It’s an adjustment.
I haven’t had a desktop Mac since my late, great, Mac Pro from 2006. Those were some good times but it was also a relief when I replaced it with a portable MacBook Pro. I remember thinking that I’d never go back to having a desktop computer. Laptop computers (as we called them in the old days) had reached a performance threshold that meant they could do “real” work.
I know Rogue Amoeba is in the news the past two weeks for other things but I thought this was cool. If you already own a Rogue Amoeba app you can get SoundSource for free.
SoundSource is a handy little menu app1 that provides more detailed controls over input and output.
Of course, if you don’t already own any Rogue Amoeba apps then you can still buy it for $10.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of macro maintenance in my Keyboard Maestro collection. That also means I’ve been writing new macros because once that KM window is open I tend to fall down a lot of rabbit holes.
Every January I need to create a sequence of numerical month folders on a couple of servers. It’s easy but repetitive work. This is a good niche for Keyboard Maestro. This macro accepts a starting number and ending number and creates zero padded folders like 01, 02, 03.
Evaluate your current Mac by launching Activity Monitor and sort by CPU. Launch your most intensive workflow and examine the CPU load over time. Now rush into the most feeble justification for buying a new Mac. This is critical for step 4. Spend inordinate amounts of time on the Apple Store website looking at every possible configuration of your new Mac. 4a. Be sure to start with the fully loaded model.
Ever find an old iPhone screenshot in your camera roll and think about the days when you had only a few apps? Sometimes those apps aren’t even installed on my devices anymore. This year I decided to go back and evaluate some old favorites to see if they could bring back a tiny sliver of the pre-2017 joy.
Paprika I used Paprika like crazy for about a year. It’s ability to extract a recipe from a webpage is remarkable.
I’m following posts like this one from Jason Snell very closely:
Once again, that’s a little more than half the time. It’s enough for me to declare that for jobs optimized for multiple processor cores, this base model iMac Pro is nearly twice as fast as the top-of-the-line 5K iMac from 2014.
I’ve also been looking at the Geekbench scores but I think this Bare Feats post summarizes the performance comparisons best.
iThoughts 5 just released on all available platforms (iOS, Mac, Windows) with encrypted maps. It’s a nice feature if you want to store sensitive information in idea maps that may be shared by email even Dropbox or iCloud.
As I think about all the good and bad of 2017, one thing stands out: I never really worry about how my data gets moved between my computers. In previous years I built fragile, and often complicated, machinery on top of Dropbox. While the Dropbox service has certainly gotten better, including a new API, but so did everyone else. Most surprising to me is how much better Apple got in 2017.
It’s a internet tradition. The end of the year means a lot of listicle article about different things. Who am I to buck the system. Here’s a listicle of the best software I used on my Mac in 2017.
1Password I’d be lost without 1Password on my Mac. The family plan also makes it possible for me to share logins with my spouse without cluttering her 1Password list with a bunch of junk she doesn’t care about.
I’ll be honest, I hate most mind-mapping apps. A good mapping app does more than just put text on lines. It should make it easy to capture, organize, and then use ideas. MindNode is one of a handful of apps that I can recommend.
The new MindNode is just as beautiful as the old MindNode but many of the most innovative features have been refined and made more accessible. The new tool palettes make the app easy to use on iPad and iPhone but also highlight a unique perspective on task and list management.
