Cardhop – The New Contact Management App from Flexibits

Today Flexibits released its new contact management application for the Mac, Cardhop. Cardhop follows in the tradition of Flexibits' other Mac app, Fantastical in that it sits in your menubar and is completely awesome. 

With Cardhop, you can tap any quick keyboard combination to access the application from your menubar and then add new contacts, edit existing contacts, perform actions on contacts (like dialing a phone number or sending an email) and more. You can even perform functions with data that is not in your address book. For instance, if you type in "Dial 1-800-GOFEDEX", it translates the letters into the appropriate numbers and dials the phone for you.

For me, the ultimate test was when I received a new contact card, and I wanted to add that person to a specific group. All that I had to do was activate Cardhop, type in the person's first name, and then type "#F". Cardhop figured out I was putting that contact into my "friends" group and with just those few keystrokes, I had accomplished what used to take me many clicks and navigations in the Apple Contacts application.

Cardhop is for contacts what Fantastical is for calendar entries. You can get it today for your Mac. If you spend any time managing contacts on your Mac, this is worth checking out.

If you want to learn more, I made a series of videos for Flexibits.

Download the 21-day free trial now: https://flexibits.com/cardhop Learn about Cardhop, the contacts app you'll actually want to use.

Solo

Today Ron Howard announced the name of the previously untitled Han Solo Star Wars Movie. 

Solo.

I like it. He finishes the video saying "I'll see you next year." The question is … when next year? Previously Lucas announced Solo would be released in Summer of 2018 but since they've now pushed Episode IX to December of 2019, I wouldn't be surprised if Solo gets pushed back to December 2018.

Free Agents 32: It’s Scary Dude! With Kathy Campbell

The latest episode of Free Agents is available for download. Unicorn Sidekick Kathy Campbell joins us to discuss how she ended up becoming a Free Agent while behind a desk at her "real job," when having her new career discovered her.

iPhone X Supply Constraints

Last week we heard even more rumors about supply constraints for the iPhone X. Yet today the rumors say things may be a little better than we first thought. I think this is going to be the most difficult to find Apple product in a long time. If you want one, plan on being awake at midnight on October 27 and hope that you’ll get one before 2018.

Generally when making these types of purchases, you are better off using the Apple Store app on your iPhone or iPad. They seem to get through the buying process more reliably than the web store when there’s a heavy load. Also, make sure to have your Apple Pay credentials all up to date and "favorite" your iPhone X of choice ahead of time. Seconds will count.

The New Amazing Stories

As one of its first big television content deals, Apple has announced it’s going to be working with Steven Spielberg to produce a new series of Amazing Stories. I was all in the first time Spielberg made the Amazing Stories television series. That was some great TV. (If you’re looking for a good episode to get started, check out season 1, episode 5, “The Mission”.) As a child of the 70s and 80s, I personally can’t wait to see the new Amazing Stories, and I’m glad that Apple is spending some of its truckloads of money on content other than Carpool Karaoke.

Timing Makes Time-Tracking Easy (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Timing, my tool for tracking time on my Mac. Knowing how you spend your time is one of the most useful bits of knowledge you can have when deciding on new (and old) commitments. I've gone deep down the rabbit hole of time tracking as I try to figure things out for my own sanity and this week's sponsor, Timing, has been an essential tool for me.

Time tracking is hard. Having to throw a switch somewhere every time you change tasks or projects never works and is super-distracting. As a result, you end up with bad data. 

Timing fixes that. Timing automatically tracks which apps, documents, and websites you use — without start/stop timers.

• See how you spend your time, eliminate distracting activities, and improve your client billing.
• Timing lets you stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead!
• Timing also understands that your time tracking data is super sensitive, so Timing keeps it safe on your Mac.

In short, with Timing you get detailed information about how you spend your time on your Mac with zero work on your behalf. Try it yourself with the free 14-day trial and get 10% off if you buy in the next two weeks.

Unrelated but cool – The developers of Timing have also recently released Faviconographer, a free utility that adds Favicons to your Safari tabs. If you ever found yourself wanting those icons on your tabs for easier navigation, check it out!

App Camp 2020

App Camp is an outstanding program working to fix the gender imbalance in technology and giving the campers (and volunteers) a lifetime of memories. My wife and I helped out with the recent App Camp in Orange County, and we’re thrilled to see them expanding. They have a big fundraiser going on right now, and every little bit helps. It doesn’t take long to make a contribution. They even take Apple Pay.

BBEdit 12

Today marks the release of BBEdit 12.0. There is a long list of new and improved features. There are plenty of minimal text editors out there but only one BBEdit power tool. Using BBEdit, you can do nearly anything to a text file. This app is so powerful that I know web developers that have switched to the Mac for the sole purpose of using BBEdit.

I use BBEdit when I need its power. For example I used it recently on a complicated search and replace to a big pile of text using regular expressions. That simply wan’t possible with every other text editor in my arsenal but it was laughably easy for BBEdit. Jason Snell writes in BBEdit every day. His comments on the new version are excellent. 

Home Screens - Peter Lewis

This week’s home screen feature Peter Lewis, maker of Keyboard Maestro, which recently got a nice update, one of my favorite productivity apps on the Mac. Peter not only shared his home screen but also some of his favorite apps on both iOS and Mac. So Peter, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

BBEdit (forever!), PCalc and NetNewsWire 3 are always running, and Acorn and Interarchy are also mainstays. Mail and Xcode are always running too, but I wouldn't call either if them "favorites".

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Really Bad Chess on the iPad. That and chesstempo.com.

What app makes you most productive? 

Keyboard Maestro. Self-serving comment, sure, but other than Xcode, nothing is more important to my productivity.

What app do you know you're underutilizing?

Script Debugger. I'm not a particularly competent AppleScripter. I'm hopeful that Script Debugger will help improve that, but so far I've failed to get the most out of it.

What is the app you are still missing?

Not so much an app, but the whole home automation space seems almost entirely untapped in terms of potential. That said, I really don't understand people putting Internet connected microphones and cameras in their living rooms (or heaven forbid, their bedrooms!). But I'd definitely like to see some massive improvements in this space, and an iPad's size is probably a perfect fit for the controller.

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

iPad at night to play games. I use my iPhone sporadically but not for much, just for boring "Smart Phone" stuff like phone calls, Messages, and Maps.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

I use Workflow, but only for a few trivial tasks, mostly just emailing myself notes. None of my iPhone widgets really get much use — since I work from home on my Mac, I generally have access to my Mac whenever I want to do something, and so I don't need to try to shoehorn myself into a 4" screen.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

My favorite new feature is the "remember where I parked", although I'm looking forward to speed limits and lane guidance when it eventually comes to Australia.

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

A massive increase on the primacy of software quality. There are just too many bugs shipping currently. I'd also like to see a re-focus on the Mac and accept the duality, and free up the iPad/iPhone to be what they are good at instead of making them so complicated that they lose the simplicity advantage they had.

Thanks Peter.

iCloud Text Replacement

There has been a lot of press the last few weeks over iCloud’s lackluster text replacement feature. Brian Stucki wrote an excellent post documenting just how bad the service is.

I have to admit that I forgot iCloud even provided text replacement services. For years I would eagerly test out iCloud text replacement when there was a new version of iOS, but after a while I gave up. I could never get it to work reliably. Indeed, I wasted so much time trying to get it to work that I ultimately gave up and stopped trying.

I left my old job a few years ago, and iCloud text replacement still tries to occasionally drop in that old phone number even though I've fixed that entry repeatedly.

I think that is one of the challenges of iCloud. It covers so many different services that it's easy to lose one or two in the mix, especially when it's one that doesn't work reliably. That has certainly been the case with the text replacement feature.

The good news is that Apple is now moving text replacement onto the CloudKit API, which is much more reliable and should, hopefully, solve the problem once and for all. Indeed, Apple representatives told John Gruber that this rollout would happen "in the next month or so". I sure hope so.

10 Years of MacSparky

This year I'm celebrating 10 years of MacSparky.com.

It's hard to believe that a decade has gone by with me writing to the internet. In some ways, it feels like much less time. In other ways, I can't remember a time when I wasn't writing for this site.

When I was in college, I spent a significant amount of time studying the founding fathers. It seemed everyone had their own newspaper back then. Every kooky political belief had its own platform. In the 1980s, when I was in college, there were, realistically, three big media companies running the whole show. I was jealous of a time where anyone with an interesting idea could easily publish that to the public.

With that in mind, you can see why I gravitated toward the internet. But instead of writing about politics, I wanted to write about my love of getting work done and using Apple products to do so.

Starting this blog was one of the smartest things I've done in my lifetime. It's led to many wonderful friendships, a separate career in the publishing business, and ultimately my escape from a law firm into a lifestyle that works a lot better for me. In short, it saved me.

Thank you all for reading. As long as you keep showing up, I'll keep writing.

64 and 256

I recently spent some time in the Apple Store looking at the iPhone 8. There's a lot to like about the new iPhone. It's substantially better than its predecessor, and the glass back makes more of a difference than I thought it would. It's silly but one the thing that pleased me is the memory configurations of the new iPhone. By making just two options at 64GB and 256GB, Apple is correcting what I think has been a problem for years. No longer does someone buying an entry-level iPhone get a handicapped device. For so long, Apple was selling the entry-level iPhone at 16GB, which was not enough. Apple raised the entry-level iPhone to 32GB last year, but this new dual option policy where a user can get either 64GB (which is just fine for most people) or 256GB (which is just fine for the power users) makes a lot more sense.

No longer do I have to watch somebody buying a brand new 16GB iPhone in the Apple Store and restrain myself from telling a complete stranger they're making a mistake. I'm glad Apple has made this right.

The End of the Line for Windows Phone

Microsoft’s head of mobile business, Joe Belviore recently tweeted that Windows Phone will get no new features.

Of course we'll continue to support the platform.. bug fixes, security updates, etc. But building new features/hw aren't the focus. 😟 https://t.co/0CH9TZdIFu

— Joe Belfiore (@joebelfiore) October 8, 2017

Ack.

I actually liked Windows Phone as a different take from the iPhone. It seems to me they were just too late to the market to ever get a foothold.

Regardless, I can’t help but think of the funeral Microsoft threw for the iPhone a few years ago. They had a hearse, pallbearers, and even bagpipes. Bagpipes! Looks like they were wrong about that.

Pixelmator 3.7 Mount Whitney

Pixelmator got its High Sierra update late last week. The new version lets you now launch Pixelmator directly from the Photos App and save edits back to your original image. It’s nice to have this feature back on the Mac. Pixelmator also now supports the new Apple HEIF image format. 

There are a bunch more small updates and fixes including fixing an Automator script bug. That little fix is one of the big reasons I am a Pixelmator user. They focus on Apple software and cover their bases on even the most obscure Mac-only features, even Automator.

Version 3.7 is a free update. Learn more directly from Pixelmator.

Mac Power Users 399: Workflows with Merlin Mann

This week, our original workflow guest, Merlin Mann, returns to the show to share how he’s getting so much work done on the iPad these days and the other bits of technology that make him happy.

Sponsored by: 

• Fracture Bring your photos to life.
• The Omni Group We're passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad. 
• SaneBox Stop drowning in email!
• 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don't have to worry about that anymore.

Sonos and Apple Music

Sonos is a great speaker system. After much badgering from Mac Power Users listeners, I started investing in them several years ago, and now I have a collection of them throughout my house. However, where Sonos failed to keep up was voice control. As Amazon, Google, and now Apple all start releasing their speaker-in-a-can products with voice assistants built-in, consumers are finding it easier to use their voice to play their music rather than fiddle with an application on the phone.

I have several friends who swear by playing music through their Amazon Echo devices because it's so easy. That has never been me. I love the sound of my Sonos system, and I can't imagine playing Miles Davis through the crappy little speaker of my Amazon Echo. Actually, I did try it once while I was making waffles. It was terrible, so I washed my hands and played it properly through the Sonos system. I’m picky about these things. I’m not even sure the Apple HomePod is going to be Miles-worthy.

Nevertheless, the rest of the world is moving forward with voice-based audio systems, and Sonos is behind in the game. This past week they attempted to solve that problem in a few ways.

First, they partnered with Amazon to build the Amazon Echo into the new Sonos One speaker. This gives you the convenience of the Amazon Echo combined with the quality of the Sonos speakers. Moreover, just having one of these in your Sonos system should let you drive everything using your voice.

I have received a lot of emails asking if I'm going to buy one of these. I'm not. While I have an Amazon Echo in my house, I'm increasingly pushing toward Siri with HomeKit devices, and I would ideally like to have just one ecosystem.

The real sticking point for me is that I'm a happy Apple Music subscriber. My entire family, including the non-geeks, has a complete understanding of how to find and play music on Apple Music and they love it. I’ve got some killer playlists, and I like the integration with Siri. Since I am all in with Apple gear, using their music streaming service makes a lot of sense.

Whether the issue is Apple or Amazon (or both), I don't know, but for whatever reason, Apple Music does not play through the Amazon Echo. To have a streaming service on your Amazon Echo, you need either Spotify or Amazon’s music streaming service. So even though Alexa can now talk to my Sonos, Alexa doesn’t have my Apple Music library, which in hindsight is one of the primary reasons I’m not so keen on adding more Echoes to my home.

That is, however, not the end of the story for Apple Music subscribers. Sonos also announced they're going to be incorporating AirPlay 2 next year. This is a new technology announced by Apple back in June at WWDC. This next iteration of AirPlay should allow you to easily drive your audio to any compatible speaker system. It is, however, a lot more than that. It also allows you to cache music and control sending the music via Siri. Dave Hamilton wrote an extensive piece on the uses of AirPlay 2 over at the Mac Observer.

It is my sincere hope that when all of this gets sorted out, I will be able to control my Sonos system with my voice through Siri, playing my Apple Music playlists. In theory, this wouldn't require me to buy any new speakers either. However, at this point, it is not an actual feature but instead a promise of a future feature. I hope Apple and Sonos can make that happen. In the meantime, if I want I want to play some music on my Sonos system, I have to take my phone out of my pocket and tap a few buttons, like an animal.

The Omni Group is Ready for iOS 11 and High Sierra (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by the Omni Group, makers of some of the finest productivity software for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The Omni Group always jumps in with both feet for new operating system updates, and they didn’t disappoint this year.

All of their iPad and iPhone apps got updates for iOS 11. My favorites are, of course, OmniFocus, which now supports drag-and-drop both in-application and from third-party applications. Dragging an email from Apple Mail over to OmniFocus is a game-changer. You can also now add tasks to OmniFocus with Siri. Activate Siri and say, “In OmniFocus add take out the garbage” and you’ll get a new task, “Take out the Garbage” in OmniFocus with no further trouble. Drag and drop is equally useful in OmniGraffle.

Of course, The Omni Group has also updated its Mac apps to be fully compliant with High Sierra.

The Omni Group apps are a key to my own productivity. Every day I keep up with all of my obligation in large part because of the hard work being done at the Omni Group. They’ve got free trials for all of their applications, and if you’d like a hand, you should give the Omni Group a chance.

Jazz Friday: Joey Alexander’s Joey. Monk. Live!

Joey Alexander, the jazz piano prodigy that continues to surprise me, released a new album, Joey. Monk. Live!, (iTunes)(Apple Music) where he played music from Thelonious Monk. I’ve written it before but I can’t get over how Joey plays with so much fire. I’ve heard a lot of prodigies that are technically excellent but yet their music still lacks soul. That’s not the case with Joey. This is a great album for the weekend.

Home Screens – MacSparky's Strange Looking iPad

This week I’m featuring my own iOS 11 iPad home screen, partly because it’s so weird. Here it is. (Click to enlarge.)

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The Gorilla on the Couch - That Crazy Dock

For a long time, I’ve kept all my apps on the home screen with everything not on the screen located in four folders. I’ve given those folders verb names, Make, Learn, Fix, and Play. Traditionally I opened apps from the home screen or one of those folders. I still do that on my iPhone.

To say I flipped out when Apple announced iOS 11 is an understatement. I installed beta 1 like a crazy man. One of my first observations about iOS 11 was that the dock is now much more important. It is prime real estate for apps, particularly if you like to use split screen multitasking. Unless you have your iPad connected to a keyboard, getting to apps to split the screen takes too many steps. At first I filled the dock with as many icons as it would accept but then they got too small and I use enough apps that I still didn’t have everything I regularly needed.

About halfway through the iOS 11 beta, I got the idea of putting all my apps on the dock. It started out as a sort-of joke so I could share screenshots of my iPad looking more like a Mac. The thing is though ... it worked for me. So now my home screen is empty and my dock has a few essentials, but also my Make, Learn, Fix, and Play folders. Opening the folder to get to a split screen app feels silly but is still way faster than getting to an app on the home screen.

All of my nerd-friends think I’m crazy but I’ve been pretty happy with this setup. I think the tipping point for this is people that use multitasking without a keyboard. If that’s you, give this a try for a week.

The other thing I did was to turn off Suggested and Recent Apps to the right of my dock. I found I wasn’t paying attention to those so a few weeks ago I toggled them off in the Dock preferences tab. I haven’t missed them.

Some of My Favorite Apps

I love so many Apps. For this post, I want to focus on a few that particularly shine in iOS 11:

Gladys

There was a lot of talk prior to iOS 11 about adding a “shelf” to iOS. Federico Viticci did a great job of showing the advantage of such an interface in his iOS 11 concept video. Apple didn’t add a shelf but with the drag and drop tools, they made it possible for third party app developers to, in essence, make a shelf. The idea behind a shelf is a temporary space on your iPad where you can store things for later use, like digital walnuts you’re burying for winter.

There are a lot of developers releasing shelf apps and I’ve been buying and trying these as they release. I don’t know what app will rise to the top of this space but my current favorite is Gladys. With this app, I can drop most kinds of media, text, and links as I collect them on a project and, using slide over, have them available for use elsewhere as I work on my iPad. This is such a key tool for multitasking that I’ve put Gladys in my dock despite how much I dislike the icon.

Fantastical

Of course the Fantastical team was early to drag and drop. Not only can you now drag and drop events and reminders inside Fantastical, you can also pull events out of Fantastical and drop them in other apps. Drag an appointment out of Fantastical into an email and it becomes an ICS file. Drag some text into Fantastical and it creates an event using the dropped text.

OmniFocus

Drag and drop OmniFocus has been a game changer for me. Every day I start out auditing my email on the iPad with Apple Mail on the left and OmniFocus on the right. Much dragging and dropping ensues. One of the nice things is the link-back created in OmniFocus for linked emails works on both Mac and iOS. I’ve already started production on some screencasts around OmniFocus and iOS 11. It will be a free update to the OmniFocus Video Field Guide and I’ll be releasing it in the next month (hopefully a few weeks).

1Password

This is another app that jumped into drag and drop with both feet. The new 1Password lets me drag passwords onto web forms and re-arrange fields internally.

I feel like this drag and drop thing is going to only get better as app developers feed off each other’s ideas.

My Current Guilty Pleasure

I'm spending a lot of time in iBooks lately. It’s not debugging one of my own iBooks but instead reading Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View. A lot of Star Wars fiction is garbage. This is not.

A Small Change

If I were in charge at Apple, I would continue iterate on multitasking. One small change that I think could help would be to include Finder search at the top of the Control Center/Spaces screen. That’s accessible from a single swipe up from the bottom of the screen and would make it much easier to get to non-dock-based apps when multitasking.

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My Wallpaper

Another advantage of putting everything in the dock is that I can use really nice wallpaper and see it all. Currently I'm using some concept art from the Disneyland Star Wars expansion. I change wallpapers often though.

Free Agents 31: Being Selective about Clients with Aleen Simms

Episode 31 of Free Agents is up. Relay FM Host and App Launch Map founder Aleen Simms joins us in this episdode to talk about her accidental fall into freelance work and setting high standards for her clients.