Tyler

A few weeks ago I built a niche little app idea dubbed MeetingBuddy. You choose a target app from a pre-defined list (or pick any app on your Mac) and a time interval and MeetingBuddy starts screenshotting that app’s windows.

Each recording session goes into its own folder where all of the screenshots are organized by date. But! while this is all going on, MeetingBuddy is also OCR-ing any text found in the screenshots and storing that alongside each image in a sidecar file.

You end up with a folder of recordings for each session. Images and their corresponding text contents.

Why is this useful? Honestly, I’m not exactly sure that it is just yet. But here’s what I’ve been using it for.

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

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?