Automate Documents in DEVONthink (Sponsor)

A lot of folks know that DEVONthink, this week’s MacSparky sponsor, excels at bringing artificial intelligence to your documents and research, but did you also know DEVONthink has a killer set of automation tools? Over the last few years, DEVONthink has added some powerful features that make automating your DEVONthink library a snap.

The app can install scripts in Apple Mail to save email messages to your DEVONthink library with link backs to Apple Mail.
You can build smart folders that automatically collect documents around parameters you (or the DEVONthink A. I.) sets.
There is now built-in document automation called Smart Rules that lets you move, sort, rename, tag, index, and perform just about any other action in the DEVONthink arsenal automatically. The below screenshot shows a list of available triggers to give you an idea. This is a relatively new feature that a lot of experienced DEVONthink users don’t even realize exists.
You can build template documents and generate them right out of DEVONthink.
The mobile version, DEVONthink To Go, supports Shortcuts and mobile automation.

I always appreciate it when developers spend time trying to take the tedium out of their apps, and the DEVONthink developers have delivered on this over the past few years in a big way. If you haven’t checked out DEVONthink yet (or looked at it lately), you should.

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. Use the code MACSPARKY2021 at checkout. This offer has been extended and now ends on December 31, 2021.

Bartender 4 Gets Menu Bar Automation

With Big Sur, we got Bartender 4, the Mac super-utility that lets you take control of the menu bar. I’ve been using Bartender for years, but this latest version is really firing on all cylinders. I even run Bartender on my gigantic monitor just so I can get some of the clutter off the screen.

Up until last week, I didn’t think Bartender could get any better—then it did. With the most recent release of Bartender 4, the app now has some automation chops. The most recent update lets you add hotkey triggers to open menu bar tools. Not only can you simulate a left click, you can also simulate a right click and clicks with option keys. With some (but not all) menu bar items, you can then use arrow keys to navigate menu bar items. Brett Terpstra also digs Bartender.

You can find Bartender directly from the developer for $15 or get it as part of your Setapp subscription.

App Store Scams Need to End

Last week the FlickType developer sued Apple for, among other reasons, failing to police App Store scams. I think Apple could do a better job at this. I’ve heard from several app developer friends bemoan the existence of copycat apps made to confuse their consumers and steal the sales. Most recently, John Gruber covered this with the Widgetsmith rip-off.

Apple hasn’t said anything about this publicly, but since they insist on an approval process for apps, it seems only fair that they check to make sure an app is not shamelessly ripping off someone else before they approve it. This isn’t one of those things where there are competing interests in good faith. These copycat apps aren’t an attempt to make a competing product. They are attempts to confuse the customer to buy the wrong thing and take away sales from the developer that made the thing in the first place. It’s been going on for years, and I think it is time for Apple to get better at this.

Project Status Board

I recently read Cal Newport’s A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload . One of the things Newport talks about in the book is finding alternatives to email for different kinds of work. He explained that as a college professor, he manages graduate students using a Trello-based Kanban board.

While it has nothing to do with email or collaboration, this got me thinking about how I’m managing my various projects when wearing my lawyer, podcaster, blogger, and field guide producer hats. Traditionally, I keep lists of active projects in a text file (currently in Obsidian). I tag all active projects in OmniFocus as an “Active Project” and then set a custom perspective to surface only active projects.

But I also know that I think visually, and the idea of a Kanban-style status board for my projects does have a certain appeal to me. So over the weekend I went down the rabbit hole of the current crop of Kanban-style apps. There is a lot out there. Trello, monday, and Notion all look like they’re up to the job. But in this case, I’m looking to make something that only I’ll be tracking. (I do my team-based stuff in Basecamp.) Because I don’t need it to collaborate, it doesn’t need to be a web service.

One of the Newport book stories was about the copper works at the Pullman railcar factory and how, in the early 20th century, they made what could be considered a big spreadsheet on the wall of the factory to track projects and labor. Again, because I don’t need to share this with anyone on the Internet, I considered doing something like this with a whiteboard in my studio, but I also wanted to figure out if my solution could show up on mobile devices and link to my projects. Also, I have this gigantic monitor, so I figured I could use all of that screen real estate. I experimented with Pages and Numbers but ultimately built my project status board using OmniGraffle.

OmniGraffle has a great set of alignment tools. I made a standard rounded rectangle box in which I can list the project’s name and, if there is a related OmniFocus project, I included a small OmniFocus icon. Using OmniGraffle’s linking tools (and some contextual-computing-style linking), I added a link directly to the related OmniFocus project on the OmniFocus icon. Then the full project rectangle gets a separate link to the project document in Obsidian. I can re-arrange the blocks as needed and, when done, I put the OmniGraffle document in preview mode (Option-Command-P). This blows the diagram up to full-screen size, and all of the embedded links are live so that I can jump from there to any specific project or OmniFocus document. On the macro level, I’ve also included links to the specific locations in Obsidian, OmniFocus, Basecamp, and Airtable, where appropriate. Here is the final product with a lot of confidential data blurred out. You can still get the idea.

So now I have three screens on my Mac. The left screen is Fantastical in full-screen mode showing the week view with 14 days. This is where I block time and plan future days. The center screen has no full-screen apps. Instead, it has all my windows from my working apps. (How I arrange that is a post for another day.) And the third screen, to the right, is my OmniGraffle generated project status board. I’m only a few days into using this status board, but I can already tell I’ll be keeping it. Another nice benefit of doing this in OmniGraffle and storing it in iCloud is that I’m equally able to view and edit the status board on iPhone and iPad with the mobile version of OmniGraffle.

Mac Power Users 580: Twenty Years of OS X

After several years of development, Apple launched Mac OS X to the world in March 2001. The new operating system was vastly different than what it replaced, and ushered in a new era for Apple. This week on Mac Power Users, Stephen and I reflect on two decades of our beloved macOS.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

TextExpander from Smile: 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 from Smile.
SaneBox: Stop drowning in email!
The Intrazone, by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast about SharePoint, OneDrive and related tech within Microsoft 365.
DEVONthink: Get organized—unleash your creativity. Use this link for 10% off.

Solar Eufy Charger

I continue to dig my Eufy security cameras. However, one issue I have is the camera that looks down at my driveway and the front of my house. It’s a battery camera, and I have to get out a ladder to pull it down and charge every so often.

It was getting just tedious enough for me to consider running a dedicated electric line through the garage when I saw that Eufy now makes a solar charger for their cameras. I ordered one, and it has been running for six weeks. The camera is now always fully charged, and my ladder has not moved.

The Dharma Initiative Uses Apple

My wife recently saw a display of various Disney film props and, since Disney owns ABC, they also had a bunch of stuff there from Lost. I remember seeing that Dharma computer, and it looked familiar. When you get around the back of it, we find out the Dharma Initiative wasn’t actually making its own computers.

According to 512 Pixels’ Stephen Hacket, the top is a monitor for an Apple III and he thinks the computer is some variant of an Apple II. I tend to agree. It doesn’t look like any Apple II that I recall.

Update: Multiple sources confirm it is an Apple II+

If you’ll excuse me, I now need to go do some typing …

4 8 15 16 23 42

Justin Long as Pitch Man for Intel

Many Apple fans are annoyed by Intel hiring “I’m a Mac”’s Justin Long to help sell Intel Windows machines and take potshots at the Mac. A lot of us have fond memories of that old ad campaign. Stepping back, it would be funny giving Apple enthusiasts a taste of their own medicine if the new ads were just made with the same cleverness as the originals. They are not.

As for me, I’m annoyed with Apple’s lawyers. How did they not write an “I won’t pitch competitive products ever” clause into Long’s original agreement? I write clauses similar to that all the time. Last week I did something similar on a lease agreement for a donut shop. It baffles the mind.

Why I’m Switching to Reeder 5

RSS and read-it-later services are near and dear to my heart. We gave coverage to both of these topics last year on the Mac Power Users (MPU 550: The World of RSS) (MPU 554: Read-it-later Services). I remain a believer in the RSS format and use it daily.

Looking at my toolset for managing RSS, it’s getting expensive. I currently use a Feed Wrangler account ($19 per year) to manage my feeds, Unread ($20 per year) to view my threads, and Instapaper ($30 per year) for read-it-later. In addition to being expensive, there is a certain amount of mental overhead that comes with managing data between three services that I would prefer to avoid.

I used Reeder awhile back but moved to the above concoction of apps for many different reasons that I’ll refer to as “nerd-based app creep”. When Reeder released version 5, I decided to give it a try again. With this most recent version, the Reeder developer has included tools to view your RSS feeds (Reeder’s original purpose), manage feeds, and save articles for reading later using your iCloud storage.

As someone who is normally skeptical of all-in-one applications, I like the idea of this update, but I wasn’t so sure about whether it would solve my problems. In short, it does.

This newest version of Reeder does a good job of managing your feeds, displaying your articles, and giving you the ability to set them aside to read later. It does all of this in one application, and in addition to the iPhone and iPad apps, there is also a Mac app. A nice bonus is that Reeder is a one-time purchase. There is no subscription involved. Instead, the developer releases a new version every few years that you buy over, but it is still far less expensive than what I paid for subscriptions. Reeder for iPhone and iPad is $5. On the Mac, it is $10.

If there is one trade-off, Reeder doesn’t display the articles as nicely as my previous RSS reader, Unread. Unread has more options for color schemes and designs for the article view. I thought that might be a deal-breaker, but the convenience of having everything in one app wins in my book. Also, while Reeder doesn’t look as nice as Unread, it looks nice enough, and it has lots of features aimed at making the reading process easier. It is still an attractive app with an opinionated design.

Having used Reeder 5 now for a few months, I’ve got a couple of tips:

Keyboard Navigation on the Mac

On the Mac app, keyboard shortcuts are your friend. I have mapped as follows:

j – next
k – previous
m – read/unread
l – read later
; – copy link

Some of these are the built-in shortcuts, and some of them are custom shortcuts I added in the preferences. Either way, I can navigate my RSS feed quickly on the Mac using just one hand on the keyboard.

Swipe Action on iPad and iPhone

Instead of keyboard shortcuts, swipes are the speed move on Reeder for iPhone and iPad. This is made even easier since I’m using Reeder’s own read-it-later service. I can jump to the next article or add to the read later list with a single tap in the article view. In list view, however, the trick is to use swipes. For me, a swipe-right marks as read, and a swipe-left adds to the read later list. I also added the optional swipe-up from the bottom to mark all as read.

As a nerd, it is always fun when I find new, more efficient workflows. Getting all of these activities (RSS management, reading, and read-it-later) combined into a single, quality app has made the whole process more streamlined and enjoyable for me. I’m sold.

Focused 121: Analog Focus, with Jeff Sheldon

Jeff Sheldon from Ugmonk joins Mike and me on the latest episode of Focused to talk about his Analog productivity system, connecting dots, intentional constraints, and being a geek for the details.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

TextExpander, from Smile: Work smarter, not harder. Get 20% off your first year.
Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post.
Microsoft Lists: A Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize work.