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Make an Impression with Hoban Cards (Sponsor)

Do you want to make an impression on every colleague you meet? You can do that with a thoughtful calling card. I’m not talking about the junk that gets “printed” at the office supply store or the things that come off your printer. I’m talking about classy, tastefully designed, letterpress cards from Hoban.

Your calling card represents you. Why not bring some intentionality to your game? 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. 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. Best of all, use ‘MacSparky’ to get $10 off any order. Get yours today.

I Didn’t Know We Couldn’t Do It, So We Did It

I was watching one of my favorite YouTube woodworkers, Paul Sellers, recently and he explained how his son wanted a cello, so the two of them built one together. Later, after he had finished it, he was told it was one of the hardest instruments to build. He laughed and explained: “I didn’t know we couldn’t do it, so we did it.” (~23 minute mark of the below video.)

What if someone told Paul and his son at the beginning of the process that they couldn’t build a cello?
All this got me thinking of all the times people told me I couldn’t do something and the sad number of times I took them for their word. How many great works of art don’t exist because one human told another human that she “couldn’t do it.”

Sometimes ignorance is not only bliss, it’s enabling.

Experimenting with DiffusionBee

There’s a lot of talk lately about AI-generated art. If you want to explore it, I’d recommend checking out DiffusionBee, which has a free Mac App. That said, I took a few shots at getting it to draw a picture of a bonsai tree on top of a Macintosh computer. It did great with the tree but never did seem to remember the Mac.

Obsidian 1.0

Obsidian, the personal management and idea connector that we have all been losing our collective minds over, is now officially out of beta with their release of version 1.0. Congratulations to the small Obsidian development team that made a very big app.

While I don’t use Obsidian for everything, I’m in it daily and use it for many things. Here are some of my favorite things about this application:

  • The file format is nothing but a folder full of markdown files. While you add some extra syntax to get those additional features from Obsidian, it is all universal and future-proof. If Obsidian were to go away, you’d still have all your data in a usable format.
  • Despite the universal nature of the files, you can do nearly anything with this application that involves words. At this point, there are 25 core plug-ins in the 668 additional community plug-ins. You can use this app to take a few notes or build an entire system around it.
  • The Obsidian community is fantastic. The people using the app are generally enthusiastic about it and friendly to people coming into it. The folks who decided to build on the Obsidian API to develop their plug-ins are intelligent and generous.
  • The Obsidian developers get it. They are entirely transparent and constantly working on improving the application. I particularly love how they publish for their Trello board so you can see what they are working on next. 

I love this app. I’m actively producing a new Field Guide about it right now. If you’ve been waiting for Obsidian to leave beta, you’ve got no further excuses.

The Trouble with Apple Watch Faces

I’ve made no secret of my dissatisfaction with the Apple Watch faces. As someone who wears an Apple Watch every day, I can tell you things I don’t like about every available watch face. I’m not alone in the sentiment. Zac Hall wrote an article over at 9to5 Mac arguing that Apple needs to give users more customization to the existing Apple Watch faces. Amen.

I agree with everything Zac wrote, but I also have a few additional points from a fifty-plus-year-old nerd.

Complications Need to Become Easier to Read

For instance, the current corner date complication puts the day of the week in large text and the day of the month in small text. Why? Most people that need the date on their watch need the day of the month. Also, why not an option with an even bigger number that is the day of the month and forego the day of the week altogether?

Another example is where they put in small bits of text in a complication in addition to an icon, like the Activity Rings. I like complications, but I feel like the inclusion of the exact count for each ring on the face isn’t necessary. Why not an option with just rings?

Watch Hands

Many faces have hands that blend into the background. For example, most of the color variations of the California face have hands that are the same color as the background. When you want to check the time but have to spend time trying to find the hands on your watch, that’s bad. There are exceptions in the California face, like Navy Blue (pictured), but they should all have at least an option to be this readable.

Making more customizable Apple Watch faces seems like such low-hanging fruit that it baffles me why Apple hasn’t done it yet. I fully realize the “get off my lawn” tone this article sets, but it seems like every new iteration makes reading watch harder for anyone over 25. If Apple gave users more granular controls over watch faces, we could build faces we’d like a lot more.

Today’s Virtual Meetup Moved to 12:00 Pacific

I’m sorry about this change, but today’s Virtual Meetup has moved back 2 hours to 12:00 Pacific. Below is a NEW zoom sign-in link to get into the Virtual Meetup today at noon Pacific. If you can’t make it, I will get out the audio and video recording afterward. I’m sorry about the last-minute reschedule… This is a post for MacSparky Labs Tier 2 (Backstage) and Tier 3 (Early Access) Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

Capture Any Text on Your Mac with TextSniper (Sponsor)

My thanks to TextSniper for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. TextSniper is a Mac OCR app that can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard so you can paste it anywhere you need it. It can even read the text to you. The whole thing works a lot like the built-in screen capture on the Mac, just way more powerful.

Moreover, in an era where so much software is more about data mining than giving you a service, TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The text recognition is processed on your Mac and does not require an internet connection. 

With TextSniper, you can:

  • Quickly get a text from PDFs, Zoom calls, Presentations, and Videos. 
  • Copy text from anywhere, even images and websites that don’t let you select text.
  • Quickly grab data like email addresses, phone numbers, and links.
  • Read QR codes and barcodes.
  • Get text out of just about any image format, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP.

I use TextSniper constantly. Anytime I need text from an image, TextSniper comes to the rescue. You can even use your iPhone or iPad camera to take a photo for TextSniper to perform its magic.

TextSniper works with macOS Catalina and later and also works with Parallels Desktop

Get TextSniper now and enjoy the fastest way to copy uncopyable text, wherever it may be. Use promo code TS2022 to get an additional 25% off. 

The Old “Pad of Paper Under the Laptop” Trick

I’m setting up my desk and trying it without a shelf. Why am I ditching the shelf? Partly so for the always-on iPhone, but also just to leave things a little cleaner looking.

One of my favorite features of having a shelf on my desk was the way it kept my laptop a few inches off the desk surface. I always liked having the expensive laptop a few inches above the desk surface just in case.

Without the shelf, my laptop is back on the desk. No shelf = no altitude. So it’s time for the old Pad of Paper Under the Laptop trick. It’s not as safe as a shelf but in the event of a spilled cup of tea, it should keep the liquid out of the laptop.