Favorites

These are some of my favorite posts I’ve written over the years. If you’re curious about the topics I cover, these are good examples.

Capture Thing

I’ve been big into journaling for close to a decade now – at least in my personal life. But I’ve never been able to build up the same habit in my work / professional life – even though I know I would reap benefits there, too.

I’ve tried all sorts of workflows to make journaling my workday a regular and frictionless routine — everything from a Day One hotkey to some convoluted Keyboard Meastro macros and Drafts.app actions.

None of them stuck.

But what finally did work for me (at least for the last six months or so) is a tiny little Mac app called Capture Thing.

Augmented Reality Ducks

I do know that fourteen years into iOS, people still ducking hate autocorrect. Especially when you find your ducking text messages littered with ducks. There’s just no ducking way around it. Short of adding a fake contact to your address book named Dr. Duck Ducking McDucker, autocorrect seems ducking incapable of learning everyone’s favorite bit of profanity.

That got me thinking earlier today. What’s going to happen when Apple finally leads us into that next frontier of human / computer interaction? What happens when our day-to-day reality becomes augmented with live information and our physical and digital worlds merge even closer together?

What happens if Apple takes autocorrect’s prudish vocabulary into AR? If they dared to try and censor the real world, how would that look?

A Computer Company

Things I want a computer company to be Hardware manufacturer Operating system vendor Model for how to build the best software for their platform Good corporate citizen Inspiration Things I don’t want a computer company to be Music store Music streaming service Television studio Movie studio News aggregator Fitness studio Advertisement company Bank Credit card company Bookstore Subscription podcast service Messaging platform Video game distributor Cloud storage service Online meetings host Email service Health platform Internet proxy Software gatekeeper Arbiter of other company’s business models The entire amount of commerce Monopoly The Police Things I’m purposefully not putting on a …

Read more

The Title

This is something I’ve long intuited based on my own web browsing habits but never really put into words. When I stop and think about it, modern web browsers drive me crazy by limiting tabs to a maximum width because that width is almost never enough to show the full page title.

Well, except one web browser: Safari.

If Safari on macOS Monterey is heading in a similar direction where web page titles are going to be even more truncated, that’s going to make me sad. I guess we should do something about it.

Time Machine

We opened the door and stepped out of our time machine — my children another year older.

Receipts

Ten months ago I drafted a post about how incredible the Apple ecosystem is when all the pieces fit together. It was a month into the pandemic and I found myself walking through a real-life Apple commercial in the grocery store.

I was a bit stunned when I got back to my car and it sorta hit me just how well the entire end-to-end experience worked. As a lifelong adherent of the positive influence and power that well made software and hardware can have over our lives, I was taken aback.

And so while I was planning on finishing my thank-you post to Apple this weekend, that’s not going to happen.

Instead, let’s talk about receipts.

Ow, My Back

We officially went into quarantine on March 22. One hot afternoon in June, I found myself in the garage with a pair of shears, a screwdriver, and a hammer so I could cut an inch of leather off my belt and punch a new hole.

All in all, I had lost twenty pounds by doing nothing.

But did I feel better? Not at all. By May, I was hurting. The next month I was in pain. That summer was nothing but agony from muscle and skeletal pain.

This post is all the fun, nerdy details that went into making my home and work offices more comfortable. It was a bit of self-preservation mixed with stress-shopping. But if you want the TL;DR, I can sum it up with two words:

Stop. Sitting.

240 Invisible Pixels

I’m generally happy with Big Sur, but the focus on design over usability in many places is baffling to me. One of the worst offenders are the redesigned banner notifications.

Here’s my solution for dismissing them.

Digital Heirlooms

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you’ll find that I take preserving our (my family’s) digital memories and history seriously.

However, if I were to die tomorrow, the app I made for my son and installed on his iPad this morning will stop working in one-hundred and ninety-two days. Not for any technical reason. Not because of future software incompatibilities. If his iPad remained in working order for another hundred years, it wouldn’t even matter. This digital heirloom will self-destruct as soon as my developer certificate expires.

And it’s all due to an arbitrary decision on Apple’s part.

I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that future historians and even archaeologists are going to revisit our time and be furious at the direction our industry turned towards using consolidation, monopoly power, and artificial restrictions to protect profits at all costs.

Surtainly Not

Eighteen hours later, I’m here to write about the dumb, little toy of an app I made this morning just for Big Sur. I honestly don’t expect other people to use it. I’m not even sure if I’ll keep using it. It was more of a “I hate this. I wonder if I can fix it?” type of thing.