For years now in work I’ve had a simple text app (Notepad++) on my work PC to keep little references, meeting logs, notes and how to’s - I treat it like post it notes or a scratchpad. I’ve never really brought this over to my personal devices but since using TOT I’ve started to do the same across iOS.

I used to use Notes but since it’s big update a few iOS versions ago even that seems too heavy for this function. Well, I’ve been using TOT now for a couple of months and found it’s become this scratchpad. I can only have 7 notes at any one time, which to be honest fits my use case. I want somewhere quick to jot down some thoughts and move on.

I’m using it for a daily check list of things I want to accomplish today, posts like this one that I can paste into Micro.Blog, things to remember for later and so on. These are notes that aren’t meant for the long term just a temporary storage area.

Not everyone likes to work this way but it fits with how I like to jot things down quickly.

An issue I raised like plenty of others I’d imagine, in beta 2 you can now delete an app via the App Library rather than having to add to the Home Screen first.

Since making the decision to engage less in social media I’ve become a big fan of RSS again and have my reader of choice NetNewsWire installed across all of my iOS devices.

I started curating my feed on my iPhone only. Once I was happy I then used the export option to save to my iCloud.

On my iPad I then use this export to sync my feed. When I add new feeds I export and reimport again. The only issue with this is that when you reimport you’ll need to remove all of your subscriptions first or you’ll have duplicates.

I know this isn’t perfect but is free and saves a sign up to an RSS management app.

Another day, another warning for apps that use your clipboard. I trust Apollo but wonder why they are taking my clipboard at all. I think there’s info here that needs to be shared by the development community as to why they are using our clipboard. For me it’s a lack of understanding so I’m not targeting any developers, just want to know why in general for any app that shows this message.

Anyone else on the beta finding they are suddenly aware of their data being shared between apps?

A week in testing iOS 14 and I’m loving the new App Library feature. My setup now involves one home screen and then the App Library, no more other pages of apps. This feature allows you to let iOS manage your app organisation and for me at least has encouraged me to install more apps.

When I swipe over I get all of my apps organised by category.

To do this I simply turned off all of my home screens in the edit home screen setting.

Now I just need Apple to bring it over to the iPad.

I’m very much enjoying iOS 14 and wanted to start to share how to customise the Reminders widget.

Add the widget and then long press and tap ‘Edit Widget”.

I like to change this view to see how many items I’ve got due today. So I tap list and change.

You can change the list displayed to meet your own needs but personally I use TODAY because for me this seems most relevant to have on a widget you want to see most often.

I don’t think I could go back to iOS 13 now after beta testing iOS 14, it’s made the iPhone home screen so much more alive and interactive. I’ve not gone overboard with my widgets but now settled on one large one that is ‘stacked’. This stacking means that I added the medium sized calendar, followed by reminders. I then dragged reminders on top and hey presto I have a stack I can scroll through. I then simply added weather, notes, music and battery.

They aren’t updating super reliably at the moment but I’m so impressed with the implementation.

As a side note this beta 1 seems really stable, much more than iOS 13. I think Apple have taken the negative feedback on board from last year.

Can’t wait to start seeing more of your setups.

Some nice looking little Reminders updates, nice to see development continuing so I’ll give it a little test as I work through my iOS 14 content.

I always love to watch the keynotes but get lost in the details so always like to paw my way through the Apple info afterwards.

Apple has now created it’s iOS 14 preview page and I look forward to reading through it all as I digest the massive feature dump from today’s keynote.

Lockne is a great little app that I can’t believe hasn’t already been done, it’s a really useful utility app that every iPhone user could do with. If you’re into changing up your wallpaper every 5 minutes (like me) then you need to check it out.

Developed by Jonathan Ruiz this is an app that lets you visualise what your home screen and wallpaper would look like in real time and then allows you to capture what you saw within the app.

The UI is simple and intuitive and for me the only place I would change it would be to move the settings icon somewhere else or make it smaller, other than it’s perfect for what the app is trying to achieve.

Once you are happy with how it’ll look then simply hit the circle to take a photo as you would within the camera app.

You can switch between lock screen and home screen by tapping on the far right icon, in this case above hitting the lock icon shows you what it might look like as a lock screen rather than the home screen as above. In my testing whilst writing up this overview I experienced no bugs and performance is really good. I’ll be using this app quite a lot going forward in my pursuit for that perfect wallpaper.

I think it’s great to see utilities like this still being made, one that feels like the creator wanted to use themselves so went out and did it. It’s important to support apps like this one and I gladly spent the £2.99 to support it.

I should have learnt my lesson totally trusting my data to iCloud given my track record but the latest failing got me thinking about my password management habits. They are shocking to be honest, I’ve kept an Apple Note with some in (not written any down on paper) and relied on iCloud Keychain. As you can see above it lost almost all of them in the most recent iOS device restore.

I’ve been using it as a password manager when I should have used a dedicated app.

I’m open to suggestions as I start to review options to moving to a dedicated app.

With this Hey and Apple argument still on going it made me rethink a few things and take a step back and review the way I think about apps. I’ve always tried to do my best to support developers but more recently I realise I’ve been trying to use Apple’s own apps a little too much. Seeing the power and frankly bullying from Apple around their App Store guidance it got me really reviewing what core apps I’m using and that I should be using as many third party (and cross platform) apps that I can.

This is to both support other businesses and to reduce my reliance on iOS. I’m not switching to Android but putting all my eggs in one basket isn’t sensible if my view changes and I have to say that it might should Apple continue down this defensive path.

So, I’m going to do my best to share more app releases and reviews from third party developers going forward. If you have an app idea or want me to offer advice or reviews then please reach out to me on Twitter or on the contact form on my blog.

It’s that time of year when those early adopters amongst us trash our data and devices with beta software for a few months. Every year I tell myself I’m not doing it and always end up enrolling in the developer program again. I’m preparing for this year I’ve gone all in and installed iOS, iPadOS and macOS betas across all of my devices.

I’m embracing it this year and planning to write up more of my thoughts on the new software versions and its impact on my workflows.

Almost all of my apps use data in the cloud so I never even back my devices up. This makes restoring non stressful knowing all my data is either in iCloud or a third party. If you’re new to the beta train then make sure you have an iCloud backup before doing anything! And if you can also do it make sure you’re photos are exported out somewhere separately.

First off here’s my setup so you know what I’m relating this post to

• 2020 11" iPad Pro
• Bluetooth vertical mouse (with scroll wheel, left and right mouse buttons)
• Apple keyboard (taken from an iMac)

Since getting my new iPad with USB-C I’ve been plugged into a USB hub with attached mouse and keyboard way more than I did when I had a lightning equipped iPad and finding new ways to work with it everyday. These might seem like a small list (I’ll be adding as I discover more) and if you’re used to using it this way may seem basic but I’m hoping others like me using it properly for the first time will find it useful.

MOUSE

• Left click the little white bar at the bottom of the screen to go HOME
• Make use of the right click in apps as you would the right click to access options on an element on the MAC, you'l be surprised at the number of apps that have this feature enabled
• Don't forget to use the scroll wheel in Safari and apps, it even works in the iPadOS settings app

KEYBOARD

• CMD+H to go home
• If you're using a MAC keyboard then the function keys work (brightness and media controls)
• Hold down the CMD key within apps to get shortcut help
• CMD+TAB to bring up multitasker (then use CMD+Q to quit any apps you want to close)

If you have more please let me know and I’ll test and add them to this page.

I’ve been using OmniFocus on and off for years but after reading this article on MacStories and revisiting how I was using tags it’s finally clicked.

I was using a project for almost everything, I had one for my creative projects and others for Home or Family etc. Taking a step back things like home and family aren’t really projects but categories. This is where tags come in.

I’m now using tags for everything that goes into my system. What I’ve changed is to use projects for actual projects like my podcast or my blog. Basically where I have a goal and need to break it down into tasks.

What in finding since switching over to this method is I’m using the tags section of the app to view all of my tasks.

So far so good and I haven’t even thought about switching apps in the last couple of weeks whilst playing around with OmniFocus again.

Quite a few changes since I last posted and I’m wondering if I should do another episode about the changes?

Main takeaway is Fantastical (mainly because the widget is great), worry tree (for obvious reasons…), Tot, AirTable and Tally.

Since using the series 5 somethings happened I wasn’t expecting - a much better experience with third party apps.

I’d tried to use third party apps on and off in the past but sync or performance always turned me off. Using the series 5 has me excited to use them on my wrist again as they perform really well. As you can see above my watch face (Meridian) is pretty simple and I’m using

• Activity
• Date
• Things
• Streaks

As I build a new system for myself I’m trying to keep a few apps core to the way I manage my goals and tasks.

I’m only at the beginning and I’ll be posting how I’m using them all soon once I’ve created a framework and it’s settled down.

Here’s a not so nice app story for me, appreciate I’m in the minority that uses this app but it’s had a change to move your data away from being local to on their server.

The beauty of this app was it’s simplicity in allowing you to see how long since something or to record streaks.

I’m not keen on moving my data so I’m deleting the app.

It’s a sad day for an app I’ve used for so long but there are alternatives so I’d recommend you start looking for one if you want to keep your data local.

There is a skip button but as you can see above it’s non functional.

After moving back to my iOS 12 iPad Mini I needed to make a choice with one of my favourite apps. I’ve been using NetNewsWire for reading my RSS and loving it but it doesn’t work on iOS 12. I needed to switch back to Reeder 4. Once I started using I remembered two areas it beats NetNewsWire for me.

• Navigation: when reading all of your feeds you can simply swipe up and down to move between stories
• You can turn off the unread article counts

These two features are keeping me using Reeder on my iPhone now both devices are back in sync on the same app.

Along with dark mode in the latest Apple Support app update we get a new addition I hope is a thing to come to all of Apple apps. It’s something that Google does really in their apps, give the chance in app to offer feedback.

I won’t go into my iCloud issues but needless to say I’ve switched back to my trusty OmniFocus. On setting up from scratch I’ve changed the way that I use the app and perspectives this time around.

As you can see above I’m using 5 main views

• Inbox
• Home
• Money
• Family
• Wellbeing

Most items in my system sit in the Inbox as you can see from the item count but I use tags. Whereas before I’d have a load of projects this time I’ve used tags to categorise.

I then have a perspective showing me everything that has a particular tag. So the wellbeing tag simply shows me everything with a tag of wellbeing.

For my forecast view I’ve implemented a tag called ‘Today’ that I can add to any items I’d like to get done today but don’t want to add a deadline.

You can do this by tapping on the little eye icon.

This seems to hang together for me and in the last few days I’ve enjoyed coming back to OmniFocus. This seems to work with my brain and I’m not wondering if my iCloud data is going to be there or not as the OmniFocus sync is rock solid and never let me down.

Are you using OmniFocus? What’s your setup?

Having talked about my setup on Home Screens I’ve changed things up a little.

This is for a few reasons

• I went back to my MacBook and got into Setapp and BusyCal

Getting back into Streaks

I'm wearing my G-Shock again to track my steps and make sure I'm keeping active

Reminders lost some data and started showing badges when I had nothing due so I'm back on OmniFocus

PresentMind is a new Mindfulness app that my work place helped point me towards

Any new apps you’re checking out?

Switching back to the MAC also had me thinking about the core apps I’m using to manage my day, I’ve now settled into a little routine using Apple Reminders. The iCloud sync seems solid now and using across iOS and macOS I’m starting to find the benefits of using Apple’s own apps. I keep it fairly simple in terms of creating lists and haven’t overwhelmed myself by dumping everything into it.

I have

• INBOX, everything goes in here to start with if it’s an idea when I’m out or if it doesn’t belong to a list it also goes here
• HOME, anything related to home (like putting out the bins) goes in here
• WELLBEING, anything health related goes in here
• FINANCES, money stuff goes in here
• CREATIVE (as a group)
• Podcast, anything related to podcasting
• Writing, anything related to blog post ideas or admin on the site
• Ambient Album, a little project to get me back into writing music
• Travel, anything holiday related

I then have the widget on iOS Today view to show me what’s due, I don’t bother with this on my MAC.

Keeping it simple has really helped me just focus on a few things and not be overwhelmed by a complicated TO DO app.

I’ve been struggling with my workflow and in particular the devices that I am going to use in my day to day and might have hit a really nice writing workflow that will work out for me when I’m on macOS. When I switched back to the Mac I didn’t have a clue what apps to use outside of the core apps that come with macOS but I decided to find the right episode of Mac Power Users and get to customising my MacBook that I am going to use as my daily machine for now.

On listening I decided to install Setapp and wow it’s already proving to be a cost saver. I installed iStatMenu (to keep an eye on battery and to have a nice view of the time and weather in the menu bar), CleanMyMac (to let it take a look at how I can get the most out of this laptop in terms of managing space) and most importantly MarsEdit.

I’ve got it installed and connected to my Wordpress blog, which I can publish to directly from this one app. The layout lets me write, add tags, categories and images all within one app that can be customised to my liking. 

It’s much nicer to use than the Wordpress app on iOS and having the flexibility of being able to create short posts from my iPhone on the Wordpress app and also this powerful app in MarsEdit is leaving me enthusiastic about sticking with this MacBook and adapting to it rather than jumping back in and replacing my iPad Pro.

I’ll update as I get more stuff done on macOS, I thought it might be interesting hearing about workflows from someone coming to the Mac from iPad.

Let me know some of your favourite Setapp apps.

As you’ll know if you follow me I finally got in gear and put out a new podcast. It’s one I’ve wanted to do for a few years but with everything going on right now I needed a distraction so put some energy into doing something creative.

I looked into hosting options and decided that right now given I’m on a budget and want ease of posting I decided to go for Anchor.

I work primarily on iOS so downloaded the app.

When you launch you can create an account and podcast including adding artwork all within the app itself.

I created some simple artwork on my iPad using Procreate and exported as a JPG ready for adding to my podcast in the Anchor app.

Once I’d created an outline of the first episode I recorded it with my iPad Pro 10.5” and Blue Yeti Microphone using Ferrite.

I did my best to edit on the iPad but ended up falling back on old habits and used my MacBook and GarageBand.

Once I had my finished and exported MP3 file I used the Anchor website to add the show. I found the app a little lacking for adding shows and writing a good show note was a nightmare. You get a little text box and can’t see the text very well.

That was it.

Anchor handles distribution to other providers and I’m currently still waiting for it to propagate to them all.

If you’re looking for a quick and simple way to get a podcast off the ground Anchor might be a good choice.

I’m going through some testing of to do apps (I know, not again!) and as I’m doing this I thought I’d share some thoughts on several of them, including Reminders.

When you pick up Reminders for the first time I’d recommend deleting any preloaded lists and starting with just one called INBOX. This will be where you brain dump everything. As you can see above I’ve also split out a couple of new projects as I thought of tasks, so a couple of creative projects. You can move more tasks later but my advice is when you pick up Reminders for the first time don’t worry too much about structure, just get everything off your mind and into the Inbox.

I’ve found the barrier to getting things done for me was worrying too much about creating a framework at the beginning instead of just keeping it simple.

Once you have everything in one place it’s really up to you if you want to organise them by categories such as home or work etc.

Like a lot of the world I’m looking for good iPad apps and any links that I can use to help my daughter with her learning, I thought I’d make a list of ones that I’ve found to be good that cover both academic and creativity

Coding

• Swift Playgrounds (best coding app I've found so far)

Creative

• Pages (create posters and practise images and layouts)
• Procreate (doodling)
• GarageBand (music)
• Minecraft
• Easy Music
• Hey Duggee colouring
• iMovie

Education

• Karate Cats (grammar/spellings)
• The Human Body
• Times Table Rockstars

Really need a distraction, Disney+ app is out and working.

Between Clone Wars and The Simpsons (30 seasons) alone it’s worth it. Also looks like just two episodes of The Mandalorian so far so it’ll be weekly.

If you follow me you’ll know I struggle with Things 3, mainly because of it’s lack of accessibility options but the Calendar integration is superb.

I’ve installed it just to use the ‘upcoming’ view so I can clearly see what’s on my plate for the next week.

I can’t read it clearly and need to really focus given it doesn’t adhere to my system font size but it’s helpful on the iPad to get a general view of important events over the coming week.

I can’t manipulate anything on the calendar but like I’ve said gives me a clear view of the week ahead.

I’m really hoping Cultured Code are working on bringing accessibility to their app so that I can more easily see what’s on screen.

I’m really scratching my head over this one. On looking at my Day One photo entries and found this random iPhone microphone entry that I didn’t do and a location I have no idea about.

I’m trying not to panic but I am wondering if I can trust Day One going forward.

Anyone else had this?

I’m starting fresh and clearing down my OmniFocus setup and when looking at removing perspectives it wasn’t that intuitive on how, here’s how to do it.

First off you need to SHOW all of your perspectives, tap on the SHOW icon.

Select the perspective you want to delete by tapping on it and then hit the icon marked in the image above.

Scrolling to the bottom you will see a DELETE PERSPECTIVE option.

I’m only a day in with taking a break but in that day I’ve noticed I’ve created more and read more.

What I’m starting to realise is having social media apps on my iPad or only checking in a browser on the computer is a good compromise if you’re looking at reducing your consumption of it.

My only social media is Twitter and Reddit (yes, I know it’s not strictly a social media platform) so going cold turkey and removing the apps from my iPhone was a good first step.

I used my iPad and realised I had left them installed so I casually checked Reddit for ten minutes and put it down. What I’ve observed is having them on my iPhone created this habit loop of checking but if I restrict them to another secondary device like a Mac or iPad then it’s much easier to engage less frequently.

Now when I want to pick up my iPhone I find I’m in an RSS reader looking at someone’s blog or listening to music. Big wins.

If you’re looking at reducing the time spent on these platforms then I’d definitely give this method a go.

One of my go to soundtracks is Captain America and on going to listen I noticed that it wasn’t in my library. It’s exclusively written by Alan Silvestri and on going to the artist within the music app I noticed it was gone.

I manually added it and then noticed again that it had disappeared. On checking I noticed the above, for some unknown reason Apple Music decided to change it to Various Artists even though even single track is by a single artist.

I’ve noticed this happen on a few albums too where it gets split across various instead of being contained within one.

So for the above track 1 got moved into a separate album, so I have two copies of this album. One with just that first track and another as above.

Most recently (and maybe the worst offender if you have a kid) I spotted explicit tracks being played even though restrictions were turned on and no way to mark as explicit as you can do with Spotify.

The iPad app also seems to be lagging behind the iPhone app. When downloading my music again I’d get weird UI glitches like the list auto scrolling to the top (back to All) when I’m in an album view. I also often see the below, where the UI has completely lost the left hand pane for some reason.

There are lots of good points (like For You and a cleaner UI than Spotify) that I like but it’s trying my patience a little.

What do you think about Apple Music?

Just a quick few thoughts on the new to iOS NetNewsWire RSS reader. I’ve been using Reeder for a little while and was a little unsure about testing out NetNewsWire but I I’m switching to it. The main reason is the performance and starred feature. Wow it’s quick and I found that with the Today and Starred article lists it helped me to engage more in reading blog posts.

The way that I’ve been using the app is to periodically check in with the Today view to see if anything is new and if there is something I want to go back to I’ll mark as starred and then pop into the starred view later to give it a read.

You can simply tap the star at the bottom to mark something to read later and then tap the arrows on the top right to move through your feed.

I don’t hook into a reader service but have an OPML export that contains all of my feeds, this can be imported into NetNewsWire.

For me this is now the default RSS reader you should be using on iOS. It’s free and you should do what you can to promote the open web and share your favourite blogs. (Note to self, I need to share more links!).

We have a family plan in the house and whilst my daughter was listening to it today I heard a swear word, on checking it turned out restriction was on and working but the song wasn’t flagged as explicit within Apple Music.

I checked Spotify and it does indeed allow you to mark a song as explicit.

Here’s the equivalent in Apple Music, no option to flag.

I’ll raise a radar for this one if it hasn’t been raised already.

Since setting up my iPad Pro and Mini again I think I might have a fix for my iCloud sync issues. Notes seems to have sorted itself out now across all of my devices but Reminders is still acting weird on my iPhone and I’m also getting some strange Calendar Ui glitches. This seems fine on my iPad so I think the answer is to reset my iPhone.

I’ve not done this since getting it out of the box back in September so it might be time to do a full iTunes reset (DFU mode) on the iPhone and see if it fixes my issues.

I’m going to take this opportunity to reset a little mentally and try not to install social media or podcasting apps. Time to get a little headspace back on my devices and take a step back for a bit.

I’m getting more into using OF now as my main productivity app and some elements are not as intuitive as I’d like so I’ll be sharing hints and tips I’m picking up. First up is moving an existing project into a newly created folder.

Navigate to your projects and tap Edit.

Now tap the project to select it and tap the ‘i’ at the top.

Tap the icon in the lower left and then tap the project name you want to move it to.

I bet you’re sick of hearing me write about productivity apps, especially Reminders but fear not I’m done.

I’ve been trying a few different apps but still not settled but that’s a post for another day, back to Reminders.

I reinstalled the app on my iPhone and it was immediately broken.

Here’s my app badge telling me I have 6 reminders overdue.

Here’s the app.

As you can see it’s completely empty, this knocks your confidence in trusting the app, especially when it only gets updated maybe once a year if we’re lucky.

I’m back with a blank slate again on my productivity system and fallen back to my old favourite OmniFocus. I thought I’d share how I’m using it over a series of posts and how I’m initially setting it up.

First off it might look intimidating but OmniFocus really can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be.

The first step is to do a bit of a brain dump. I find that even if I’m coming from another app I don’t duplicate I start fresh. I’ll go into the Inbox and start to drop in everything on my mind.

Once I’ve “dumped” everything out of my mind I’ll start to work through each one by tapping on it and picking a tag to categorise (such as errand or chores) or add it it’s own project if it’s something bigger like a trip.

To be honest you don’t need to worry about tags or projects if you’re just starting out with OmniFocus you can just drop stuff in and get it scheduled so you don’t forget.

For now step 1 is just to install, use their sync service and get whatever is in your head into the inbox and add due dates where they are needed.

I’ll be creating more posts in the coming weeks on next steps.

I’d love to be able to use Things 3 as my daily task manager. I love the Calendar integration and ease of task entry but two things stop me from using it.

Accessibility

Things is really poor from an accessibility point of view unfortunately. I bump up the font on my iPhone these days thanks to my ageing eye balls and there is no support in Things to inherit the system setting. In fact there’s no setting to up the font in Things at all. All of the other to do apps I’m testing (Reminders/OmniFocus/Todoist) all support this and I can’t believe in 2020 there’s no accessibility support. It’s pretty tough on the eyes to go from a font I can’t comfortably to one I have to take my glasses off to see properly.

Repeating Reminders

The creation of a repeating task is a bit broken for my workflow

• It takes too many taps to create a task that repeats on a schedule
• Reminders in my testing don't stick. So I create a task on Monday that repeats each day. I noticed on the Tuesday the reminder (at 2pm) hasn't moved into the next days task. I update the Tuesday task to have a 2pm reminder. On the Wednesday the task forgets I've done this and I forget to do it

These two combined are deal breakers for me, a pretty UI isn’t going to win me over if the functionality I need isn’t there.

I’ve had my niggles with the Wordpress for iOS app for a while but in the last couple of months it’s gotten worse, so bad I’m considering leaving. As someone that is iOS only the majority of the time it seems pretty obvious to me that the folks over at the Wordpress iOS team don’t actually use the app.

The first major change and gripe is the forced user experience of the block editor.

It seems I have to change this setting each time the app updates. It’s not I don’t like change but the block editor has some broken functionality (like the one below) and I just wish the developers would respect my choice of disabling this feature.

As part of this block editor another area broken with it is the writing experience itself. I like the way the images are resized but when it comes to text it’s lacking.

In the screenshot above you can see my text disappearing under the keyboard. Yes, when you type and it flows past the screen it goes underneath the keyboard and you have to manually scroll down. This doesn’t happen in the non block editor and is the main reason I think no one at Wordpress is actually using the app.

So I’m sat wondering what platform us best for someone that is predominantly on iOS. I’m open to suggestions.

Few new apps I’m testing out this month

• Productive: help me with habit tracking
• Todoist: yup I'm back on Todoist
• Pedometer ++: trying to get more active
• Tally: simple counting app to allow me to record how often certain things happen
• Peek-a-view: non destructive way to allow someone to look at your photos

Think that’s it at the moment, layout isn’t great but I’m trying to keep apps open so the way I’m using my phone is changing slightly.

I finally decided to eat that frog and stop putting off the worst thing I could imagine setting up iOS - Family Sharing. With us all using Apple Music in the household (with different accounts mainly) and the fact I’m paying for 2TB of iCloud it was time.

It took a couple of hours and now it’s mostly setup up but wow the experience isn’t the best or least buggy I’ve seen on iOS.

If like me you are adding a child under 13 you’ll need to create an AppleID for them which included creating their email and the mostly useless in these days security questions. This part of the process was ok and logging into the account on my daughters device with her new AppleID was also ok.

Where the experience falls down is granting access to your family members.

You grant access on an individual application level.

iCloud storage was pretty straightforward but Music and Purchases are a bit of a nightmare.

For Apple Music I upgraded to the family account but whenever I tried to use the interface above to add family members it just took me to the Music app with a dialogue saying I had already purchased Apple Music. I restarted both of our devices several times but nothing worked. In the end all it took was time, after a couple of hours this workflow changed and I could see I was sharing music. Seemed like a time delay where something in the backend needed to tell the Apple servers I had upgraded. Once this happened I could go into Music on my daughters device and it knew she was part of the family plan. I still have a bug though where the ‘For You’ tab just says error retry later and a start your free 3 month trial message but everything else works.

The most annoying though is sharing content you’ve purchased via iTunes. I want the TV app to know what I’ve purchased so can be watched but it seemed to link my wrong AppleID, defaulting to iCloud. I have to wait 90 days to be able to change this to my actual iTunes account email address. Not a huge deal but still something that could be checked on entry rather than defaulting to iCloud.

You’ll need to redo content and restrictions for your child if you were using this previously. This has to be done on the family owners device. One thing that doesn’t work though is allowed apps. You need to do this on the device of your child. If you want to hide Safari you’ll need to do this via screen time on the device of your child. Doing this on your device doesn’t sync the app removal on your child’s device, I’m raising a ticket for this one.

Overall the experience is unintuitive but eventually mostly works so far.

If I experience any showstoppers I’ll let you know.

Yesterday I looked at whether you should be closing apps after using them and the overwhelming majority of you don’t, seems to be a habit I’m into. Once I’m done with an app I close it, moving forward I’m going to try to change this and leave them open as a test.

Well that got me thinking about Background App Refresh. This setting controls which apps can work in the background updating their data. I usually turn this off for almost every app in a bid to save battery life. But with the latest iPhone I don’t even think about the battery so should I be leaving it on for most apps?

I’ve enabled it for a few more apps (I usually only have it on for 2 or 3) to see how it changes my battery life and general refresh of iCloud sync data.

What do you do?

I know I don’t have to close an app as soon as I’m done but I find I’m still in the habit of doing this. I’m going to try to leave them open and use app switching to navigate between them. How do you use your apps? Do you close them straight after using them like me?

I’ve been trying my best at changing a few things and bundled everything into my current To Do app of choice - Todoist.

But what I’ve found is that having a Reminder for something like ‘Write in your journal’ isn’t keeping me honest. I’m sometimes ignoring the Reminder, it’s not holding me accountable for not doing it. It also clutters up my view of what you need to do with all of these good habits you’re trying to accomplish.

What I’ve found is moving these into a dedicated Habit Tracking app seems to work better. It keeps my Todoist looking a lot cleaner and with streaks it keeps me more motivated to do it.

I haven’t settled on an app yet but am testing both Productive and Streaks.

It’s finally time to delete Apple News from my devices. Reeder has completely removed my need to use Apple News. I don’t have issues with the Apple News interface but did feel like between notifications and suggestions it was a bit too much in my face. I’m much happier firing up Reeder and looking at the feeds of my favourite sites.

This is one of those apps that you don’t realise you need until someone creates it, a really great idea. Peek-a-view is a photo viewing app that allows you to give your device to someone else without the worry of your precious memories being edited or deleted.

I’ve deleted the Amazon app from my devices (probably a good thing for my wallet!) thanks to it’s hard push on Amazon prime video. Everyone I launch the app I get a full screen video advert for Prime video. I don’t see any setting to turn this off, please let me know if you find this setting. I’m a prime member so not sure if this is a new marketing tactic or a bug but I definitely don’t like the intrusion.

Writing up a post this morning took me 3 times as long with the new block editor in the Wordpress app for iOS. Initially I couldn’t find a way to turn it off but thankfully you can.

Head into site settings then you’ll see a block editor option as below.

Phew, I got worried my Wordpress app experience was ruined there for a minute.

I’m really not using Twitter much these days, I tend to have a flurry of tweets then go quiet for a bit. After trying and deleting the official app after finding ads and trending unbearable I’ve settled on a way to use it that matches up with how I want to use it.

I’ve only really done two things.

1. Significantly reduced the people I follow (sorry if you're in this list) but I don't want to see any politics so if I see a lot of RT that are going down this rabbit hole I unfollowed. I also unfollowed a few prominent Apple people mainly due to the fact all I'm seeing is nitpicks.
2. Using Tweetbot. An easy swap for me, I don't see many notifications of activity on my posts but that's fine. I can easily mute topics etc and only see what I want. I also don't see trends and ads, a win.

Social media isn’t that great for me being completely honest and this is definitely helping me.

I’ve really gotten into using Fantastical over the last few months and particularly enjoy the fact that my calendar and reminders are all in one place.

Flexibits have teased us with a new version and whilst I’m not so excited about new functionality around sharing I’m very excited to see what they do about better integrating reminders into the app.

I like the statement above emphasising the word tasks, the current version is a little lacking when it comes to managing your to do list. I’d love to be able to use just fantastical so anything they can do to improve this integration would be much appreciated.

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple not offering encrypted backups over the last week, personally I’m keeping out of this one for now but if like me you don’t need to backup your device to iCloud here is how to do it. Please make sure you are happy turning off your device backup, all of my photos, notes and music etc are in the cloud already so I don’t need this secondary backup method.

Head into settings:

Then follow these highlighted steps in the screenshots below:

Tap on iCloud:

Tap on iCloud backup:

Toggle the switch to OFF:

Waking up and being faced with this red 22 to remind me how much I have on my plate makes things worse. It adds stress to an already stressful time, it’s got me thinking again about simplification. In this case Todoist is showing everything due today rather than stuff that’s gone over.

OmniFocus and Reminders can show me a badge count for when things go over due instead.

My current thought is just to turn off badges completely on everything apart from Messages.

Anyone else find it’s better just to turn them off?

Working at home it’s easy to forget to move and get some exercise in so moving into new habits (not resolutions) I was looking at a way to track this.

The native health app can show steps but it’s fairly basic - that’s where Pedometer ++ comes in.

It offers a really nice visual guide into how much you’re actually moving and helps you motivate yourself with awards.

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and with the complication on my Apple Watch it’s a stark reminder of how little I’ve moved sometimes.

I’m going to be adding this to my daily routine going forward, trying to get to 10,000 steps to help me get moving again.

It’s strange, they’ve been around forever but I’ve only really started using them properly over the last year.

Here are the 6 that I have pinned and use daily.

• Weather: I use the weather app that comes with iOS. I do occasionally try third party ones but find the way they don't update all the time annoys me. Working at home I only really look at the weather a few times a week and the standard app gives me what I want.
• Fantastical: I've made the switch really due to frustrations switching views with the Apple app. I like to have a list view and Fantastical is the quickest way to view this, the up next widget view and quick monthly calendar view makes it a winner for me
• OmniFocus: It shows me all of my items due today, it's amazing the amount of to do apps that don't do this and just show the first few.
• Shortcuts: I have a few shortcuts I run multiple times a day, this is for quick access.
• Favourites: I like to have quick access to make phone calls to certain contacts. This works great but it doesn't remember favourites in iCloud so new iPhone and you have to set it up again.
• Batteries: Handy for keeping an eye on AirPods and Apple Watch battery.

What are some of your favourite widgets.

I’m back using OmniFocus and one of the features I’m glad I have back is the Forecast view. I check this a few times a day.

I check it in the morning, around midday and then in the evening. I look at the count at the top to see if I have any items left today and I can also have a look at my calendar items.

If I see an item that I need to reschedule I simply long press and then pick an option to move it tomorrow.

Using this as I’m moving through my day is helping me keep on top of things.

Following on from my Zombie Reminders post I deleted all of my lists and yet the reminders keep coming back, this is from today.

Anyone else?

I’ve been giving the official Twitter app a go based on the fact I can’t see likes etc via Tweetbot. I stay away from the whole trends etc and just use the timeline and notifications panes.

But a side effect that I wasn’t expecting was that by keeping the timeline in “top tweets first” I am using the service less. I’m no longer scrolling until I read everything but just checking top tweets a couple of times a day.

I switched to RSS for my news months ago so I’ve found that by using this method it’s let me step back from Twitter quite a bit.

I did use Safari for a while but to be honest the experience wasn’t great so I’ll leave the app in place and either set some limits or just remember to check in now and again.

If you’re looking to use social media less then I’d recommend trying out this method.

This is a good one, so I recently purged everything out of Reminders and it’s iCloud database. The weird thing is that slowly but surely they are coming back but only for things scheduled. I had several daily Reminders that remind me to take a break and get out for a walk, these were moved over to another system and deleted from iCloud. The problem is they keep coming back and I have no idea how to fix it.

You can see this in the above screenshot. So I have two of these deleted daily Reminders that have come back from nowhere. One of these is even coming from a list that doesn’t exist. Check out the My Lists area saying there is 1 Reminder in the system but Today is showing 2, argh.

So I currently have Zombie Reminders in iCloud coming back for me and kind of another confirmation that moving my data out of iCloud slowly in the background as I’m currently doing is a good idea.

Saying no to something isn’t always easy but with the Decline sticker pack it makes things a little easier to select the right response.

I use sticker packs a lot and having another one to pick from is something I’m always going to take a look at.

There’s a good selection of responses and the artwork is clean and stylish. Personally I’m looking forward to more sticker packs, no pressure!

Great work from Alyssa and Tim, well done. Check out more at their site here.

I’ve been a fan of the NASA app app for a while but only really just started using it for getting great wallpapers.

Firing up the app you can see images on the main screen.

You can type your search terms in the top bar.

Tap on the image to load and then tap again to bring up options.

Tap on the share icon in the top right and tap ‘save image’.

I wanted to scratch my photography itch and mistakenly installed Flickr. It seems like nobody is using it anymore, very little photos being uploaded and no interaction. To be honest I’ve even forgotten who owns it these days.

I’ve deleted it and now trying EyeEm as an alternative. Already seeing more engagement and some beautiful images.

I live in dark mode on iOS 13 but I don’t like having a dark background on Apple Notes. The good news is you can change this just for Notes.

Head into settings, then tap notes and you’ll see the following option

Just pick the Note Background that fits what you want to see.

I use projects to either break down a large task e.g. decorate living room or to group tasks such as a holiday.

Adding a new project is simple.

Tap on the ‘+’ next to the Projects section.

• Give your project a name such as 'Decorate living room'
• Give it a colour
• Choose to share it or not, default will be No unless you are using it with a partner or company
• Is it a sub project? Maybe you have a parent called 'DIY'
• Make it a favourite if you want quick access from the top level of the layout

I’ve needed to simplify a bit over the break and made the switch back to Todoist.

Todoist has been my fall back app for a while but I’m determined to make it stick. It’s the fastest way to get things out of my head and the natural language passing really helps to track repeating items. I’ll share more as I move through my experience of getting to know the app really well.

Any tips?

On a side note I’ve really tried to use Reminders but I have no confidence it’ll see any updates until September and it’s got UX issues in my use.

Been a lot going on so I’ve trimmed my home screen down as I get through the Christmas period. Only apps I’ve really been using lately are Notes (sync seems fixed now), DayOne (journaling) and Todoist (simplicity of keeping to do lists).

I’m planning on using Headspace and MoodNotes more in the new year but for now they sit there as a reminder.

How’s your home screen looking as we close out 2019?

My apple Notes sync issue seems to have bedded down now and I’m using it again slowly.

One thing going back is how dull it looked so I added emoji to the folder names.

I think it looks a lot more inviting, what do you think?

As I’m using the latest public builds of iOS 13 I’m still amazed at the number of UI issues across the system. This actually applies to watchOS too and iPadOS. I’m not trying to pile on as there have been plenty of posts about iOS 13’s lack of stability but simply to share my experiences. Performance wise I’m happy with iOS 13 but the little glitches around the system really have me scratching my head into what the QA actually does and how they test.

The main offender is my iPad Mini, which I honestly think has never been tested internally at Apple given the devices popularity. Rotation issues are a daily occurrence for me across both of my iPads but the Mini seems to get stuck in one orientation or the other mode often than not.

I’m not sure if this down to the performance of the older 10.5” iPad Pro and slower processor of the Mini but I do wonder if this is an issue on the latest iPad Pro and if Apple are testing on older devices.

watchOS has it’s share of UI issues with little glitches like the one above.

Here’s a nice share sheet bug that doesn’t show the Reminders icon but if you tap the blank space it opens the app.

Apple Music on my iPad Pro is the worst offending app though. This layout issue above occurs in multiple places and I still get issues when using the app in landscape mode. An example of this is when it shifts to album view it resets the left hand pane and takes me to the top of my music again.

This isn’t really a rant post but I can’t air these bugs with Apple as I get zero response or a fix as these have been going on since beta 1. I gave up reporting bugs or asking Apple for help a while ago, I still haven’t been called back for my Notes sync issue despite multiple promises I would be.

I’m writing this to get it off my chest and the little hope someone from Apple might come across it and reach out.

Keeping my fingers crossed that iOS 14 has very little new features and a focus on stability.

I’ll preface this by stating this isn’t the list of apps that came out this year but the ones I’ve used the most on my iPhone. It’s a mix of things here but all served me well at times in 2019.

Dark Noise

I’ve been using this ambient noise app to help me relax or just to have something in the background whilst I work. It’s beautifully designed and offers a load of customisation and shortcut support.

Link.

Apple Music

Continues to be my music streaming app of choice. I’ve dabbled with Spotify but for me the UI offered with Apple Music just matches how I’d like it to work. It mixes the music I’ve purchased over the years with ones added from the streaming service and recently played and recommendations are great.

Link.

OmniFocus 3

An app I’ve used on and off for years but when iCloud started to fail me I switched full time. It can be as simple or complicated as you need and although I keep it pretty simple I’m learning new ways to use it all the time. The backend sync has been rock solid and I have complete trust in the data storage. I’ve been using shortcuts more with it these days and finally settled on a daily workflow that helps me get stuff done.

Link.

Reeder

Now I’m getting back into RSS I don’t think I can go back to using a news app like Apple News.

Link.

Pennies

I’m trying to get better at managing a budget and spend less on gear, this app has been a great way to set a budget cap against categories and stick to it.

Link.

Overcast

Still my podcast player of choice, works great in the car too. User friendly interface and sync across devices is rock solid.

Link.

DuckDuckGo browser

My go to browser, replaced Safari for almost everything I do. Being more privacy focused is something I’ve been working towards and this browser is the best out there in my opinion. You’ll be surprised at home many trackers are being blocked on your favourite sites.

Link.

Eventail

This is a widget app and it shows me exactly what I need, a 5 day view of my calendar. Can be customised in lots of ways and is worth a look if you have a busy schedule.

Link.

What are some of your favourite apps?

My first to do app of choice and still one of my favourites, Wunderlist is finally being shut down May 6th 2020.

Link

I’m playing around with to do apps again so I’m going to install and test out its replacement, Microsoft To Do. I’m my experience of testing it previously I didn’t like the way it handled due items but I’m going to give it another shot.

This was the last straw, watching a video via the iOS app and this message pops up under the video and no matter how much I tap on ‘skip trial’ I get nothing. This is the latest message that got me to delete the app again.

Here’s another on that pops up when I close the app on iOS.

How is this not user hostile, I’m not sure why it doesn’t remember my choice instead of forcing me to see these ads almost every time I use the service.

I’m a couple of weeks in with using OmniFocus exclusively and it’s actually starting to stick. I wanted to write a series of posts on how I’m using it in my daily life.

First up each morning I’m looking at what I have on my plate and adjusting the day to suit my availability and energy.

I tap on the relevant day in the forecast view to drill into the day itself.

This shows me my agenda and the to do items I have set for the day.

If there is something on there I’m not going to be able to achieve I’ll long press and move to tomorrow.

My forecast view also shows me any items I’d like to get done today but haven’t set a due date or time. I tag these items with ‘today’ and change the view settings to show me them in my forecast view.

These show at the bottom of the list in the forecast view.

That gives me a view of the day within the app. To supplement this I also use the widget and the Apple Watch complication to have a quick reference of how I’m getting on.

So far the data sync has been good but if I’m updating on my iPad and don’t open the app on my iPhone to sync then app notifications do get a bit out of sync.

Seeing my images being used in scams isn’t particularly nice so I’ve done a little experimenting to see how I can start to watermark all of my images I post now.

I’ve settled on using Snapseed from Google.

Once you load the app, add the image you want to add a watermark to.

Tap tools and select TEXT.

You can then change the style and double tap to edit the text.

I then add the text and align how I want it. Then you need to change the opacity by tapping the middle icon as in the image below.

I’ll then adjust until I’m happy and export the image out into my photo library.

I go away but have found I always come back to OmniFocus (OF). OF still remains one of the quickest ways for me to enter new items to my inbox (I have SIRI disabled) using text entry and using a combination of due times and flagging I’ve been using it well this week and kept on top of things.

I’m still in the process of sorting myself out and setting some personal goals but I’ve settled on OF. I was going to go all in with Reminders but a few things put me off using Apple apps

1. Sync has been unreliable across devices for me, especially macOS
2. I don't have any confidence in the Apple development team to keep the app updated. It'll always be a small part of iOS for Apple and I don't want to wait a year between updates for bug fixes
3. If you need support, good luck. I'm almost a month in on my second attempt to get my iCloud sync sorted and Apple keep breaking their promises of calling me back with updates or even looking like they care about my data. I'm paying for iCloud storage and Apple aren't taking me as a customer seriously, I don't want to put my life into Reminders then hit a problem and be stuck trying to sort it out on my own

Ok, rant over.

So how am I’m setting up OF?

I’m starting pretty simple and mostly chucking items into the inbox via the app or Shortcuts. Anything that I think is urgent or want to get done today ideally I’ll put a flag against. I can quickly view everything flagged as almost a wish I could get this done today list or a reminder of items that are going to cause me some pain if I don’t get done.

Project wise I’m using folders to divide my projects into areas of focus. It’s pretty simple for now but I have one for my writing and another for personal, which includes any goals. I’ll share more on this one I’ve got my project structure sorted. I’m expecting it’ll be financial, work etc.

Everything else in OF I’m pretty much ignoring. The beauty is that it can be as simple or complicated as you need it.

I’m not sure if this bug is specific to my make and model of car but I’ve finally found a way to fix this annoying bug. I have a Volkswagen Golf GTE with factory fitted CarPlay and about 50% of the time it would not play any audio. I would turn the volume up and it would say ‘No Audio’.

I’ve found a fix, well a hack really. If you move into the Media section first then do a new Bluetooth search for your iPhone. Once you have seen the iPhone in the list of discoverable devices don’t tap it. Simply tap app again to go into CarPlay, the audio will magically start working again.

So we’re a couple of months in with iOS 13 and it struck me that after updating to iOS 13.2.3 it seems to have finally settled down. I’m getting far fewer bugs than I did before the update and it’s where it should have shipped back in September. Before this update I was having to turn my iPhone on and off at least once per day due to audio bugs. Now the only time I’m doing that is when I use CarPlay.

I’ve got one bug that I’m not seeing anywhere with CarPlay. Once I’m done using it in the car the audio app stays on the lock screen even though the app is closed. The only fix is to restart the iPhone.

I also still experience the odd camera bug when I’m taking photos from the lock screen.

I don’t use the Apple Watch now so can’t comment on the fixes I needed on the Series 2 when I was using it.

iPadOS seems ok although I still get rotation issues but they have been there for years now.

I wanted to post a follow up on my Notes sync issues as I’ve been testing it in the background whilst using other apps. So, first up Apple have never called me back. As I’ve already written about they seem ok with hardware issues but struggle with anything software related. Now I’m not sure if this is training related but even their senior advisors are heavily reliant on a backup software team. They need some more software people in the senior advisor role in my opinion. I still think Apple support is lacking right now.

So my Notes have stayed in sync over the last week and the speed of sync seems to have improved, yes there is a but here - only if you don’t have folders. I’ve found that in my testing if you have a flat structure then sync becomes a lot more reliable. If you’re have problems then on top of migrating out and deleting everything then start with a flat structure, don’t create any folders. I find that as soon as you introduce folders it goes awry. Sync becomes slow and unreliable, especially on macOS.

I’d tell Apple if they ever called me back but I think that ship has sailed and I’m not wasting anymore of my time being on hold for them.

I used Wunderlist quite happily as soon as it came out until it was picked up by Microsoft but in a bid to try to simplify I have installed it and to my surprise it still works as I like it. There’s no overly complicated UX to deal with or loads of options just the basics and a solid backend sync.

I’ve got a lot going on and after having iCloud issues with Reminders, getting overwhelmed using OmniFocus and not liking the look and feel of Todoist or Things 3 I have gone back to where it started for me - Wunderlist.

Yes you might think this strange given that it’s no longer really being heavily worked on but I’ve installed it on my MacBook and iOS devices, completed an initial brain dump and feeling the better for it.

My data is laid out in a logical way to me with a clean UI showing me what’s due today and each of my lists. In the today view the list is organised by the list the item is in so I can see the various areas of importance, I can set repeating items and have reminders that work.

Aside from being reminded that Microsoft TO DO exists (which pales in comparison to Wunderlist in my opinion) it’s the perfect TO DO app for me right now.

As you’ll know if you read my blog I’m struggling somewhat with iCloud. I’m now at the point I’ve moved completely away from Notes and Reminders as I’ve lost trust in Apple to both store my data and commit resource to working on the app and support the infrastructure, I’ve still not heard anything back from senior support on my iCloud sync issues despite several promises.

The two I’m testing my workflow with is Google Keep and Notability.

Over the last week I’ve used both and can see me using both but for different scenarios.

I’m using Notability almost just for reference information like flight details or for keeping extended warranty information. An archive of information I need to reference at a later date.

I’m using Google Keep for quick notes and checklists. I don’t like the UX for Notability for adding quick notes with bullets etc. I can’t seem to quickly get in and out. Google keep is simple and intuitive. It also has a widget that speeds up entry.

Main downside of using Google apps on iOS for me is their lack of adoption of core iOS features so no dark mode but I can live with that in a notes app.

It’s a beginning so I’ll update how I’m getting on in a month or so.

I’ve been enjoying my time with GoodTask but I’ve hit a display issue that has me rethinking my app choice. It may seem small but I use a to do system to remind me of things I should be mindful about.

You can see that when I do this I don’t see the entire text. A lot of apps do this, I stopped using Things because of it. Strangely Apple Reminders is the best at displaying this. Omnifocus also does a good job here.

I don’t want to make the text smaller with my ageing eyes so if you know a way around it please let me know.

Update: it’s in settings

I wrote that I wanted to stick with iCloud and if you’ve followed me for a while you’ll know that Reminders does my head in. I moved over to GoodTask a little while ago but didn’t commit to using it until a month or so ago. Here’s how I’m using it.

Apple Watch

Reminders doesn’t have a new complication so I’m using GoodTask to show me how many items I have due today.

Today widget

The widget shows me both my reminders and appointments on one view. This means I can see my day in order and also means I can use one widget instead of two.

Lists

I’m using lists to categorise all of my tasks. Still getting started but here are my lists so far. I’m also using Overdue, High Priorities and Within 5 days.

Today with no time

Using Reminders in the standard app doesn’t let you mark a task due just today, you need a time. I don’t like this to be the only way of doing it. With GoodTask I can mark something due just today and not worry about adding a time element.

I’ve come to really enjoy Bear again after a brief hiatus. I tried my best to use Apple Notes but started to find it slowed me down when I tried organising my Notes. The most powerful feature of Bear for me is quickly being able to organise your notes.

I’ve found that being able to quickly add a ‘#’ to the end of a note to quickly organise my Notes into ‘folders’. I started with looking at it around my writing in ‘draft’ ‘blog’ and ‘published’.

As I started to build up my Notes and everything went in Bear more tags appeared. You can see above my total list so far, it’s constantly evolving and I’m enjoying this way of organising.

I’ve been struggling to get my head around Android but something finely clicked yesterday. It’s overwhelming trying to figure out everything straight away but here are a few tips that have helped me.

Home button

There’s no home button on either the pixel or iPhone these days but coming from iOS I wanted to get my head around what the home button was on Android.

No matter which app you’re in tap the little white pill shaped object at the bottom of the screen to go home.

Quick launching the camera

Double click the power button to quick launch the camera. If it doesn’t work make sure it’s turned on in settings, system, gestures.

Launch recently used apps

When you swipe up from the bottom you get to app switching. There’s a little list of apps here that Google assistant thinks you might like to launch.

I’ve gotten into the habit of using this and 9 times out of 10 it shows me the correct app.

What are your tips?

I’m still getting to grips with Android but here’s my setup.

• Messaging seems a mess but I've settled on using hangouts
• I'm using Google keep to do my notes taking
• Using Todoist as my task manager whilst I test the Pixel

It’ll most probably change a bit daily but here’s my starting point.

I’ve been playing with a lot of third party productivity apps and you know what I’ve discovered - it’s best to stick with the defaults, at least in terms of data storage. I’ve been missing things because I haven’t been seeing them, I forgot which app I’d put it in (I appreciate this is my problem).

On sitting back and thinking about what I have to manage going on and how I want my data to be stored, here are the apps I’m using with iCloud:

• For my Calendar I remain stuck in the default app camp, whilst it isn’t the prettiest I like being able to see the date on my home screen with it’s app icon and it does the basics fine. I don’t micro manage everything on my personal Calendar so fits the bill quite nicely
• For my Reminders I’ve switched over to GoodTask, it’s a much better interface to iCloud and I like both the Today widget and Apple Watch complications
• For my Notes I use Apple Notes for everything. I write posts like this one in there, store images or receipts etc.. and food recipes. I like the simplicity of it and the fact I can do both handwritten and typed notes
• For my Photos I use iCloud Photo Library
• For my journal I back up DayOne to iCloud rather than sync with their service

These are the areas that are most important to me.

The only data in the cloud outside of iCloud that I rely on is Gmail and Blog posts.

For the first time in a while I’m content with this setup and for me even though the apps are pretty basic I find all the extra functionality in apps like OmniFocus adds unnecessary complication (for me) and I spend more time messing with my systems (and tags I don’t need) rather than actually doing stuff.

An interesting post over at Bloomberg about iOS 13 dropped today and I’m more interested in it from a productivity angle.

An updated Reminders app that better competes with the several to-do list programs available on the App Store. The new app has a main screen with four default sections laid out in a grid: tasks to be done today, all tasks, scheduled tasks, and flagged tasks. Each section has its own different-colored page that users can add items to.

An update to Reminders is about 5 years overdue and can’t come soon enough. When I read this I thought, great but when I read ‘scheduled tasks’ I started to get a little concerned about what we’ll see. I’m thinking it’s going to simply be a skin on top of what we already have. The current scheduled view is basic and full of bugs and at the moment I have zero confidence they’ll address these issues but simply put a new front end to the content.

This also means that there will be no way to have a list of tasks due today. What I mean is every task will need a due time as it is today. This is one of my main complaints with Reminders today.

I’m hoping I’m being my usual pessimistic self and Apple will truly put in some effort into their own apps.

One of the more interesting points in the iOS 13 article by 9to5 was the mention of a new Reminders app. It’s interesting to me as someone that has tried and failed to use the existing app many times.

It’s a very basic app with bugs, some of which I’ve had open for 3+ years with Apple. It looks like from the outside there is literally no one working on it.

The thought of it having a refresh fills me with hope that I can do away with third party apps but I do have to be careful with my enthusiasm given their track record of looking after their own apps.

For me I’d love to see something along the lines of Things where we can have a scheduled reminder or an open Today list with no time commitments just a list of stuff you want to get done today. In fact I’d like Apple to either Sherlock or buy them outright and be done with it.

As Apple leans into services I think it’s important for them to put some effort into their core apps and not leave them in limbo only to be updated once or twice a year. I’d also like to see them stripped out of iOS and launched into the App Store like Numbers or Pages. That way we can get (hopefully) lots of updates throughout the year.

I’ve tried a lot and have a few installed including Halide and Moment (for RAW) but always find myself just using the built in app.

I’ve had good intentions to get into mobile photography and RAW but I’m coming to the realisation that I don’t want to mess around too much. I take a picture and then do minor levelling or colour correction using the Photos app I already have installed.

I’ve found that my main complaint with the iPhone camera is low light and even though the XS is way better than any other previous iPhone I’ve used it still struggles in low light. I was hoping RAW would solve some of this but it hasn’t.

Any tips for getting better low light photos on the iPhone?

I started and stopped using Bear about a month ago but after struggling to organise with Apple Notes I’ve gone back in.

The main reason I’ve gone back is tags. Folders in Apple Notes is ok but I’m finding that the ability to add a quick tag at the bottom of the page I’m writing on is clicking with my brain more. All the dividers such as ‘gifts’ and ‘shopping’ above are tags that Bear automatically uses to create this structure.

It may be that it’s early and my brain hasn’t woken up but when messing around with Reeder 4 this morning it wasn’t obvious to me how I unsubscribed from an RSS feed I’d added.

1. Go to the 'All Items' view

2. Long press the RSS feed you want to unsubscribe from

3. Tap unsubscribe

I’ve given up using Apple News, mainly because of the Today view that is constantly broken for me.

Mine only shows everything from days ago not today. Even though my sites themselves have newer stories the Today view never updates.

I’ve got back to actually reading the sites via the DuckDuckGo browser.

Anyone else?

Thought I’d post an update to my home screen on my iPad Pro 10.5”. Recently newly setup my warranty replacement so this is pretty new, literally just got to setting up today.

As you can see I’m still using Emoji for my folders

• Social
• Apple
• Creative
• Stuff

Then just the apps that are used more often on the home screen and my dock.

Apps are pretty consistent but moved back to OmniFocus. Despite rumours of a refreshed Reminders I have zero confidence in Apple’s ability to create a good app these days so I’m sticking with third party for my productivity. I am sticking with Notes however as it does everything I need it to and sync is reliable.

YouTube has become worse for me over the last few years both as a distraction (all on me) and becoming a hive of negativity, humble brags, encouraging people to waste money and fake theories. It was a real eye opener when I used it signed out for a week but worse than that my own suggestions are also polluted with these same videos and awful thumbnails.

YouTube’s algorithm for encouraging this kind of content has gotten out of hand and I don’t want to be part of it. As I’ve written before I’m glad I stopped growing my channel about 7 years ago now I’ve seen what content YouTube encourages you to create. The way to grow is to be extreme!

I thought that I have my subscriptions that I mostly enjoy and as long as I only use it on our TV watching only those things I think I’ll be ok but when the app defaults to recommend and the first thing I see is “how I blew £2000 at (insert store name here)” I’d had enough. The content I watch I can get in podcast form so I’ve just subscribed to the podcast feed in Overcast instead.

I’ve now deleted it off all of my iOS devices, unsubscribed to all channels and deleted my account from our LG TV.

I’ve been using Apple News on and off for a while but in the last month or so it’s gotten bad for me. Check out what’s happening with mine.

Here’s my channel list on iPad

Here’s my channel view on iPhone

As you can see they aren’t in sync, which coincidentally only started happening when I looked at how News looked on macOS, which had a completely different list of channels.

This one bug alone makes it unusable for me.

Another issue I have is that in the Today tab I’m getting stories from 2 or 3 days ago and nothing from today.

This both means that I’m not using Apple News anymore.

Anyone else?

I’m trying out Todoist again and when messing around I discovered vacation mode.

I don’t know how new this feature is but it’s potentially very useful. Being away from work allowed me to do a bit of a brain dump but I didn’t want to be reminded of chores when away. This vacation mode puts everything on hold until you’re ready to get back to it.

Somethings clicked for me with the notes app Bear. I’ve used it before but since trying Drafts and trying to get my head around workspaces I went back to try Bear and it suddenly makes sense for me. With its iCloud sync and support for the Apple Pencil and Attachments it fits my need for a better looking Notes app than Apple Notes.

The main reason I’m using it is tags - it’s really pretty simple. Every time you create a note add a tag to help organise.

Here’s my setup (so far), you can see that I have already started to organise my notes by tags and when I tap on any of them all I see is the notes with that tag. This is something I struggled with when using Drafts and gave up trying to get my head around with how workspaces worked.

The main tag I’m using is ‘blog’, anytime I get an idea (like this one) I start a new note with my heading of what I want to write about and add the tag ‘blog’. When I’m in the mood to do something for the blog I can simply tap the ‘blog’ tag and see everything I’ve started on.

Just like in this image.

Another tag I’m finding useful is ‘reading’ where I’m importing entire articles from the web to keep and read later then delete of have as reference. This is done via shortcuts, I’ll write up a post on this in the coming weeks.

Are you using Bear? How is your setup?

If you’ll remember last week I wrote down how to move from DayOne into Apple Notes, well I’m back with DayOne. I have to say it’s nice too, Apple Notes just wasn’t built to hold massive notes full of images and text. I’m talking 800MB single notes here, the performance just isn’t workable.

If the large Journal note is the last thing open I found Notes would either crash out or hang on reload. If I left it long enough it would load but it’s just not a workable solution unfortunately. Basically if I did load I needed to move away from it as soon as possible so I could actually use the app.

Viewing images wasn’t ideal if you wanted to check on events and even though I thought Photos could give me this it also fell a bit short.

Anyone else tried and succeeded?

I’ve been tinkering with GoodTask for a few weeks now and recently discovered the joy of being able to create and share themes. This is really unique and you can make GoodTask look just the way you like it.

Importing Themes on iOS into GoodTask is based on a text string that you can simply copy to the clipboard and use in GoodTask.

First off select the theme you’d like to import. I picked up mine from the GoodTask forums. Once you have found one you like copy the long text string above the image in the forum.

Now head into GoodTask and follow these steps.

The theme is picked up because it’s in the clipboard.

Let me know which theme you’re using.

I’ve been slowly growing tired of trying third party apps on iOS. I’m not sure if it’s me getting older or trying to consolidate my data in one place but an area I needed to look at was journaling. This is something that I’ve been using DayOne for but not being a premium member It’s becoming a pain as I need to manually remember to backup and manage my entries.

That got me thinking about using Apple Notes as a journal. I use it for everything else so why not? The first thing I needed to do was to figure out my folder structure. I had plans for an elaborate setup but in the end kept it simple. I created a folder in Notes simply called Journal. Then within this folder I created a note called Journal 2019. I also pinned it and then added the notes widget to my today screen so that I can quickly get at it. Every day I create a new entry with the date and just jot down my thoughts along with any images I want to add to the day. It’s pretty simple but will always be in the order of latest first. I can also add as many images as I want, something I can’t do in DayOne without paying and giving them my data. There were two areas I wanted to address. The first was searching, well after testing I’m happy with what Notes gives me. Secondly images, I can add but if I want to look back I need to see all of the text too. DayOne is great for showing just images but I’ve decided I can just use the photos app for this. That’s how I’ve initially setup but now I am looking at shortcuts to let me quickly jot down my thoughts rather than fire up Notes every time. I’m happy I don’t have to remember to manually export and backup but now I need to figure out how to get my DayOne into Notes.

Looks like my shortcut to share to Wordpress from Apple Notes went down well, thanks to everyone that shared.

I’ve got a list that I want to work on so watch this space.

Here’s another app for a writing workflow I’m testing. This is shared from Ulysses directly to my Wordpress site. If it’s worked I’ll see this there.

Feeling inspired by playing my favourite guitar today I realised that I could record my ideas onto my iPhone using Ferrite over the voice memos app. It’s great to be able to record ideas quickly and organise them, something this app does better than anything I’ve tried.

Nothing fancy just into my Boss Katana Mini then into the on board MIC on my iPhone.

Don’t think of Ferrite just for podcasting give it a go if you play an instrument.

I’m trying to get better at being more productive and keeping an eye on what’s happening over the coming week. I tend to focus on the current day and not look ahead and plan for things happening over the week. Staying in the moment is great but sometimes I feel more relaxed or prepared for the week if I know what I’m up against.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying out an app called Eventail.

When I say app I actually mean a supercharged Today widget.

It’s completely configurable and for me I use it to display just my Calendar events for the next 5 days. It doesn’t give me times but just an order of what’s happening each day.

I can also tap on any of the days to give me a view of the day in detail if I’d like.

What’s even better is nothing leaves your device so privacy isn’t an issue.

There are also options for showing Reminders but I’m yet to dig into this one at the moment.

If you’re using iCloud for your Calendar then I’d definitely recommend giving Eventail a look.

I’ve used Fantastical on and off for years but with it’s ability to display calendars and reminders all in one view I thought I’d give it a go. The beauty of using this is that you stay in the iCloud bubble and not having to manage data elsewhere.

Things I like about it

• The widget displays a full calendar if you expand it out. It's great to be able to quickly see the entire month and each days events if you click on a particular day
• Natural language, just like Todoist you can type things like "put bins out every Thursday at 2pm"
• Dark mode (because...)

Things I don't like

• No ability to create a Reminders list
• No ability to reorder Reminders lists
• Apple Watch app doesn't show Reminders due today

Did it stick?

For me, no. As a calendar app it’s second to none, it’s pretty great. But, if like me you are trying to use Reminders too then it’s going to be a frustrating experience if you value the same items in my ‘things I don’t like’ list above.

I’m feeling like I have a bit more headspace now I’m less active on social media and to my surprise it’s allowed me to focus on trying one productivity app at a time. This might sound strange but when I was on Twitter daily I’d look at others and their apps and get FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). This would inevitably lead me to trying other apps.

Well since last week I committed to using iCloud (for privacy reasons mainly) and when I saw Reminders wasn’t up to scratch I started using GoodTask. I think my problem in the past was I didn’t stick with one app long enough but now I’m not seeing others feeds I’m not tempted to switch apps.

I’m keeping it simple so far and still in the process of moving everything in from OmniFocus. As you can see I’ve split up by Reminders lists so far, I’ll be sharing more as I go but this is stage 1.

I’ll share more on creating smart lists at a later point once I get my head around them.

Are you using GoodTask? Any tips?

Now I’m taking my break from Twitter I’ve taken the apps off my iPhone and simplified a little.

The main new workflow is using GoodTask for my productivity. I’ve settled on iCloud and using the Reminders backend with a better front end makes the most sense for me at the moment.

I’ll report back on if GoodTask sticks and any new apps I’m testing next month.

I just noticed that I passed the three year anniversary of a bug I raised when trying to use Reminders on macOS. There been no update since and it’s marked as duplicate, like a lot of them do 😀

Mine actually stops me being able to use Reminders on macOS.

It’s a great one too. When I create a new list it doesn’t apply the name to the right hand window as you can see above.

I really hope Apple is throwing Reminders away and starting again on iOS 13. As someone that tried (I’ve moved on now) to use Reminders to get things done it’s pretty embarrassing how bad the app is.

I’ll be posting iOS 13 wish list stuff soon but expect Reminders to feature.

I’m trying different apps that stick to iCloud and have installed both Memento and GoodTask.

Well I was planning to try out Memento this week but after reading their privacy statement I started to have second thoughts.

On looking at their faq I saw this

Expired certificates don’t fill me with confidence.

I’ll skip Memento and head over to GoodTask and Fantastical.

Following on from my post on how I use DayOne I thought I’d show you how I back it up.

I’ve been using the journaling app DayOne since 2011 and it’s one of the only apps from that time I’m still using. As you most probably know I change my mind like the weather but this app has stuck with me.

First off I should explain that I don’t use their sync service. Journaling is very personal and it’s not I don’t trust DayOne but the less data I have out there the less there is to potentially lose. I used the import from DayOne classic function to move my data into the new app. I then backup manually by exporting to JSON and saving into an iCloud folder. I’ll do a post on this method soon.

I use DayOne in one of two ways.

Firstly I’ve found that I add images to remember day trips out, things I want to remember like first time as a family we went on holiday along with an image for each day and what we did. This has become my main use, a photo log of our life.

Secondly I’ve started more recently to try and look on the bright side of life and write down three positive things that happen each day.

Over the last 6 months this is where I’ve come to realise that I use this app for only these two purposes.

It’s become a habit for me and something that I (almost) daily make sure I do.

Do you journal or use DayOne?

I’ve had so many little UI niggles lately I though I’d finally use my developer account and jump into the beta on my iPad and iPhone.

So far I’ve only really noticed a couple of things.

News got an Apple logo instead of the company name, it also got a new app icon.

I’m not sure what to think about this one, it doesn’t really say News to me. I don’t think I like it.

Secondly even though it’ll be logging more information at an OS level it seems snappier than the public release. Where I notice it most is in app switching.

Here’s a post on all the changes, my one is about things I’ve personally found when using it.

This one image sums up my ongoing issues with location services and the iPad. I have no idea what’s going on but I’ve restored multiple times and weather apps always seem to struggle on iOS and my iPad, especially when using the widget.

Here’s another example where Dark Sky sees where I am but gets the weather measure wrong between the app and widget. It should be 8 not 47.

Here’s an example of what most weather widgets show me.

I literally have no idea what’s going on, all my settings look fine.

Anyone else? I’m going to move onto the beta and give it a test before raising a radar with Apple.

I’m getting more and more into spending time editing and using RAW on my iPhone rather than just stick with the stock camera app. It’s a great app but I want to push my iPhone and see what it can do. Here’s my current list of camera apps on my iPhone XS. I’m planning on testing Spectre and writing up a little review, Halide I’m already appreciating and Darkroom is the best editing app I’ve used. I’m aiming to leave my DSLR at home a little more and using the RAW and zoom capabilities of my iPhone more over the coming months.

I’ve been an on and off user of Todoist for years but the latest update might make me stick around. The main thing I’ve always liked about the app was it’s straightforward UI and flexibility. I can do a fee form ‘today’ or have specific time reminders. That’s the best of both worlds for me.

The latest update introduces a few things that really improve its use (for me).

First up is a checkbox next to each item. Sounds simple but improves both the use and look of the app. If you want to go back to swipe to complete you can (it’s in the general settings) but this is now the default behaviour.

Next up (I think I’m right on this one) there’s a little more space around elements. Hitting the create task icon seems like there’s a bit more room in this latest update.

Lastly the text seems a little larger or bolder to my eyes, a nice visual improvement.

I’m only just getting into the latest update but as you can tell I’m happy with the little tweaks and I’ll be giving it another go.

Personally I really like the addition of checkboxes in the latest Todoist update but not everyone does so the good news is whilst you can’t remove them you can go back to swiping to complete.

Believe it or not this isn’t as straightforward as you might think if you aren’t looking beyond the end of your nose.

To turn off shuffle make sure you have the current track playing full screen as per the image on the left (see above).

Swipe down a bit and there is the shuffle button. Tap to disable shuffle.

I thought I know I’ll finally get around to testing Things 3 dark mode - now I’m rethinking my productivity workflow!

It’s just such a pretty looking app. Maybe not as efficient for quickly entering and marking repeating reminders but it’s one of the best looking apps out there.

I’m going to do a little experiment and use it alongside my main to do app (OmniFocus) and see where it takes me.

I don’t normally do roundups on here but this year I thought I’d start a new tradition. As you know I switch apps quite a lot through the course of a year and I’ve tried a lot of different ways to get things done on my iOS devices.

So here we go my first apps of the year round up. Note these aren’t apps that came out in 2018 but my most used ones.

Productivity

OmniFocus

I’ve been a user of OmniFocus on and off for many years but with the latest version that supported tags it’s actually stuck. It may seem complicated from the outside but with OmniFocus you can really make it your own. I’ve gotten into a workflow with it now and don’t see me switching again anytime soon. The functionality that got me was the ability to show a specific tag in the ‘today’ (called Forecast) view. This shows all of the calendar events and any tasks with a due date of today. With the addition of tags I can now show anything I want. So I have a ‘today’ tag that I show in my forecast view. This gives me a less formal way to organise things I want to get done today without adding a due date. The Apple Watch app is also solid and the sync works well between all of my devices.

Apple Notes

This is easily my favourite Apple app, it had a big update a few iOS versions ago and has stuck with me. I use it for recipes, mind maps using Apple Pencil, storing important documents and project planning. It’s sync works great and it’s always with me no matter what device I’m on. I might be in the minority but I actually want an Apple Watch version as I store codes in there and would like quick access, but that’s probably just me.

iA Writer

If you’ve been following me for a while this app choice shouldn’t be a surprise. I’ve used iA since it was launched and it continues to keep being updated and just works for me. I use iCloud to sync my documents and the app is great across all of my devices.

Shortcuts

I have to admit I didn’t get shortcuts right away but now it’s a massive time saver for me. Aside from quickly adding health information being able to create images for the blog is worth the time investment in learning it alone. I’m nowhere near the level of some shortcut devotees but steadily finding ways that it suits me and can improve how I use my devices.

Email and Calendar

Just wanted to mention it as we’re talking productivity, I use the Apple apps for both email and calendar. They both work fine for my needs and although I’ve tried several third party options none of them have stuck.

Creativity

Ferrite

One of my finds of the year, I love this app. It took me a little bit to get my head around it but now I know the workflow I use it for recording iOS Only. It allows me to use only my iOS devices to record and produce a podcast.

LumaFusion

Another standout and allowed me to produce YouTube videos on my iOS devices. I actually prefer this experience to anything I’ve done on macOS, it’s great. I used to do everything on iMovie but LumaFusion has replaced the need to even have it installed.

Wordpress

Since moving my blog from squarespace to Wordpress I haven’t looked back. The iOS app gets constant updates and I feel more in control of my site. I can write posts like this one, check my stats, reply to comments and even change my theme via the iOS app. As an iOS Only user this is especially important as the experience in Safari on iPad isn’t the greatest. My only wish is for a dark mode.

Photography

Halide

This year with the camera improvements in the X and then the XS I’ve tried to replace my DSLR for those smaller family day trips and shots for the blog and social. One of the ways to get the most of out this is to shoot in RAW so I gave Halide a go. Out of the box it was intuitive to use and I’ve found that especially in low light I’ve gotten shots that I wouldn’t have been able to rescue if I’d used the stock camera app. I don’t use it for every shot when I’m out but if I’m doing a landscape or something I’ll want to share I’ll use Halide.

Darkroom

Darkroom has slowly become my go to photo editing app of choice. I find it intuitive to use, has a tonne of options and is tightly integrated with Halide.

Wellbeing

DayOne

I’ve been using DayOne since 2011, it’s become a long standing habit to journal my thoughts and keep a log of photos. I use it without a premium account and still use sync with iCloud via export and import of backups. It’s not I don’t trust DayOne with my data but why pay when my workflow already does the job. I just have to remind myself to do a weekly backup.

Calm

Calm has slowly become my meditation app of choice. I find it intuitive to use and I like the voice of the teacher. I don’t always use it everyday but do my best when I’m feeling particularly anxious. The music addition is nice and I find myself using it whilst I’m working, it seems to help my focus.

Sleep++

I’ve swapped between a few sleep tracking apps but find that Sleep++ is the most reliable.

Consumption

Marvel Unlimited

I got back into reading comic books this year and being more into Marvel I naturally went for the Marvel Unlimited app. I’m paying my monthly subscription and have access to everything I’m after. It’s intuitive to use and the only downside is that you can only store 12 comics for offline viewing.

Apple Music

I’ve been a subscriber to Apple Music from the beginning and I’ve become particularly keen on the for you tab to see what I’ve recently played and what my friends are listening to.

Other apps

Apple Maps

Now I’m using CarPlay I’ve become used to using Apple Maps and to be fair it’s not sent me to the wrong location once. As privacy becomes more important it’s my only option so thankfully it’s been great so far.

DuckDuckGo

I’ve completely switched to the DuckDuckGo app as my browser of choice. It blocks all of the ads and lets me browse as privately as I can.

Apollo

A big change is getting into Reddit, it’s replaced my use of Apple News. I avoid what’s popular and just view my favourites.

Night Sky

Myself and my daughter have really gotten into astronomy this year and I find Night Sky to be a great reference for both information and where in the Sky stuff is, like our daily viewings of the ISS.

Tweetbot

I have to use the official app to check notifications but that’s maybe a few times a day but every other time it’s Tweetbot. I love the themes, lack of ads and a clean (in time order) timeline.

Which apps have you been using this year?

Notes

• This article was completely done on iOS
• Thanks to MacStories for their shortcut to add frames to images

Capsicum has launched today and brings with it an app that reminds me of a paper journal and is a remarkably relaxing way to manage your life.

It combines a to do, calendar, habit tracking and notes into one place and in my experience so far has been a more relaxed place to organise myself than a more traditional to do app.

Check it out, it’s got a free trial so you can’t go wrong to at least give it a go and try something different.

I’ve started to use OmniFocus folders as my areas of focus, such as career and financial. Within these I have projects such as podcast and blog. They are building up and seem to stay in the same order they are created in. Well the good news is that you can reorder these.

To do this simply tap on one and hold. You’ll then be able to order them by moving around.

I’d like to see a sort order added to the app, if anyone knows a better way please let me know.

Whilst listening to an episode of Mac Power Users there was a really great tip shared by David when using OmniFocus.

I wanted to post this to help me remember more than anything but hopefully you will find this useful too.

If you are deep down in a project and want to quickly get back to the home you can simply long press the ‘back’ button. This may not say back but it will labelled with whatever the sub division you are in. This doesn’t matter as its always the button in the top left.

This has already saved me a tonne of taps.

I’ve been using Apple Reminders or at least its backend for years on and off and always thought it needed work. Whilst the backend sync has been good the app hasn’t been updated since what feels like years. It looks out of place and especially on iPhone isn’t easy to use.

I’ve been raising issues for a while and still have open bugs that have been there for years with no updates.

Well it looks like I have my answer

This is for a macOS bug in which the list name doesn’t update in the entire UI on new creation. I’ve not received bug updates on iOS like this yet but I expect them to be coming.

This makes me think either Reminders is being dropped or on a more positive thought being redone.

Anyone else had one of these?

Looks great on first look, I’ll have a dig into it later on.

I do a lot of repeating tasks and found creating them in OmniFocus a little time consuming. For each task I had to tap ‘show more’ in the inspector and before I could do anything with it.

Thankfully I’ve found a quicker way.

Tap on any task you’ve already created (this won’t work on a new task you’re creating). Tap ‘show more’ then tap ‘customize inspector’. This then let’s you drag and drop the fields you use the most when creating a new task.

I’ve used a few different apps over the years to try to build good habits but in the end they all fall by the wayside. The main reason for this is I’m not seeing or being reminded of them. When switching over to OmniFocus I thought I’d use their tagging system to help me with this.

On discovering I could add a tag to my forecast view I had an idea. If I want to build up habits why don’t I make sure I’m seeing them everyday.

So to this end I created new tasks such as ‘complete exercise rings’ and marked them with my ‘urgent ’ tag. This means that when I see my forecast I’ll always see them. The only downside is that these don’t appear on the Apple Watch app, unless I’ve missed something of course - please let me know if I have.

The task itself is never actually marked as complete so I don’t have it repeating or anything. It’s just a visual reminder to be better.

I was feeling overwhelmed and my TO DO apps weren’t serving me well so I did a brain dump to get everything out of my head and into a system to bring some calm and planning into my life, something I really need right now.

1. I took my iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil and created a grided note within Apple notes to give me something to line up my text
2. I then wrote down areas of focus (health, family, social, recreation, money, house)
3. Next I created an ‘inbox’ line and proceeded to write everything down that I had in my head
4. Then I went through the list and put an * next to all of the important ones
5. Once I had read them all I then had all of my thoughts on ‘paper’

I’ve been playing around with a few apps but settled on TickTick as an app to try out this month, who knows it might stick.

I created tags for my areas of focus and then proceeded to copy my list I made above and  get it all in order. I only have 2 projects (blog and podcasting), everything else is categorised using the tags.

I then went back through and set reminders and repeats E.g. put bins out every Thursday at 3pm.

I also created a smart list to show me anything that I ‘Must do!’ that I mark as High Priority in the app.

That’s everything out of my head, now to get on and do it!

Now I’m firmly in the using iCloud camp both Calendar and Reminders have become very important to me. Whilst Calendar is fine Reminders hasn’t seen an update in years. I’ve been raising radars to Apple for years and all my suggestions for improvements have been ignored. I think Reminders is now only updated for compatibility rather than giving us an overhaul.

This series of Tweets has me looking back at GoodTask.

I’ve created lists based on my areas of focus and thanks to GoodTask I can see everything that I’ve flagged as high priority with their smart list feature.

Creating tasks is pretty straight forward and I’ve started to brain dump into the app.

I’ll post a review in the coming weeks.

Thanks to the suggestion from Andy over at The Dent for suggesting LumaFusion for video editing on the iPad. I’ve installed and started to play around in it. Intuitive so far so time to get into some video projects.

The straw broke the camels back today when using Overcast. I’ve been having multiple issues including random crashes and this morning my phone was playing a podcast with no app running. Overcast has lost my trust.

I’m giving the in built podcast app a go, wish me luck.

I’ve been playing for years, it’s not had an update in forever but Plants vs Zombies is still my favourite game on iOS.

Source: The Sweet Setup

Great write up on the best calendar apps for Apple Watch. Got to agree, I love Fantastical.

Now I’ve given Things a good crack I’m dipping back into Omnifocus. I’ll report back on my thoughts in a month.

Things 3 is a great looking app that had lots of potential for me but after trying multiple times I’ve stopped trying to fit it in with my workflow.

The bad

• I experienced missing notifications. I'd set a reminder and it wouldn't show so I'd forget to do my task, my number one show stopper
• It annoyed me that the task name would be cut off with '...' if it was too long
• Setting repeating and reminders is too many taps
• No dark mode
• Slow to load the app (for me on an XS)

The good

• One of the best watch apps available. Quick sync and looks great.
• Integrated Calendar view
• Relaxed formatting on project view

When dark mode comes along with iOS 13 I’ll take another look but for now my quest continues. I’m going into Omnifocus next and I’ll report back.

Do you use Things?

The latest update brings app icon selection, I’m going retro.

Wasn’t expecting this free update to Tweetbot, wow it looks great with pure black mode for OLED screens and redesigned profile pages.

I’m getting back on plan, left things slide a bit and tried to use iCloud to get things done. I’ve failed miserably and need to get back to using a third party app to keep me on task.

I’ve always come back to Todoist or Omnifocus but Todoist gets my vote just now. I like that I can create a free form ‘today’ but also add reminders where needed such as get Milk at 2pm when I’m at the supermarket or call dentist etc.

I’m only just getting started but here’s my setup.

I’m using labels to classify tasks as you can see above and only using projects where they are needed such as my passion ones. In the past I’d have created a project called Home and put all my family tasks in the there but labels makes more sense to me these days.

I’m also enjoying the new dark mode 😎.

The only downside of using Todoist coming from something like Reminders is that their Apple Watch app just isn’t very good. Sync to the app seems slow and there is no support for Series 4 complications in the info watch faces. I’m hoping these are being worked on.

Here goes, wish me luck.

Ooops, bet people inside of Apple are working to fix it ASAP though. Strange bug.

Expect lots of updates on iOS 12 and watchOS 5 this week on the blog. I’ve just started to test apps that use the Siri watch face so I’ll be reporting in on how they are performing and some of my favourites.

There’ll be lots of app updates today as part of the big iOS 12 launch. Up next for me is an app that I am starting to play with, GoodTask. Anything that uses iCloud for calendar and reminders is on top of my list at the moment. I’ll update on how I get on but for now here’s what’s changed in version 4.1.

One of the apps that I’ve started to get into is Streaks. Along with iOS 12 today we get a version 4, which most importantly adds an iPad app and iCloud sync. Looking forward to getting it all setup today and testing.

It’s a big day for the Omnigroup, today sees the launch of OmniFocus 3. I’ve been a user of OmniFocus for a while, well on and off. I switch a lot but always seem to come back eventually. I like their privacy and encryption stance and trust them above any other productivity app to look after my data.

I’m starting to test and will let you know how I get on.

Omnigroup

I’ve been using a lot of default Apple apps in a bid to simplify both my workflows and data. In this day and age it’s good to have your data in just a few places and I’m starting to delete third party apps that hold my data (more on this in a later post).

Here’s how I add lined paper to the Notes app on iOS.

[gallery ids=“311,312,313” type=“rectangular”]

1. Open up Notes
2. Create a new note
3. Tap on the Share icon (see first image above)
4. Tap 'Lines & Grids'
5. Choose the grid pattern that you want

My favourite Twitter app Tweetbot has got a shiny new version for the MAC. This is just a short post to let everyone know it’s available but I’ll be digging into it over the next week and will write up my thoughts.

I’m at a point in my technology that I have pretty much what I want from a hardware perspective (still debating my iPhone decision BTW) but have found flaws (I might be too picky!) in almost every app that I use that is supposed to make my life easier to manage. Be it privacy concerns, UI issues, rubbish Apple Watch apps or workflows I haven’t found anything that sticks.

I’ve decided to declare APP BANKRUPTCY.

In this I mean that I am taking away most of the apps off my iPhone and sticking with stock and iCloud sync, something that has worked well for me (sync reliability that is). I am fed up with relying on third parties to implement new features or delving into their mostly vague privacy statements.

I’ll keep you all updated on my progress but on iOS (where I do 90% of my writing and hobbies) I’ll be using only Apple sync and apps

• Notes
• Reminders
• Calendar
• Music

Wish me luck and I’ll report back.

How do you feel about your choice of apps?

I’ve been using Apple News since release but something troubling has happened to my setup - Apple are adding unapproved News sources to my feed. To add insult to injury they are also enabling notifications.

It’s always been a good app allowing me to control what I see but I can no longer trust it not to add what it thinks I want to see.

You can see above that I set up News not to suggest or show me anything I don’t follow.

On firing up the app this morning the above has been added. I’m not happy. The mainstream news is something I’m avoiding (for obvious reasons) and not being able to trust my app is a deal breaker.

At this point I’m done with Apple News.

Twitter seems incapable of acting in a way that gives me confidence that they actually care about their user base. I’m not going to get political in my blog but their inability to act on certain accounts has me not wanting to benefit their platform with my content.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get benefits and enjoy interacting with my community but enough is enough.

The problem for me is that the negative side of Twitter seems to be bubbling up to the top, I’m trying to be more optimistic in 2018 and Twitter isn’t going to help me fulfil my goal.

I’ll still be on for sharing posts and managing comments but for now I’m taking a step back, deleting the apps from my devices and seeing how I get on without checking it constantly.

Be safe out there.

I’ve been using a mixture of Todoist and Reminders but now I’m into 2018 I’ve decided to make a switch back to OmniFocus.

Todoist was fine but it’s update to include little illustrations didn’t sit well with me. Reminders is ok for basics but not to plan a lot of projects.

So, I made the decision to go all in on OmniFocus.

The most important decision when choosing a to do app is trust. Do you trust that when you get something off your mind it’ll stay safe somewhere until you need to see it?

With OmniFocus and more importantly the Omnigroup I trust them as I do Apple with my data. I can’t say the same for most others.

I’ll keep you updated on my configuration and how I’m getting on.

At last…