Speaking at the Release Notes Conference

I’m excited to be named as a speaker at this year’s Release Notes Conference in Indianapolis on September 27–29. The Release Notes Conference is all about independent developers and the challenges they face. Indie developers are some of my favorite people. They are entrepreneurs, geeks, and fearless trailblazers all at once. I can’t wait to talk to them about the perils and thrills of working for yourself.

FotoMagico 5

For years I’ve had the reputation in my friend and family groups as being the “slide show wizard”. If somebody’s getting married, or having an anniversary party, or whatever, they always come to me and ask me to put on their slide show.

I always hedge a bit, explaining that it is very time consuming and that if I’m going to do it, they should at least make sure I get extra cake and ice cream. They always agree to my terms.

What they don’t know is that all this time I’ve simply been taking their pictures and dumping them in FotoMagico with some good music. The app does all the work.

Recently Boinx released version 5 of FotoMagico and now I’ll look even better. They’ve now got features like:

* Resolution independence. Your slide show will play on any projector up to 4K

* Adding video

* New slide transitions and better text animation

One of my tricks for weddings is to always get a shot of the bride and groom’s first kiss and then add it to the end of the slide show for the reception. Everybody loves that. Now FotoMagico makes that job easier with a pre-built snippet for just that purpose.

There’s more, like export functions, synchronization with music beats, and other fancy tricks but to me the real value in this app is how easily it makes a great slideshow. Learn more over at Boinx Software.

Drawing on iPad Word

I don’t know what they’re feeding the Microsoft iOS development team but I wish they’d give some of it to the Mac team too. I’ve been using Word’s latest new feature that lets you annotate Microsoft Word documents on the iPad with the Apple Pencil. It feels super natural and makes a great deal of sense once you get the workflow down. I was going to write it up but Jeff Richardson covered it thoroughly today so I’m just going to point you over there.

At this point I’m beginning to wonder if it’s inevitable that I’ll be moving my Apple Pages template documents over to Word and just go all-in for Word. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Five Weeks

Today Apple announced an update to the MacBook. Overall, the new machine looks pretty solid. Faster SSD. Better processor. More battery life. The shocking thing to me is how little I care. Last week I had to get my laptop out and found a letter open on it that I had started writing … five weeks ago. I knew it had been awhile since I used the laptop. I didn’t realize it was five weeks.

Don’t get me wrong. I spend hours a day using my iMac. But for mobile work, the iPad Pro has largely been getting the job done for me. As iOS further matures, I’m just not so sure I’ll have much need for a laptop. Trust me. I’m as surprised by this realization as anybody else.

Typing on Glass

I’ve made no secret over the years about the fact that I’m not particularly good at typing on glass. Part of the reason is ham-hands and my preference for dictation. Those, however, are just excusees. The real reason is that after a lifetime of touch typing, I’ve never felt particularly good at typing on glass. It felt like productivity molasses.

A few things, however, have swayed me. It started with the iPad Air. On that machine I got quite good at thumb typing in portrait mode. It’s nothing like touch typing but still pretty great to sit on an airplane and thumb my way through an outline or a pile of email.

Speaking of airplanes, I recently took a flight where I was seated right between the window and a big guy that made pulling down the tray and using my iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard cover impossible. I had four hours on that plane and was determined not to thrown in the towel. So I placed the iPad on my lap and started typing. I then went into one of those hypnotic work-states that I often feel on airplanes and before I knew it the pilot announced we were about to land.

I got a lot of work done typing on glass that day and it really opened my eyes. There’s a lot to like about typing on the 12.9″ iPad glass. You can switch keyboards easily. If you’re paying attention, the recommended word selections are pretty good and can speed things up. That eye-opening flight was a month ago and now I find myself typing on glass a lot more than I’ve ever done before. This post was typed on glass (more out of convenience than to prove a point). When you get right down to it I really don’t think there is much a speed loss typing on glass with the big iPad Pro.

Jason Snell’s brought math to this party. He recently ran his own typing tests where he found he only had a 17% loss in speed typing on the 12.9″ iPad pro glass over a keyboard. While I don’t think it is quite that close for me, I don’t think Jason is far off. Moreover, if I spent a little bit more time getting better at this glass keyboard, I’m certain I could close the gap further.

All of that said, there are still definite pain points. Text selection is still far easier for me using a keyboard. Also, typing on glass at least once a day my finger accidentally hits the keyboard switch button which brings my work to a screeching halt. On that note if I were in charge, I’d make the keyboard selection button something where you had to press and hold to switch between keyboards.

I’m not ready to give up my Apple Smart Keyboard cover anytime soon but I can tell you I’m much more receptive to typing on glass now than I’ve ever been before. 

Sponsor: Interact: Do More with Your Contacts




This week MacSparky is sponsored by Interact, an app for your iPad and iPhone to manage your contacts like no other. I am doing a lot of work on the iPad these days and one of my surprises as I dive deep is that some apps on iOS are better than those on the Mac. That is the case for this week’s sponsor, Interact. Interact helps you create, organize, and communicate with your contacts in ways that just haven’t been possible before. It’s so good that I actually prefer managing contacts on my iPad now over the Mac.

Interact empowers you and your contacts to get more done in less time, with features like group management, one-tap contact creation, and easy communication.

Interact works directly with your iOS Contacts accounts, adding features not available in the built-in iPhone and iPad Contacts app, like:

  • Group management. Create and manage membership in groups.
  • Capture contact information from plain text anywhere with the system with the Contact Scratchpad. The Scratchpad automatically recognizes phone numbers, emails, addresses and much more to easily turn an email signature or other block of text into a complete contact record. This feature is spooky and awesome all at once.
  • Send group emails and messages with attachments from photos or files from Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive or any other iOS document provider.

And best of all, since Interact works directly with iOS Contacts, any work done in Interact is immediately reflected throughout iOS whereever contacts are used.

Get Interact on the App Store today!

MPU 316: Locking Down Your Technology

There seem to be a lot of shenanigans lately with other people trying to get at your personal information. In this week’s episode Katie and I explain how to lock up your Apple technology. My thanks to this weeks Mac Power Users sponsors.

  • Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
  • PDFpen from Smile With powerful PDF editing tools, available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, PDFpen from Smile makes you a Mac Power User.
  • 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. 
  • The Omni Group We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Home Screens: James Coleman


This week’s home screen features James Coleman (Twitter). James was a recent guest on the Mac Power Users and runs the Switcher Genius website that helps show PC users the light and bring them to the Mac. So James, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

My favorite apps aren’t necessarily the ones on my home screen, which is interesting. In fact, my favorite apps are just the interface to an entire platform that solves some problem in an incredible way previously not possible.  More and more I’m reminded that the iPhone is just the box we carry around to interface with platforms that could span hundreds or thousands of servers, and hundreds of thousands or millions of people worldwide.

As of the time of this writing, I really, really like Withings. I have two Withings scales and a bluetooth blood pressure cuff, and I use the scales daily, and the cuff every few days and no less than once per week.  I just discovered and applied a fitness recovery protocol for myself and lost >15lbs in the prior month, and I’m on track for losing another 10 this month. Withings is an important tool that’s part of my plan.  It’s groovy because it gives me data points I can look at, which is like reviewing financials if you’re a business type. A really critical 20% of my fitness regimen is a psyche game, and having those data points to look at constructively helps me analyze and stay focused. So if Withings helps me get back my sexy, I’m a fan.   Shazam and SoundHound are two of my favorite apps for telling me what the song is that I’m hearing, wherever I’m at. I dig this, especially in yoga sculpt (I’m addicted to yoga), and it can even tells me specific mixes, which is more awesome. And Shazam lets me put listening on continuous mode so I don’t have to tap the big listen button. I used SoundHound at my 5 year old’s sports festival recently to figure out what the songs were they were dancing to. My son was super stoked when he found out that I had added them to his playlist on iTunes.

I love Periscope. Tech has so much potential to open up TV, like Podcasting has done for audio broadcast.  I worked in West Hollywood for a few years, and during that time I met so much talent that had a snowball’s chance in hell of being discovered because media is largely controlled a few big companies. With a platform like Periscope, a student, screenwriter, actor – virtually anyone – can be heard, followed and discovered worldwide.  It’s unbelievable. I’m planning on putting Periscope to good use by answering tech questions my readers and listeners ask on the Switcher Genius blog and in a Q&A format online, live, unscripted. How cool is it that this is possible?

I have to admit that I was blown away with the experience using Postmates.  Seriously, if anyone hasn’t ordered delivery (usually food, but other things like groceries too, etc.) via Postmates, do it. When a business really thinks through the customer experience, and not just on-screen, but also off-screen, like how well the information flows between the person holding the phone and the company they want something from, they’re winning the game. 

A related note for business/tech nerds like me, about why I think an apps like Postmates are cool: The future of products and services is really about who can deliver the most efficiency from an asset. And not necessarily their own assets. Think about Apple: When you think Apple, the first products that come to mind are Macs and iOS devices. Those are just the medium.  Where Apple’s winning super hardcore is on making money on everyone else’s assets.  What is it now that they make off of iTunes and Apps that are other people’s assets?  Like $20 billion in profit?  Uber and AirBnB are two other great examples of this.  Any App that makes my experience with a company better by making it more efficient is cool.


Other than that, the apps most important to me are closest to my right-hand thumb.  I actually organized my phone specifically so the apps that I use most each day are easily in reach. No folders. No stretching. They’re right there. I call this area my iPhone’s “golden triangle” (see picture).

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

It’s nutty and nerdy, but it would have to be the app called Japanese.  I have a degree in Japanese Language and Literature, and during my undergrad studies I carried around a character lookup dictionary by Nelson that looks like a law school tome: Hardback, and it probably weighs 4 lbs and has some 1100 pages.  To look up any Kanji (Kanji = the adopted Chinese characters that are a core part of the Japanese written language) I would have to dissect a character based on its core components mentally then look it up. It’s actually really similar in some ways to translating hieroglyphics.  The whole process always struck me as crazy inefficient when we have English and can look up anything from A-Z, and most of the time phonetically instead of graphically.

Japanese is awesome because I can look up almost any word any number of ways.  Like by the way it sounds, just typing roman letters. Or via the “alphabet” of Japanese.  I can even draw the Kanji (which is useful if you’ve memorized 2000+ Kanji in college and still remember some, or can write what you see on a sign/book/newspaper, etc.)  I recently started blogging about Japan and Japanese (on Japanophile.jp), and I’ve using this app probably 15–20 times per day as I find new things to translate and share with people interesting in cool Japanese stuff.

What app makes you most productive? 

When I think productivity, three appsimmediately come to mind. Omnifocus, Evernote, 1Password.

The clear winner would be Evernote. I wrote most of this in Evernote in my car using Siri. But Evernote goes so much further than I could possibly have imagined. It’s text recognition capability is amazing, and paired with all of the capability of the iPhone it makes for the perfect external brain, which is basically their tagline. I take photos and menus at restaurants. I log almost all my calls of any consequence, and can look them up on any device instantly and by content, tags, or even the notebooks that I organize my notes into.  It’s so ridiculously easy to keep track of notes with tags, and organize them into notebooks or projects and endeavors.  And Evernote’s hooks into web browsers make it’s superbly easy to capture clips of anything.  

I signed up for Evernote for Business, and I keep discovering new ways to use it. It’s already replaced my company’s wiki and it’s replacing a large part of what Box.com used to do for me, and now I’m using it to collaborate on projects at work and at home, including planning vacations, school activities, etc. I estimate that actually utilizing Evernote gives me back at least 5 hours per week.  I used to think that Box.com was hot and servers were ancient.  I’m starting to realize that a platform like Evernote is much, much more than notes and can radically change the way a business – or even a household – runs.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

You know, when it comes to under-utilizing an app, I can’t really think of one off the top of my head.  I think it’s because I’m so obsessive-compulsive about how I select apps, how I organize them, and more important, what I get rid of. I do an 80–20 analysis on everything. My iPhone is a great example.  I use the stuff on the home screen 95%+ of the time. I used to have the calculator app on the home screen before Siri and before the Calculator was moved to the control center.  If I had to pick one by features it would be OmniFocus.  There’s just so much more I could do with it, but I don’t need to because the 20% I use it for gives me the 95% of what I want. 

What is the app you are still missing?

A really, really, really good translation app. There are some cool ones out there, but there’s no real rosetta stone of apps yet. I will seriously geek out when the day comes that I can tap ’translate’ and have it do real-time translation of everything happening in my conversation and transfer it to my Moto Hint that’s usually embedded in my ear. Then again, I remember holding the original 5GB iPod in my hand and saying “wouldn’t it be cool if this thing had a camera and you could make calls on it.” Maybe Siri will become my personal translator not too far off.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

I use my iPhone a lot. In order of use:

1.  Phone. I’m only using one phone number nowadays.

2.  Messages.

3.  Evernote. Using with #1 and #2 constantly.

4.  Music and Apple Remote. Music is sooooo important to me.  I’m playing music constantly, in the car, at the office, at home.  

5.  Twitter. I’m @jamescoleman on Twitter. Twitter is the ultimate ability to say “hello” to anyone out there, and I love responding to anyone that says hi to me.   

On the other hand, I’m getting more and more used to leaving the ring volume on and cranked up somewhere in the house when I’m home so I don’t have the tendency of looking at it all the time.  When it’s in my pocket or in my hand, I noticed I’m more likely to look at it when I don’t need to.  Same for work production time.  When I’m writing the phone is a massive distraction, so it good to my right on the bookshelf and waits there.

I own two iPads and use them all the time teaching people Photos and business and personal productivity, but I use my iPhone for everything.  The only time I really use my iPad is as a parent-saving-device (PSD) on 12-hour flight to Japan, fully loaded with Ultraman and Youkai Watch videos for my kiddos.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

The camera. Without a doubt. The ability to take a photo anywhere, anytime, geo-tagged, is just so wonderful. I’ve spent 10 years learning everything there is about digital photography, and I’ve helped everyone from moms and dads to some of the best photographers in the world get their photos and videos in order. I fill up my iPhone (I have the largest size and storage possible) at least once every 3 months.  I just love it.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

My wife’s phone was just stolen during a trip to San Francisco, and within minutes we pushed the destroy-all-data button. About an hour later we had confirmation that the iPhone was zeroed out. The problem is, the jerk who stole it still has some incentive, despite the IMEI being reported stolen. There are too many parts that get taken and make their way into the black market. I want an option to not only wipe data, but fry all the circuitry simultaneously so every single part of the device is worthless to the crook who took it. I would find a way to not just remote wipe the phone, but also to safely remote destroy it.

What’s your wallpaper and why?


My lock screen rotates a lot. Usually pictures of my two boys or my gorgeous wife. Right now it’s a good luck charm I saw in Kyoto, Japan when I was traveling in the Yunohana area with my brother last April. I had just started a new blog so the maneki neko – a good luck cat – is beckoning for new readers 🙂

Thanks James.