Apple’s big iPhone announcement is tomorrow at 10 AM Pacific. The event will stream at Apple’s website and YouTube. If you’d rather take it all in while in couch potato mode, it will also stream on the Apple TV app.
Just get your popcorn and buckle in for the new iPhone 12. Only a few more hours until my beautiful iPhone 11 feels like garbage. My kids are already dropping not-so-subtle hints about what I should do with last year’s model.
I’m currently working on a future secret Field Guide project that involves a lot of writing. So, before digging in I took another look at all the writing tools, as you do, and settled on Ulysses(https://ulysses.app). That was in January. The Ulysses updates this year have only affirmed that decision.
Most recently, we got version 21 on the iPad and iPhone(https://ulysses.app/releases/). The headline feature is grammar, style check, and text revisions. With revisions mode, you can track your annotations and comments in addition to the app’s grammar and style suggestions. I immediately implemented these features in my secret project, and my words are better for it.
Join us for the latest episode of Mac Power Users. With Apple silicon Macs coming soon, Stephen plays a montage for me that recaps the Intel era, featuring its highs and lows.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
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The Intrazone by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast hosted by the SharePoint team.
It’s just a few days until Apple’s iPhone 12 event. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like there are a lot of leaks this year about the new hardware. We seem to know the sizes, colors, storage configurations, and even the cellular radios. 9to5 Mac has done a great job of keeping up with them all. The rumors could be wrong, but they sure don’t feel that way.
The saddest bit for me is that there seems to be no oxygen to the idea that the cool little TouchID button going in the new iPad Air is also going on the iPhone with all of these rumors. I get that Apple has to manufacture millions of iPhones, and when the iPhone 12 was being developed, Apple didn’t know that the universe would conspire to require all of us to wear face masks, but I was still hopeful. The lack of the TouchID button.
Changes are afoot in the cloud automation space. IFTTT now has a pro tier. Zapier continues to improve. There’s a new player on our radar: Integromat. In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I break down the current state of cloud automation.
This episode of Automators is sponsored by:
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The Intrazone by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast hosted by the SharePoint team.
A few days ago, I published a video about my personal retreat experience. Since then, I’ve had many people ask me to explain further what technology I used. I’m about to explain what I did, but before I do so, there is a good argument that you shouldn’t take any technology on a personal retreat. It’s so easy to let the tech take over.
However, in my case I wanted to do a lot of typing and dictating, and tuning out infinity bucket apps has never been a problem for me so I brought along some Apple gear. If you want to bring technology and are worried you’ll be wasting time in social media instead of doing the hard work of a personal retreat, turn off your WiFi and cellular radios. I didn’t need to get that drastic, but if I’d caught myself lurking on Twitter, I absolutely would have done so. (I also did bring along pen and paper, just in case.)
If you are going to use technology, there are three phases to my version of a personal retreat:
Identifying and writing out your roles.
Asking tough questions about each role.
Planning for action in relation to each role.
For steps one and two, you could do this with any tool for managing words. A text editor would be fine. Apple Notes or even TextEdit could get the job done. The next level would be an app that supports headings and organization, like Drafts, Ulysses, or even BBEdit. As I explained in the video, the process is very non-linear. You’ll find yourself bouncing around among roles and questions a lot. For that reason, another excellent tool for this process would be an outliner or mind mapping app with both the ability to add plenty of text and folding branches. My two favorite apps for this process would be OmniOutliner or MindNode.
For this past retreat, I spent the first two days using Roam Research. I’ve been experimentally using Roam for a few months. It’s a powerful tool that combines the ability to turn anything into an outline with the ability to link any outline block in your Roam document (“graph” in Roam parlance) to any other outline block in your Roam graph with no friction. Roam is an excellent tool for this process … except for its immaturity. While Roam is a bit of a mind-bender and makes connecting thoughts very easy, it is still very new, and there are a bunch of parts to Roam that are not ready for prime time. My biggest concern is the lack of security. As I started to pour my heart into the retreat document, I became concerned about lack fo security in Roam, a web app, and ended up towards the end blocking and copying into OmniOutliner, which lacks Roam’s cool backlinks but has better security. (We’re going to be digging in on these research tools on an upcoming episode of Mac Power Users, and I’ve got a lot more on my mind when it comes to Roam and its competitors.)
For part three, turning my retreat ideas into action, I relied heavily on OmniFocus and Drafts. A lot of the process toward the end was writing plans out for myself and my collaborators. All of those started as blank text files in Drafts and grew into much more as I worked through the process.
I also set up a series of new repeating tasks and projects in OmniFocus to help keep myself accountable for some of my planned changes. Using a set of custom perspectives and review frequencies, OmniFocus can help keep me honest.
Looking back, my personal retreat technology wasn’t particularly novel or demanding. You need a place to write words down. You need a place to turn words into future actions. To go much beyond would probably just be a distraction on a retreat.
Today Apple announced some subscribers are getting an extension to their free AppleTV+ subscriptions through February 2021. I’m sure this is at least partly because the shows that we expected to be dropping another season right now are delayed due to … well … everything.
I got more enjoyment out of Apple TV+ in its first year than I expected. Winners for me were Then Morning Show, Dickenson, little america, Mythic Quest, For All Mankind, and Greyhound.
That was a lot of TV for me. My biggest disappointment was Amazing Stories. I enjoyed that show back in its first run many years ago, but it just didn’t land with me.
My biggest surprise this year was Ted Lasso. We’re all trying to get through this pandemic. (My wife is now officially a casualty of the Disney lay-offs.) Watching Ted Lasso with the family every week was indeed a highlight and a break from all of that. If you have Apple TV+ and haven’t watched that one yet, you are in for a treat.
Regardless, I think Apple did better at making content in their first year than I expected. As someone who thinks about Apple a lot, I didn’t watch the shows out of some loyalty to the Finder, but instead because they were good shows. I’d always forget I was even watching Apple’s produced shows until a Mac or an iPhone prominently appeared, which did occasionally happen.
Apple is smart to extend the trial a bit longer, given things. When we get to February, and they can release more content, the case for renewal will be easier.
A few weeks ago I went into the local mountains for a few days on a personal retreat. If was a good experience for me and I’ve got a video explaining how it worked. At the end of the video, I give a link to download my personal retreat materials. If you’ve already signed up for my newsletter, you don’t need to bother. I’ll be sending out links to all of that stuff on Friday.
Some additional personal retreat resources include Mike Schmitz’s Personal Retreat Handbook and Ian Byrd’s Excellent Quarterly Retreat Post.
Today Apple announced the ‘Hi, Speed’ event for October 13, at 10:00 AM Pacific. Apple’s made no secret of delaying the new iPhones’ release until October during this nutty year, and here we are in October.
No word on whether we’ll also see a new iPad Pro or Apple Silicon Macs, but if I had to bet a nickel, I’d say we won’t see any of that. The iPhone is Apple’s bread and butter, and I expect they want the iPhone to get all the attention next week.
The rumored new iPhone design looks like something between the iPhone 4 and the current iPad Pros and I’m all for it. Next week will be fun (and likely expensive).
Everything these days is about artificial intelligence. Often people are using AI in apps where I have to wonder if it is worth the trouble. However, this week’s sponsor, SaneBox, is artificial intelligence at its best, helping you with your email. Imagine for a moment that instead of waking up to 200 items in your inbox, you wake up to five, and those five are the most critical emails that you need to read. You can have that experience with SaneBox. And SaneBox is not proprietary—you can use it with any email app or service.
SaneBox is the solution to so many of my email problems. What if you had an assistant who worked for you 24/7 who did nothing but sort and manage your email? Wouldn’t that be nice? That is what SaneBox does. SaneBox is the email service that adds a pile of productivity features to your email, regardless of what email client you use. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain point, and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox at your back, you can:
Wake up every day to find that 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 have 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.”
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 SaneFwd service to automatically send appropriate emails to services such as Evernote, Expensify, or 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. I have heard from so many readers over the years who finally figured out email when they signed up for SaneBox. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account? If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.
