I absolutely love Fantastical 3 and happily pay the subscription fee. One unfortunate part of its update though was a change to its URL schemes which broke the actions for it I was using in Drafts. So today, I happily crossed off my to-do list updating the actions. The original actions were made by Greg (AgileTortoise) the maker of Drafts:
Really simple Drafts actions, but no one else had yet updated them on the Action Directory.
My district has just gone to distance learning, and I figured it was time to share some of my thoughts (that I’d originally begun formulating in the spring) about what I”m using to make the process as smooth as it can reasonably be.
In rehearsals, I find Loopback to be really valuable. I can pipe in audio from Logic or AnyTune for students to hear. I’ve got a MIDI controller that I’ll use with Logic to give them individual notes, and with AnyTune I can easily adjust the tempo of the piece(s) we’re working on.
There’s obviously no great solutions for running rehearsals in terms of being able to hear the kids’ actual progress.
For lessons, I’m having students sign up through Calendly. Calendly lets students grab a 20-minute block within the times I’ve set, but automatically filters out any times that I already have calendar events (as meetings throughout the day pop up). Once they sign up, it automatically adds to my calendar and I get an email notification, and the students get the same.
I then open the event on Fantastical and use Fantastical’s native handling of Google Meet or Zoom (depending on what students selected on their Calendly form). I have a TextExpander snippet that I send with the Zoom/Meet link along with a link to some quick video directions for configuring Zoom audio to better facilitate a music lesson. I have another TextExpander snippet after a lesson that sets a template for their next assignment, and in the Spring it instructed them how to sign up for another lesson.
(I actually use Airmail’s Markdown mode so that I can totally avoid Rich Text snippets.)
If I were paying for Calendly, I could skip this step because it’d integrate with Zoom and add the meeting automatically, but I pay for Fantastical anyway, and I’ll take any excuse I can get to make some new TextExpander snippets.
When I was teaching general music last spring, I prepared an asynchronous video lesson each week. It was definitely overkill, but I used Final Cut Pro X to prepare the videos. I was able to use transparent .png files to overlay music notes over myself and transition them in on top of a video of me speaking. Using QuickTime’s ability to capture an iOS device’s screen, I did a video demonstration of what I wanted students to do in GarageBand. I also captured a bit of Dorico running on my screen to highlight some rhythms. To pipe the audio back in to the screen capture, I was using Loopback again. I also tried a bit of Screenflow towards the end as well over QuickTime; there were compromises (using the free version) and it didn’t make showing my button presses as easy as I”d hoped, but it was okay.
I’ve tried Reincubate Camo, but I don’t really need a better camera. What I’d love is the ability to add an image overlaying my video when I’m on Zoom, and I’ve started to explore some of those rabbit holes. It might be more trouble than it’s worth, though.
I’ve made great use out of a QuickLook from Fletcher Penny to preview Markdown files (which I use a lot of). Without this, you’re previewing the raw Markdown which is still readable, but usually I find this lending clarity to whatever I’m trying to preview over the plain text.
Unfortunately, with macOS Catalina 10.15.4, I’ve been unable to use it. The day I updated, it started rejecting the quicklook generator because it couldn’t verify the developer. It took a bit of digging, but I found a solution on the GitHub page for an unrelated project (that is also a QuickLook generator). There might be a ‘better’ way of doing this by the book (building it yourself in Xcode, etc.) that is a bit beyond me, but this worked for me.
From this link
Permissions (Quarantine)
If you run into issues with macOS not letting you run the plugin because it’s not signed by a verified developer you can follow these steps:
- Install the plugin using one of the methods above
- run
xattr -cr ~/Library/QuickLook/MultiMarkdownQuickLook.qlgenerator(sudo if needed)- run
qlmanage -r- run
qlmanage -r cache- Restart Finder by…
- Restarting your computer
- or holding down the option key and right click on Finder’s dock icon, then select “Relaunch” from the menu
(I just tweaked the path in those directions so it actually points at MultiMarkdownQuicklook.qlgenerator instead. It might also be titled MultiMarkdown QuickLook.qlgenerator or be in /Library/QuickLook/ instead of ~/Library/QuickLook if you grabbed a similar utility from someone other than Fletcher Penny.
I’ve gotten a lot out of listening to the Class Nerd Podcast and lots of the things that Robby Burns puts out. I was insanely jealous in the Class Nerd episode where Robby described his use of FileMaker in his band program. Unfortunately, I don’t have the chops with a program as complicated as FileMaker to make the best use out of it, nor do I have the resources for a deployment of it in my band program to the extent it would be as useful as I desire for something similar to Robby’s use of it. I tried other solutions, like Airtable, but they didn’t feel like the right fit.
At NEIBA this year, I caught Dave Anderson’s awesome talk that he gave at IBA last year (and described to me in person earlier in the year) about using Google Forms with an add-in essentially as a database for producing email reports to parents on lessons that I’m going to be looking at implementing eventually.
But a bug caught me the other day, and on a whim, I got sucked in to setting up a Ninox database for my band program. I have some insights to share from what little I’ve been able to do with it so far, and why it’s already paid dividends for me in tracking information.
The first question is ‘Why Ninox?’ I’m looking for something about in that budget range, but I don’t want to be paying for a regular cloud service fee. When I caught this bug awhile ago, I tried a few products without success before throwing in the towel. I picked up Tap Forms at that time, but didn’t invest the same amount of upfront work as I just have with Ninox to put it though its paces. Before I’m too far along in Ninox, I might wind up giving Tap Forms a more fair shake, just to see if it does some things better. Obviously, there’s also the band-focused software out there like Charms or Cut Time, but I want to try rolling my own system first.
The main goals I had with a database program were tracking program-level information. I wanted to be able to have a central hub of student information that I could easily extend to cover new vectors (in database parlance, tables). The two primary things I wanted to extend tracking for was instrument rentals and tracking information related to solos.
At my school, I have happily maintained my predecessor’s tradition of requiring all students to prepare and perform a solo at a local solo & ensemble event. After year one, I saw how much some of our students grew (particularly our first-years) through the event. It was also a lot of valuable feedback for me as someone new to the profession.
The only downside is the work of selecting a solo for every student in my program, managing our library, keeping track of payments, and coordinating accompanists without much time in my schedule to do it.
Enter Ninox
After getting a table set up in Ninox with core student information (emails, lesson time, what bands they participate in), adding another table for their solos was a cinch. It’s made it easy to track the information I need to submit for the contest coordinators, and it’s already saved me a lot of time.
Before, I threw together a spreadsheet from information I copied over, and then got to work filling it out, and trying to keep some things up to date. It’d be organized in a different way than my other spreadsheets of student information, and there’d inevitably be friction throughout the whole process.
Being able to link information together in Ninox has saved me a bunch of sanity already when I’m running on less sleep than is ideal. It still has a few friction points in terms of shortcuts and some minor bugs, but I’m getting the hang of its core functionality quite well. It’s also easy to keep the information up to date on my phone (essential when I’m in the workroom on a different floor, and much more reliable than having my fingers crossed that the right spreadsheets have synced in the right folder).
It’s because of these small friction points that I’m hoping Tap Forms might have a bit more for me than I’ve currently seen, but if not, I can live with Ninox.
If you’re looking to give a database program a serious whirl, I highly recommend starting by importing all of your student records from your grading system (Schoology, Canvas, PowerSchool, etc.) Adding students piecemeal is not an effective way to see if a database program is a good fit for you. You’ll also just wind up importing some of those things (like parent contact info) later anyway.
I’m hoping to scale it for some lesson-related tracking as well, but I’m not sure if it will handle the exact needs I have without throwing extra money at it. I’m also not sure how well it could integrate in my current physical set-up for lessons and the needs of my program, but I’ll continue to update regarding this journey.
I pivoted over to Dorico last year, and have had great results. I still get a bit of use out of Sibelius[1] for specific needs, but Dorico has become my primary driver. Someone on the Facebook groups for Dorico has worked out some of the kinks to the only limitations I’m feeling with Dorico, and I’m looking forward to exploring his ideas.
What’s very exciting, though, is that Steinberg has just released a free edition of Dorico, titled “SE.” I’m very excited for my students to be able to tap into the raw power of Dorico, compared to anything else available. It’s not just that it’s great software for someone doing serious work, but its treatment of music stands to be so much less in the way of a student than anything else on the market. I remember as a student fighting with Finale NotePad, and struggling to get results that looked passably professional. Nowadays, the engraving you can find on Musescore’s web portal is straight-up gruesome. Dorico acts as a mediator for the intent, though, in a way that I feel much better setting my students up with.[2]
While the limitations are definitely significant, Dorico SE, I think, is the ideal tool to have most of my students inputting actual music they want to have printable as something to play. Whether that’s things they’re trying to share that they’ve learned by ear or something they’ve found online[3]. I’m looking ahead towards being able to produce some aids for them to learn the basics. Dorico’s guided tour feature isn’t a bad start, but the learning curve to music notation software – even when I’d argue Dorico is relatively intuitive – is still steep.
UPDATE: Dorico’s Daniel Spreadbury reached out on my mention of Dorico’s limitations with MusicXML. I was mis-remembering some things, and for that I definitely apologize. Dorico does a pretty good job of importing MusicXML, though I would still actually recommend using MIDI export from MuseScore’s site. That’s not because Dorico can’t handle the import of the MusicXML well; it’s because by importing it as MIDI, Dorico will use its smarts of taking the intended lengths of the rhythms and the notes as pitches and make smarter choices for how to notate the rhythms and the enharmonic spellings than you’ll often find on the MuseScore portal.
I picked up an AWS Lightsail instance to play with while trying to learn a few things for personal hobbies. I’ve really taken to using Sublime Text, and one of my favorite features may be rsub. rsub piggy-backs off of a technology developed for TextMate called rmate. While BBEdit is able to open an entire FTP directory, and of course FTP clients are able to open whatever editor you please, there are times it’s nice to be able to launch into editing directly from a shell.
I got the basic setup from Keyrus for installing rmate on my Lightsail server. Briefly, it’s:
sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/rsub https://raw.github.com/aurora/rmate/master/rmate
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/rsub
rsub is installed locally through Package Control for Sublime Text.
Unfortunately, I’ve had some issues with my SSH config file, so I was unable to get rsub to tunnel back. If you follow the instructions on the linked post, you wouldn’t have to deal with this. I, however, needed to establish this in my ssh startup command (loaded into the iTerm profile for my Lightsail instance).
I got the answer on fixing the tunnel from Stack Overflow, using the bind address option. On top of that, I declare the identity file of my private key in the SSH command[1] when I’m loading the server, and I wasn’t sure immediately what order to handle those in.
The final command was:
ssh -R 52698:localhost:52698 -i FILEPATHTOPRIVATEKEY username@instance.url
Loaded in that manner, I can just load text files using rsub with ease.
I wanted to share this just to lay out the solution for anyone dealing with the same thing, and because I haven’t had an excuse to post in awhile. None of this would be hard to figure out for anyone doing this on a serious basis, but that doesn’t describe me at all.
I’ve recently written to end out 2018 about apps that finally stuck this year and the most important book.
The two changes in my workflows this year that made me happiest were my Fall hardware upgrades and OmniFocus 3.
When I got into OmniFocus 2 last year it changed the game for me. To put some numbers behind that, I’ve kept track of 3,211 actions since getting OmniFocus, and completed 523 since the beginning of November alone (when my actions last archived). I keep everything that I’m trying to keep track of in OmniFocus, from new habits and routines, to whatever level of detail I need to break up a bigger project into. I use it to keep emails of things I need to do out of the way (with Airmail links), grading, and just having a list of the things that need to happen before I go home.
OmniFocus 3 came out first on iOS and then on the Mac. The best feature for me on iOS was initially being able to attach notifications that were unbound from due and defer dates. Unfortunately, this still hasn’t made its way to the Mac version, so its usefulness has started to dissipate. But the new tags feature and the accompanying custom perspectives have been awesome.
The custom perspectives feature as it exists today is exactly what I hoped it was back in OmniFocus 2. Now it supports a huge list of arguments, and nested AND/OR functionality that gets me the exact task list I need. With good tagging, this is even more useful (for example, a filter of items that contain the tags that mean something takes place at school, organized by date).
OmniFocus on iOS has become way more useful to me though, with my far more useful XS Max. I felt guilty spending this much money on a phone, but I’ve been holding out for it since its first leak in December 2017. The additional screen size makes it vastly more useful for keeping track of all the information I’m handling on my phone, especially in OmniFocus. Because I was coming from an iPhone 6 Plus, I had a ton of other upgrades along with that screen size including (by my likely faulty math) 240% better processor performance, 3D Touch, Face ID, and an OLED screen, among other things. (As an aside, 1Password’s new AutoFill features that iOS 12 enabled with Face ID takes all the friction of using a password manager away, and actually makes it faster than my bad password practices ever were).
I also picked up an Apple Watch this fall. They were a hard enough tech item to grasp from others’ accounts and using demo models that I really didn’t have a great idea of what to expect. I’m surprised by how easy it is to get drawn into the fitness features, and in love with keeping media controls on my wrist. It’s also changed the way I handle a number of apps (and finally gotten me into using Due to pester me to make sure I get something run down the hall for another teacher between classes or remember a special announcement at the start of class.)
Ultimately, technology is something that I do get enjoyment out of. It’s part of why I decided to blog, and it dominates my podcast feeds. I remember being a kid and playing with the calendar on Outlook wishing I had a job so I could have coworkers to schedule meetings with and use the availability features. As an adult, technology does find its way to make work easier, and some challenges become a bit brighter because of the tools I get to use to solve them.
2018 has been a bumpy road, and there are a few things I want to write as a recap on the year. After talking about reading the Bible in a year, I wanted to focus on three apps that I’d tried previously or owned but wasn’t making very good use of.
I’d picked up Day One for the Mac back at the end of 2016, but I didn’t really get into it (or ever pick it up for iOS). When they went to a subscription model I originally wrote it off entirely. It was a post over on The Sweet Setup that showed me the role Day One could play in my digital life. To summarize his article, momentos, cards, and letters are easily preserved in Day One as memories, in addition to traditional journaling. I’ve also enjoyed using it to keep track of my life through my first year teaching and things happening on the personal side.
It’s still a bit hard to justify the subscription price, but I look forward to one day being able to print these journals, likely for my kids.
I’d heard the Mac Power Users go on about Drafts quite a bit, and tried it myself without it really sticking. It was generally just a substitute for my OmniFocus inbox that wouldn’t get processed. With the release of Drafts 5, things started clicking much better. It wasn’t any specific feature contained within Drafts 5 (though I’m getting great use of Workspaces for literal drafts of things I write), but it inspired me to make other tweaks in my workflow (including adding Bear). Until I upgraded some of my hardware, it also served as a better dumping ground for OmniFocus tasks where I otherwise might let things slip, as well as recording things that would eventually go to Day One or other destinations. It does take a bit of added time to process down my inbox in Drafts, but it allows me to make sure everything really does get captured.
My hardware upgrades in 2018 allowed for Drafts to become even more supercharged though. As a method of capture, speaking into it on my Apple Watch is generally the fastest and most accessible thing I have access to. And I don’t have to be concerned about finding its fit in OmniFocus right away (lots of things wind up getting added to an existing Bear note or just getting put straight into its destination, like an email, from Drafts). Drafts also launched its beta Mac version this year. This makes it that much more versatile of a writing environment. Actions aren’t a part of the Mac app yet, so processing Drafts on the Mac is a bit clumsier than it is on iOS, but it’s freeing having all of my text accessible on the Mac.
Drafts works for me much better than the sticky note systems I see my fellow teachers using. As I process things down, I feel like I’m truly clearing clutter from my life. And as I continue to stress my OmniFocus system, it’s a major bonus being able to separate capture from my OmniFocus inbox many days. Now that it is free to use the basic version, it’s worth a try for anyone who makes major use of iOS.
I’ve always been a fast typist, and the idea of paying for a service to save me time typing was really never attractive. I had a free year of TextExpander from a bundle I’d previously purchased, and I redeemed it this year to see if there was anything to it. For awhile, even with its snippet suggestions, I wasn’t getting very much value, but with the start of the school year I’ve finally found its niche. TextExpander is valuable for me not because of reducing characters typed, but in reducing the amount I’m thinking when writing.
First it was with snippets that format date for files (yyyy-mm-dd) and for the way I want it to appear on printed documents (mm/dd/yyyy). This saved me moving up to the number rows and the little bit of mental energy it took to think through my desired date format and the actual day in my menubar. But I was able to quickly branch out with fill-ins for sending cookie cutter emails (like emails regarding a new lesson book or a blurb at the end of an email explaining to the student that I’ve cc’d their parents). It’s not just having my words thought through ahead of time, but when I’m filling forms, the way multiple parts of a snippet can draw from a single field (e.g. if I properly set up a snippet, I can have a student’s name filled in everywhere I need it after I’ve typed it once). I sometimes feel a bit self-conscious about using these snippets when emailing parents, but I also know there’s no shame in trying to cut down on the number of hours I’m working right now. I spend a lot of time torturing myself over phrasing in emails home, and being able to reuse my own words where I can may allow me to have time in my life outside of work.
TextExpander and Drafts both allow for JavaScript to make actions more powerful, and if my life gets any less crazy in 2019, I’ll hopefully find the time to learn the skills necessary to make use of these features. On top of this, OmniJS is coming to OmniFocus (hopefully) in 2019, and there are a lot of things in OmniFocus I’d like to accomplish that I think this will enable. I’m not sure what the best way to learn JavaScript is solely for automation, but I picked up a great deal on m1m0, though practicing some of these early skills has been hard.
I had hoped to post more on this blog in 2018. After subbing, I had particularly wanted to share a lot of my frustrations for my fellow teachers with some constructive ideas for improving what subs are set up with, but as life stayed hectic, I no longer feel that it’s quite as valuable now that I’m in the trenches.
The start of my first year teaching has been an absolute adventure. I truly enjoy where I’m at, working with a staff that is flexible and always ready to help, and an administrative team that’s very supportive. My students are enjoyable to work with (and some read my blog!), and I look forward to growing through some of the challenges. Out of concerns for privacy, I probably won’t get too much more into detail about my school.
I wanted to write a few retrospectives on 2018, and the first of those I wanted to be on reading the Bible in a year.
One of my major resolutions for 2018 for a number of reasons was improving the balance of faith and the rest of my life. While I don’t want to sound as if I think I’m ‘done working on my faith,’ as it’s a lifelong journey, I do think I have gotten back to the place I need to be right now in life.
A lot of individuals in my church, and things beyond my control are responsible for this progress, but doing a Bible-in-a-year reading plan has allowed me to reaffirm everything I believe and receive the Holy Spirit, as well as growing in understanding of God. I’m inspired to write about it in no small part because of a post Craig McClellan wrote about his own faith on The Class Nerd (both the blog and podcast I recommend).
I highly recommend such a plan as a truly reasonable way to accomplish the task of reading the entire Bible. I felt that it was by and large clear enough to get through without any additional resources, though I appreciated some additional context reading many of the Epistles and books of the prophets. I was afraid that some books I would get bogged down in, but with a couple exceptions, I got the clarity out of this that I wanted.
Before I get in to some of the technical considerations of the plan I used, it’s worth talking about why this was so worth doing. There were all sorts of pieces of Scripture I couldn’t link together before reading it as a whole work. There are all sorts of messages that I can now pull, and so much context behind verses used as justification for things that I previously could not. I feel that the ability to piece together one’s whole faith is best done by reading the Bible in its entirety. While it was easy enough to get caught back up after a busy week got me behind, I can’t imagine trying to take on something of this size without a good plan for breaking it down.
The plan I used was “Eat This Bread” on YouVersion Bible. I wanted a plan that took the Bible from cover to cover, and this was the closest I was able to find. It mostly accomplishes this (while oddly putting Chronicles at the end of the Old Testament, and less oddly swapping John and Luke in the gospels.) It also breaks Psalms up into one per day on top of the rest of the reading rather than having you take the whole book through. While I like the idea of interspersing Psalms, it just paired the whole book down the line rather than picking readings that connected (e.g. day one was Psalm 1, day two was Psalm 2, starting over at Psalm 1 on day 151). The end result was that after I finished Psalms, I skipped the remaining Psalm per day. Doing the Bible in a year again, I’d love a plan that broke up Proverbs and perhaps other books in a similar way (though I preferred reading Ecclesiastes and most other Books of Wisdom straight through).
I liked the reminders and syncing between devices that YouVersion provided, and there were some times I liked the ability to have a few chapters read aloud. I wished I had a better app for reading the Bible though in a lot of ways though. YouVersion lacks the footnotes I’m used to (at least for the ESV), though I’m not sure what the best Bible app I could get for the ESV might be. I’ve seen several recommendations, but most of them are a bit of an investment, and I’m not sure which one fits all of my needs the best. Though YouVersion provided a lot of great features specific to this goal, I hope I’m using something else the next time I try to take the whole Bible in a year.
Just like reading an eBook, I found myself making highlights here and there, but my most meaningful notes found their way into Bear to be more easily referenced and combined with other notes.
I’m planning on covering a bit more for the end of 2018, and hoping that I can get to some of the other topics I’ve previously mentioned on here. Christmas break is a good time to just sit down and write, and when my renewal receipts came up for my site, I felt a bit bad that I wasn’t posting more.
I’m well into the start of my first year teaching now, and things are crazy. I wanted to first share a tip I’m using to manage some of the work I’m doing on my own computer for work (I have a PC assigned to me by my school, but I’m working a lot outside of the school day).
I have my primary personal Google account set to my “default” Google account in my browser. The primary benefit of this is that if I click a link to a Google Doc anywhere on the web, it goes into that account (which is the behavior I want). The downside is that when I’m opening up a new tab or window for Google Drive in the middle of work-related things, I’d have to click the account switcher, select my work account, and then wait a second for Drive to reload while closing the first tab. It’s a small inconvenience, but it adds up doing it a lot.
Instead, I’ve bookmarked the Drive URL that I have after switching to my work account. It should be something like drive.google.com/drive/u/(number for that account)/my-drive. Your default account is 0, then each one down the list is another number.
To speed up getting there, I usually launch the bookmark from Alfred, as I don’t keep the bookmark tab open for Safari. It’s a pretty simple solution to a pretty simple problem, and I could always use a different web browser for work matters (but I don’t want to).
OmniFocus 3 has changed the game for me. I was part of the TestFlight for OF3 for iOS, and I’m now in the beta for OF3 for Mac. Tags and better perspectives are helping me manage a ton of work. I’m a bit disappointed that OF3.0 for Mac lacks support for the advanced notifications that OF3 for iOS has, because I’m still taking out my phone to set a reminder notification for tasks. It’ll come in a point update that I”m already excited for.
I’m constantly restructuring my projects and tags to make them work better for me, but it’s not a time sink, it’s just a chance to organize better. I have so much on my plate at work that I think I’d have a nervous breakdown without OmniFocus to keep track of it all.
I’ve finally got Drafts integrated into my workflow. Drafts 5 added some really nice features, and it’s a great fit. Part of the reason it was so essential is because of some degradation of my iPhone 6’s speed (which will cease to be a problem within the month), but it continues to be the first thing I open when someone tells me something in the hallway that I can’t forget. Most of it goes into OmniFocus still. Because of how little email I compose on iOS, I’m still not getting the most out of it, but between updates to my phone or Drafts coming for Mac, it will only be more useful soon.
I’m planning to write soon about how my adoption of Bear has let me keep track of the documents and emails for rehearsals and individual class periods, why Dorico has won me over, and how I’m getting great use of Pages for making materials.
Ehler 