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Home Screens — Joe Moyer

Joe Moyer is writing some great stuff over at his blog, 24 Letters. That name comes from an Athenodorus quote, “Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar, don’t say or do anything until you’ve repeated the 24 letters of the alphabet to yourself.” Of course Joe and I get along great! So, Joe, show us your home screens.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Craft has become my favorite app. I use it every day on all of my devices, and it’s a big part of how I keep track of what’s going on.

Readwise is another favorite that I interact with a lot. I post quotes weekly on the blog and have just started an Instagram account. I like starting my morning with the highlights email because it can help inspire new ideas and positively shape the day.

CARROT Weather is a favorite too. It’s so useful and such a thoughtfully designed and customizable app. It has a prominent spot on my iPad and iPhone, and I often check it. 

I listen to a lot of podcasts, so I’m in Overcast often. I like the redesign a lot. It was an improvement without changing how I use and enjoy the app.

I use Day One to write a daily gratitude entry. I created a simple prompt and have a Shortcut set on my devices and my newly acquired Stream Deck. I also do deeper reflection in a separate journal, and I enjoy having separate spaces for the different types of writing. 

For task management, my favorite is Todoist. I’ve been a subscriber for several years. I like the Kanban board style view to track larger projects and used it at my most recent corporate job to track the performance reviews I was responsible for every year. I like the natural language processing and the ease of use. It feels lightweight yet comprehensive.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Instagram. I enjoy staying connected with friends and family and following creative people on the platform for inspiration. I recently created an account for the blog at https://www.instagram.com/24lettersnet/to experiment and see how I can be creative in a different medium.

What app makes you most productive?

Craft is where I go to be productive. I organize the blog and elements of my personal and family life and find that it’s a joy to use and helps me stay on track with projects. I do my monthly and quarterly reviews in it as well.

I created a dashboard in Craft where I manage everything and have a shortcut on the Home Screen of both my iPad and iPhone. It’s constructive to see things at a glance.

Craft is a beautiful app, too, so that helps!

My runner-up is Ulysses. I’m using that to write the blog entries, and I like how clean the interface is. I can jump right into writing without distraction.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

Shortcuts! I’ve created a few simple shortcuts on my Home Screen, like opening a specific MindNode project or opening my daily gratitude journal in Day One. I like how it improves my focus and gets me to where I want to be quickly.

I’m deeply interested in focus and productivity and look forward to exploring Shortcuts more actively in the future!

What is the app you are still missing?

I still don’t have a great calendar app that I love. I’m going to explore Fantastical in the future. Right now, my “day job” is as a stay-at-home dad, so my schedule is rarely my own anyway!

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

I’m on my iPhone a lot because I use it for everything from tracking my toddler’s daycare and my infant’s feeding and nap schedule, to organizing tasks and lists, messaging, and working on projects.

I am on my iPad several times a day as well. I use it as a tool for consumption, review, and idea creation. I watch content from YouTube and the big streaming services, read books on Kindle or news on the NYTimes app, or check in on my dashboard in Craft. I also like to do my monthly and quarterly reviews on the iPad.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

I keep my Today View pretty simple, with my battery status on the top left, the month view of my calendar on the top right, and below that the productivity widget from Todoist because it’s fun to see my stats. I also keep my screen time widget here to see where my attention and efforts are going.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

On iPad, split-screen went from something that I struggled to remember how to use effectively to something that I use all the time. Apple fixed that so successfully.

My favorite feature on the iPhone is Focus. I know it’s not exclusively on iOS, but that’s where I find it to be most helpful. I wrote on 24 Letters about how it helps me stay on track with my sleeping (despite a four-month-old baby’s best efforts not to sleep!).

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I’d provide more than 5 gigabytes of iCloud storage when someone buys a new iPhone. It’s just not enough!

Do you have an Apple Watch? Show us your watch face tell us about it.

I have an Apple Watch Series 5 that I love. My complications include Messages, Activity, CARROT, and Todoist. I regularly use dictation to compose messages, and that’s even more helpful and necessary after a recent wrist injury.

I use the California face during the active part of my day and have an automation to change to the Simple face in the evenings. I got the idea from an MPU episode, and I do this to help shift the context from the busy task-filled days to a more gentle data set for evenings and overnights.

On the Simple face, I have the alarm, sunrise/sunset, CARROT, and mindfulness complications.

My Apple Watch is several generations behind now, so I’m interested in what the Series 8 will look like.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

I’ve been using the Aqueux wallpapers on my iPhone and iPad for a while now. The iPad Lock Screen often has a recent family photo, but I prefer to keep the home screens simple to avoid visual distraction.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I’ve taken advantage of widgets and stacks, particularly on my iPhone. Apple Music and Overcast share a small stack, and Todoist, Calendars, and Photos share another.

CARROT gets its own medium widget space just because there’s so much data that I want at a glance. As I write this, it’s 62°, and yet there’s a winter storm watch for the coming days. Massachusetts weather is a mystery!

I keep things more straightforward on my iPad. I want to be able to unlock it and jump right in, whether it’s for creating or relaxation.

Finally, I want to say how much I enjoy this community. I’ve been a Mac user for almost 20 years and have followed MPU and many Relay FM podcasts for years. The MPU forum is practically a daily visit for me, and the positivity, kindness, and support that everyone gives each other is refreshing and welcome. I’m excited to share my voice as well, both on the forum and on my blog! 

Thanks, Joe!

DEVONthink, the Ultimate Database Tool (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by DEVONthink. There are a lot of ways to manage a database on your mac, but in my opinion, there is no better tool than DEVONthink. Just a few of the things I use DEVONthink for include:

  • A reliable repository of research documents. DEVONthink will hold as many documents as you can throw at it. In addition, it makes import (and export) easy, so you can have all that power without feeling trapped.
  • A research assistant. DEVONthink uses artificial intelligence to analyze and connect your documents in ways that may not otherwise occur to you.
  • An OCR Tool. Everything you store in your DEVONthink Pro library gets OCR’d. It just happens.
  • An Automation Tool. DEVONthink lets you build powerful automation subroutines into your library to help tag, move, and organize documents.

One of my uses for DEVONthink is managing all of my personal documents. I dump bills, invoices, tax records, and all the other bits of personal files that come my way into my personal records DEVONthink database. It automatically sorts them and syncs them for me using my own password. If I need to find anything, the DEVONthink search engine is always up to the task.

DEVONthink supports multiple sync methods and lets you even use your own sync password, so everything is encrypted. If you’ve got an iPad or an iPhone, you can access your DEVONthink data there, too, with DEVONthink to Go.

It is this combination of power and security that makes DEVONthink the clear winner. You can think of DEVONthink as your paperless office. You can automate your workflow from capture to filing, editing to publishing. It stores all your documents, helps you keep them organized, and presents you with what you need to get the job done.

Interested? MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount on DEVONthink. This is a limited-time offer, so check it out now.

Keyboard Maestro 10.1

This week we got another nice update from Keyboard Maestro. This update includes a ton of new support for Shortcuts integration on the Mac. I’m so happy to see Keyboard Maestro setting itself up to be a platform where you can use it’s already powerful automation alongside anything Apple adds to Shortcuts.

I’m in the midst of building an update to the Keyboard Shortcuts Field Guide. This new Shortcuts integration just got added to the menu. You can read more about the update at the Keyboard Maestro website.

The Flat Apple Watch Rumors Return

Rumors are coming back about a flat-sided Apple Watch getting released this year. John Prosser made some renders, below. Who knows if this thing will actually ship. People were convinced it was going to release last year and it didn’t.

If this is truly the next design for the Apple Watch, I’m going to need some convincing. Just looking at the images, I like the existing, rounded design better. Maybe flatter equals thinner and lighter, and that would be good. However, my immediate reaction is that it looks boring.

New Outliner App: Bike

Jesse Grosjean from Hog Bay Software has a new Mac outliner app called Bike. The idea is to make it as easy as possible to add and rearrange outline entries.

The documentation quotes Jonathan Edwards, “We were promised bicycles for the mind, but we got aircraft carriers instead”. That certainly is true for some productivity apps. Hog Bay Software has made some other great low-friction productivity apps in the past, like TaskPaper and WriteRoom. With my initial tests, Bike is right on brand with those apps. If you are looking for a fast, easy-to-use outliner, check out Bike.

Mac Power Users 640: The iPhone App Roundup

The App Store didn’t launch until a year after the first iPhone, but it has defined the smartphone era. On this week’s episode if Mac Power Users, Stephen and I talk about some of our favorite iPhone apps.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
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  • Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post.
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Some Speculation on the Future Mac Pro

As we lead up to WWDC and look at the current state of the Apple silicon Macs, I can’t help but wonder what’s left for the Mac Pro. The thing that has me scratching my head is the extraordinary power of the Mac Studio. If you get a fully loaded Mac Studio, you’re getting one hell of a computer. The M1 Ultra, with all the bells and whistles, can keep up with the most expensive currently selling Mac Pro at a quarter of the price. So what is Apple going to do with the Mac Pro?

I think the new Mac pro will definitely be more expandable and more powerful than any existing Apple silicon Mac. I also think it will have a corresponding price tag. Let me explain further.

Expandability

There are a group of people inside Apple known as the Pro User Group. They all make their living doing creative work with Macs, but they also work for Apple as very knowledgeable lab rats. They provide feedback for future hardware and software. I believe this group of insiders explains why the new MacBook Pro is so much more suited to pro users than its predecessor. I also think this group explains why the currently shipping Mac Pro does such an excellent job of supporting external cards and other bits of bolt-on technology that professionals need at the highest end.

I was lucky enough to get invited to Apple’s big unveiling of the currently shipping Mac Pro at WWDC a few years ago. At one point, they brought us into a series of rooms populated by some of these pro users. They were doing things like 3-D rendering, 8K movie editing, high-end sound work and video scoring, and many other creative endeavors that often lead people to buy Mac Pros. All of them were using specialized equipment inside their Mac Pros to get their work done. 

One conversation that stands out to me was with one of the pro users that spends time writing music for motion pictures. When writing music for a movie, you need an extensive library of musical instrument samples. The current technology for that involves large and processor intensive sound samples for each note of each instrument sample, some of which have multiple versions, like pizzicato vs. bowing and using a mute on a violin, for example. Now multiply that times every instrument you could need when creating a music score for a motion picture. 

The creative professional explained that historically he would pull this off by having multiple computers chained together. As he explained it, his needs were a very powerful central computer supported by specialized expansion cards. Where historically, he was doing this with a collection of lesser computers, he was able to do the whole project with one Mac Pro.

This was a common theme among the creative professionals. They all had some specialized card or peripheral they needed to get their work done. Thus far, with Apple silicon, we’ve got a series of increasingly powerful Macs, but none of them have the external peripheral support that these pros require.

Apple’s Pro User Group is still inside Apple and presumably still explaining how important it is to have this kind of expandability in a professional workstation. While the Mac Studio may be crazy powerful, it will not hold all of your violin samples or support these specialized cards.

So getting back to the new Mac Pro, I think this sort of expandability will be table stakes. Moreover, I think Apple understands that. I don’t know if the new Mac Pro will be as expandable as a currently shipping Mac Pro, but I expect it to accommodate Pros’ specialized hardware.

Compute Power

Compute power seems a little murkier. I could see an expandable Mac driven by something in the neighborhood of an M1 Ultra chip making the new Mac Pro, essentially, a Mac Studio Ultra + Expandability. But if I had to bet a nickel, I’d say that’s not the case. I think Apple will find some way to get a lot more compute power (Double the M1 Ultra?) from the new Mac Pro. So that new Mac would be something an order of magnitude more powerful than the Mac Studio, and expandable. 

Price

I think the Mac Pro will be a computer with all the stops pulled out. And by all the stops I don’t just mean the hardware, I also mean the price. The existence of the Mac Studio gives Apple the ability to make a Mac Pro with a shocking amount of power and a shocking price to go with it. This will not be a computer you buy just because you like to have the latest and greatest. The people who want a computer like that will buy a Mac Studio. I expect the Mac Pro is going to be for serious professionals that will have no problem dropping tens of thousands of dollars on a computer for them to do their work better and faster.

Adding the Mac Studio to the line gives Apple a lot more room at the highest end. The new Mac Pro will not be a computer that most people need or can afford (myself included). But I do expect it to be a rocket ship, and the people who need that kind of rocket ship power and are willing to pay rocket ship prices will get a genuinely remarkable Mac. This is all speculation, but it seems to me like the stars have aligned for just this type of Mac. 

When will we see it? Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple shares some details about the new Mac Pro at WWDC in a month.

Still locked in your email all day? There is a better solution for that!  (Sponsor)

Daylite is more than just a CRM app for small businesses. Its Productivity capability is what sets Daylite apart from other web-based competitors. Here is an example of one of Daylite’s unique features – Daylite Mail Assistant (DMA). Direct Apple Mail integration allows you to take action from your inbox and be more productive. Instead of drowning in emails all day, you and your team can capture all email communication, clear out your inbox and stay on top of the next steps. Save emails related to clients, appointments, and tasks, so you have a full history of conversations in one place. Plus, you can create tasks in Daylite right from Apple Mail.

DMA automatically scans the email addresses in the “To” and “Cc” fields. If the person is a prospect and there is no prior correspondence, with two clicks, you and your team can store that first email as a piece of history in the Daylite database. DMA then searches for additional contacts or objects associated with that prospect. If another person at the prospect’s firm has been in contact about your offer and been identified as an open Opportunity in Daylite, that Opportunity and its related history will appear, allowing you to link it to the most recent prospect.

DMA can also display upcoming Tasks and Appointments with prospects and customers and add new ones if required, providing a handle on deliverables to anyone for your business who needs to know. DMA is only one of the many productivity-boosting power features that thousands of Mac-based small businesses couldn’t do without. To learn more about how Daylite, the made-for-Mac, iPhone & iPad CRM and productivity app, has become a game-changer for Mac-based small businesses. Learn more here.

Focused 151: The Bento Method, with Francesco D’Alessio

Francesco D’Alessio joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about the state of productivity apps, picking the right tools, and his new app, Bento.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

  • Kolide: Endpoint Security Powered by People. Try Kolide for 14 days free; no credit card required.
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code FOCUSED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
  • Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post.