My latest module for ScreenCastsOnline is live, and this one is all about Day One. I share many of my personal journaling workflows in this one, including me journaling template. If you’re a Day One user and want to elevate your journaling game, click here.
Bookworm #45: What’s Best Next
A book about Gospel-driven productivity? Sounds right in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately, I had a couple of major issues with this book. If you want to hear my rants, click here.
Mac Power Users #424: Workflows with Mike Schmitz
I was a guest on the latest episode of Mac Power Users! This was a really fun discussion about my reading workflows, how I nerd out about sleep, and much more. I have often referred to David Sparks and Katie Floyd as two of my internet heroes, and it was a thrill to join them for this episode. To give it a listen, click here.
ScreenCastsOnline: April 2018 Magazine
The April edition of the ScreenCastsOnline monthly magazine is out. A lot of really smart contribute to this magazine, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to join them. This issue features an article about how I take digital notes while reading physical books and an in-depth MindNode tutorial by yours truly. To check it out, click here.
Bookworm #44: Man’s Search for Meaning
This book impacted me deeply. It’s not an easy book to read, but some books are worth the struggle. This is one of those. I highly encourage you to read it yourself, but if you want the cliffnotes version, click here.
Bookworm #43: Flow
I’ve lost count of the number of times the books I’ve read have referred to Flow. This is a landmark book in the productivity space, and it’s about time we covered it for Bookworm. If you want to learn more about how to “get in the zone,” click here.
Bookworm #42: How to Read a Book
Don’t be fooled by the title, this book is deep. It was written a long time ago, but there’s a lot of practical information here on how to get the most out of the time you spend reading. For the full shownotes, click here.
Thoughts on TextExpander 6
Today, Smile announced a new version of TextExpander, the popular text expansion tool for Mac. This version of TextExpander though I’m afraid will be met with resistance and potentially alienate current customers as it embraces the popular software-as-a-service model and has gone from a one-time purchase of $34.95 to a monthly subscription of $4.95/month (discounts available for yearly billing).
TextExpander has long been one of my favorite applications (I even made a video guide for it over at Asian Efficiency), and I can’t imagine using a Mac without it anymore. As a long-time user of TextExpander and a huge fan of Smile Software I’m happy to give them more money for quality software, but I’m afraid the SaaS model isn’t a great fit here. IMHO, syncing my TE snippets via Dropbox is different than syncing financial (YNAB) or even personal (DayOne) data because those services need to be secure, whereas my TE snippets being synced is a matter of convenience. I’m not sure of the value of a stand-alone sync service in this case.
That being said, I do get it. TextExpander has launched a team component to make sure that your snippets are always in sync, and they even have a Windows beta now. This could be the saving grace for this model as I know many people who love their Macs for personal use but are stuck using a PC at work and being able to use TextExpander in both places would be a huge benefit for them. I get asked frequently if there is a Window’s equivalent for TextExpander, and I’m thrilled that they are launching one.
I do wish they had chosen to do something similar to 1Password though and allowed users the option of using the paid service in a team environment or continuing to use the Dropbox/iCloud sync for personal use. I don’t have a need for the cloud service myself, and I’m afraid of what will happen to my stand-alone TE installation. Smile has said that they’ll support version 5 for now, which is usually code for “until we can figure out a way to turn it off without making people upset.”
Will be interesting to see how this all shakes out, but I’m reserving judgment for now. As a TextExpander super-fan though I’m also not upgrading yet, which I think is very telling.
Rough Draft Review
A little while ago, I received an email from a software developer asking me to check out their app Rough Draft, a writing app designed to help you get your ideas out, not perfect your words. Since I write occasionally for The Sweet Setup, I get these kind of requests from time to time. Usually, they are from developers who are trying to garner attention for their app in hopes that I will add it to the list and feature it in the review. Most of these apps are not very good, but the emails I receive often start something like this:
“I really liked your article, and I think you’ll absolutely love our incredibly awesome app!”
I’m usually very skeptical about these emails because I spend a lot of time researching and testing the apps that I mention. Many times, I’ve actually seen the apps that these developers mention to me and they just don’t make the cut because (in my opinion) they’re just not that good.
But this request was different. For one thing, the developer had taken the time to research me and my other work instead of just clicking through on the article. But what really grabbed my attention was the premise of their app Rough Draft, which I absolutely loved – a writing app that didn’t allow you to go back and edit what you wrote.
While that may not seem like a big deal to most people, if you are a writer that probably sounds both appealing and frightening at the same time. As a writer myself (and a perfectionist), the tendency is always to go back and revise what you’ve already written rather than create something new and hit “publish.” Rough Draft eliminates this temptation and provides an easy, beautiful interface for getting your words down. Once you’re done, you can export a cleaned up copy to be revised in another app but the app does a very good job of encouraging you to just keep on putting words on the page.
One of the things that I really like about Rough Draft is that the interface is very clean. It’s very simple and doesn’t have a lot of features, but that’s the whole point. Instead of worrying about text formatting or spelling/grammar mistakes, you’re focused on cranking out words. Some of them won’t be very good, but some of them likely will be. Rough Draft does an excellent job of distilling the essence of writing down to the words, and in my experience, it helps significantly when I hit a point where I maybe would have stopped in the past as it encourages me (just enough) to keep going because you feel like there’s no going back now.
There are plenty of export options, including text, email, copy & paste, etc. With the stock app you can export your annotated rough draft, but with the in-app purchase (currently $6.99 due to the 50% discount) you can enable “Clean Exporting” in which all your mistakes (which are stuck through when writing) are removed. You can even export straight to Medium if that’s your thing.
The only thing I don’t like is that it does not support Markdown formatting, which is how I write 95% of the time. I get why it doesn’t, but I’m so used to writing in Markdown that missing the instant formatting from an app like Byword or Ulysses as I write was kind of jarring. That being said, I can still see where this app would fit into my workflow and I can tell you from personal use that it does what it says on the tin.
I’m very excited to see Rough Draft featured on the Mac App Store, and I hope that it does very well. I think it’s a very focused tool that solves a definite pain point for most writers, which is creating the momentum to keep the words flowing. If you’re a writer, you should definitely check it out.
Thoughts on iOS Night Shift
I’ve been listening to a lot of my favorite podcasters lately talk about Night Shift, a new feature set to roll out with iOS 9.3. While the idea has been around for awhile, this is the first time it’s been available on a large scale to Apple users and as such this is the first time many people have been exposed this type of technology. It’s been amusing to hear people debate the effectiveness of it.
I can tell you from personal experience though that only does Night Shift deliver and do what it says (help you sleep better), it solves what has been a difficult health situation for me for many years.
The summer of my senior year of high school, I had a seizure while standing in line at a McDonald’s. Fortunately my friend was with me and there was a nurse in the line also, so I was rushed to the hospital, given some medication and sent home. A couple months later, I had another one and I was diagnosed with epilepsy.
For me specifically, there are certain triggers I know can lead to a seizure. One of them is not getting enough rest, and the medication I have to take makes me drowsy on top of it. So in order for me to function, I have to get not only enough sleep, but good sleep so my body can physically recover.
As someone who writes about technology for a living, this has proven to be a problem sometimes. Often the only times I would get to sit down and write were late at night after my kids went to bed, but the blue light would keep me awake. I solved this on my Mac by using f.lux, a utility that causes your screen to emit an orangish glow instead of the harsh blue light that causes your body to stop producing melatonin (the checmical that it naturally produces after the sun goes down to help you fall and stay asleep).
f.lux on the Mac has been a game-changer, but I find myself doing more and more on my iOS devices and until Night Shift there hasn’t been a great solution. f.lux has existed on iOS for years and I even used to jailbreak my iPhone in the past just so I could install it, but Jailbreaking has always made me nervous and every time there was a new update Apple would patch the security holes the jailbreaking community would use in order to “unlock” the system level acces to the phone.
So to say I was excited about Night Shift is an understatement.
I’ve been using Night Shift in the public beta, and I absolutely love it. It’s one of those settings that you don’t even have to think about, and you don’t even realize how great it is until you actually turn it off in the middle of the night and you feel like your eyes are getting stabbed by the blue light that until recently you had become accustomed to.
If you want more info on the feature itself, check out the iOS preview page. If you want more info on the science behind why this is a good idea, check out the research section on the f.lux site and download the desktop version if you haven’t done so already.