Dipping Your Toes in Conversational Artificial Intelligence

There’s a Mac and mobile application, Poe, giving you an easy way to kick the tires on artificial intelligence. I’ve been playing with it for the last day, and I recommend it, particularly if you’ve never tried this kind of thing before.

The application is as simple as download, open, and start talking to it. It’ll give you a good idea about the state of conversational artificial intelligence. It is easy to make fun of this stuff; AI gets a lot wrong. But it’s constantly learning. Like it or not, this stuff is coming, and it’s time to wrap our heads around that.

While we are not at the point of robot overlords just yet, we are getting to the point of helpful robots.

Main window for Poe, an AI chat application on iPad, showing a question and answer.
Poe for AI Chat (main window)

The Six Colors Report Card

Jason Snell just published his annual Six Colors Apple Report card, where he asks folks writing about Apple to score the company in different categories. Jason has been doing this long enough now that you can see some interesting trends and get a feel for how Apple is doing with its various products and services. I like how the report card is focused on the products, and not the finances. It’s always a privilege for me to participate in this, and fascinating to see how Apple appears to be doing from the outside.

Mac Power Users 678: Sales and Studies, with Kerry Provenzano

Relay FM’s VP of Sales Kerry Provenzano drops by Mac Power Users to talk about her Apple gear, keeping multiple projects going at once, and why she has built much of her workflow around Airtable.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Never forget a password again.
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  • Indeed: Join more than three million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast.

Timing: Track Your Time Without Timers; Now Even on iOS! (Sponsor)

Time is the most valuable resource you have. It’s the only resource you can’t get more of.

Yet, many of us don’t track our time. And the reason is usually simple: it’s cumbersome, and it’s way too easy to forget.

Not anymore! Timing is an app for your Mac that automatically tracks your time, no timers needed. It’s smart, it’s beautiful, and it’s easy to use.

Just download and install Timing and it’ll start recording how much time you spend on each app, document and website you use.

And with the latest update, Timing will now import your iPhone and iPad usage from Screen Time as well! This means you’ll get the full picture of how you spend your time, across all your devices.

I use Timing because of how easy it is to get good data. The app is smart. It learns how to categorize time for you (with a bit of help from you), and the reports are beautiful. I put screenshots of my Timing reports in my weekly/monthly reviews in Day One.

If you’ve tried time-tracking before and gave up on it, give Timing a try. It literally does the work for you.

Creating an AppleScript to Automate Timing Entries (MacSparky Labs)

I’ve had a few members ask me for help automating setting timers in the Timing App. Since the Timing App supports AppleScript, this gave me an opportunity to explain how I build an AppleScript by cobbling together bits of code I find on the Internet. If you’d like to learn how to build and execute a simple AppleScript, this one is for you.… This is a post for MacSparky Labs Level 3 (Early Access) and Level 2 (Backstage) Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

The Omni Group Roadmap and A Few Thoughts on OmniFocus

The Omni Group has published its latest road map. As a fan of their software, I love reading these. They are committing to release OmniFocus 4 this year and they are also working on an update to OmniGraffle. I’ve heard from a lot of folks about the OmniFocus 4 release, and I’ve got a few thoughts:

  • Many readers tried the early betas and didn’t care for it. If that’s you, I’d encourage you to give the current, later betas, another look. A year ago, they were focused on features. They’ve done a ton of UI polish since then.
  • The Omni Group is the first company I’ve seen emerge from the morass of Swift UI with a high-end productivity app. I expect this will pay dividends going forward. Just like we’re now seeing Apple release major new features across all platforms at once, I expect we’ll see the same from the Omni Group.

I went into the wild over the last six months looking seriously at other task manager options including Reminders, Things, and some of the emerging online tools. I started that survey willing to move to another app, but ended up right back where I started. My takeaway is that OmniFocus is still the only option for me. (Perspectives are so powerful and you can link anything, anywhere.) While Reminders is a lot better, on a scale of 1 to 10 it goes to 7, whereas OmniFocus goes to 11.

Finally, now that I’ve finished my survey, I’ve committed three months to making an entirely new edition of the OmniFocus Field Guide once the new version ships.