mostly nonsense
The point of today’s post is that while I’ve been using Three Things myself for a year now, a very nice person was kind enough to email me last week and let me know that the version posted online had expired. My bad.
Here’s an updated build.
Also, this new version comes with an experimental new feature: iCalendar syncing!
My five year old, driving home from daycare today, unprompted: I know what lockdown is. Like when we had to stay home for a long time last year? It’s when we turn the lights off and lock the door and hide in the fire room because a bad guy is coming. Pause. But, daddy. Why … Read more
We opened the door and stepped out of our time machine — my children another year older.
Some ideas are just too silly to not try and follow through with.
Moments after publishing my previous post, I was doing a final editing pass and found Riccardo Mori published his own, excellent take on the App Store and developers. It’s spot on. Go read the whole thing.
Since Apple will stand on a virtual stage tomorrow and tell us how much they love, value, and appreciate third-party developers, I want to be crystal clear about the value these apps (and many others) provide.
I could switch to Windows and Android. I wouldn’t like it, but I could make the switch. Except for all those third-party apps. I couldn’t give those up without significant effort – if it would even be possible to find replacements for each.
Third-party apps are what keep me locked into Apple’s lucrative don’t-call-it-a-walled-garden.
In any healthy software ecosystem, third-party developers and the platform vendor are a symbiotic relationship. To pretend otherwise is fanciful gaslighting.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to interrupt my not-so-regularly-scheduled posts about silly macOS workflows and tech complaining for a not-so-humble-brag.
TextBuddy received a lovely review in the June issue of Mac|Life – including an Editor’s Choice seal of approval.
“The bottom line. A marvel. If you work with text, you need this app.”
As a nerdy kid who grew up in the 90s browsing the magazine section of Waldenbooks for the latest issues of Macworld, boot, and Next Generation, seeing one of my apps in a print magazine is a huge thrill.
The pandemic changed how I took meeting notes at work. With video calls being the new norm, I found myself grabbing screenshots of the meeting window to capture shared slides, documents we were collaborating on, and the latest screens the design team was showing off.
So now, in addition to my detailed text notes, I found myself compiling a visual archive of my team’s communication as designs changed and evolved – as Gantt charts shifted over time.
But where the hell do I store all this stuff? And how do I keep it correlated to the notes I was taking?
Stick with me, folks. This is going to get super nerdy and may take a while to explain. It’s also going to cover some of my favorite topics: a custom-built Mac app, a small server-side script, Keyboard Maestro, the command line, and URL schemes.
Let’s talk about the stuff you need to do and the files, supporting documents, and reference material you need to accomplish those tasks.
Maybe I’m just an ornery old man yelling at the new kids running through my lawn. Maybe I should be content to retrain myself to hit ⌘H instead of ⌘W when I no longer want to see a non-document-based app but want to keep it running.
Maybe Apple has done the research and realized that a decade-plus of relearning computers with iOS had taught the over-60 crowd that fullscreen apps are the be-all-end-all. And Gen-Z, who grew up with touch screens, intuits that as well. Maybe there are diminishing numbers of us in the middle reluctantly dragging overlapping windows around like cave people?
Regardless, there is one specific UX sin that interrupts my workflow and annoys me more than anything else on macOS. I want to call out a few of those offending apps now before offering my dumb solution.