iPhone 8 Speculation

Later this year we're going to get the next iPhone. There's been a lot of rumors about this new one with talk of an edge-to-edge (possibly OLED) screen, embedded touch IT, and even maybe wireless charging. Chance Miller at 9to5 Mac did a nice job pulling together the current rumors. Personally, I'd be surprised if the next iPhone has all of the rumored features. The iPhone is nearly the whole story when it comes to Apple revenue and for every new iPhone they have to build millions of the things reliably and quickly. Too many big changes in one generation increases the possibility of delays for specific parts or, worse yet, defects in the phone. If I had to pick just one feature I'd like in a new iPhone, it would be that edge-to-edge screen. It looks pretty great in 9to5 Mac's mock up photos in the above linked article.

Home Screens – Bill Wilkins

I love meeting new and interesting geeks. One such person is my friend Bill Willkins. Bill Started out a “farm boy” in from Durham North Carolina but eventually found his way to England and now Switzerland. Bill’s now 75 but still works as a European Outdoor Industry Consultant. I can only hope I'm as much a geek at 75 as Bill is.

So Bill, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

I still find Apple’s native contacts app as the most useful. No other contacts app comes close. I have Fantastical on every device and MacBook. Excellent.

While I'm using 1Password, I'm also testing out other password managers. Apple Notes & Reminders are run as a team on the home screen of my iPhone & iPad.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

My iPhone is my app resource. I have at least 200 apps archived on my iPhone. I review them monthly. I have to start deleting some. I emphasize I don’t use them all but review them monthly.

What app makes you most productive? 

OmniFocus without doubt.

What app do you know you're underutilizing?

Most likely, OmniFocus.

What is the app you are still missing?

I am not missing anything. The problem is the reverse. Too many.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

It is the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night.

My iPhone is my most used Apple device. I can see the day coming when I move to a large iPad. This is mainly due to the ease of updates.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I can use them everywhere. I also like the ease of updates and the relative economy and/or price of apps. (The other side is I buy too many.)

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I would not take the job even if it were offered.

There was a famous saying. You can please some of the people part of the people some of the time and a few of the people all of the time but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. 

What's your wallpaper and why?

My wall paper is a plain black background. I do not want any distractions.

Thanks Bill!

 

Wikileaks and CIA iOS Exploits

Yesterday Wikileaks barfed up another pile of alleged confidential data, this time from the CIA. Setting aside the separate conversation about exactly who Wikileaks works for these days, I do believe the CIA, NSA, and intelligence agencies of every other country in the world has an interest in hacking iOS devices. Both hackers and governments have significant motivations to read private data. The question is what our hardware and software vendors are doing to protect us.

Apple released a statement on this point yesterday:

“Apple is deeply committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy and security. The technology built into today’s iPhone represents the best data security available to consumers, and we’re constantly working to keep it that way. Our products and software are designed to quickly get security updates into the hands of our customers, with nearly 80 percent of users running the latest version of our operating system. While our initial analysis indicates that many of the issues leaked today were already patched in the latest iOS, we will continue work to rapidly address any identified vulnerabilities. We always urge customers to download the latest iOS to make sure they have the most recent security updates.”
— Apple on alleged CIA iOS hacks

The battle to retain our privacy will never end. Apple will continue to build walls and governments and hackers will continue to batter them. I do believe Apple is committed to this fight but the continued protection of our private data is by no means a certainty at this point.

Sponsor – Conquer Your Email with SaneBox

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can can change your life … today. For a lot of folks, email is that thorn in your side that you can't quite ever escape. It doesn't have to be that way. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. With SaneBox you can:

  • Wake up everyday to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 
  • Defer email for hours, days, or weeks so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time.
  • Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
  • Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
  • Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
  • Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. I've been a SaneBox subscriber since 2012 and just signed up for another year. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

Richard Stallman's Uber List

Richard Stallman has created a list of Uber's sins. There's a lot of them. I still can't get over the idea that one of their executives wanted to spend $1M trashing journalists that wrote negatively about Uber. I know I'm late to this and I'm sure I'll probably hear from some readers explaining how Lyft is more expensive but at this point I've come to the conclusion I don't want any of my money heading toward Uber ever again.

MPU 367 – Getting Productive with Michael Hyatt

This week we're joined by New York Times best-selling author Michael Hyatt to share ideas about technology and productivity.

Sponsors include:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
  • TextExpander from Smile Type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
  • 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don't have to worry about that anymore. 
  • Pixelmator Powerful image editing that gives you everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images, now on iPad and Mac.

Home Screens - Bob "Dr. Mac" Levitus

This week’s home screen features Bob “Dr. Mac” Levitus. (Twitter) (Website) Bob is a prolific technology writer and one of my favorite members of the old Macworld Allstar Band. Bob has recently written his very first self published book, Working Smarter for Mac Users. I'm so pleased to see Bob doing his own thing. So Bob, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Ulysses , Final Cut Pro , Logic Pro , Words with Friends

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Real Racing 3 (with nearly 200 hours of guilt).

What app makes you most productive?

A Pomodoro timer.

What app do you know you're underutilizing?

Photoshop.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

Too many to count.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

Dark Sky (hyper local weather), Workflow (shortcuts and macros), Launcher (shortcuts)

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

Voice control and Siri (especially with Apple Music)

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

Go back to selling Macs with user-upgradeable RAM and storage.

Do you have an Apple Watch? Show us your watch face tell us about it.

Yes, and I use the Simple face for its retro good looks and subtle elegance.

What's your wallpaper and why?

“Welcome to Macintosh.” The “why” should be obvious: I like retro.

Anything else you'd like to share?

My mission is to show you how to use your Mac better, faster, and more elegantly; how to banish procrastination forever; and how to do more work in less time so you have more time for things you love.

My first self-published book—Working Smarter for Mac Users—ships on March 3 and I invite you to check it out or sign up for my weekly newsletter packed with productivity tips right here .

Thanks Bob.

OmniOutliner Essentials

This week Ken Case of the Omni Group announced the upcoming OmniOutliner Essentials. It is a focused version of OmniOutliner that doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles you get from OmniOutliner Pro but still a wicked useful outlining application. The best part is that they are going to sell this for just $9.99. There is also a price reduction on OmniOutliner Pro. As they work towards the release of OmniOutliner 5, OmniOutliner Essentials is available for public test.

The first version of OmniOutliner I purchased was in a box at a computer store. Those stores are all gone but OmniOutliner continues to evolve.

The 10.5 inch iPad

Today the rumor sites are abuzz with the “delay” of the new iPads. I always find it funny how the press reports something is “delayed” which has never been publicly announced.

Nevertheless, Apple finds itself in that place once again with the rumored 10.5 inch iPad Pro. I’ve not written anything about this new iPad yet but there are many rumors at this point that it’s probably a real thing. This hypothetical iPad gets rid of the bezel and manages to get a 10.5 inch edge-to-edge screen on a 9.7 inch iPad-sized device. I think it’s a great idea.

An edge-to-edge screen makes the standard size iPad all that much more useful for making things in addition to consuming things. It may offer users the best of both worlds with a large screen and portability.

I’ve currently got both sizes of the iPad Pro and find myself using the larger screen for very particular projects–like reading sheet music, editing PDFs, or working on a detailed document in Microsoft Word–while I use the smaller iPad for most of the day-to-day tasks–like managing OmniFocus, answering email, and the like. I’d be curious to see if a 10.5 inch screen is good enough for everything. Either way, if the rumors are right, were not going to hear about this until May or June.

Looking at Tags … Again

Lately I’ve been thinking about making another run at file tagging. It’s kind of funny how these tech issues percolate up. It all started with some receipts that I wanted to save to both client folders and tax folders. I found myself creating duplicates to have them in two places at once, which rubs me, someone who used to save computer data onto a cassette tape, as fundamentally wrong.

Tags would solve that problem. I could barf tags all over the file and then find it easily enough later with any index. Spotlight is good for this. Houdahspot is even better.

Then I had another problem with a backlog of unfiled documents. I’ve got Hazle trained to auto-sort a lot of documents that come my way but between my various careers I also get a lot of oddball one-timer documents that don’t really lend themselves to Hazel rule creation. However, if tagged, Hazel could easily land those documents in the various big bucket folders in my system.

So I’m looking at a hybrid tagging system that will still work with folders at some level but also rely on tags to help sort, store, and find files. There still are a lot of downsides to tagging. It takes extra time and it has very shaky support on iOS. I’m making a list of problems as I go.

I’m only a few days into this new experiment so I’m not going to share results until I dive deeper but I will say early results are promissing. I’ll report back on this next month.

MPU 365 – Maps and More

It took us 365 episodes but Katie and I finally got to an indepth look at at the available mapping and navigation options for your Apple gear.

This episode is sponsored by:

  • TextExpander from Smile Type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
  • Gazelle Sell your iPhone for cash at Gazelle! 
  • Marketcircle We help small business grow with great Mac, iPhone and iPad apps including Daylight and Billings Pro.
  • Sanebox Stop drowning in email

Sponsor - TableFlip

This week MacSparky has a new sponsor, TableFlip. No matter what app you’re working in, creating tables is a pain in the neck. TableFlip solves that problem with you letting you create tables using Markdown and getting a live preview right in the app. 

After you create your table you can update the underlying Markdown file or the table preview and both the TableFlip and Markdown files update automatically. I like setting up the table in TableFlip to begin, and then going back to the Markdown file for quick changes.

If you don’t want to use Markdown, you can also use TableFlip independently to create a table and later use it in Markdown or CSV. (Additional formats are on their way.) 

You shouldn’t have to open Excel every time you need a table. Check out TableFlip