Ehler

2018 Recap: OmniFocus 3 and my Fall Hardware Bumps

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.

Ehler

2018-12-31

Technology

hardware, omnifocus
2018 Recap: Apps that I didn’t ‘get’ in 2017

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.

Day One

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.

Drafts

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.

TextExpander

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.

Ehler

2018-12-26

Technology

drafts, ios, mac
2018 Recap: Bible in a Year

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.

Ehler

2018-12-25

Uncategorized

faith, ios
Managing Multiple Drives and Managing My First Year

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).

App updates

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

2018-09-15

Music Education, Technology

alfred, drafts, omnifocus
I’m Not an Apple Fanboy
For the foreseeable future I plan to use some version of an iPhone for my cell phone, a Mac for my computer, and an iPad for my tablet. I plan to pick up an Apple Watch as my first and future smart watches, and I continue to sink more money into powerful apps that would not follow me if I ever did decide to switch out of the Apple ecosystem.

But while I love their products, and follow their news closely, I am loathe to call myself an “Apple Fanboy,” and I think approaching Apple—or any company—as a fan is not a positive thing.

I subscribe to r/Apple, and listen to the Mac Power Users podcast and am a member of their Facebook group. I see a lot of posts on there, and miss very little from the RSS feeds of MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and AppleInsider among other blogs that focus on topics related to— or exclusive to the Apple ecosystem. On some of these sites (such as the MPU group), I see healthy discussion that allows me to get more out of my devices, and sometimes discourse over broader tech ideas. However, I see a lot of very different coverage from some Apple news sites or communities I visit.

First, I want to acknowledge something about the sites whose content I’m discussing. Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world, and there’s a lot of discussion from an investment perspective that happens. And it’s not just these sites I’ve mentioned that do it; I see a great deal of web coverage out there on any tech companies that is also market discussion. It’s hard to separate, and there’s certainly an audience of people who aren’t geeks who have an interest in Apple (or any tech company for that matter) that is purely financial.

Regardless of the motive for the coverage, I see a lot of content that seeks to defend Apple regardless of its errors. Recently, this has been discussion about the Macbook/Macbook Pro keyboard issues, battery throttling, or the market performance of Apple’s product lines in 2018. There is great effort to take legitimate grievances about how Apple has handled problems they’ve caused themselves and dismiss them. Obviously, in the broader climate of news coverage, this happens in far more nefarious and impactful ways than discussing dust under some keys, but it’s nevertheless strange to see sites dedicated to covering Apple exclusively dismissing these problems in their editorials.

I’ve also seen responses to accusations about Apple stagnating, that focus entirely on the sales of Apple compared to its competitors and making the wrong conclusions. When people complain, for example, that iOS’s notification system is archaic and a problem, Android’s fragmentation isn’t the answer. Or when the Touch Bar on the 2016–17 Macbook Pros is highlighted as missing the mark, Microsoft’s bad Surface sales [1] fails to solve Apple’s own failure. There is a current reward to Apple playing it relatively safe in choosing new features, but Apple would probably be seeing the same revenue with an iOS release that added some keyboard buttons to the iPhone that are arbitrarily locked to the iPad.

There are certainly cases to be made in defense of Apple in these instances, but the nature of most of the arguments I’m seeing is somewhat disingenuous. With the battery throttling, for example, it was somewhat blown out of proportion in its severity[2], but the people writing Apple a free pass on their deceptive comments and lack of transparency aren’t giving us a more accountable tech sector.

And while Apple’s received a few knocks of bad press recently, I don’t want to cast this as a 2018 issue in coverage. The same approach to issues like labor with Foxconn and Steve Jobs’s professional behavior is a problem. While I don’t think that a tech blogger ultimately should be held to the whole book of journalistic ethics, things are still out of perspective. And community members and fans of Apple products shouldn’t get a free pass either. Too much criticism that could actually improve products and services is met by a cadre of internet knights who feel that one of the five richest companies on Earth need their defending.

I don’t want to leave this post as some sort of hit piece on Apple itself. There are ways Apple has impressed me as a company, particularly by encouraging iPhone users to sign up for Donate Life, and the stance they took over the San Bernardino[3]. And regardless of their failings as a company, the products have still very much earned my preference. At the end of the day, I’m much more critical of Apple’s treatment by its fans than the company itself.
1. I know this is the only story/narrative I’m sourcing in this article, but there are two reasons. The first is that I don’t want to individually call out any individuals who I’m criticizing in the Apple press for a number of a reasons. The second is that I know this is the single point in this post someone would be most inclined to leave an angry comment about. ↩
2. My iPhone 6 is feeling pretty slow these days, but I don’t think that older phones being less desirable is anything new. I don’t think any more iPhone users have gone out to get new phones due to throttling than Galaxy users have gone out to get new phones due to lack of updates or battery degradation that doesn’t see throttling. All the same, the problems with other phones don’t vindicate Apple’s missteps on their own. This sort of “look at this other company,” deflection is what I see 11 year-olds doing when they’re reprimanded for being on their phones. It’s not an acceptable standard for adults, much less multibillion dollar companies. ↩
3. While it’s easy today to see the positive PR that built, and be cynical about Apple’s privacy stance as nothing other than marketing, it was a ballsy move at the time. It’s easy to forget how much negative reaction there was to this in general. ↩
Ehler

2018-05-22

Technology

ios, mac
How I’m Consuming my Feeds

I’ve been very occupied lately with the job hunt, but thankfully have found work for the Fall. I’m excited to follow up with my previous post on using RSS feeds with my progress!

I’ve improved the actual experience of getting news through RSS by organizing my feeds into more specific folders. I found through some searching that this is what most people do with their RSS feeds, and it was certainly a pain point for me. I now have separate folders for national/world news, local news, sports news, music notation blogs, and tech sites. I have a few particularly low-volume/high-interest feeds outside of folders entirely. This makes my RSS a lot more digestible, but I find myself totally catching up with some folders (mainly the tech news) and barely touching others. One of the ones that I’m opening less is the national/world news, which was part of the whole goal of switching to RSS. It’s largely because the feeds in here are a mix of worthwhile content and insightful op-eds buried under content that exists purely to fill quotas.

Reeder as an app has grown on me. I’m still manually syncing by OPML (although a Workflow could probably help speed that along down the road). Discovering how to actually use the “Mercury Reader” feature on iOS was a major improvement. Most articles only preview ‘before the break’ as you go through them. Mercury Reader simply pulls everything after the break to read in the app instead of opening in your browser. It’s must faster than waiting for all the extra elements of most sites to load and closing the ad that blocks the whole screen on most news sites. I was using it heavily on my Mac (where it’s clearly labeled in a dropdown and a shortcut). I assumed it wasn’t on iOS until I discovered you can get it by using the zoom-in gesture or tapping the favicon on an article.

Despite RSS improving, I’ve actually found myself drawing more from Twitter and Reddit again, because I’m managed to improve those experiences. When Twitter announced they were dropping support for their Mac App, I wanted a better way to manage a group chat I was in on Twitter. I picked up Twitterrific for Mac on sale and really liked the experience. (Interestingly, the Twitter API doesn’t let 3rd party apps access group messages, so it didn’t solve that need). After a bit of time using Twitterrific, I decided to switch to Tweetbot which I’m still using on Mac and iOS.

I was always content to use the official Twitter app, but using a 3rd-party app in 2018 has really improved the experience. While there are a few features missing (polls, in-app Periscope access, etc.) it is a chronological feed. I didn’t realize how much I disliked Twitter’s algorithmic feed until I had a chronological feed again. No matter how many times I told it that I didn’t want to see “what I missed,” I still saw it. I was using Twitter less, not in protest of this feed, but because I found the content less compelling. Having my raw feed, I feel the same connection to Twitter I did when I first signed up.

I would wholeheartedly recommend picking up either Twitterrific or Tweetbot if it didn’t seem Twitter is putting another nail in the coffin for 3rd party apps with a change to the APIs. I hope this doesn’t come to pass, but I’m not optimistic. I’ve been told that by using Lists, one can get a chronological feed natively on Twitter, but that seems like a lot of extra steps to just check a social media site. I see my Twitter use basically dropping off again if the APIs break.

I mentioned also using Reddit a bit more than I did. This is largely due to picking up Apollo for my iPhone on a whim. I’ve always hated the Reddit mobile site, but always been fine with the desktop site on mobile. I didn’t think there was a need for Apollo to solve for me, but I’m actually a big fan of the app.

Until (unless?) Twitter kills their API, I see this set-up for my feeds working very well for me. When that time comes for Twitter, I don’t know how my consumption will change, but I’m sure I’ll post updates here. I’ve got a few posts cooking, including a “blog roll,” or rather, feeds I’m reading a lot of that I can recommend.

Ehler

2018-04-12

Personal, Technology

rss
Teaching Scales

I’ve put off posting for awhile because I’m running into some specific formatting issues with the top post in my drafts folder that I’m hoping a friend of mine can help me with. In the mean time, I thought I’d dig up some resources for other music educators I’ve been meaning to post. Today I’ve got some handouts for students on understanding major scales.

Beyond just knowing how to play any number of major scales on their instrument, it’s important that students understand the fundamentals of constructing them. Beyond the muscle memory (that is itself a valuable skill for performing most diatonic music), it forms the basis for understanding a great deal in theory, and specifically serves as the best foundation for learning other scales (minor scales, modal scales, etc.)

While I’m sure there are more ways to conceptualize scales effectively (especially outside of the concert band set-up), through my own teachers and teaching experience, I’ve encountered two dominant approaches that I’ve made handouts for:

The first is understanding them by the circle of fourths. This is my preferred method for teaching scales. The way I see it, it builds a more innate understanding of the relationships between keys, which encourages a faster mental turnaround. Of course, there’s a lot of bias in that viewpoint, because that’s the way I learned my scales. I was fortunate to my former high school band director—Steve Stickney’s presentation at the 2017 Iowa Music Educators’ Conference on warming up bands, where he discussed teaching scales this way. He had some useful warmups in his presentation notes that he has graciously permitted me to share. These are useful regardless of your teaching approach on scales.

The other way that I have been exposed to teaching scales is through a series of rules that focus on the relationship between the last accidental and the name of the key. While I think this requires more steps of processing longer in the learning process, it does better allow a teacher to guide a student to getting their answer and formatively assess where the comprehension may be breaking down in a lesson more easily.

I know both seem a little wordy, but during my student teaching, I was seeing light bulbs go off for seventh graders who were reading the latter handout after having had scales explained more than once in class. While I’m fine with my second handout as is, I’d like to update the first for students down the road. It would probably need to go on to a second page, but I would like to elaborate a bit more and discuss how “adding flats” to a key with sharps is just removing sharps (and vice versa).

I hope others find these useful! Feel free to drop a line in the comments or on any other platform on the side bar regarding these!

Ehler

2018-02-28

Music Education, Projects

resources
My Relationship with my iPhone

My Smartphone History

Smartphones ascended to being an indispensable tool that most people owned as I was in high school. After a few feature phones, I considered myself privileged enough to get my first one in 2010, an HTC Incredible. The primary appeal for me at first was not apps (though they were exciting and constantly advertised) but to be able to send texts longer than 160 characters without them breaking apart, and conversation threading. Since then, I’ve owned an iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

I enjoyed the earlier iPhones a great deal, having previously used an iPod Touch. I eventually jailbroke the iPhone 5 and enjoyed some increased functionality. The size and battery life of the Note 2 were very appealing to me, but that phone lasted a very short while. It developed a problem where it would drain batteries quickly and the refuse to be turned on while charging. After a number of replacement batteries failed to solve this, I gave up on the phone as a repair would have cost quite a bit and our family plan had an upgrade credit rolling around.

I can only think of three phones that have really excited me from their announcement in the past few years. The first was definitely the iPhone 6 Plus, which I would have got instead of the 6 originally if I had not been in marching band and found it unfeasible to high step while keeping it in my pocket. It was just a little bit bigger than the Note 2 actually, but the 6 served me well.

The second phone announcement that excited me was the Google Pixel. I think Android is a great platform, but I personally find its fragmentation annoying from a user’s perspective. I remembered constantly checking for Android updates that had launched quite some time ago on my Note 2. Regardless of the advice of any tech sites, I tend to update my OS on all of my Apple devices on the day they launch. I’d had my iPhone 6 about two years when the Pixel drops, and I seriously considered getting one.

The Ecosystem Chain

The reason I stuck with my iPhone 6 was that I valued the features it added to my Mac too much. I wrote about how I’ve found my MacBook Pro to be the best computer I’ve ever used, and there’s a lot of reciprocal value with my iPhone. The first is being able to text from my Mac, both iMessage and regular SMS. I do most of my messaging with the people I’m close to through one of the two, and cutting off SMS would be frustrating. Today there are decent applications to allow texting from your computer if you’re on Android, but I didn’t see any of them as being nearly as functional in 2016. I also get a lot of use from AirDrop, mostly from my iPhone to my Mac as a way of transferring videos and photos directly rather than having to wait on a cloud service. It sounds small, but it saves so much effort and time.

As I began to try and use my iPad a bit more, my iPhone became even more essential. Yet, despite adding value to my Mac, I felt like my Mac chained me to staying with an iPhone. I was a bit dissatisfied with iOS at the time, and the iPhone 7 did not seem like a worthy upgrade at the time. I resented my iPhone just a bit, and wished for a smarter digital assistant, and better handling of notifications. While I saw flaws in the Pixel, it certainly looked good. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the features on my Mac though, and I still don’t see myself leaving the Mac platform.

Learning to Love my iPhone Again

As I’ve gotten more and more out of my Mac find the apps that work best for me, I’ve also adopted them on my iPhone. OmniFocus, Airmail, and Fantastical in particular are critical to how I work every day, and all three are incidentally exclusive to the Mac and iOS platforms. I’ve gotten more and more into finding the best apps for what I do, and I’m increasingly finding that the some of the best tools available (whether they’re what I choose or not) are not available on Android.

Maybe it’s silly to like my platform more because of a deficiency in the competing platform. I know the developers of many of these apps have no intention of ever making them available on Windows or Android though, and at the end of the day, it’s not a deficiency that I see disappearing. But as iOS 11 has expanded my iPad’s usefulness and I’ve gotten an Apple TV, I’m starting to see the Apple ecosystem as more of a boon than a chain. Despite bugs I do think that iOS 11 has expanded the usefulness of my iPhone, particularly in letting me take tasks down on my commute in OmniFocus through Siri.

The fact that my phone runs well with its age makes me appreciate it that much more. I’ve never wanted a Samsung phone again after my Note 2, and the Pixel 2’s bungled launch made the grass look less green. And with the money I’ve dropped on iOS apps, I’m far less inclined to switch platforms than when I was younger. And maybe some maturity has made me less envious of the platform I’m not on (and would be true if I were on Android now).

I’ve named two phone announcements that have excited me out of three; the third isn’t actually an announcement, but rather the preliminary leaks of the 2018 iPhones. While they’re obviously subject to change, a plus-sized edge-to-edge iPhone I personally find worth holding out for. Even though the iPhone X has a screen larger than the iPhone 6-8 Plus, it’s not as wide, and I would love to get a phone with a Plus-sized form factor and a screen even bigger than the X. No single iPhone release since the 6 has been terribly impressive to me as of yet. However, when you add the upgrades up, jumping from a 6 to a 2017 iPhone is a major upgrade. I’ve tried to compile these differences for my own benefit (my partner also has an iPhone 6, and I thought it would be helpful for her as well; I can’t guarantee the accuracy, all based off of my own research). Adding whatever additional upgrades the 2018 iPhones bring will make that all the more impressive, but the ideal form factor of an iPhone is enough for me to upgrade regardless of specs.

Smartphone Recommendations

I don’t want to pretend I’m some guru that everyone goes to asking about tech. But if I were recommending smartphones right now, it becomes very dependent on what kind of user someone is. It’s worth noting that I’m only taking into consideration “premium” or “flagship” handsets, I’m not familiar with other availability, but there’s better resources out there if that’s your price point. For someone getting their first smartphone or someone less tech literate, I would certainly recommend an iPhone. Which specific model depends on personal factors (keeping their phone in a pocket, purse, etc.) but certainly a 2017 model. The polish and review of apps, and how simply functional the phone is with only stock apps make it a good fit for those who feel less equipped to deal with making informed decisions on their devices.

I think for anyone who considers themselves to be more adept at technology who does not have buy-in to the Apple ecosystem, I would recommend a Pixel 2 despite its screen issues. I’m not some journalist who gets previews of phones, and I haven’t used an Android phone since my Note 2, but as I understand it, there’s still a lot of bloatware on Samsung phones. Between Bixby and useless Samsung utilities, you’re better off getting Google’s imagining of what a smartphone should be. I haven’t done much investigating into HTC, Motorola, or Huawei lately, but nothing’s come my way to make me second guess my recommendation of a PIxel for those who would benefit most being on Android.

Android is a great operating system, and the customization is great for most of its users. Yet if you have the resources and you consider yourself a power user, I find that if you can be in Apple’s ecosystem on Mac and iPhone, it’s well worth it. The exclusive apps to iOS are incredibly powerful, and work amazingly well with a Mac. None of the phones I’ve had provided meaningful synergy with Windows, no matter how many web applications I was using on my PC. Moving between devices was generally an obstacle and at best out of the way. In addition, the rest of the Apple ecosystem provides benefits. It’s my perception that the iPad has matured much farther than Android tablets are ever going to. Apple TV remains a bit overpriced in its market, but it’s a powerful box all the same. And while I don’t own one (yet), the Apple Watch seems to be leading the wearable market.

If you’re not in the Apple ecosystem and want to get the most out of your device, I don’t know exactly how much I can recommend the iPhone. Many of the apps I use would be less effective if I couldn’t access them on my computer, and they’re only available on Macs. That said, despite the deserved bad press Apple has gotten this year, I find my iPhone more and more useful. Between the long lifespan of my current phone and other strengths of the platform, I don’t think anyone is going wrong picking an iPhone right now, and it’s been long enough that I’ve used an Android phone that I can’t say what strengths are present on the platform. Equipped with more Apple technology though, I truly feel like I’m getting the most out of my phone.

Ehler

2018-01-28

Technology

hardware, ios
My Journey to the Mac

I don’t remember when I first started using computers, but I know from my family it was before I could read. I eventually had “my” computer, which was the hand-me-down from the family computer. Out of these desktops, there was a WIndows 95, 98, and an XP. I had total reign over them, which usually involved figuring out how to run games on them. Anything that wasn’t working I had to fix myself for the most part. When I was 13, I got my first laptop, a Compaq Presario which ran Vista. It was a nice laptop, but eventually it died and I replaced it with some terrible HP laptop that ran Windows 7. When I graduated High School I used that graduation money to buy a gaming PC, an ASUS G75VX running Windows 8. That computer still runs, but it does so slowly even after a hard drive replacement, so it almost exclusively gets used for the occasion I want to play a game on it.

I was like a lot of PC users, turning up my nose at the Mac platform. The year I replaced the hard drive in my last PC, I began to see how much work Mac users around me at the University of Iowa were able to do more effectively. When that PC was in the shop I was using the nearest computer lab to where I was living, which was exclusively a Mac lab. It was…nice. I began to look more and more into it and eventually I bought the 2015 13” Macbook Pro. As I mentioned in my tech set-up post, it’s the best computer I’ve ever used.

There’s a lot that goes into that evaluation. For one, the computer is super ergonomic. Because I have massive hands, I can reach the bottom of the trackpad with my thumbs and the top of the keyboard with the rest of my fingers. My Compaq Presario was the same way, but its trackpad wasn’t as nice. The trackpad on my Mac can be clicked at the top of the trackpad for a normal left click, and not one of those awkward double-tap clicks either. Even the right-click region seems to be 1/4 of the trackpad’s area. While I don’t use the “look-up” hard press a lot, the Force Touch features of the trackpad make it a much more natural experience in my opinion.

While I’m not one of these people in love with making everything lighter and thinner at the loss of functionality, my MBP doesn’t lack any functionality, and its lightness is very nice. I can sit at the most awkward of angles and still balance my laptop very well. Its port set-up is nice, though I don’t use the thunderbolt ports often (they’re a versatile port for adapters for, say, ethernet).

There’s something nice about the keyboard too. Using ⌘ doesn’t seem like it would be that different from CTRL on a PC, but being able to use the same modifier key to ⌘↹ into a program and then paste or quit it is very nice. While some programs provide exceptions, the use of the modifier keys usually follows a pretty logical progression.

What makes this computer a real dream though is definitely macOS. From the exclusive software to the flexibility of the OS, it’s wonderful. I spent a little bit of time on Linux Mint on my last PC and it really hit home how an operating system should work without getting in your way. Windows gets in your way. I see posts all the time complaining about Windows’s awful default settings getting restored by new updates. I currently run Windows 10 on that old PC of mine and it is a nightmare.

I don’t know why there is such an urge among Windows users to cast scorn upon Macs. I was one of them. I’ve only experienced macOS since Yosemite, so maybe it was actually less pleasant before. There’s the stigma that Mac users don’t know how to use their computers as well. As someone who considers themselves a power user, I’m doing less digging around with a registry editor or manually loading up dll libraries for certain software, and instead finding better app synergy and scripts other people have written for Alfred that make my life easier.

I write all of this not just to gush about my Mac, but because I want to lay out how committed I am to Mac as a platform for the purpose of discussing synergy between Apple devices and my journey with phones in a future post. On Mac Power Users, they sometimes talk about the “delight” of using an iOS device when they contrast it with their work on a Mac. I don’t get that, but I do feel the “delight” they describe when I’m working on my Mac after a life of Windows use.

Ehler

2018-01-23

Technology

hardware, ios, mac
RSS in 2018

At the end of 2017 I decided to try using RSS for news. Previously I’d check Facebook and Twitter’s trending topics, and I followed a number of news accounts (whose biases in coverage aligned with my own). The bigger impetus for this was that I was on Twitter a lot less and was sick of seeing more news than posts from people in my social circles.

In theory this also meant that I could get a lot more news that would be unfiltered. Facebook’s algorithm wouldn’t play a role, and I could add a lot more sources without feeling like it was crowding my social feeds. I’ve got probably ten times the number of subscriptions of news sources that I followed on Twitter, and a wider variety of perspectives.

If you’re looking to try RSS, I started by using Feedly and switched over to Reeder which integrates with Feedly. If you’re using Reeder, you can keep your subscription list on iOS and your Mac the same by exporting your Mac subscriptions to OPML and importing it to your iOS client (but you have to manually do this each time). Your alternative is to sign in to a service like Feedly in your Reeder client. Feedly is $45/yr if you want to remove the restrictions on your total number of subscriptions and integrate with IFTTT and Zapier. It’s worth noting that IFTTT has good applets for raw RSS feeds as well (and Zapier probably does this too).

Using RSS, you’re the only person accountable for what news you’re seeing, which is really nice. It’s not a perfect solution though if you’re used to consuming most of your news through social media and sites like Reddit. Getting a feed that just shows you everything that’s been posted by a number of sources means the ones that are posting about everything are dominating and bigger stories are difficult to notice. Feedly has a feature where you can look at “top stories” based on what other people are clicking from the sources you’re already subscribing to. This is nice, but relying just on this gets back into the very “problem” I was trying to solve.

I have two groups of feeds, one for news and one for personal interest blogs (Apple blogs, notation software blogs, college football blogs…) Segregating these feeds means I can see the lower-volume things that I like and clear some email subscriptions for some of these interest blogs. I have local news included in my broader news subscription group, but I’ve been enjoying some of that coverage so much that I might want to get it out of the noisier group and give it its own.

In an era where most news sites are battling ad blockers or trying to sell subscriptions, and RSS has arguably been out of style since Google killed Reader, Reeder is a worse experience because of the problems with a lot of feeds. Hunting down RSS feeds for the sites I wanted was a mix of pages not linked to on their sites anymore, or using third-party feeds. I’ve got a mix of feeds that are just links to the story and stories that are actually readable in Reeder.

While I’m still trying to make this experiment work, I’m finding myself still drawing a lot of news from Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook. I am off until my subbing job starts, and maybe I can get back into more of a pattern that uses RSS when I’m back to work. If anyone has some advice on how to make my experiment go better, I’d love to hear in the comments.

Ehler

2018-01-14

Technology

rss

Day One

Drafts

TextExpander

App updates

My Smartphone History

The Ecosystem Chain

Learning to Love my iPhone Again

Smartphone Recommendations