Alex Cox joins Rosemary and me on this episode of Automators to talk home automation, Drafts, Shortcuts, and how to learn new automation.
This episode of Automators is sponsored by:
PDFpen, from Smile: Powerful PDF editing on your Mac.
ExpressVPN: High-speed, secure & anonymous VPN service. Get an extra three months free.
The Intrazone by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast hosted by the SharePoint team.
Email is a challenge for all of us. This week’s sponsor, SaneBox is the solution for most of your email problems. SaneBox is an email service that adds a pile of productivity features to your email, regardless of what email client you use. With SaneBox at your back, you can:
Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant.
Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I’m underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.” SaneBox can even auto-reply when you defer an email.
Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.
The list goes on, and MacSparky readers love this service.
The SaneBox team has been hard at work lately improving the SaneBox interface and releasing even more new tools. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account today. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.
Today Apple released iOS 14.2 and iPad OS 14.2. As usual, the point two release gets a ton of new Emoji. I’m sure there is a good reason for holding the new Emoji for the point two updates, but it also is a way to ensure that everyone downloads it. Emojipedia breaks them all down. This year’s release, in particular, helps me personally settle a dispute with my children.*
Additional features include some new wallpapers, updated lock screen controls, and the ability to add a Shazam button to the Control Center.
Notable this year is that this update does not have to deal with as many bugs as it did last year. iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 are more stable than last year.
Looking forward, I would love to see Apple add better widget support to the iPadOS at some point in a future 14.X update. The world loves widgets, and the iPad needs the ability to put them anywhere, not just the left side. A nerd can dream.
* As a Californian, I have to acknowledge the inclusion of this sandal in the 2020 new Emoji. I grew up wearing them, and we always called them “thongs” or “flip flops”. My children inform me (frequently) that while the term “flip flops” can still work (though it dates me), the term “thongs” is very much not acceptable and embarrassing to them. So I call them “thongs.” Apparently, I’m not alone because the official name of this new Emoji, as handed down from the Emoji standards commitee is “Thong Sandal”. I look forward to sharing this with my children. (Also, if you really want a pair of Californian-approved “thong sandals” I recommend Rainbows.)
Apple has now announced next week’s One More Thing event for next Tuesday. This will be the third event in three months and the one I’ve been looking forward to most. There are a lot of contrary rumors about exactly how Apple will start rolling out Apple Silicon Macs. I can tell you that I am personally very excited to see how this goes down. Using Apple Silicon, I expect Apple will have the ability to turn up the dial quite a bit on battery life or performance (or perhaps a little bit on both). It will be interesting to see how they decide to go. Also, I’ve been looking at all the white space in Big Sur for months and imagining some cool new Macs with touch screens and iPad apps running alongside traditional Mac apps and all the possibilities that come with that.
Mark Gurman’s sources say that we’ll initially get new models of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with Apple Silicon. I have no idea if those will include a touch screen or instead just be the same design as the existing models with a different processor. Regardless, we are going to learn a lot more next Tuesday.
The Apple One Subscription bundles are now available. There are three tiers available:
Individual ($14.95) Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 50GB of iCloud storage.
Family ($19.95) Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of shared iCloud storage for up to six family members.
Premier ($29.95) Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Fitness+, Apple News+, and 2TB of shared iCloud storage for up to six family members. (Currently only available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia)
It represents a moderate saving over the sticker prices if you added the services individually. Because I’m on a family plan and am including my kids, I’ll spend some time over the next few days making sure to remove any duplication. For instance, I know my daughter subscribes to Arcade+.
To sign up, go to your subscriptions page on your iPhone or iPad. When I tried it, I couldn’t get the Apple One page to load. Rebooting my phone fixed the problem.
We’re joined by Luc Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist, author, and developer of the Mac app Hook on this episode of Mac Power Users. Luc explains how we typically gather, process, and use data, and how our computing devices can assist—and detract—in that work.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
SaneBox: Stop drowning in email!
Mailbrew: Your personal email digest. Sign up for a 30-day free trial and get 30% off when you upgrade.
Sync Up, a OneDrive podcast: Takes you behind the scenes of OneDrive.
Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to boost your job post.
I took a walk in the neighborhood last night and took some pictures. The landscape around here is like another planet. I enjoy hiking the local trails but I suspect they’ll be closed for a while until things start to recover. We had a similar fire back in 2007 and it is remarkable how quickly things grow back. I was speaking with our local park ranger and he reports the deer are already returning, though nobody is exactly sure where our local pride of mountain lions are right now. When these trees catch on fire, the burn continues inside long after and often down into the roots. Some of these trees will one day just fall over.
This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by TextExpander, the easiest way to start automating your work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. TextExpander is a text replacement tool. With it, you can type a phrase like “ccell” and it will automatically fill in your cell phone number. But TextExpander is so much more than that.
Using TextExpander, you can have it automatically create the date and time. For example, when I talk with someone on the phone related to the day job and want to keep notes about the conversation, I just type “xdts” which, in my head, means date and time string. Then TextExpander automatically creates something like this, “2018-03-28 06:42”. If I need to put the full date in a letter, I just type “fdate” and TextExpander puts in the current date, like this, “March 28, 2018”.
TextExpander can still go deeper. It can use the contents of your clipboard to auto-fill in snippets. It can press keyboard keys, like the tab key, to automate filling in forms on the web or creating an email. You can get it for yourself and your team members so you can share snippets with your team members.
I’ve done so much with TextExpander over the years that I even have a page of snippets I’ve created that you can download ranging from movie to reviews to conference calls. One of my personal favorite groups is foreign thanks where you can say thank you to people in most language. Sending an email to a French friend, just type “french thanks” and TextExpander gives you “Merci”. It’s like your own, personal translator.
To learn more, head over to TextExpander.com and let them know you heard about it at MacSparky in the “Where did you hear about us” field.
Thanks everyone for the kind wishes. I’m finally back home now that the fires have subsided and I’m back at work.
This week has been a challenging one for me. Monday morning, I received a text message that there was a new wildfire near my home, The Silverado Fire, and to be on alert. So throughout the morning, I kept working with one eye on the reports and maps showing the fire’s progress. The wind was roaring Monday in gusts up to 60MPH. It’s a local condition we call the Santa Ana Winds, but the good news was the Santa Ana’s were blowing the fire away from my house.
Unfortunately, shifting winds are not always just a metaphor. Sometimes shifting winds just mean shifting winds. And at about 3 pm Monday, the winds shifted, and fire came roaring toward my sleepy little community of Foothill Ranch. The emergency text message arrived shortly later that we were under a mandatory evacuation order. The fire hadn’t arrived yet, but it was on the way. So all of my podcasts and blog posts about backups paid off. We packed up a few valuables, pictures, and hard drives and took off. I can tell you that the experience of evacuating your neighborhood while everyone else is also evacuating your neighborhood is pretty surreal. Everyone is packing their cars, smiling and acting like they aren’t worried while they are, in truth, all a little terrified. The smoke and ash were already blowing in, and police cars were driving up and down the street, blasting warnings to evacuate. Everybody was a bit on edge.
We stayed with family Monday night and watched some scary news coverage. I live in a tract of homes in the foothills. They were built with fires in mind. Our roofs are fire-resistant. We keep the brush cleared around our little community’s perimeter like some sort of ancient fire moat. The California firefighters are pros and understand wildfires. There isn’t a lot they can do when it is burning through open land. However, when it gets near homes, they have a tremendous arsenal of fire fighting tools. So the fire burned around the perimeter of our community Monday night. The park where I take my dog caught on fire, and to the extent a park can burn down, it burned down. However, no homes were lost. All was good.
We returned home yesterday only to find more shifting winds and more evacuation orders. We had another long night last night, but again, no homes were lost while the Silverado fire continues to linger in the neighborhood. We are once again with family, hoping we can get back home today. My family and home are safe, and the fire is very unlikely to pick my little tract home as the one it takes out.
We are very fortunate, and California firefighters are very good. Everyone in my community is safe. None of the houses in my community were lost. I can’t help but feel that if this fire’s siege of my community hasn’t broken through in two days, it’s not going to break through. The mandatory evacuation order is still in place, but we’re hoping it gets lifted later today. I just want to get back home, take a nap, and resume something close to normal life. Thanks for all the kind tweets and emails. I haven’t responded to many of them, but I appreciate them all.
