mostly nonsense
Rakhim is the hero we need in 2020.
Please don’t let the comedic nature of the video turn you away. I’m not sure if there is a better way he could have presented this.
Stay for the entire trainwreck so you can appreciate the focus of a two-trillion dollar company that says subscription services revenue is the future.
He really does make some excellent observations about usability, attention to detail, care, and obviousness in software.
I cackled for the full 18 minutes.
The idea for this app started eleven months ago as a collection of PHP scripts and a giant Shortcuts.app shortcut. But I quickly realized it would be best served as a real iOS app. I’ve been working on it off and on since February and have teased it a few times publicly on Twitter.
But now I think I’m ready for broader feedback from outside my small group of testers. And hope that feedback will show that it’s useful to more people than just me.
The app is called Voxmail. And (I think?) it’s the first iOS email client that you can’t use on your phone.
Instead, you check and triage your email using only your voice with Siri.
I’ve been using it every weekday for the past six months (when not quarantined) to go through my inbox while commuting to work. Specifically, I use it with Siri via CarPlay to hands-free get a handle on any email that came in overnight or that morning before I arrive at work.
Voxmail isn’t meant to replace your real email app. It’s meant to augment your mail client so that you can read, archive, delete, mark as spam, etc. your inbox while driving or doing other tasks with headphones on.
The app even has, what I think, is an amazing workaround to give you verbal push notifications of new messages when connected to AirPods or CarPlay. (I hope Apple approves it.)
How does Voxmail work? Let me show you a conversation on my phone with Siri side-by-side with my email client and Reminders.app on my Mac so you can see things happening in real-time.
(Make sure your volume is up so you can hear Siri reply.)
Think of Voxmail like you would old-school cellphone voicemail from the 2000s. The app will read your messages to you one at a time, and you can take action or skip and move on to the next.
Here are some things you can ask Voxmail to do:
As a bonus feature, you can also say
and Voxmail will add a reminder to the iOS Reminders app with an alert set for the date and time you chose and the email as an attachment.
But what about CarPlay?
Well, one of the things that have always annoyed me the most about CarPlay is that Apple silences all notifications while you’re driving except for a few whitelisted ones such as text messages, calendar alerts, and turn-by-turn directions.
I totally get the safety reasons for this. But at the same time, if my boss sends me a Slack message saying that the world is on fire while I’m driving home and I need to call him, I would very much like to hear that notification via CarPlay. Not so I can try replying in Slack while speeding down the interstate, but so I could hands-free say, “Siri, call my boss.”
My point is that I would like to be aware of other, non-approved notifications – even if I have no intention of ever using my phone while driving. Email is one of them.
Voxmail solves this problem by reflecting new emails to your phone via SMS when you’re connected to CarPlay or Bluetooth headphones.
What does that mean exactly?
During my commute home, Voxmail will periodically check for new email in the background. If it finds a new message, it will send the sender and subject (and nothing else) to my web server. My server then sends a text message to my phone, summarizing any new messages, which Siri will happily announce and read to me in the car or over AirPods.
If it’s a message I’m interested in, I tap the voice button on my steering wheel and say, “Read that email” to hear more.
What about privacy?
Email is a sacred thing full of all your secrets. That’s why none of your email ever leaves your device with Voxmail.
Unlike most other iOS email apps, Voxmail checks your email itself – on your device – communicating directly with your email provider. It does not use an intermediary 3rd party server to proxy your messages. All of your information, including your email account credentials, are kept locally.
The only exception to this is the SMS forwarding trick I explained above. That feature is opt-in and disabled by default. If you turn it on and confirm your phone number, only the sender and subject line of new emails are sent to my server – never the actual contents of your emails.
Further, none of that information is stored in a database. It’s only around long enough to send you a text message, and then it’s gone.
I don’t need your data. I don’t want your data.
So that’s Voxmail. I think it’s a ton of fun and find it incredibly helpful.
It’s not fully featured or quite ready for prime-time yet, but it is now available as a public TestFlight build. If anyone would like to help test, I’d love your feedback.
You can join the public TestFlight here. And I have more documentation available here.
(Click here to skip my boring intro and go straight to the fun stuff.)
It’s been nearly two years since I posted anything significant to this blog’s Productivity and OmniFocus section. A big reason for that is after practicing GTD for fifteen years, I had pretty much nailed down a slightly tweaked take on the process that worked well for me. There was no need to make changes just for the sake of change.
But one significant change I have made is to my morning routine. And it was made possible by OmniFocus’ version 3.4 update last year. I’m sorry that I’m just now getting around to writing about this new workflow because it’s a lot of fun. And it just might be my favorite new feature Omni has ever shipped. As a user, it’s wowing me with the possibilities. And as an Apple developer, I’m amazed at how well done it is.
One of the fundamental tenets of GTD is capturing all the open loops in your head and putting them into your trusted system. I’ve found that making capturing as frictionless as possible in any situation has been one of the most significant net benefits in my life.
But OmniFocus’s Siri Shortcuts allow for something entirely different: Ubiquitous Planning. I can now review my commitments for the day at any time without being visually tied to my device.
I have two young kids, so our morning routine is barely controlled chaos. Add to that a fairly long commute into the office where the last ten minutes is me on the phone for our daily standup call. So, from the time I open my eyes to when I sit down at my desk, I pretty much have no idea what’s in store for the day other than what I remember from my weekly review on Sunday or anything I managed to look over the night before.
My actual planning time is me triaging emails, Jira tickets, Slack messages, notes from standup, and my OmniFocus lists during the 30 minutes after my morning call ends. Only then am I ready to begin work. And by that point, it’s practically already time to start the daily Slack poll for what we’re ordering for lunch, and, well, mornings go by fast.
But what about that dead time in the car on the way to work? Podcasts? Sometimes. Singing at the top of my lungs to 80’s New Wave? Always.
How about stealing back some of that time and doing a daily review? Yep. Now I can.
OmniFocus now has a fantastic Siri Shortcut action that lets you run queries against your task database. And with some clever Shortcuts.app programming (is it really programming?), I’m now able to ask Siri questions about my upcoming day via CarPlay and have the results dictated back to me so I can at least get a summary of what’s available, what’s due, and a reminder of what I completed yesterday.
Let’s start with a simple example.
My OmniFocus Inbox is a dumping ground for tiny reminders, half-baked ideas, and the beginnings of larger projects. When I’m preparing for the day, those items can mostly be ignored until I’m ready to do a review or real processing. But often, I’ll also throw in one-off tasks that need to get done quickly and don’t warrant me taking the time to add them to a project or assign tags. Since these will never leave my Inbox, it’s important to me to do a quick catch-up of what’s in there, or they might get lost among the chaos of my more organized projects.
Here’s the first version of the Inbox shortcut I built. It’s a basic example of how to query for tasks.
(Quick note: I originally wanted to call this shortcut “What’s in my inbox?” as that’s the most natural phrase for me to speak. But I use all of these shortcuts hands-free while driving with CarPlay. And since iOS assumes you’re asking about Mail.app because of the word “inbox”, it complains that you aren’t allowed to use Mail.app while driving. So, I have to add the “tasks” qualifier to make the system run my shortcut.)
Here it is in action:
This works well enough, but it can be improved. Because Siri is just reading the raw output from the OmniFocus query, it’s too difficult to discern the separate tasks she’s speaking. It doesn’t sound like natural speech.
After a little bit of experimentation, here’s a better example that I can run by asking, “Hey, Siri. What’s due today?”
Siri is easier to understand in this example because I’m sending each task to voice one at a time and a one-second pause between each.
Let’s take things one step further and ask for a rundown of the upcoming week – including an overall summary as well as dates for each task.
It takes 23 actions to piece together that Shortcut. But I think the results are worth it.
I construct my OmniFocus query and then loop over all the tasks – formatting each one into a sentence – and combine them into a single, larger string that I send to voice output.
Using simple punctuation and putting a newline between each task forces Siri to speak the results more naturally.
So, that’s how I talk to OmniFocus.
With a few custom shortcuts as well as Voxmail and CarPlay’s built-in calendar support, I’m able to get an excellent overview of my day on the drive into work. I can triage emails, find out what’s due on my task list, and hear any new meetings added to my schedule overnight.
It lets me use my otherwise dead time commuting to prepare for the day and feel more confident when I dial-in to my morning call.
A good friend texted me the other day. They said:
I’m jealous of a lot of your work ethic, but the fact that you enjoy writing is the biggest one I think
I don’t share that to say that my work ethic is better than anyone else. I’ve been called “lazy” my whole life by teachers, friends, even loved ones when it comes to me not putting effort into things I’m not passionate about.
Is that a personal flaw? Yes, I think so. If I could have mustered the maturity and self-discipline to study for the classes I wasn’t interested in, I probably wouldn’t have flunked second-semester college Biology two times. I probably would have remained in past jobs longer. And a million other screwups and failures throughout my ridiculously privileged life could have been avoided if I had just cared enough to try harder at the things I didn’t care for.
A few years ago, my therapist told me I’m going to have just the right personality and temperament to enjoy my 40s when I get there. I wasn’t entirely sure how to take his comment then, but now that I’m well into my thirty-eighth trip around the Sun, I think it’s beginning to sink in.
What I mean is, I feel like I’m dangerously close to discovering the cheat code for my own life. After a decade of turbulence, I’m more at peace with myself than I ever have been. Thirty-eight years into being here, I finally understand myself well enough to forgive my shortcomings (while continuing to try and be better) and realize what makes me tick, what motivates me, and how I can fight back against the worst parts of myself and stay healthy.
Everything above is just a long-winded and meandering introduction to say that this post is about motivation. Specifically, the two most significant motivating factors that contribute to my “work ethic,” as my friend said.
The first one is so dumb and straightforward that I can hardly believe it works. I didn’t even realize I was using it to my advantage until I stumbled upon a story about Jerry Seinfeld that accidentally made the idea internet-chic.
There are a million blog posts and articles explaining it, so I won’t bore you with a detailed rehashing. But, in summary, do the thing you want to do every day. The more days you can muster in a row, the more leverage you create to keep yourself from ending the streak – from breaking the chain.
I’m tempted to dismiss the whole idea as nothing more than a fancy way to build a habit, except that I think the insight of using an ever-growing streak – compounding interest, essentially – as leverage against yourself can help you through the period before it becomes a habit. At least that’s how it has helped me.
Two quick examples.
For a long time, I kept a daily journal using the wonderful Day One app for Mac and iOS. Whether added for this reason or not, I don’t know, but the main screen displayed the number of consecutive days you last wrote an entry. I accidentally got my streak up to twenty days or so and just never wanted to see that number stop climbing.
Soon I had a couple of months in a row, and by the time I finally let a day lapse without writing, over two years had passed.
Along those lines, when it comes to the software I write, I really do enjoy looking at my GitHub contribution chart. And while I think it’s a complete asshole move to judge anyone else by what theirs looks like, I like seeing mine.
While maybe not as specific or as motivating as a number you can count, it’s fascinating to see the relative ebbs and flows chronologically. I can often correlate the chart seasonally or to my mood levels over time. And, yes, it gives me a bit of an endorphin rush when I can look back and feel proud of what I accomplished.
I’ll end this section with a recent quote from one of my very favorite people, Kourosh Dini.
Moving something forward a little bit each day is likely more important than doing something all at once. Doing so helps you to build the structures needed to keep moving forward.
I wrote something similar (but not nearly as eloquent) six years ago.
Moving on.
The other big thing that pushes me forward is fear.
When I stay busy, productive, engaged, curious, whatever you want to call it, I feel mentally healthier. That doesn’t mean I work all the time or that I don’t binge-watch a season of TV every now and then, but without some baseline level of gears turning in my head, solving problems, and learning something new, I get dangerously bored – for lack of a better word.
I turn inward. I shut down. I’ve been to some very dark places in my life, and in hindsight, the warning signs were always there. Chief among them is losing interest in the work I am passionate about.
And so I’m incredibly fearful of that happening again. Call it a precursor or a canary in a coal mine, but if I can gauge my ability to remain engaged in my work as a barometer for my mental health, I’m happy to do so.
Kourosh’s post I linked above offers this quote from Paul Tillich‘s The Courage to Be.
Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightful it may be, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it.
If I’m going to be afraid, I’d much prefer to use that emotion to my advantage, stay busy, and build things that make me (and hopefully other people) happy.
I occassioanlly need to scan a folder and all of its subdirectories to see if any of them DO NOT contain files of a certain type.
I’m fully aware you can do this with some combination of shell commands, but I always spent 20 minutes googling for how to do it again every time I needed to. It was faster just to write this small utility myself.
I call it dnc, which stands for “does not contain”. You can download the source or a pre-built binary on GitHub. The builds aren’t notarized. So be sure to ask Apple if it’s OK to run this on your Mac.
USAGE: dnc --directory <directory> --query <string> [--invert]
OPTIONS:
-d, --directory <directory>
The directory to recursively scan.
-q, --query <string> A string to search for in the filename of the directory's files.
--invert Invert the query. i.e., show directories that DO contain the query.
-h, --help Show help information.My primary use-case is finding which albums in my music collection (folders on disk) are in a lossy format. This gives me a quick shopping list of used CDs to buy when I need something mindless to do during quarantine.
A typical command would be
dnc -d /path/to/music -q flacThat will output something along the lines of
/path/to/music/Violent Femmes/1999-11-23 - Viva Wisconsin
/path/to/music/Weezer/1994-05-10 - Weezer
/path/to/music/White Denim/2013-10-29 - Corsicana Lemonade
/path/to/music/Yonder Mountain String Band/A Decade of Yonder Live, Vol 9_ 6_29_2006 Apple Valley, MN
/path/to/music/Zero 7/The Gardenwhich means of all the folders recursively inside /path/to/music, those directories DO NOT contain any flac files.
A key difference of this script than many of the solutions that Google gives me, is I’m not interested in every file that does not match query. I just want to know about any folders that do not contain matching files.
You can use the full command line arguments listed above with --help, or you can quickly run the command on your current directory by only passing a query string like this:
dnc flacIn line with my affinity for backing up and owning my data, one component of that strategy is avoiding proprietary file formats and databases whenever possible and reasonable. That’s why I prefer plain text (and more recently .textbundle) for all of my notes, and why I’m so meticulous about how I organize my family’s photo archives.
It gives me the agility to move from app to app or even (heaven forbid, it may eventually happen) to a new platform as my needs change. If you own your own data, there’s no lock-in.
So along those lines, here’s a very tiny optimization (is that the right word for this?) that I’ve been doing for years that helps keep my reference material organized and more easily searchable and filterable.
(Oh, and also a quick story about how I effed up someone else’s data.)
My primary “database” is the Finder – files on disk. And while Spotlight is amazing and wonderful and all that (go purchase HoudahSpot), I find its results too fuzzy and noisy unless I’ve really lost a file. It’s way faster for me to find what I’m looking for using the combination of how I naturally organize files into folders based on the client / app / subject / etc. and then sorting by date.
And it’s sorting by date that this simple trick is all about.
I gave up long ago relying on file creation and modification dates as a reliable way to sort files. They’re too easily corrupted.
Some modern Mac apps that adopt the post-Snow Leopard policy of automatically saving will save files behind your back just by viewing them. That can easily blow away a file’s timestamp. Or, if you restore from a backup, it’s very likely the original dates won’t be preserved. And now that all our data is flying across the network at any given moment with Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc. it’s easy for a bug in their sync code or your own mistake to propagate everywhere instantly.
My solution is basically what every Microsoft Office Warrior has already been doing ever since email became a thing and people needed to keep track of multiple revisions.
I stick the date in the filename itself.
Ok, I know this is ridiculously obvious, but it works, it’s flexible and has saved my bacon many times.
Rather than relying on filesystem dates, which can be mangled at any time, I sort by filename and voilà.
Here are my archived photo albums:
It’s especially awesome for this purpose because, for me, I want my photos / videos stored chronologically. After all, I mentally see them as a timeline of my life. And if every album of a birthday party were named “Birthday Party Blah Blah,” it would be a nightmare to find what I was looking for among 1,000+ folders.
This strategy can really shine when you go beyond Finder and use an app that can filter, search, and sort by dates this way.
Here’s my note-taking app focused on my daily standup meeting notes. In addition to the full-text search, I can quickly filter to meetings that took place in a given month or day.
This whole thing works for me because my memory is naturally oriented around dates and timelines. When I’m trying to reference a piece of information, I can almost always pin it down to the specific month it was created, at a minimum, and then use that date range as a launching point for more refined searching if needed.
But how do you make adding these dates faster? Text snippets, of course.
I’m a terrible typist, and I can barely remember the current date as is. So I’ve been using Typinator for years to convert short abbreviations into longer snippets, including variables and dynamic data.
(Lots of apps that do this sort of thing. I feel like TextExpander is the default choice for most people, but I’ve always preferred Typinator for many reasons that warrant their own blog post.)
So when I need to insert the current date, in any app, I type .dt
…and it expands into 2020-10-09. You’ll also see in that gif that typing .ts inserts the current time, too.
Neither of these snippets is amazing or original or unique. Folks have been raving online for years (rightly so) about all the amazing and clever uses you can find for apps that automate typing for you.
(If you’re curious about the sorts of things you might use a text expansion app for, go visit David Sparks. I’ve stolen a ton of great ideas reading his blog over the years.)
Anyway, this blog post’s point is just a long-winded way to say that inserting the current date into filenames or note titles is a small habit I’ve learned that makes me so much more organized. It lets me find the content I’m looking for much faster and get on with my work.
I wrote above about the delicate nature of filesystem dates and how, if you rely on them, losing that part of your reference material can be a Bad Thing?. That’s why I use the date-inside-the-filename trick.
But what clued me into this?
In 2009, when I was building the first version of Nottingham over Thanksgiving weekend, I sent an early build to John Gruber. I knew he was a big fan of Simplenote, and I was excited to show that my new Mac app would sync with their backend.
It didn’t go well.
(I know it’s not cool to publish emails with another person without their permission first, but I hope he’ll let this one slide as it’s been 11 years and I was clearly the idiot in the exchange.)
So, yeah. That was my first time writing any sort of network synchronization code, and I probably shouldn’t have used him as a guinea pig.
That said, a few years later, I think it was WWDC 2012, I struck up a conversation with him at Bourbon & Branch.
I basically said, “Hi, I’m the guy who fucked up your note timestamps. Sorry about that.”
I don’t remember his exact reply other than being very nice about it and not punching me in the face, but I do remember during the entire short conversation he was scribbling into a Field Notes journal. I can only assume he had learned his lesson and swore off digital note-taking.
I don’t quite understand how it’s been five years already. Nevertheless, happy birthday to the most fearless and persistent young lady I’ve ever known.
If you need something to listen to this weekend or during your next commute, here’s a link to me prattling on for forty-six minutes about how and why I build the software I do.
Brett Terpstra was kind enough to invite me on as the guest of his Systematic podcast this week. And when he says I’m “on about the same level of a geek frequency as” he is, well, that’s a heck of a compliment in my book.
While using one of my favorite iOS Shortcuts the other day, I realized how much things have changed in six years.
I say six years ago specifically because it was in 2014 that I made an iOS app called Upshot.
Sadly, Upshot never saw the light of day because I couldn’t get it past App Review for very dumb reasons. Lucky for you though, after I show the ridiculously simple Shortcut that I now use instead, this gives me the opportunity to tell you my very favorite App Store rejection story.
I subscribe to the whole GTD philosophy – especially the notion of ubiquitous capture. (Although, as usual, Merlin has a really good anti-take on the topic that is worth considering.) It keeps me sane knowing I have a system to record the things I shouldn’t forget when they occur to me.
For a long time, many of the notes, ideas, and reminders I captured were quick cellphone snapshots. Of course, that means my camera roll quickly cluttered up with photos that were only relevant to me for a day or two or maybe even just an hour after I snapped them.
There are a thousand ways (and apps) to solve this problem. For me, my solution has long been a top-level folder in my Dropbox named _Inbox. (The _ keeps it sorted at the top of the directory listing.) It’s where all my dumb, non-text notes go right away so I don’t have to think about where to put them – before sorting through that folder a few times a week.
I built Upshot for myself to make that process even faster. Because, this was 2013 – 2014, before there were iOS share / action extensions to make moving data between apps easy. Before there was Files.app and file provider apps.
The app was simple. Five giant buttons.
Tap one, capture what you need, and it’s immediately put in your preferred Dropbox folder. It could also (and optionally) automatically generate a Dropbox share link on your clipboard.
And because this was back in the day, it also had full support for x-callback-url integration. Which means it could tie into other wonderful apps like Drafts.
I loved my little app and hoped other people might, too. Sadly, I could never appease the App Review gods. And because this was back during the Dark Ages where every app submission took an entire week or more to review, after multiple rejections, Apple successfully defeated my desire to share the app with others, so I stopped trying and just used it myself until iOS share extensions and Shortcuts arrived.
But more on that later. First, here’s my incredibly simple replacement Shortcut that I’ve had on my home screen for a while now.
Tap the icon, snap a photo, and choose between
It’s super simple, fast, and lets me quickly send a photo wherever I need it without cluttering up my camera roll.
You can install the shortcut from this link. And here are the steps for posterity.
Back to Upshot’s App Store rejection. It was rejected for two reasons. The first one I fixed, the second one I gave up on.
I’ve been playing this game for a while, so in hindsight I should’ve know better, but Upshot was reject at first because I linked to an “external mechanism for purchases or subscriptions”.
Aha! Silly me, my mistake. I bet the app reviewer visited the FAQ part of the app which linked to the Help page on my website. And then my website, of course, links to, well, the rest of my website which allows people to purchase the Mac app I sell direct to customers because it isn’t allowed in the Mac App Store. That has to be it, right? I mean, it happened two years earlier.
Nope.
The whole purpose of Upshot is to store your photo notes in Dropbox, right? Well, my mistake was that I had “dropbox.com” or something listed in the App Store meta description. And since none of the text you put into the description is actually tappable, I can understand why Apple was worried someone might see a word ending in dot com and think to type that string into their web browser and Apple might be denied a finder’s fee for that customer giving money to another entity they have nothing to do with.
Fair enough. I removed it.
But, the rejection I couldn’t get past because I literally did not have the technical knowledge or google-fu to solve myself, was the audio note recording feature of Upshot.
When you tapped the “Audio” button in Upshot to record your voice, the app made a “beep” to signify that recording had begun.
Except…
…when the phone was in silent mode or the volume turned all the way down.
In that instance, you couldn’t hear the recording beep. And App Review took exception to that.
(The second highlighted paragraph was in response to me pointing out that other apps, including the iOS voice recorder app, didn’t make a beep when the phone was silenced.)
Try as I might, I couldn’t make my app make a noise when the phone was silenced. Audio programming is something I know basically nothing about. And even dropping down into (for me) obscure APIs dealing with HAL Audio Units, I wasn’t smart enough to make it work.
So, I gave up.
On the plus side, by keeping my dumb little app out of the App Store and preventing someone from surreptitiously recording another person, App Review was able to keep the App Store a safe and trusted marketplace for customers who have no choice but to shop there.