I know I keep referring to this tweet of mine from last year… One day I will get around to either releasing or open sourcing the dozen or so bespoke, one-off Mac apps I’ve built just for myself. Today is not that day. The reason for that is because I really do have a backlog of random, one-off Mac apps…
Every task management app has a feature that will let you postpone, delay, or snooze a task. You can tell them to push a todo item out by a day or a week, etc. But I like to think Three Things is smarter than that. It’s designed to be flexible and forgiving – pragmatic and realistic. When you defer a task, it won’t accidentally reschedule it for a day that’s already overflowing with commitments. It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day.
It fits my brain. Maybe it’ll fit yours, too.
…Firing up Xcode’s wonderful view debugger, however, completely blew my mind and shattered any remaining self-confidence I had as an app developer. And then nearly an hour later I’m really questioning everything I thought I knew about ones and zeroes until a google search leads me to this page. And, sure enough, my bug is spelled out right there.
DefaultApp is an open source starting point a template. I maintained it in Objective-C for over a decade before finally porting it to Swift in 2018. Anytime I start a new app big or small, whether or not it’s something I plan on releasing publicly or if it’s just a small prototype or utility app I’m building for myself I start with this project.
With DefaultApp I can go from initial idea to writing actual code in thirty seconds.
That said, I would’t use this as the basis for a billion dollar corporation’s enterprise app. Or with a team of “100 engineers” “solving hard problems”. But if you’re a one-person development shop or a team of just two or three engineers building a typical macOS shoebox or document based app? Please take a look.
This is a quick followup to my post from this week about backing up my family’s photos and home videos with Google Photos and B2. A reader asked why I use B2 over Amazon’s cheaper S3 Glacier alternative. I started to reply directly, but then like everything I write, it kept growing. And then I thought my answer might be interesting to others as well. So, here you go…
Two of the topics I’ve written about the most on this blog are backing up your data and photography – not professional, artsy photography, but more in the sense of your family’s photo and home video library. I’m a huge nerd for these topics. Part of the reason for that is my own obsessive personality traits, but also because of my affinity for nostalgia and history. My life, to a certain degree, is documented through the literal data I’ve created over the years. And the lives of the people I love are likewise documented through the digital archives I keep. So when those two topics intersect, holy cow do I ever proudly fly my geek flag.
I’m a firm believer in the whole mind like water spiel that David Allen preaches through GTD. I jumped on the Gettings Things Done bandwagon around 2004 I think – the first of my two senior years in college. And here we are in 2020, which means I’ve been practicing this methodology (with varying levels of success) for over fifteen…
Remember standing in line at midnight to literally pay $129 for Jaguar? Or in 2007 for the iPhone launch? There could be no more literal embodiment of the Futurama SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY meme than the way I felt at those and many other Apple community events. It was a momentously joyful whirlwind of nerdery and consumerism run amok in truly the best way possible. The Apple of old used to earn our money by creating products we loved. Now it feels like they take our money by locking us into services we have no choice but to use.
I’m filled with rage and despair and also just sad thinking about what we in the tech industry unintentionally unleashed upon the world and then willfully made worse through greed and arrogance. This is my small contribution to make things better. It likely won’t matter. But it does give me some relief to have done something. Anything.
I live and die by my keyboard. And here are the shortcuts I couldn’t do without. (Maybe this post should have been titled “A Love Letter to KeybaordMaestro”.)