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.
read the full post →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.
read the full post →Let’s be honest. I’m an idiot. If it weren’t for technology holding my hand and functioning as a second brain, I wouldn’t be able to make it through this modern world. That’s why I trust software to remember all the things I would otherwise forget. And with the number of meetings I’m in now, it really helps if my calendar is front and center. So, another week, another app. This time it’s a small little open-source calendar for your macOS Desktop I call Calendar Hero. I made it last week after I was late to a meeting because, well, I was vacuuming and not thinking about the day ahead. I used another Mac app to do this, but it stopped working for me sometime during Catalina in 2019. I missed what it did, so I reimplemented a simple version of it last week. This is Calendar Hero.
read the full post →"You either die a programmer, or you live long enough to see yourself build a text editor." —Harvey Dent (or someone) Two weeks ago, I released TextBuddy – a new text editor for macOS. And now I'm finally getting around to sharing why I built it.
read the full post →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.
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