It’s WWDC time. The keynote starts in less than an hour! Here’s a few of the things I’m hoping to see, almost none of which will make headlines.

The second annual Automation April event, hosted by Federico Viticci and John Voorhees at MacStories, is just one day away from wrapping up. I just completed my submissions and I’m looking forward to trying all of the winning Shortcuts!

If you’re at least somewhat interested in optimizing your personal productivity there’s a good chance that you use also use a todo list app. If so, you likely spend a lot of time multi-tasking between your calendar and todo list — literally correlating your calendar events (when is my next meeting?) with your todo list (what is my next task?) in an effort to optimize your productivity. If you are just now realizing that you do this all the time, and that this is actually quite inefficient, then this post is for you!

My my number one question about the Apple Watch Ultra wasn’t about the size or the bands or any of the details you can find in just about any of the serious reviewers’ analysis to date. It wasn’t even about the battery life per se. It was about the charging routine.

My first encounter with an AI chat bot was legendary. I regret nothing.

I haven’t updated the blog since mid-November, but for good reason. I started a new company and launched my first product in the App Store!

Brent Simmons, of NetNewsWire fame¹ (among other things), in “After Twitter” on his personal blog, inessential:

A New Hope

With the fall of the Twitter consensus I am energized. I remember what it was like in the 2000s; I remember the liveliness and sparkle of those days on the web.

I don’t suggest dialing the clock back to old tech, but I hope we use the good parts from those days to help us build new and amazing things. There is so much to do, and so many grand problems to solve.

The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.

As soon as you have 20 minutes to spare, I encourage you to go watch this short film about Sally Schmidt, produced by Oscar® award winning documentary filmmaker Ben Proudfoot, for the New York Times¹.

Speaking of restaurants, Sally started a little establishment you might have heard of called The French Laundry.²

Casey Newton was on the Vergecast in July to talk about how BeReal is taking over. On the podcast he described his “pop-up restaurant theory of social networks”, which he has been talking about since at least 2018:

I have this pop-up restaurant theory of social networks, which is: every restaurant is basically the same, but sometimes a pop-up will open up in your neighborhood and all of the foodies start going there, and they’ve just kinda remixed the ingredients a little bit, and for two weeks all everyone wants to talk about is this restaurant.

This post explores whether this pop-up restaurant theory can be applied to apps in general, not just social media.

Last month the @microsoft Twitter account tweeted something relevant to my interests:

What’s the best advice you’ve received on how to maintain work-life balance?

This post explores the importance of the wording in the phrase “work-life balance”, and my quest to promote a better alternative.

The 2022 operating system updates from Apple will bring a much needed improvement to Mail.app: the ability to schedule emails to send later. While Apple is playing catch up here, it still lags behind on a similar ability for Messages.app.

This post explores a simple workaround to schedule text messages to send later on iPhone, iPad, and Mac that doesn’t require any third-party apps.

It’s WWDC time. The rumor mill has run its course, and the usual suspect Apple pundits have weighed with their predictions and wish lists. Since I’m trying my hand at this blogging thing I thought it might be fun to write down my own personal wish list.

Have you ever wished you could use Slack-style emoji codes like :facepalm: in other apps on your Mac or iPad? Wish no more! :nerdface:

I can’t remember the last time I read a book from front to back, but I am a voracious reader. The thing is, I prefer to read “the internet” instead of books.

This post explores how RSS has impacted my internet journey, how RSS is making a comeback, and some of my favorite RSS follows of all time.

Every new blog should start with an obligatory “hello, world” — so here I am doing just that.