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This week, summer officially began with the summer solstice (I live in the Northern Hemisphere). It’s the longest day of the year, or at least the day with the longest period of sunlight. Will you be stuck inside all summer dealing with your email? You don’t have to be. You can make this fantasy a reality with SaneBox, MacSparky’s sponsor this week.
You can get your inbox a whole lot cleaner. How? You’ll train SaneBox to figure out what are important and unimportant emails to you. The emails don’t disappear. The unimportant ones go to your new SaneLater folder, allowing you to focus on what’s important. You’ll keep the distractions at bay, and can delete the unimportant ones later, all at once. You’ll get an email digest each day that summarizes what’s in your SaneLater folder, and if you see something that shouldn’t be there, you can train SaneBox to re-direct it to the right place. Get your email sanity back. Get your time back. Enjoy the longer days, the warmth of the sun, and the fresh air, and get out from those emails that are wasting your time. Give it a try with a free trial, and you can get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription.
Sabbaticals have been a frequent topic on the Focused podcast. However, I use the term sabbatical pretty loosely here. I’m not referencing the structured academic sabbatical that we see in higher education, but something more in line with the Internet worker concept of sabbatical as pioneered, to my mind at least, by Sean McCabe.
Recently Jason Kottke announced he’s on a months-long sabbatical at Kottke.org. That’s brave. When you pay for your shoes on the Internet and then take a few months off, there’s a chance that your readers will go somewhere else. John Gruber weighs in that you should take a sabbatical before you know you need one. He’s right.
While I like the idea, I have yet to successfully implement regular (even short) sabbaticals in my life. I think my depression-era parents etched “show up every day” on my retinas. It was pretty tricky to unplug when practicing law as a solo attorney. Clients need you constantly. Since ditching the legal career, I’ve been busy getting things rolling as exclusively MacSparky and sabbaticals still aren’t possible for the immediate future.
That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, though. And taken more broadly, that also doesn’t mean sabbaticals are something only for precious nerds that earn their living on the Internet. An occasionally forced retreat, for everyone, is a good idea. Whether you are “generating content” or selling insurance, taking a break, a true break, is where you get time to recharge and let those creative background processes between your ears grind out some answers. Sean McCabe has explained that a sabbatical doesn’t have to start out as a months (or years) long process. It could be as simple as a few days without commitments and space to think (or not think).
I intend to implement some form of a regular sabbatical as I get things sorted out here at MacSparky HQ. I’d encourage you to read Sean’s Sabbatical blog and at least consider the same for yourself.
A lot of us (myself included) have been piling on the recently updated 13″ MacBook Pro. You have to admit it really stands out in Apple’s current line as a relic of days gone by. That said, it now has the M2 chip and it is now for sale. Jason Snell wrote a piece for Macworld explaining why it may make sense. Still, it’s weird. The 14″ MacBook Pro is far superior and the new MacBook Air is also a better computer by several metrics for less money.
We’ve been speculating on Mac Power Users now for some time about the idea of a 15″ MacBook Air. There are plenty of people that would like a bigger screen without the MacBook Pro power (and price). In my head, the 13″ MacBook Pro exists as a placeholder for that mythical 15″ MacBook Air.
In the meantime, I stand by my advice, “Friends don’t let friends buy the 13″ MacBook Pro.”
Shortcuts for iOS 16 is adding a feature that lets you open a specific Mailbox in Apple Mail on your iPhone or iPad. Shortcuts for Ventura, however, doesn’t have that function. What gives? Never fear. Sparky figured out a way to duplicate the feature using AppleScript…
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Linking
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Mathew Panzarino at Tech Crunch is one of the most intelligent people writing about Apple these days. I was pleased to see he spent time with Craig Federighi (Apple’s Software chief) to talk about Stage Manager.
If you’ve been under a rock the last week, Stage Manager is Apple’s new attempt at multitasking. It uses stacks of related apps (that you create) along the left side of the screen. It works on both iPad and Mac, and taping (or clicking) on any stack of apps minimizes the existing apps and opens the stack of apps in its place.
Interestingly, Federighi disclosed that this feature was not designed for both iPad and Mac from the get-go, but instead, both teams had similar designs that approached one another.
From Federighi, “There were many of us who use the Mac every day who really wanted this kind of focused experience that gave us that balance. So we were on the Mac side, picking this idea up and saying we think that’s in reach, we want to make this happen. And separately on the iPad side we were thinking about [it]. And believe it or not two independent teams who are brainstorming and designing converge on almost the identical idea.”
The Stage Manager on iPad requires an M1-equipped iPad. While that’s a bummer if you are using older hardware. I don’t believe this is Apple trying to get you to buy a new iPad but instead what it seems: a feature enabled by new, more powerful hardware and additional memory. Federighi explains at length in the Tech Crunch article, “It’s only the M1 iPads that combined the high DRAM capacity with very high capacity, high performance NAND that allows our virtual memory swap to be super fast …”
I’d also note that Stage Manager lets you run four simultaneous iPad apps (or eight if you have an attached external screen). We’ve all been asking Apple to take advantage of the powerful iPad hardware. Now it has.
I’ve been using Stage Manager now for a week. I have opinions from two angles, the iPad and the Mac. For the iPad, Stage Manager is what I would call vertical improvement. It substantially improves multitasking and adds options that weren’t there before. Moreover, it is immediately accessible. I think many folks who don’t pay any attention to things like WWDC and MacSparky are going to latch onto Stage Manager on their iPad and suddenly start multitasking. I’ll be shocked if this one isn’t a winner. Already, I have stacks on my iPad of communication apps, research apps, and writing apps that I can jump between with just a tap. It changes the way I use the iPad.
On the Mac side, I would call it a horizontal improvement. Stage Manager isn’t necessarily better than some of the other options, like Spaces or using automation. It’s simply different; It’s another option. It’s better in some ways, like how accessible it is. It’s worse in other ways. You do lose some screen real estate, and at this point, it isn’t particularly keyboard friendly. I’m unsure where I will land with Stage Manager and the Mac. I think of someone like my wife, who finds Spaces completely baffling, will easily be using Stage Manager on both her iPad and her Mac.
And I think that is part of the point. Using the same paradigm on the iPad and Mac makes it much easier for most users to adopt and use the paradigm. People who figure it out on the iPad will want it on their Mac and vice versa. Not everyone is nuts enough to write an AppleScript to set up their writing applications.
In my initial testing, Stage Manager feels like the best window management system Apple has ever put on the iPad and perhaps the most accessible window management system Apple has ever proposed on the Mac. The trick is holding everything to that one screen. In the TechCrunch article, Craig Federighi also explains that the Stage Manager system is still evolving and will change throughout the betas. I am looking forward to its evolution.
