My One Feature Request For iOS 13

With WWDC fast approaching, it’s the time of year when everyone posts their hopes and dreams and predictions for Apple’s upcoming software release. There’s tons of great ideas out there, and I certainly have my own feature requests both as a developer and as a consumer, but I just want to write today about one … Read more

Creating a Permanent SSH Tunnel Back to Your Mac at Home

Today’s post is a bit more technical than what I’ve been writing about lately, but it’s also partly for my own reference to save me some googling when I forget everything again in the future. I was always a big fan of Apple’s Back to My Mac service. I found it incredibly useful to be … Read more

Apple Asked For Feedback

Apple asked for feedback from developers today in an email survey. I try to keep this blog positive and restrict most of my snark to Twitter, but I figured I might as well post it here, too. If you can’t see that image for some reason, here’s what I wrote: I’m a long-time, independent Mac … Read more

Missing Rdio and Making the Best of Apple Music with Shortcuts

Man, I miss Rdio. I mean, I really miss it. I loved that service. When I was a teenager, I’d spend hours on the weekend and get lost in new and used music stores (CD’s) just digging through stacks of beautiful album artwork and unfamiliar band names. I’d talk with other customers and ask the … Read more

Starting and Finishing More Long-Form Writing in Drafts.app

I’m writing this blog post in Drafts.app on my Mac. But before I publish it, I’ll also probably do some light editing of it on my iPad before bed. And I’ve been capturing ideas, short thoughts, and building a basic outline on my phone over the past few days as things occur to me or … Read more

Losing Faith

I posted this to Twitter earlier today, but thought I’d add it here for posterity… Last week I mentioned that I had been yelling about Apple a lot on here lately and was going to try and be more positive. But allow me one more thought before I shut up… We went on vacation this … Read more

Why Many of my Apps Failed And What Comes Next

I’ve started building something new. I’m about four weeks in and already finding it incredibly useful in my day-to-day. I’ve built many different apps over the years, thrown them against the wall, and excitedly watched which ones developed a following and which ones failed miserably. Most of my apps have fallen into two categories. There … Read more

iTunes Match Failed Me

Remember iTunes Match? It’s great. But Apple stopped promoting it (probably rightly so) a couple years ago when they realized they could make more money charging $10/month for Apple Music than Match’s $25/year. Anyway, I loved it and still do. It uploads all of your digital music to Apple’s cloud and makes it streamable on … Read more

Moving back to Google – just a little bit

I’ve been hosting my company‘s email with FastMail since 2008. They’re amazing. But my personal email had been with Gmail since the service was in beta in 2004. (And everything before Gmail lost to time and bit rot. Sigh.) Around five years ago, I started getting nervous with so much of my online identity tied … Read more

Finder Folder Actions not being triggered when files are added with rsync

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I was automatically capturing the photos and videos my kids’ daycare emails to me and importing them into Photos.app. The major pieces of that script worked fine – parsing the emails, downloading the images, and then rsync’ing them down to my Mac every hour. But what was … Read more