate all parts of your workflow and delegate boring, repeating tasks. Let DEVONthink automatically organize your data with rules you define!
DEVONthink’s AppleScript dictionary is one of the best on the Mac. There’s no part of DEVONthink that can’t be automated. Extend DEVONthink’s functionality with your own commands by adding them to its Scripts menu. Even templates can have scripts inside and you can set up new documents with data from placeholders, or inserted using your own AppleScript code.
DEVONthink just continues to get better. In the latest update they improved PDF annotation, Evernote import, Markdown functionality, and added even more AppleScript and JavaScript automation.
I find DEVONthink’s combination of innovative features and automation support irresistible. Interested? MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount on DEVONthink.
Stephen Hackett joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about his recent sabbatical experience and share what he learned from taking an extended break.
This episode of Focused is sponsored by:
Rumors are percolating about Apple creating a home command center for launch next year. According to Mark Gurman, it’s roughly a six-inch square iPad that you hang on the wall, allowing you to control your HomeKit devices and other helpful home command center-y type work.
I’m interested if they can get it right. This also reminds me of my wish for something like this in the form of an Apple TV app, displaying the date, calendar items, the weather, and the like.
Every year or two, I look for status board-style applications in the vein of the now-abandoned Panic app, and to the extent there are any, they never seem quite good enough. If this were to work, I expect Apple would need to create it. If, however, they’re selling a separate product, I think the likelihood of that status board app for my Apple TV becomes even less likely.
Apple is, understandably, taking a conservative approach to artificial intelligence. Nowhere is this more obvious and product-crippling than its text intelligence features. I am a fan of using AI for an edit pass on my words. Specifically, I’ve come to rely on Grammarly and its ability to sniff out overused adverbs and otherwise general sloppiness in my writing.
I’ve been around long enough to recall when grammar checkers first started appearing in applications like Microsoft Word. They were useless. It was comical how often their recommendations went against the grammar rules and made your writing worse. It wasn’t until the arrival of Grammarly that I got back on board with the idea of a grammar checker, and it’s been quite helpful. Note that I’m not using artificial intelligence to write for me; I’m using it to check my work and act as a first-pass editor. The problem I’ve always had with Grammarly is that it sends my words to the cloud whenever I want them checked.
Ideally, I’d like that done privately and locally. That’s why I was so excited about Apple Intelligence and text intelligence. It would presumably all happen on the device or Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers. Unfortunately, at least in beta, Apple Intelligence isn’t up to the task. That conservative approach makes Apple’s Text Intelligence useless to me in this editor role. While Apple’s tools can identify obvious grammatical errors, they fall short in the more nuanced aspects of writing assistance.
A telling example: As a test, I recently gave Apple Intelligence a paragraph where the word “very” appeared in three consecutive sentences — a clear style issue that any modern writing tool would flag. However, Apple’s text intelligence didn’t notice this repetition. That’s very, very, very bad.
This limitation reflects a broader pattern in Apple’s approach to AI tools. While the foundation is solid, the current implementation may be too restrained to compete with existing writing assistance tools that offer more comprehensive feedback on style and readability. The challenge for Apple will be finding the sweet spot between maintaining their caution and delivering genuinely useful writing assistance. I get the big picture here. I know they’re not trying to make a Grammarly competitor, but they need to take several steps away from that conservative benchmark if this is going to be useful.
Another problem with the text tools is the implementation of recommended changes. You can have it either replace your text entirely (without any indicator of what exactly was changed) or give you a list of suggested edits, which you must implement manually. Other players in this space, like Grammarly, highlight recommended changes and make it easy to implement or ignore them with a button.
Apple is famous for its ability to create excellent user interfaces, and I suspect they could do something similar but probably better if they put their minds to it. Unfortunately, the current version of the text intelligence tools in Apple Intelligence isn’t even close.
On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I make it through the rest of Apple’s platforms, including a speed round of the company’s entertainment portfolio.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
We’re almost to 2025 and it’s not too late to get yourself a Focused wall calendar. Mike and I put a lot of effort into making this calendar special.
I love mine, and I bet you would, too.
Happy Thanksgiving, gang. Let’s hope that next year at this time, Apple Intelligence can actually draw a picture of a turkey on a farm wearing sunglasses.
I’m often asked about future Apple displays. Many people are now switching over to the desktop-computer-plus-screen model as the big iMac seems less likely to show up, and the Mac mini got so damn cute. So folks want to know if Apple has any new displays in the works. I’m sure the Apple Studio Display and Pro Display XDR will get successors, but I’ve got no clue when. Apple can sometimes go a long time between updating monitors and has, in the past, abandoned making them altogether.
The latest rumor is that the Pro Display XDR will be improved using Quantum Dot technology. This makes a lot of sense. The Pro Display XDR is really expensive and has a low-volume screen. The current MacBook Pro displays are, by most measures, better. Bringing new tech to the Pro Display would give Apple a low-volume platform to iron it all out before bringing it to the more popular displays. The rumor is that it won’t get released until late 2025 or 2026.
One question in my mind is if they do create a successor to the Pro Display XDR, is it going to use the same mounting system as the existing one? Will people who dropped $1,000 for one of those stands be able to use it with the next iteration? Place your bets.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by Yoink (Website) (for Mac) (for iOS). Dragging and dropping files from one place to another is a common task, but it’s not that easy.
You have to click on the file you want to move, drag it over to the destination of your choice, and drop it there. This can be done if you’re lucky enough to land in the right spot and have just the right windows open next to each other. You also have to do this while looking at your monitor, which means that every time you drag something around, you are distracted from what else might be happening in front of your eyes. Moving files shouldn’t feel like defusing a bomb.
Yoink allows users to easily drag & drop items, getting files exactly where they belong and without having to have everything set “just right” in advance. They have a version for Mac, iPhone, and iPad and I use it daily. Everybody needs a shelf. Make your technology shelf Yoink.
There are several reasons I chose Yoink over its competitors. First, I like the design. It looks nice but also gets out of the way when I’m not using it. Second, Yoink has been around for a while, and it has both stability and a rich set of features. Get Yoink if you need a shelf app that won’t let you down.
Yoink’s developer also has two other useful apps, ScreenFloat (a screenshot utility) and Transloader (a download utility). You can get a bundle with all three apps in the App Store.