I’m sold. iOS 9 is the best OS Apple has ever made since OS 6. As usual, the documentation is the weakest part of the product. Every week I find some new reason to love my big phone. This week I discovered two revolutionary, if hidden, features.
Annotate And Mail I measure the success of iOS by how many times I don’t have to put down my phone. Last week I received a request to complete a contract and sign it.
The today screen in iOS is one of those dividing features that you either love it or you forgot about it. I love it.
My most used features of the Today and Notification screens are the widgets provided by apps like Fantastical and Drafts. By far my most used widget is from an app named Launcher (see this previous overview).
The latest version of Launcher extended the relatively simple app launch actions of version 1.
My favorite phrase of the week by Eddie Smith:
In some ways we’re living in the mushroom cloud of a productivity time bomb that was first wired by the Protestant work ethic.
Eddie is commenting on this interesting Economist article regarding leisure time in the modern world
All this work has left less time for play. Though leisure time has increased overall, a closer look shows that most of the gains took place between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Jason Verly writes about how he converts an iThoughts map into a nicely printed outline.
The goal is to get a visual mind map into a orderly text form that can be shared with others. iThoughtsX is what I use to create and capture my thoughts and ideas. We’ll use Marked to render the mind map into a text outline.
You did know that Marked can preview iThoughts files, right?
Engineers are organized. One other advantage of having everything on a sheet of paper is that it doesn’t require WiFi or cell service.
Jess Martin writes about task management with Trello (but only tangentially references actually using Trello):
You might think it’s working. You might even be considered effective at your work. Someone might have once called you a rock star or a ninja. You might not find out that it’s not really working until you get that promotion you’ve been craving. Or things get busy at home. And then you’re stuck with a broken system, underperforming in your new role, overwhelmed at home, and you’re wishing you could just go mow a lawn.
I mentioned Todoflow, a python module for working with Taskpaper files, back when I first started using the system full time. It has a lot of the core query support of TaskPaper right from Python.
Now, the same module is available through an Editorial workflow. The workflow automatically installs the module if needed and supports advanced queries and result folding. It adds some minor enhancements to the TaskPaper query syntax (like a “today” term) but does not support parenthetical (nested) expressions.
If you own an iOS device and use words a lot you probably have Editorial on your home screen. Hi, me too. Today we get to rejoice because it’s the annual update of Editorial!1
I’ll save some general discussion about iOS text editors for the end because I think most people just come to find out what’s new. If that catches your attention you might stick around to find out a bit more about how I use this stuff all day, every day.
The first time I mentioned Taskmator for iOS it was a year ago and it was a newly fixed successor to TaskPaper.1 As a reminder, TaskPaper for iOS was removed from sale and the source code was made available as open source. The developer of Taskmator cleaned up the original TaskPaper and fixed a number of major bugs on iOS 7, including issues with Dropbox syncing. Here we are a year on and Taskmator is showing that it’s not just a dev and dash project.
My thanks to Pagico for sponsoring Macdrifter this week. The new version looks fantastic. It looks so good that I’m running a longer than usual ad copy. Pagico runs on multiple platforms, makes reference material a core feature (like I do) and syncs everywhere.
Some apps are great at managing projects & tasks, and others are great at managing data. Pagico 7 is one of the few apps that combines data organization with task management into one easy-to-use package.
