Matt Birchler shared a very interesting thought experiment regarding whether getting the new Mac Studio is a good decision for you:

Consider an alternate reality where the Mac Studio was released in October 2021, and the new MacBook Pros were just revealed yesterday. Apple would have sold them with some variant of "if you want the power of the Mac Studio, but need to move around, then the new MacBook Pro can get you all the power of the same M1 Max in a thin and light device you can take anywhere."

It may sound simple to some, but I would bet that it’s a thought that most people wouldn’t have. I know it’s now one I’ve thought about when trying to determine if I need the new shiny object that appeals to me.

A lot of the time, when something new and shiny appeals to me, it’s normally because it’s new and shiny, not because it’s necessarily better for me than what I already have.

Marketing can work in wonderful ways, but it can also trick you into swapping a product for something new. Simply because they’ve told you how amazing it is, and the assumption is that well, it must be more amazing than the thing you already have.

I’ll definitely be using this one in the future.

Ru Singh wrote today about how Apple Music just doesn’t work for them, and that Spotify seems to be a better fit:

I recently began using Apple Music. There was something to say for a native mobile app and a native-in-progress desktop app.Unfortunately, that is simply not enough on its own.Here’s why Apple Music doesn’t cut it; and why Spotify does.

Obviously, I’m in no position to discredit their opinion. But the headline had me from the start, since I’m the other way around. I prefer Apple Music to Spotify. However, there are a few things that I think Spotify still does better.

The main points in the article against Apple Music are these:

1. No Handoff or continuity of playback between devices.
2. No “download all.” option.
3. Search on macOS being terrible.
4. The quality of playlists.
5. Apparent previous/next button issues.

I don’t want this to come across as a “well, actually…” piece. But I would like to at least offer some perspective on these points. I can’t comment on the last point, as it hasn’t affected me, but that’s not to say bugs don’t exist.

No Playback Continuity

First off, I think I can understand the feeling towards the lack of playback continuity between devices. Spotify does do this very well. However, although Apple Music doesn’t have this feature itself, AirPlay does. From any Apple device, you can send music to another device, or control it at the source.

Although, while I’ve found Apple Music to work better in the Apple ecosystem, with devices such as the HomePod, I’ve found Spotify to work better with Alexa devices.

No “Download All”

The lack of “download all” option is bad, I agree. Ideally, there should be an option to either keep your entire library downloaded to your device. But at least a “download all” button for your entire library would work.

Even so, there is a workaround to keep your entire library downloaded, and I’ve been using it for a very long time.

The trick is to create a Smart Playlist in the macOS Music app that has rules that mean all songs are added. I have it set up to include all songs where the artist is not blank.

Once this is created, you can then set this playlist to download on any device. Then as you add songs to your library, this playlist will update, and it will download on your device.

Search on macOS

Totally agree. This is terrible. The search just doesn’t feel good at all. Sometimes you enter a query and hit enter, and just nothing happens.

Here is me complaining about this issue back in November 2021.

Search in the Music app on Mac is terrible. pic.twitter.com/Ojj44Y2ElH

— Chris Hannah (@chrishannah) November 30, 2021

However, macOS 12.2 will include a lot of improvements for the Music app. You can read more in this article by MacRumors, but here is a video of me using the beta back in December 2021.

First search in the new Music app in macOS 12.2 beta. Much faster than before, massive improvement. pic.twitter.com/VVOMRqZkHl

— Chris Hannah (@chrishannah) December 19, 2021

I’m not sure if it’s up to the same level as Spotify, but at least it’s getting better.

Playlists

I’m mixed about playlists on both Apple Music and Spotify. For a while, I thought that Spotify’s “Daily Mix” was the best, but I’m really liking Apple Music’s “Favourites Mix” now.

As for community-created playlists, although I share some myself on Apple Music, I’ve always found Spotify to have a much bigger collection.

I know Apple (and I guess Spotify) also make “official” playlists for various genres or moods, but I haven’t really tried these at all.

But I get the point, the community on Spotify definitely seems better.

More thoughts on Apple Music vs Spotify

Apart from the points mentioned in Ru Singh’s article, there are a few extra points I’d like to make.

• The Music app on macOS is definitely getting better, but Spotify has always felt much more responsive. I also think it looks better.
• Although I like Spotify’s dark interface on macOS, when I used it on iOS, I really wanted a light option.
• When I used Spotify, I didn’t find it particularly easy to manage the library and my downloaded songs.
• Apple Music seems to work much better for me on the HomePod, but I think this probably more because of the limitations from Apple. It would be good if Spotify could have this level of integration too.

For now, Apple Music is a better fit for myself. But I like to switch between the two services every now and then, so I’ll most likely be playing with Spotify again soon.

Brie Wolfson, wrote a great article listing their favourite things about working at companies that have a culture of writing. I’m a big fan of writing (and sharing) at work, and I tended to agree with everything in the post.

My favourites on the list would be:

Raises the quality bar: When you open up your work to a broader audience, you naturally do more polishing before you share. When everyone is doing that work for each other, the average for the company goes way up!Good ideas bubble up: If the ideas are compelling, they will spread. And it doesn’t necessarily matter who wrote it. I’ve seen documents written in a corner of an organization make their way all the way to the CEO and meaningfully influence top-level decisions.Ditch the “roadshows”: Publish a document to get your ideas out there and it not only democratizes it, it saves time! Docs create a single destination/artifact for anyone around the org to reference and opine on when appropriate or required. I like to call this the ‘YO, FYI” approach. Draft your doc and blast it out with the simple message of ‘YO, FYI” to those that may want to know.

I’m someone who writes a lot at work. For many of the reasons that are pointed out in the above-mentioned list. But if I would come up with the main benefits that I see myself from writing a lot at work I’d say:

Increases chance of understanding - You can spend more time explaining something when writing it out, and the reader can read it at their own pace, and take their time to understand it fully.

Gives the opportunity for more people to gain knowledge - Sometimes when you’re on a call or in a meeting, knowledge stays within small groups of people. But by having a written record, it allows more people (if shared appropriately) to also read it. For example, maybe a new employee wanting to know more about a piece of work/functionality, or someone on the same team that wishes to gain a better perspective of a bigger piece of work.

Showcases your work and knowledge - This can be taken the wrong way, but by offering more detail on discussions, decisions, or any learned knowledge, you can both help others with the shared information, and showcase your work to others. Perhaps it helps your boss to see what you’re up to, and reassures them that you’re on track. Or possibly it shows hard work, and potential for promotion.

Information has a longer lifespan - Instead of staying within the confines of a conversation, information can live longer. And at the same time, it can be used as a living document that is constantly updated.

Saves time - Both as a method of sharing information to big groups of people, and to explain complex topics that may take a while to read and fully understand.

Anecdotally, I have noticed that at my work the people that write more, tend to have a better reputation, and from my perspective, seem to be better at their jobs.

Kam Lasater, wrote a great piece on technical debt. Primarily explaining how stupid you sound when most people try to explain technical debt to businesses-minded people.

When we use the term technical debt with non-technical business colleagues, they assume, that technical debt is analogous to financial debt. After a few minutes of discussion they are usually relieved to find that there is no actual money problem. Then after not seeing any tangible sign of a fire in the movie theater, they will then conclude that that we either don’t know what we are talking about or we are using the wrong terms or both. Think about their context, how quickly would the CFO get fired if they claimed “we have a lot of debt” but couldn’t produce a balance sheet with lenders, amounts, interest rates and terms?

The article goes into a lot more detail on what the problem is, and also the ways you can explain it better. But essentially, the trick is to explain it in ways that people can understand:

Companies and business leaders don’t care if jobs are hard or annoying or take longer than they “should”. The difference between a user story taking a day or 3 days is negligible compared to its business value. Companies and their leaders care about revenue and costs. They care about customers and growth. They care about time to market. If we want to have our non-technical colleagues listen and act, we need to either improve our use of the financial terms they understand or we need to translate our message into business outcomes that they do care about.

I’ve seen this myself where I work. Every so often it’s regarding technical debt, but typically, I think it’s when people aren’t aware of the context in which they’re explaining something. It’s something I definitely had to get to grips with as well, learning how to talk to various people, what they understand, what they’re interested in, and overall, what matters to them.

This may sound rude, but I think sometimes us developers get a bit stuck in our own world. We tend to use a bit too much jargon, arguing over the stupidest of problems, and not really focussing on the wider business perspective. For example, the value of the product doesn’t get better if you use a different code style.

One thing that helped me at work was to spend time with people like product managers, business leaders, or anyone else non-technical that I had to explain things to. That way I learned their perspective, and adapted my wording to fit. It’s only going to be better for both parties if you can get things across clearly. It avoids unnecessary confusion and it saves time.

Since getting my new Mac a few days ago, I’ve been trying to move my iOS writing automations over. However, one of the main shortcuts just wasn’t possible on the Mac. It’s the “Link Post” shortcut that I’ve been using for quite some time on my iPad.

It doesn’t exactly do much, but it saves a lot of time and effort. It essentially uses the share menu in Safari to pass the article and the highlighted text to a shortcut. From there, it extracts the title, author, and url of the article, along with formatting the selected text as a markdown blockquote (using my app, Text Case), formats it nicely, and creates a new sheet in Ulysses. Leaving me to add some comments to the sheet, before publishing it to my blog.

Turns out the Mac’s a bit more complicated, as while there’s a share menu, you can’t use it to launch a shortcut. So, my existing solution was out the window.

I tried a few other options that sounded promising, such as the “Get Article from Safari Reader” action that seemed to be precisely what I wanted. I’d be able to detect the URL somehow, and then be able to extract any information manually. Unfortunately, this action doesn’t work, and I’ve been told it hasn’t been working for some time.

After some experimenting, I realised that as long as I could have the URL and highlighted text, then I would be able to come up with something sufficient. Because from the URL, I can make a quick GET request, and get the page title. I haven’t worked out how to get the author using this method, but it wasn’t exactly reliable on iOS anyway.

My last option was to try to use macOS Services. I discovered that if I used a service from Safari, then it received the selected text as the input. And to top it off there was also a way to receive the “onscreen content” inside a shortcut, which in the case of Safari, returns the URL of the current page.

That meant I was able to combine the selected text from the input, and the URL from the onscreen content, and put together a link post generator.

After fetching the page title and url, the only thing it needs to do is to format the selected text as a Markdown blockquote using Text Case, and put it together into a nice format.

It’s definitely not the quickest shortcut, with it taking around 5 seconds to create the Ulysses sheet, but it’s definitely better than doing all of this manually. I also added a notification after the sheet is created, so you can be sure it’s done. And you also get an option to open the sheet straight away.

Here’s a quick video of the shortcut in action:

Download the “Safari to Link Post” shortcut.

Greg Morris, on what he thinks is the best minimalist phone:

After experimenting with older devices, I felt unfulfilled and sometimes caused more hassle than they are worth. Recently, I tried a ‘dumb phone’ in the Punkt MP02, which left a lot to be desired considering its £300 price tag. Couple this with the realisation that I need to be able to access some apps occasionally (How on earth do you do banking nowadays when the branches are hardly open?) – I was stuck. That was until I realised I had the best minimal device to replace my phone the whole time – my Apple Watch.I’ve been in love with the Apple Watch, particularly a cellular version, for as long as I can remember. It allows me to leave my phone at home when I don’t need it but still be contactable, yet I couldn’t see its real usefulness until I took a step back. I truly think this could be the best minimalist approach to a world that seems to demand a smartphone.

It’s an interesting idea to have the Apple Watch be your “phone”, and after reading Greg’s piece, it sounds like a very viable option.

I’m not an Apple Watch wearer anymore having switched to a “real” mechanical watch recently. However, this idea of a more discreet device which performs the fundamental functions of a phone without most of the distractions is very attractive to me. I guess it’s somewhere in the middle of being cut off from the world, and being wired-in to the internet.

It’s the first update to Text Case this year, and to be honest the first one in quite some time. I’ll get on to that in a bit, but first I’ll go over what’s in this update.

Two fixes. Firstly to address the Guardian title case that wasn’t correctly following the rules where certain words are always lowercase. And secondly, to address the bug when searching the formats list and the empty section headers would still be present.

Refreshed dark mode . The previous dark mode took inspiration from other iOS apps when it was first designed, where it used a lot of jet black, and everything was very dark. But it’s always been a thing that I’ve not 100% been a fan of, so I took some time to soften the colours a bit, and I think it looks a lot better.

New accent colours. Text Case has always had a red-ish accent colour throughout the app. This colour was taken from the original app icon. However, the default icon changed back at the start of 2021 when 12 new variants were added. The new default icon featured a slightly different red, and a new blue colour. So for this update I’ve decided to adjust the accent colours to match this icon, which means in light mode the accent will be red, and the blue will be used for dark mode (which works well with the new dark mode I must say).

Support for Shortcuts on Mac. Definitely a finally. This has been long deserved, and I’m to be honest I’m surprised more people haven’t ben reaching out and asking for it. But it’s finally here, and I think it makes Text Case a much better option now for people who want their automations to work on all of their machines.

1 new format. This update wasn’t planned to be filled with new formats, but there was one that I was getting a few requests for, and that was to be able to remove line breaks from a piece of text. It’s relatively simple, so I thought I may as well add it now. There are a few more I have lined up that will be in a future release, I just wanted to get this update out sooner rather than later.

Download

This update is available now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!

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So why has it been so long since the last update?

Okay, so it mainly comes down to one event. Which was pretty much self-inflicted, and probably shouldn’t have happened.

So, a few months ago I was playing around with Linux, and installing various distros on a partition on my Mac. This time I was testing out Pop!_OS, which is a relatively beginner-friendly distro, and seemed Mac friendly.

I created all the necessary partitions, making note of the macOS partitions to keep away from them, and I installed the OS. It went fine, and I was able to play with it, and spend some time installing a bunch of packages and desktop environments. And once I was a bit more comfortable, I decided to clear the partitions and reinstall the OS, and then use what I learned to make a cleaner configuration.

However, on the second install, the OS was written to the wrong partition. Somehow the macOS partition had been used instead. I’m 99.9% sure it wasn’t me, although if this was someone else doing it, I’d be 99.9% sure it was user error.

My Mac had essentially been wiped. Although, at this point I was relatively calm as I have my important documents in iCloud Drive, photos in iCloud Photos, and my development work hosted in GitHub repositories.

Except that last one wasn’t entirely true. For some reason, the work I did for the 2021.6 release of Text Case hadn’t been pushed. So the App Store version was actually ahead of the code.

This meant that before I could work on any new features, I’d have to rewrite the last update. The update contained 15 new formats, various adjustments, and a few bug fixes. On top of that, there was a slight issue I was having with Xcode where I had one framework causing me issues, because it was being linked in the Mac Catalyst app target, and also the macOS bundle which powers the macOS services support.

If you add in my laziness, and some irritation that I’d have to spend time on things I’d already finished, this work took longer than it did originally.

Eventually I had everything how it was in the 2021.6 release, and I got working on the new functionality that I mentioned above. Part of me was thinking that I should add more to the update to make it a bigger release, but with the big gap in time since the last update, I thought it was best to just get it out now. It’s not like I can’t update again in a few weeks.

So that’s the story. I’m certainly glad it’s over, and I’m sure some of you will find it funny. I’ve taken a few steps to make sure it won’t happen again, such as buying a NAS and setting up Time Machine, and also buying a second-hand ThinkPad to handle my Linux experiments. Hopefully that means Text Case can go back to being regularly updated with new formats and functionality.

In some very much unexpected news, Blizzard have announced that they’re developing a new survival game, for both PC and console (which, I assume, will now be Xbox).

Blizzard:

Blizzard is embarking on our next quest. We are going on a journey to a whole new universe, home to a brand-new survival game for PC and console. A place full of heroes we have yet to meet, stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be lived. A vast realm of possibility, waiting to be explored.Every story needs a teller. And every world needs builders. What if that could be you?For thirty years, Blizzard has been creating universes for millions of players around the globe. This requires a diverse team of developers willing to lend their voices, to listen and to be heard. That is our mission.

As much as World of Warcraft has had more downsides than good for the past few years, and so has the company (and parent company) as a whole. I used to regard Blizzard as being my favourite game developers. They always seemed to be the ones that would arrive late, with a few delays, but always ended up making a great game.

I’ve been a theoretical fan of survival games since Day-Z came out, and I’ve tried a few of them, but they’ve all felt a bit boring to me. I’ve never found one with any real depth. Maybe that’s because I haven’t tried the right one, but I would assume that a Blizzard one would probably be my best bet, as I’ve enjoyed all of their games so far.

The artwork definitely looks interesting, and looks like it matches the style of World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, which I very much like.

I like the idea of this survival game being set in the Warcraft universe, but I can also accept that it might be time for some new worlds and characters. I guess I would be fine with it either way.

One thought in my mind is that I hope this doesn’t take away anything from World of Warcraft. There’s been a few recent leaks regarding a potential ‘Dragon Isles’ expansion for WoW, and they all sound good to me. So if they are true, and WoW does seem to be on the right path again, I hope it can continue that way.

The Guardian have published a great article listing 100 different ways that you can improve your life without really trying. It’s both insightful and funny, so I’d recommend giving it a once-over.

My favourites would have to be these:

• Keep a bird feeder by a window, ideally the kitchen. It’ll pass the time when you’re washing up.
• Sharpen your knives.
• Laugh shamelessly at your own jokes.
• Eat salted butter (life’s too short for unsalted).
• Don’t save things for “best”. Wear them – enjoy them.
• Always be willing to miss the next train.
• Listen to the albums you loved as a teenager.

I wrote recently about my feelings on using older products, and how they can still function many years on. And with good timing, Joshua Blais, one of my current favourite YouTubers, made a great video about the products he uses.

As mentioned in the video’s title, he uses a 10 year old Thinkpad laptop currently. But he also goes over the other products he uses, and how he splits his use cases across his devices to keep contexts clearly defined and separated.