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Posts tagged with "productivity"

iPad Pro for Everything: How I Rethought My Entire Workflow Around the New 11” iPad Pro

My 11" iPad Pro.

My 11” iPad Pro.

For the past two years since my girlfriend and I moved into our new apartment, my desk has been in a constant state of flux. Those who have been reading MacStories for a while know why. There were two reasons: I couldn’t figure out how to use my iPad Pro for everything I do, specifically for recording podcasts the way I like, and I couldn’t find an external monitor that would let me both work with the iPad Pro and play videogames when I wasn’t working.

This article – which has been six months in the making – is the story of how I finally did it.

Over the past six months, I completely rethought my setup around the 11” iPad Pro and a monitor that gives me the best of both worlds: a USB-C connection for when I want to work with iPadOS at my desk and multiple HDMI inputs for when I want to play my PS5 Pro or Nintendo Switch. Getting to this point has been a journey, which I have documented in detail on the MacStories Setups page.

This article started as an in-depth examination of my desk, the accessories I use, and the hardware I recommend. As I was writing it, however, I realized that it had turned into something bigger. It’s become the story of how, after more than a decade of working on the iPad, I was able to figure out how to accomplish the last remaining task in my workflow, but also how I fell in love with the 11” iPad Pro all over again thanks to its nano-texture display.

I started using the iPad as my main computer 12 years ago. Today, I am finally able to say that I can use it for everything I do on a daily basis.

Here’s how.

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Apple Shows Off Layered Recordings in Voice Memos with the Help of Michael Bublé and Carly Pearce→

Do you remember Music Memos? It was an iPhone app launched by Apple in 2016 that acted as a scratchpad for musicians. The idea was to quickly save musical ideas that could then be exported to GarageBand to be fleshed out. The app didn’t get many major updates and was discontinued in 2021.

Screenshots from the original Music Memos app.

Screenshots from the original Music Memos app.

Music Memos didn’t last, but the idea behind it was sound. When it was introduced, musicians were already using Apple’s Voice Memos app to save ideas for vocals, guitar riffs, and more as the press release announcing Music Memos acknowledged.

In the years since Music Memos’ demise, musicians presumably returned to Voice Memos, a more general utility, but one that has steadily been updated and improved by Apple. Yesterday, with the release of iOS 18.2, Voice Memos took another big step forward by adding the ability to isolate vocals recorded over an instrumental track. As Apple explains it in its press release:

Powered by the A18 Pro chip, and leveraging advanced processing and machine learning to isolate the vocal recording, Voice Memos creates two individual tracks so users can apply additional mixing and production in professional apps like Logic Pro. And with Voice Memos on Mac, Layered Recordings are synced across devices and available on Mac to drag-and-drop into a Logic session.

To prove the power of the new Voice Memos feature, singers Michael Bublé and Carly Pearce, along with producer Greg Wells, used the app on an iPhone 16 Pro to create “Maybe This Christmas,” a new holiday duet available on Apple Music.

Michael Bublé had this to say about Layered Recordings:

I don’t think people realize the critical role Voice Memos on iPhone plays in the creation process for musicians. And now with Layered Recordings, if an artist has a moment of inspiration, being unencumbered by the traditional studio experience becomes the advantage, not the limitation. It’s so typically Apple to build something we didn’t know we needed — and now won’t be able to live without.

This feature is remarkable and a great example of the power of today’s devices. Just a few days ago, I was given a demo of Moises, this year’s winner of Apple’s App Store Award for best iPad app, which does similar sorcery separating vocals and individual instruments. It’s a powerful capability with incredible productivity implications for all musicians.

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Mimestream: The Perfect Email App for Gmail Users on the Mac

I’m going to straight-up spoil this review for you at the top. If you primarily use Gmail and work on a Mac, you should try Mimestream now. It offers the core Gmail experience wrapped in a thoughtfully designed native Mac app. If you spend a lot of time on other devices or have non-Gmail accounts, the call is tougher, but that’s exactly my situation, and I think Mimestream is still the best Mac email choice for most people. Here’s why.

I have four primary email accounts. Two are work-related, and two are personal. All but my iCloud email are connected to Gmail, which makes me a pretty strong candidate for Mimestream, which launched this week after a couple years in beta.

I’ve been using Mimestream on and off for over a year, returning to it in late January after briefly trying Missive. What drew me back to Mimestream was the app’s native design, tight integration with Gmail, and open roadmap. The app doesn’t have everything I want from an email client. However, because I handle most of my email on the Mac and most of what I’d like to see Mimestream incorporate is planned or under consideration for future updates, it’s become how I manage most of my email.

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MacStories Hands-On: Podcast Editing with Logic Pro for iPad

I was as surprised as anyone when Apple announced that Logic Pro was coming to the iPad. I was excited too. Logic Pro is an app I use every week to produce MacStories’ podcasts, and I’d wanted the freedom to do that work on the iPad for a very long time.

However, my excitement was tempered by skepticism about whether the kind of work I do would be supported. Logic Pro for the Mac is designed for music production. It’s a very capable podcast production tool, too, but editing podcasts uses only a tiny fraction of Logic Pro’s tools. With the focus on music production in Apple’s press release announcing the iPad version, I wondered whether the subset of production tools I use would find their way onto the iPad or not.

Music production projects are typically much more complex than podcast edits.

Music production projects are typically much more complex than podcast edits.

So, when Apple offered to send me a 12.9” M2 iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil last week to test Logic Pro for iPad, I jumped at the chance to see what it could do. Since last week, I’ve played with Logic Pro’s music-making tools, which I’ll cover below. They’re impressive, but I’ve spent most of my time putting the app through a more personal, real-world test: podcast editing. After some initial exploration of Logic Pro’s UI to get my bearings, I created a project, dropped in the audio tracks from last week’s episode of MacStories Unwind, and started editing.

Logic Pro for iPad includes a collection of lessons to help you learn the app, along with a catalog of sound packs and loops.

Logic Pro for iPad includes a collection of lessons to help you learn the app, along with a catalog of sound packs and loops.

What I found is that Logic Pro for iPad is a remarkably capable alternative to the Mac version. The app comes with limitations and frustrations, like any first version of a complex new app, but it’s also the real deal. Logic Pro for iPad isn’t a companion app to the Mac version. The iPad version doesn’t match the Mac app feature-for-feature, but it’s not a watered-down version of the desktop version either. Instead, Logic Pro for iPad delivers on the promise of the iPad’s hardware in a reimagined way that we haven’t seen enough of with so-called ‘pro’ apps.

There’s a lot of ground to cover between my podcasting experiments and the music production features of Logic, so let’s dive in.

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The Practicality of Art in Software

I’ve been following with great interest this series of articles by John Gruber (and Matt Birchler’s related story) about the chasm between iOS and Android apps. I have some thoughts since expanding my app knowledge beyond iOS and iPadOS is one of my goals for 2023.

About a month ago, during my holiday break, I purchased a Google Pixel 7 as a way to re-familiarize myself with Android.1 To say that I found the ecosystem worse than I remembered would be an understatement. It’s not just about the fact that – as Gruber and Birchler noted – most Android apps suck compared to their iOS counterparts; it’s that the entire OS lacks cohesiveness.

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Things 3.17 Overhauls the App’s Shortcuts Actions

Things 3.17 is out for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with greatly expanded support for Shortcuts. That opens up a much wider variety of possible automations than ever before. It’s a lot to take in at once, but I’ve been playing with these actions since the end of last year, so I thought I’d highlight what each does and share a few shortcuts that I’ve built with them.

At the highest level, these are the kind of Shortcuts actions I like best. They work across all of Apple’s platforms and include parameters and predicate filtering, which allow users to build fine-tuned shortcuts that either weren’t possible before those features were added to Shortcuts or would have required users to jump through many more hoops to achieve.

When you start exploring Things’ Shortcuts actions keep in mind that they operate on more than just tasks. When you see ‘items’ referred to in the actions, that could any of the primary components of the app, including projects, headings, tasks, areas, or checklists. Not all actions support all item types, and each item has a unique set of properties that can be accessed depending on the action, so it’s worth experimenting to understand everything that can be accomplished.

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‘Command-K Bars’ as a Modern Interface Pattern→

Maggie Appleton (via Michael Tsai) has written about one of the UI trends I’ve seen pop up more and more lately, and which we mentioned on AppStories several times over the past year: the so-called ‘Command-K’ bars inside apps.

Command bars are command-line bars that pop up in the middle of the screen when you hit a certain keyboard shortcut.They’re also known as ‘command palettes’, ‘command launchers’, or ‘omniboxes’ Traditionally CMD + K, hence the moniker “Command K bars.” But CMD + E and CMD + / have also been strong shortcut contenders.

[…]

They don’t even have to remember its exact name. Fuzzy search can help them find it by simply typing in similar names or related keywords. For example, if I type “make” into a command bar, it’s likely to show me any actions related to creating new items. Even if “make” isn’t part of the action name.

[…]

These bars also do double duty as universal search bars. You’re not only searching through the available actions in an app. You can also search through content like documents, file names, and tasks.

You’ve probably seen these command bars in apps like Obsidian, Craft, Todoist, Arc, Cron, Notion, and lots of others. (On Apple platforms, Things did something similar all the way back in 2018 with a feature called ‘Type Travel’.) It feels like every modern productivity app – especially on desktop – has its own flavor of this interface element nowadays. In a way, this visual trend reminds me of pull-to-refresh before it was standardized by Apple and became a native iOS UI component.

I’m intrigued by Command-K bars as a feature that speeds up keyboard-driven interactions on iPad and Mac while at the same time serving as a search box for an app’s own commands. Think of the typical Command-K bar as a mix of Spotlight, the macOS menu bar, and iPadOS’ keyboard shortcut menu, but as an element that can be invoked from anywhere in an app and dismissed with just a keystroke. As the examples in Maggie’s article show, Command-K bars can be genuinely useful to surface hidden commands and allow power users to save time when using complex apps.

There are plenty of cases where Apple’s apps could benefit from this kind of in-app search makeover. Here’s Notes, for instance, when you activate the ‘Note List Search’ command:

Search inside Notes.

Search inside Notes.

And here’s the rather complex list of keyboard shortcuts supported by Safari:

Keyboard shortcuts in Safari for iPad.

Keyboard shortcuts in Safari for iPad.

I said this on AppStories and I’ll say it again: I think Apple should consider an in-app version of Spotlight that replicates the functionality of Command-K bars and is optimized for keyboard usage on iPadOS and macOS. Modern productivity software is clearly moving in this direction on desktop and the web; I’d like to see Apple apps offer faster keyboard navigation and command discoverability too.

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Bike: An Elegant Outliner For Mac-Focused Workflows

Bike is a brand new Mac-only outlining app from Hog Bay Software that executes the fundamentals of outlining flawlessly. The outline creation and editing workflows are polished, and the keyboard-focused navigation makes moving around a large outline effortless.

The app’s feature set is limited by design. That focus is part of what makes Bike such a good outliner. The care and attention that has gone into building a solid outlining foundation are immediately evident.

However, that focus comes with a downside. Bike is a simple app that won’t meet the needs of users looking for iPhone or iPad support, formatting options, Shortcuts support, or other features.

Overall, I like the approach Bike has taken a lot, but I think it has gone too far, limiting the app’s utility more than is necessary to maintain its simplicity. Let me explain what I mean.

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Automation April: Never Forget to Stop a Timery Time Tracking Timer Again

I’ve been using Timery to track my time using the Toggl time tracking service for several years now, and although I’ve gotten better at remembering to stop timers, I still forget sometimes. That’s why I built Stop Long Timer, a shortcut that periodically checks if you’ve had a timer running for a long time and volunteers to stop it. If you decline, Stop Long Timer offers to leave you alone for a while so you can wrap up whatever you’re doing.

Stopping a timer that’s been running for a certain period is the easy part. Timery has an action to check the duration of the current timer and another to stop a timer. What I wanted, though, is something more flexible because sometimes a timer has been running a long time because I’m deep in the middle of a project. In that case, I don’t want to stop the timer. In fact, I don’t want to be bugged again either. That part of Stop Long Timer is a little more complex and is a good example of how you can save data outside a shortcut to use as a reference point.

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