Author: StaringAtPhones

StaringAtPhones https://staringatphones.wordpress.com Christian, student, blogger, friend. Electrical Engineering student at KSU. I've been following the Apple world since high school, keeping up on the latest news using my iPhone 5s, iPad Mini 2, and 2012 MacBook Pro.

Link: The Limitations of the iPad

M. G. Siegler writing on 500ish Words:

“But [the iPad] is actually my favorite device. Yes, you read that right. While I certainly use the iPhone far more than the iPad, I enjoy the iPad more. It’s just perfect for what I actually like doing — reading, writing, needlessly getting distracted on Twitter, and such. In fact, I like using it so much that I find myself very annoyed these days.”

Siegler goes on to say that he’s annoyed at the iPad because it’s such a great device, but it still can’t fully replace his Mac. There are some things that the iPad simply can’t do, or can’t do well enough. I feel exactly the same way. My iPad is also my favorite device, and it’s frustrating that it’s still so limited sometimes. Recent years have brought some great improvements (like split-screen multitasking), but we still have a long way to go. Here’s hoping Apple prioritizes the iPad, makes it better, and allows it to fulfill everything we all want it to be. ••

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To Waze or Not to Waze

(Sorry I haven’t posted in a few weeks, everyone. School’s been super busy. I’m gonna try to get back into writing now 😊 I’ve got something exciting planned for next week 😏)

Waze is an interesting take on GPS navigation. Rather than just using GPS to get to places you’re unfamiliar with, Waze invites you to use your GPS everywhere you go. You see, Waze’s goal is to save you every possible minute while you’re driving – to work, to school, or wherever you’re going. So instead of taking you along the most direct route, Waze takes you on what it hopes is the fastest route – even if that means going through neighborhoods, on and off the interstate, whatever.

Waze achieves this the way I assume most GPS apps get their traffic data – through thousands and thousands of uses, or “Wazers,” with their phones in their cars. As you driving using Waze, you’re also reporting back just how fast that route really was, which influences whether Waze sends the next driver along that route too, or if they get a different path. However, Waze goes a step further on data collection. Wazers can report all kinds of hazards along the road, from construction, to stopped vehicles, and even police and red light cameras. I don’t like that Waze encourages people to use their phones to report things while driving (there is a hands-free voice mode), but I will (guiltily) admit that it’s nice to have this sort of info.

This brings me to the question: Do I use Waze everywhere I go, like it’s intended? No, I don’t. I tried. When I first downloaded the app, I did. But it got pretty old. When I drive to school, I basically have two, maybe three different routes I can take. And they’re all within five minutes of each other. So generally, Waze doesn’t really save me much time, and often it takes me on the same path I would’ve taken anyway. Even if I do take a different path, once I’ve made the first turn or two I know which way I’m going. And those voice prompts get really annoying.

I’ve gotten to the point where I only use Waze when I’m not sure which route would be fastest. Right now, that includes:

  • When I leave school at a different time than normal, and I don’t know what the traffic is like.
  • During the heat of traffic, when all routes could be equally bad.
  • Driving to my new church, where I’m still getting the hang of the traffic on the different routes.

So that’s how I use Waze. Have you tried the app? If so, how do you use it? I’m interested in hearing how other people use this app, so let me know in the comments below, or on Twitter 😊

What I really want is for Waze to just send me a notification before I leave, telling me which route (“I-75” or “Highway 41”) is fastest, and then I wouldn’t even have to use the app at all. Oh well.  ••

Quick Tip: Print to PDF on iOS

I don’t print much these days. The kinds of things I once would’ve printed – ticket confirmations, important emails, and the like – I now just save as a PDF. On the Mac, I just use the Print to PDF function from the print dialog. This means that anything I can print I can save. Until iOS 10, you needed a third-party app to do something like this, but no longer.

Tap “Print” from any share sheet
Pinch outward on the thumbnail
This opens a PDF!

The process is really straightforward:

  • Select “Print” from any share sheet.
  • Pinch outward on the document thumbnail (like you’re trying to zoom in).
  • This will open a PDF of the document, which you can then share to any app.

Didn’t we have a share sheet to begin with? Yes, but in this case that would’ve only shared the link to the webpage. This saves the webpage as a document. This is also great for the Mail app, which doesn’t have share sheets for messages. You can however, print from the Mail app, which means you can now share PDFs of emails anywhere.

This is another great way that the iPad is slowly becoming a more powerful computing device, and I say more power for the iPad is a good thing for everyone. ••

Link

Link: Apple Rectangles

Mark Stanton writing on Hacker Noon:

“Ever since iOS 7, app icons went from being rounded squares to something more complex and refined. Apple has created design consistency between their hardware and software.”

This article is fascinating. Fair warning, it’s pretty nerdy, but it’s a really cool and obscure “turns out” that I had never heard before. The level of detail that Apple puts into both hardware and software is incredible. I for one didn’t even notice the app icon change in iOS 7. ••

Link

Link: My Interview on The Sweet Setup

tss_logo

Image credit: The Sweet Setup

http://thesweetsetup.com/nick-fosters-mac-ios-setup/

My interview on The Sweet Setup runs today!  One of the things TSS does is interview someone each week and ask them about what devices and apps they use to be productive every day.  This week that someone is me!

If you’re not familiar with The Sweet Setup, you should go check out the rest of their site (after you read my interview of course).  In addition to these interviews, they also do great app roundups.  Big thanks to Jeffrey Abbott for working with me on the interview, I had a lot of fun with it!  ••

Bear: Beautiful Notes for iOS and Mac

I’ve been using iCloud Notes for about a year now.  In general, it works well.  After using Day One, however, I’ve been bitten by the Markdown bug, and I wanted to find a new text app that supported it.  Markdown is kind of like pseudo-HTML formatting.  It’s simpler to type than standard HTML, and it’s definitely faster than all the tapping involved with formatting in the Notes app.  I also liked the idea of organizing things with tags rather than folders.  Tags are better than folders because you can put a single note under multiple tags if you want.  These criteria led me to Bear.

Bear’s main screen
The editor
Inline images and tags
File attachments and search operators

The first thing you’ll notice about bear is that it’s absolutely beautiful.  The colors and typefaces are amazing.  Bear’s simple interface is exactly the same on iOS and macOS, which is awesome.  The editor is clean and distraction free, and shows Markdown output as you type.

But Bear goes beyond just writing text.  You can add images inline, or any other type of file as an attachment.  It’s also very easy to export all your notes and attachments from the Mac app (I’ve been burned by iCloud Notes here before).  Tagging is as simple as adding a hashtag anywhere in the note.  You can also use #tag/subgroups or #multi word tags#.  These are all automatically detected and can be found in the sidebar, or you can simply search for them.  You can also use other special search operators such as @attachments or @untagged.

Bear uses a subscription model for its pricing.  It’s $1.49/month or $14.99/year, with a one week or one month trial, respectively.  This subscription covers iPhone, iPad, and Mac.  This is great, since I’ve found many reasonably priced iOS apps have absurdly priced Mac counterparts.  At first I was put off by the subscription model, but I’ve since warmed up to it.  I realized that I would happily pay a flat $15 for Bear.  However, I move around between apps like this somewhat frequently, and in a year, I may have found something else.  If Bear still fits my needs in a year, I’m willing to support the developers by paying again.  Longevity and adaptability are worth paying for.  ••

Link

Link: Ghacklabs’ Startup Quotes

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Image Credit: Ghacklabs

http://blog.ghacklabs.com/startup-goals/

A new friend of mine, Luke Fitzpatrick, recently posted a cool piece on his blog over at Ghacklabs.  He asked many different people, most of them founders of startups, what their goals were for 2017.  Luke was kind enough to include my goals for Staring at Phones in his list.  Go check it out!  ••

Journaling with Day One

I’ve dabbled in journaling before, occasionally keeping a prayer journal during my daily Bible time.  I don’t think I’ve ever set out to make a journal about my life in general.  Now that I think about it, I’m kinda surprised I never have (I like lifelogging, it’s fun).  Recently, I’ve spotted some articles online about the Day One journaling app, and I decided to give it a go.

I’m still playing around with what exactly I’m going to log.  I guess that’s the beauty of a journal: it can be anything.  It doesn’t have to have rules.  Fortunately Day One allows me to still be organized, even without rules.  Every post is automatically geotagged so I can, for example, look up all the notes I’ve taken in church.  I can also tag things manually or sort them into different notebooks.  Day One also supports Markdown, a sort of pseudo-HTML that makes formatting a snap.  I’ve fallen in love with Markdown so much that I’ve switched notes apps to one that supports it (more on that app soon).

Day One’s Main Screen
The Activity Feed
Widgets!

When I downloaded Day One, there were two things I knew I wanted to log.  Firstly, I wanted a place to put down good Bible verses I discover.  Getting closer to God is a big goal of mine this year, so I’m getting more intentional about morning Bible time.  I tag all these entries with a “Bible” tag.  Secondly, I wanted to simply put my thoughts down in writing at the end of each day.  This includes a list of good things that happened that day – being more positive is another 2017 goal of mine.

Throughout the day, if something makes an impression on me, I may put it down in my journal right then, or I may simply “check in” using the widget.  This creates a blank, time- and location-stamped post that I can add words to later.  I also created a Workflow that takes the contents of my clipboard and makes a new entry, and I’ve added this to my Workflow widget.

I also find stuff to add using the app’s Activity Feed.  This timeline can pull from your calendar, photo roll, location history, and even your social posts.  Here’s the beauty of it though: Day One doesn’t automatically add all that stuff into your journal like a firehose.  Instead, it’s there for you to scroll through at the end of the day.  See anything worth saving?  A few taps creates an entry for it (stamped at the time it happened, not when you logged it).  It’s so nice to curate my memories, instead of just dumping everything in there.  I think I’m going to like this app.  ••

Amazon Basics Bluetooth Keyboard: Thumbs Up

Years ago, I wrote about how I no longer bring my laptop to school with me, I just bring my iPad.  At the time, I also bought a cheap ($13) Bluetooth keyboard.  That keyboard turned out to be almost unusable, dropping the connection constantly.  I didn’t end up needing it much, however, so I never bought a new one.  This semester, however, I’ve got a lot more time between classes on campus, so I decided to pick up a new keyboard.

amazon basics keyboard.jpg

Image Credit: Amazon

I’ve selected the Amazon Basics Bluetooth Keyboard for Apple Devices.  I’ve always been really happy with the Amazon Basics brand, and this product is no exception.  It works great, it’s comfortable to type on, and the price is right: $20.  I definitely recommend this product.

I also made an accessory for my keyboard.  My old keyboard, after being left in my backpack for months, had lost its ‘M’ key.  I wanted to protect my new keyboard, so I sewed a padded carrying sleeve for it.  Now I can be productive on my iPad – in style.  ••

Airmail: Stop Fighting Email

In addition to Notability and 2Do, another app that really changed the way I work last year is Airmail.  Just like iOS Reminders, I had used iOS Mail for years and years, and never had much of a problem with it.  However, as time went on, my use of email outgrew the app.  As I started getting more mail, I began using the “Unread” inbox filter to keep track of emails that required action.  However, I had to make sure I didn’t accidentally mark one of those emails as read, because then it would get lost in the shuffle of all my other mail.  Basically, I realized I needed to move to an inbox zero-based approach, moving all mail I was done with out of my inbox, leaving only the important stuff.  I wanted a more powerful email app to do this, so I turned to Airmail.  Shoutout to my girlfriend’s dad for this recommendation!

Airmail’s Inbox
Snooze Options
Action List on the iPad
Airmail for Mac

The bottom line is that Airmail allows me to be faster and more organized with my email.  The goal is to get everything that isn’t important right now out of my inbox, so I can focus on what is important.  After reading an email, if I don’t have to take any action on it, I archive it right away.  If it’s something I need to deal with later that day, like when I get home, I usually just leave it in the inbox.  If I’m going to deal with it another day, I snooze it.  Snoozing is one of the most powerful features of Airmail.  Snooze a message, and Airmail moves it to a special folder.  Then, at the snooze time, I get a fresh push notification and the message reappears in my inbox.  This has totally streamlined the way I work with email.  No more fiddling around with read/unread to make sure I can see the important stuff.  The important stuff is all that’s there.

Archiving and snoozing messages is super quick and easy thanks to Airmail’s customizable swipe actions.  I have right swipe set to Archive and left swipe set to Snooze and Trash – you can select up to four actions for each direction!  Need even more?  A full list can be pulled up for an individual message (see image 3).  There’s even more actions available, but I’ve set the app to only show the ones I use.

Customization is a big theme throughout Airmail.  The main menu in the left pane of the app is fully customizable on both iOS and Mac, and there’s tons of options.  Airmail also has support for smart folders (created via searches, just like 2Do).  I haven’t set any up yet, but I’m going to soon, to organize emails that I refer to often.  All this customization is what makes Airmail a great app: it can be as powerful as you need it to be.  There are still a few bugs and things that need to be worked out (threads on the Mac are kinda wonky), but it’s a relatively new app, and I’m sure these things will be fixed in time.  If you’re tired of fighting your email and want to work with it instead, you should definitely give Airmail a try.  ••