Just under 13 months ago, I tapped Purchase on an app in the Mac App Store that changed the way I write: Ulysses III. Then a brand-new reworking of a writing app with a decade’s legacy, Ulysses III was at once the 3rd version of the closest competitor to Scrivener, and a new writing app unlike anything seen before. It had the writing simplicity of iA Writer or Byword combined with in-line formatting and text info panes and more that’d remind you more of a traditional word processor, combined with file management that could rival a notes app like Evernote and exporting tools that’d rival Marked. It was feature packed, but then hid everything away to let you focus on your text.
Ulysses III was everything a web or print writer needed in one Markdown-powered app. You could write, easily keep up with all of your texts, and export in any format, all in one app. It's a one-stop-shop for all your writing needs, and a beautiful one at that.
That perhaps doesn’t sound so revolutionary, but it was enough to win me over. I love trying out new writing apps, wanted to switch to the Mac just so I could get Notational Velocity and WriteRoom years ago, and then bought iA Writer for Mac the second it was available. Its beautiful simplicity still makes it my favorite plain text editor. I’d tried the original Ulysses, as well as Scrivener, both of which offered to make managing documents and writing and publishing easier, and yet I only found they complicated my work. Most Markdown writing apps let you export as basic HTML, which is plenty for a web writer, and then there’s Marked for any other export needs you may have. I’d left Word—the original all-in-one writing app—behind in lieu of lighter apps and Markdown, and I didn’t see a need to go back.
But with Ulysses III, putting everything together clicked for me, enough that I switched to it as my main writing app. Here’s what made it so great, and what’s extra nice about it with the just-released v1.2 update:
Simple & Beautiful Markdown Writing
At its core, Ulysses is still a plain-text writing app, just one that happens to include a lot more features than most. You’ve got the plain text writing simplicity you’d expect, with extras. There’s Markdown formatting added as you write, with standard keyboard shortcuts to make it easy to write in Markdown even if you’re not used to it. Links, images, and footnotes get an extra popover to make it easy to add them to your text without cluttering everything, and pressing and holding CMD+V will let you paste rich text or code. It makes Markdown look so nice, it’s the writing app that'd make anyone want to start using Markdown.
Rather than just showing one blank document when you open the app, as the average text editor does, Ulysses shows everything you’ve written on individual sheets. You can select multiple sheets and “glue” them together to keep them as a set (perhaps to keep your table of contents and chapters stuck together while still individual), merge sheets, or now in the latest update split sheets at your current curser position. Scroll to the end of a document, and keep scrolling to open the next sheet automatically. It’s a simple way to jot down separate notes, flesh them out, and pull them together into a cohesive work.
And no matter how lenghty your writing is or how many sheets you have glued together, your text will always look beautifully clean in Ulysses. There’s always been a couple of styles built into Ulysses, including the nice default scheme and a Solarized theme that each had an accompanying dark mode, along with the options to simply tweak the style of every part of the Markdown syntax. Now, that’s accompanied by themes, so you can download styles and share your own in the beautiful new Ulysses Style Exchange. There’s already some nice themes there, and it’ll be exciting to see more themes show up.
But then, my favorite Ulysses writing feature is that it remembers how you like your window to look in windowed and full-screen mode. If you want to have the 3 column view with a light theme in windowed mode so you can see all of your notes, but would rather use a dark theme without the folder sidebars when you’re full-screen, just use those options in the respective locations and Ulysses will remember what you like. And, as another nice v1.2 addition, you can now use a dark writing theme while keeping the folder columns in the more readable light mode.
There’s also still the options for typewriter scrolling, having the current line highlighted, show or hiding line numbers, and more. It looks great out of the box, and yet makes it easy enough to tweak that if you’re particular about your writing experience, you’ll be able to get it looking just the way you want.
All Your Writing in One Place
A slick writing environment would be enough to stand out in the writing app market, but Ulysses III goes far beyond that by letting you organized all of your writing in one place. You can keep your notes in iCloud, synced to Daedalus Touch (the current mobile counterpart to Ulysses until Ulysses Mobile is finished), or add your local folders from your Mac with text files. You can open files to add them to your library, and now even drag-and-drop in Word documents to convert them to Markdown (and yes, that preserves the basic formatting quite nicely). And, there’s Keywords (or OS X tags with the latest update, if you’re using external files) to add extra info to your notes, and smart filters to automatically put related documents together based on their contents, keywords, and more.
Ulysses has the standard folders and sub-folders you’d expect, but if you write a lot, you’ll end up with quite a mess of files. Ulysses has a ton of ways to help you cut through the mess and jump to the text you need quickly. The best feature is the Alfred-like search tool that the v1.1 update brought. Just tap CMD+Shift+O, and you can search through your entire library and jump to a different document without ever leaving your keyboard. The list even remembers your most recently edited files, so you can jump to them even if you forgot what you were last writing about. And, as mentioned before, you can show or hide the file browser sidebars, so if you only rely on the search box, you could get all the benefits of Ulysses’ library without having a more cluttered interface than in any other writing app.
A Built-in Personal Trainer
You can have the nicest writing app in the world, but sometimes it takes a bit more motivation to get a blank page filled with words. There’s nothing like a writing goal to keep you going, and nothing like an automated word count watching over your shoulder to let you know when you’ve hit your goals. That’s what the new Ulysses Goal feature offers.
Just attach a goal from the top of your sheet, and then set the number of characters, words, sentences, or pages you want, and choose if you want at least, around, or at most that many. Now, just keep writing, and there will be a small circle indicator at the top of your sheet that’ll fill up as you write and change colors to let you know when you’ve hit your goal. You can even share the goal image on your social networks if you’d like. It’s the Runkeeper of writing.
There’s also still the great Statistics pane as well, that shows you how many characters words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages your document contains, along with an estimated reading time for slow, average, and fast readers—and you can even tweak that view to only show the stats you need. Sure, you shouldn’t be looking at that all the time, but it’s nice to have the detailed stats when you want them. It’s also fun to select everything in your library and check the statistics of everything (my library contains just over 155k words right now).
Turning Text Into Documents
You’ve finished your writing goals, with your text organized and easy to find in Ulysses. Now, it’s time to put your words to work. You can select the text you want to export and tap Alt+CMD+C to copy it as HTML, or click the Quick Export button to export as Text, Markdown, HTML, Rich Text, PDF, or ePub. Or, just drag-and-drop the file or folder icon in the Quick Export box to your desktop or the folder you want in Finder, and you’ll have the document and any included images and files saved together.
If it’s formatted HTML (with a style sheet, not just as plain raw HTML), Rich Text (say, for Word or Pages), PDF, or ePub exports you’re wanting, you’ll find a number of beautiful export styles built-in. You can duplicate and tweak them in your favorite code editor, using CSS or a custom CSS-like syntax that’s easy to tweak. Or, you can now download new document styles from the new Ulysses Style Exchange, where you’ll already find a Word 2010-style template so you can write documents and export them in rich text that looks just like a document made in Word’s default text styles.
The Ulysses Style exchange is perhaps the nicest extra with the latest version of Ulysses III, with a number of nice text editing themes and export styles ready to use. It’ll be very exciting to see how it continues to grow, and it could end up being for writing (in some ways) what Package Control is for Sublime Text. And then, it’ll be equally exciting to see how Ulysses III itself continues to get better for writers. It redefined what a full-featured modern writing app should be, then in its v1.1 update made it insanely simple to export formatted documents and find what you want with the built-in library search. This update, v1.2, brings the new styles and the Style Exchange, along with goals and other tweaks that make it even nicer. In the future, we’ve got WordPress publishing and an iPad version of Ulysses, and more, to look forward to.
Putting it All Together
You can have the nicest writing app in the world, though, and still find it an unproductive place. Word isn’t a bad writing app, but it has far more features than you need and is designed around print, making exporting for the web a nightmare. Same goes for any other traditional word processor. Then, the average writing apps (iA Writer, Byword, and more) are great, but they’re also simple. You’ll need to organize your files in Finder, and if you want to export your documents beyond simple HTML export, you’ll need another app like Marked. You’ll also have to stick with their default writing theme, unless you use a highly configurable text editor like Sublime Text but then you’ll have to fight the urge to tweak for hours.
Ulysses III brings everything together in a way that reinvents what a word processor should be in 2014. You can write in an interface that looks the way you like (which is half the reason people change fonts and colors in Word—to make writing more fun, even if they have to switch everything back to Times New Roman when it’s time to print), keep everything in one place for reference, and export beautiful web or print ready content in a button click. It simplifies your writing experience, and gives you the power to do more—and even encourages you to write more with its new goals. It’s minimal and distraction free when you want it to be—and even remembers how you like said distraction-free interface to look—but then includes the extra features you need to not feel limited by writing in plain text.
I honestly couldn’t recommend it enough. If you write much at all, as a student, professionally, or just for a hobby, do yourself a favor and download the trial or just buy it already. You’ll love it.
It’s been 6 months since OS X Mavericks was released, which is a relatively short time but in the age of annual OS upgrades, it’s half a generation. Mavericks itself wasn’t a huge leap forward for OS X, design-wise, but it dropped some of the more skeuomorphic elements from the OS and rebuilt the core of the OS to be more energy efficient and speed up the entire system. If the Mac was Apple’s only computer, we could at best expect light UI changes and perhaps some new built-in apps in the next version of OS X.
But today, it’s iOS that’s the OS everyone notices, in a world where iPhones and iPads vastly outsell Macs. iOS 7 was a complete redesign of the original modern mobile OS, with bright colors, thin fonts, and swipe-orientated navigation. It’s so sharply different from everything that came before, it’s hard to imagine that Apple won’t work some of the iOS design changes into the Mac this year. OS X Lion was the “Back to the Mac” version that brought new apps and design from iOS over to the Mac, and Mavericks continued that tradition by gaining iBooks and Maps from iOS. But this year’s 10th release of OS X is all but guaranteed to be a far sharper change from everything that’s come before—one Apple presumably wants the world to help them test, by opening OS X beta testing to everyone this week.
There’s next-to-no way Apple’s going to turn OS X into iOS directly, with its one-app-at-a-time model. It also seems rather unlikely OS X will be fully redesigned as deeply as iOS 7 (and as so many designers have mocked up, as in the above OS X Ivericks concept). For now, everything’s speculation.
Steven Hackett rounded up the progress of Apple's user interface designs over the years, for a solid look at the past and a perspective on how Apple might change OS Xs design. But for a glance forward, the best place to look is at the apps that have already been designed with a lighter, thinner UI that’s reminiscent of iOS 7. And then, for a better idea of the future of pro apps on the Mac, there's everything from Apple’s own iWork apps to the new OmniFocus and Sketch that have this year redefined the way inspectors work on Macs, even while sticking with more dated designs. These apps give us the best concrete glimpse of the future of the Mac, as it already exists today.
The Simplification of OS X Design
There's been a steady march to lighter, less distracting UIs for years now, with writing apps leading the way. WriteRoom was the original UI-free writing app that, while being a traditional windowed app, harked back to terminal-powered text editors like Vi. iA Writer took the next step, making a lighter, typography focused writing app with zero settings or options. It was the original iOS 7-styled app, launched nearly 30 months before iOS 7. And so, it's only appropriate that one of the first new Mac apps launched with an even closer iOS 7 style was Simplenote for Mac. Clean, bright white, and focused on thin lines and typography, it would feel at home immediately in a redesigned OS X aside from its traditional bubbly window buttons.
Fonts from Bohemian Coding, launched last November as an alternative to the Mac's default Font Book app and a successor to their own Fontcase, is at once a nice app and a beautiful showcase of what light, typography centric design could bring to the Mac. It has familiar Mac features like the move-mouse-to-scrub font previews that are reminiscent of iPhoto libraries, coupled with a unique design that stands on its own while being obviously influenced by iOS 7. Most interestingly, it has its own typography-based window buttons in the top left corner.
This month's release of the new Markdown-powered presentations app Deckset completes the circle from iA Writer's original off-white sparse writing interface merged with an iOS 7 style UI. The app is centered on your slides, not the UI, which makes it feel more like a mobile app than the traditional inspector-driven Mac apps, but it's the multicolored typographic window buttons and the beautiful theme browser that earned it inclusion in this list. A new OS X with this level of redesigned window boarders seems immediately possible.
Modern doesn't have to mean bright white, though, as the launch screen in the new Sketch 3 proves. The app itself relies on a more traditional interface—though Sketch itself was one of the earliest adopters of the integrated inspectors that fill the ranks of Mac productivity apps today. What does show a sharp contract to traditional Mac design is the launch screen that's at once unique and yet iOS 7 inspired.
But if you want the strongest iOS 7 experience on the Mac, you'll need to look at Apple's own iCloud.com web apps. The Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Notes apps feel almost just like their native iPad counterparts, with some desktop-orientated tweaks. I'd highly doubt the next OS X will look this much like iOS 7—after all, the last iCloud web apps looked precisely like iOS 6, and even at the height of OS X' skeuomorphic design it never looked that precisely like iOS. Still, these apps provide an interesting look at what an iOS 7ified OS X could look like if taken to its logical extreme.
Whither Inspector?
There's one more shift over the past few years in Mac app design that's as important to remember in how the next OS X will look as any other design change: the new integrated inspectors. They're embed in the right side of the app, use tabs that typically will switch smartly based on context (similar to Microsoft's Ribbon, albeit without taking up valuable vertical space). Perhaps it's not such a huge change from the former floating inspector windows, but it does make full-screen apps make much more sense—and that's one of the tiny iOS-style changes that have popped up in OS X over the past few releases.
Third party developers have been using the new built-in inspector in various ways for quite some time now, with Sketch including one of the nicest built-in inspectors, but a recent adopter of the style has been the Omni group. OmniGraffle's UI looks perhaps the most dated of recently released Mac apps, but its inspector is similar to the iWork inspector while adding the extra tools needed for that app. OmniOutliner kept a floating inspector, but with the tabs and smarts that make it similar to iWork's inspector, while the still-in-beta OmniFocus 2 has a nice new twist on a built-in inspector that's flatter and whiter than most. Plus, its new Quick Add pane would look perfectly at home in an iOS 7-style interface.
Speaking of flatter, whiter design, Microsoft Office 2013 took that to a different extreme, with all-caps typography, bright white accented with app-specific colors, and flat elements through the apps. The new OneNote for Mac sports a similar design, though with a bit more of Apple's Aqua bubbly plastic than could possibly look at home in an iOS 7-styled OS X. It'll be fascinating to see how the presumed upcoming Office 2014 for Mac looks—if Apple goes to an iOS 7 style extreme, and Office 2014 looks like Office 2013 for Windows, it'll actually look quite at home.
Then again, the best hint at what Apple may have planned for the next OS X' design is once again the iCloud.com web apps, this time the iWork apps. Their recent still-in-beta redesign uses a dark UI theme that includes iOS 7 style thin fonts and flat elements alongside an OS X style new-style inspector. These web apps design are unique in Apple's in-house lineup today, and I have to wonder if they don't point more towards a more "professional" twist to iOS 7's style that could be what Apple has planned for the next OS X.
New design, new inspectors, or perhaps something entirely unexpected that we can't predict? It's tough to say definitively what the next OS X will bring, but I happen to think you can put together the designs that have hit the Mac already and guess rather well at what a redesign that's halfway between iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks would look like—and my money's on that being the direction Apple goes.
What's in a Name
And then, there’s one more thing that’s fun to speculate about: what the next version of Mac OS will be called (which apparently is currently codenamed “Syrah”). OS X Mavericks was the first OS X version to not be named after a cat, but rather after a surfing location in California, and that change presumably means the next version of OS X will include a California location name as well. OS X Cupertino, anyone?
Even more interestingly, though, is the version number Apple will use. Mavericks is OS X 10.9, so will the next OS X be 10.10? Or, is it possible that this year OS X, will actually become OS XI (or OS Xi to show a closer alignment with iOS)?
OS Xi 11.0 Cupertino. Insanely great.
And then, there’s that fabled One more thing Wall Street is salivating about…
Speaking of interesting web app projects, here’s one that’ll blow your socks off: Project Naptha. It’s a Chrome extension that’ll OCR the text in any images in your browser, letting you select the text and copy it just as you would any other text on a page.
And it really works, even on skewed text in not-so-perfectly-clear photos. It’ll have similar mistakes to other OCR apps, and the results are perhaps similar to what you’d get with the OCR in OneNote for PCs, but still, that’s pretty good.
Want to really be surprised? Open a page with text in another language (Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, and French for now), select said text, right-click, and you can get Project Naptha to translate the text right on top of the image. It’ll replace the original text in the image with the translated text, like magic, similar to the Word Lens app that can similarly replace text on signs and more with translated text. Or, you can just use it to “erase” text from a picture, again like magic.
One of the many nice new features in Photoshop CC is a tool to copy text and layer styles as CSS, added in an attempt to keep web designers using Photoshop to design sites instead of Sketch and other newer tools. And now, with the new free beta Project Parfait from Adobe, you can get the same features in your browser with any PSD even from an older version of Photoshop.
Just upload your PSD, and you can select elements and then copy their CSS, text styles, colors, and more to use in your own designs. You can even view a list of the layer elements and toggle their visibility, download layers as web-optimized images, and measure the distance between elements precisely. You can’t actually edit the PSD, but you can very quickly extract the design as CSS to use in your web designs.
We might never see a full-featured Photoshop web app, but this is yet another neat, lightweight web design tool to add to Adobe’s growing arsenal of free and surprisingly nice web design tools. There’s the Adobe Edge tools, the open-source Brackets text/code editor, and of course Typekit and its new Typekit Practice site that’ll help you learn typography design for free.
The lumbering software giants Adobe and Microsoft are staying surprisingly interesting this year.
Presentations are too complicated. There’s hundreds of tools and options in PowerPoint and an entire industry of books and courses on using those tools, just to help you get a single sentence looking nice on a 100” screen.
And yet, presentations should be simple. Really simple. They’re just snippets of text and images, plus some formatting. That shouldn’t require a full-featured slide design app—one that actually makes it difficult to keep your presentation consistent.
With writing, we’ve solved the problem with Markdown. You can write in plain text in any app, from humble code editors to beautiful apps designed just for Markdown writing, using formatting that’s structured and translates equally well to the web or print. Then, with export tools like those built into Ulysses III or in stand-alone apps like Marked, you can turn your writing into beautiful print documents or HTML in a click. While writing in Markdown and using the tools that support it might take a bit to get used to, once you’ve switched you’ll never look at word processors the same.
And now, with the brand new app Deckset, the Unsigned Integer team is disrupting presentations in the same way. Give it a Markdown document, and it’ll turn it into a beautiful, ready-to-show presentation in one click, the same way Marked turns your Markdown text into printable documents. It’s awesome.
Just write the text you want included in your presentation in Markdown, using headers, quotes, body text, and bullet points as you would otherwise. Separate each “slide” with three dashes on a new line, and add in images and video the same way you would in Markdown (e.g. . Now, open the file in Deckset, and you’ve got a presentation. It’s that simple.
In iA Writer’s grand tradition of including no settings, Deckset is almost feature-free. You can pick from one of 7 built-in themes in 5 different colors (click the color square under the theme to select the one you want), each with their own professional typefaces that are bundled with the app, but for now, you can’t add your own templates (though the team has announced that feature may come in the future). The only setting you’ll find is one that lets you choose which text editor you want to use to edit your presentations, and an Aspect Ratio setting in the menubar. That’s it.
All you’re left to do is focus on the content in your presentation, and leave worrying about how the presentation looks to the app. You’ll get a preview of how each slide looks, then can click on each slide to see it fully in the window. If something looks wrong, or you just want to keep adding content to your presentation, click the Edit button to open the Markdown document with your presentation in your default text editor. You’ll get a tiny floating preview of your slides from Deckset as you write, and it’ll update with your changes live as you make them. It’s a handy little addition that should leave you confident in editing your text, and is a great way to try out the various styles you’ll get with quotes, code, and more content that Deckset’s themes will use for special slides.
Multimedia is the tricky part, though, and yet Deckset has it covered, too. There’s no graph support built-in, so you might need to reach for an app like the free OmniGraphSketcher (or even the iPad app Paper as Ben Thompson has used so nicely for charts and graphs at Stratechery) to create charts and graphs, and then add them as images to your slides. Then, adding images and video is as simple as adding them in Markdown (as such: ). Images will be shown full-screen by default, or as a background with a filter or blur with your text on top if in a slide that has text. Then, you can use simple text modifiers like [right] to align your images the way you want. Each theme will make images look slightly different, with various filters and such to look perfect with the theme, so you can experiment to see what looks best for your content.
Then, when it’s time to show your presentation on the big screen, Deckset has a nice surprise for you: presenter mode. You’ll get a preview of your current slide and the next, along with the current time, while your presentation shows as normal in your projector or TV screen. You can even add presenter notes to your Markdown text, and they’ll display below your slide in the presenter view. It’s everything you could have wanted from a simple Markdown presentations app.
Now, as a Markdown-powered app, the only files you’ll have are your text file and any media you’ve included. Deckest will save your theme choice as metadata on your text file, so you should be able to send the file to someone else using Deckset without trouble, but to be safe you might want to tell them what theme to use as well. Otherwise, you can export as PDF, which would work even to present the presentation without Deckset if you preview the PDF full-screen since Deckset doesn’t use animations anyhow.
Conclusion
Text in Markdown formatting turned into a slide makes sense. It’s something the online writing app Draft added recently, and that Evernote (sans-Markdown) added to their Premium subscriptions, letting you turn your notes into a basic presentation. What’s difficult is making those presentations actually look better than a decently polished PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. And yet, Deckset’s themes and typography will be sure to make your presentations look nicer than they would with any default PowerPoint template, and with the advanced-yet-simple image options and the beautiful presenter mode, it’s got enough to not just to use as an occasional quick presentation tool but instead to actually replace PowerPoint for most presentation needs.
Deckset is priced the same as Keynote for Mac—$19.99—and is absolutely worth it if you use a presentations app at all. It’ll reduce the time you spend making your slides to nearly zero, while making you focus on the most important part of your presentation: your content.
*****
There’s nvAlt to replace OneNote, Ulysses and Writer Pro and Byword and Marked and dozens of other Markdown writing-centric apps to replace Word, Calca in some small ways to replace Excel, and now Deckset (along with Draft and a tiny handful of others) to replace PowerPoint. The Markdown-powered Office is all-but complete, and it’s great.
Take time to think more seriously about subscriptions than signup forms want you to.
Everything’s a subscription these days. You can get Photoshop and Lightroom, all of Microsoft’s Office apps, almost every song ever recorded, a library full of books, a vast catalogue of back TV shows and a handful of movies, a terabyte of online storage, unlimited backup, virtually unlimited website hosting, and so much more, all for the low price of $9.99 or less a month each. You can get a domain for that price per year, and a number of web apps like Evernote for half that price per month. You can support your favorite writers on the web or subscribe to magazines and newspapers for anything from a dollar to $20 a month.
They all sound cheap and harmless at first, but over time, they can add up just as badly as traditional boxed software and stacks of music CDs. Worse still, if you stopped subscribing to everything tomorrow, you’d have little-to-nothing to show for your investment. That’s perhaps not precisely bad, as you could say the same thing for your internet subscription or even the food you eat, but it does put subscriptions in a different light than buying a box set of your favorite artist’s music CDs. Worse still, if you buy a CD, you won’t automatically be charged for another CD next month, but subscriptions will keep charging you automatically even if you forget about them.
Subscriptions aren’t bad. If anything, they’re a natural extension of the internet. Information wants to be free, and having it behind an all-you-can-eat subscription paywall is the most obvious way to set media and apps “free.” You pay for an unlimited internet connection, and then pay for unlimited “libraries” of apps and content. That makes sense.
And yet, it can all get expensive. Add up a few site, app, and media service subscriptions, and you’ll be spending more than a premium cable bill each month—and more than your computer’s value each year. That’s fine if you want and use all of those services, but it’s far too easy to forget what all you’re paying for—which sometimes can be nothing, as I found when iTunes doesn’t automatically kill subscriptions even after a magazine app and its in-app purchases are pulled. A handful of services can go unnoticed on your bank statement for a few months, but they sure add up over time.
That’s why you need to do two things: only subscribe to the things you know you’re glad to spend that annual amount on, and remind yourself to reconsider each of your subscriptions every so often. The first should be obvious: subscriptions cost per month, so think of the cost over time instead of the cost today. Sure, it might just cost $9.99 this month, but it’ll actually cost nearly $120 this year. If it still sounds sensible to you, then go ahead and subscribe.
Then open your to-do app, and set a recurring reminder a few days before your subscription is due—a few days sooner than a year from the day you subscribed for annual subscriptions, or perhaps 3 months later for monthly subscriptions. Remind yourself to reconsider your subscription then, and forget about it. When that time rolls around, think through the first condition—am I getting my subscription’s value out of this?—and if you can still answer it affirmatively, then check it off and don’t worry about it again until the reminder comes back. This will give you a somewhat random list of your subscriptions in a way that’ll remind you to be smart about your subscriptions and give you a chance to reconsider them right before they’re due to charge you again.
~
I have quite a few subscriptions, some of which absolutely make sense. Netflix, for instance, makes sense whenever I’m watching a TV show series, as it’d cost far more to buy the series on iTunes when I’d never watch it again. Rdio mostly makes sense for me, but then, I like random radio which iTunes Radio does brilliantly for free, and I listen to the same albums enough times that buying them almost makes more sense. My reading material subscriptions (newspapers, magazines, and blogs) vary over time, so the reminders are the most helpful there. Office 365 makes sense for me right now, as I often write Office-centric tutorials, but it may or may not make sense next year, making it great to review then.
The first domain name I purchased felt like a huge decision since buying it was really committing to paying for it each year for the foreseeable future. Over time, in-app purchases and subscription upgrades get easier and easier to add on, since they just cost this much, and it’s easier to lose sight of the long-term picture.
You wouldn’t have bought a several thousand dollar Creative Suite box set without careful budgeting and consideration years ago. Don’t jump into subscriptions that are just as expensive over time with any less consideration.
One of the nicest Kindle features is that you can email your own eBooks and documents to a unique @kindle.com email address and they’ll automatically show up on your device. That same feature is what lets Instapaper and other services automatically send periodicals and books to your Kindle. It’s nice and simple.
There’s two major problems with it: one, it’s a pain to send a lot of documents to your Kindle wirelessly, and two, it’s very annoying to have a dozen old Instapaper archives in your Kindle Cloud account. For the former, it’s smarter to just connect it to your computer and copy the books over if you have a ton to move, but the only way to get around the latter problem is to delete each document individually from your Manage Your Kindle page.
Now there’s another option. Amazon has combined their Amazon Cloud Drive service with your Kindle Personal Documents, so you can see all the documents you or any 3rd party services have sent to your Kindle. Just login to Cloud Drive, open the My Send-to-Kindle Docs folder, and you can delete any files you want from there, and they’ll be deleted from your Kindle Cloud automatically. You’ll also notice now that you’ll have 10Gb of free storage space in Cloud Drive: 5Gb for free by default, and another 5Gb for your Personal Documents.
Unfortunately, you can’t add documents to your Kindle from Cloud Drive, at least not right now. You’ll instead still need to email documents and DRM-free books to your Kindle or use one of the Send to Kindle apps. The good thing is, those files are now much easier to manage in Cloud Drive, and they’re saved there in your original formats—no more having your documents converted to the kindle .az3 format by default.
Now, here’s to hoping that Amazon will eventually let you add documents to your Kindle just by saving them to that Cloud Drive folder. Until then, you can get something similar by getting IFTTT to email documents to your Kindle when you add them to a Dropbox folder.
Google Chrome started out as the most clutter-free browser. It was fast and had a clean interface, but it also lost most of the features and buttons that other browsers had. But that’s ok. It taught us to love the web on its own, and that the browser is best as a minimalistic chrome that’s there just to render websites and web apps.
And then, out of nowhere, Google decided to add a menubar icon for notifications, without asking if we wanted it and with no obvious way to turn it off. If you like keeping your Mac menubar clean, as I do, that’s more than just annoying—it’s almost enough to make you not want to use Chrome at all.
The new notifications center is designed to show all the browser notifications you’ve missed, as well as Google Now notification cards that you’d otherwise get on your Android phone or in the Google app in iOS. That can be nice enough to want to keep enabled if you rely on Google Now, but I don’t use it anyhow. Thus, my annoyance with the new menubar icon.
There is a way around it, though, thanks to the hidden preferences in Chrome’s chrome://flags page. Just open that page in Chrome and search in the page for “Notifications”, or click this link (chrome://flags/#enable-rich-notifications) inside Chrome to jump directly to the notifications settings section.
Here you’ll find two options: one to disable the "experimental UI for Notifications" (aka the new menubar bell icon) and another to disable “Rich Notifications” (aka Chrome’s flat-style notifications). Disable both of those, and you’ll lose the bell icon from your menubar and Chrome will start using standard OS X-style notifications for web app notifications, just like Safari. You’ll lose Google Now on your Mac, though, but at least your menubar won’t be cluttered with random stuff if you wouldn’t have used it anyhow.
Perhaps features randomly showing up and disappearing is just the price we pay for rapid development these days. It’s how web apps like Gmail work, and Google treats the Chrome browser the same way. It’s not all bad.
What is bad is the lack of choice when it comes to visual clutter. At least there’s an option—however hidden it may be—to take some of that clutter away.
The Office team's on a roll. After releasing the redesigned free Office.com web apps and finally shipping Office for iPad—as a much more full-featured suite than most of us would have expected—it looks like it's going to be a good year for the 2nd most important team in Redmond (presumably Windows is still considered more important for the company). And so, yesterday, the Office Team ran an IAmA Q&A session on Reddit yesterday as, perhaps, a bit of publicity for the new apps and a chance to answer a few questions from users.
There were a few interesting facts revealed by the Office for iPad team—which, incidentally, is the Office for Mac team as well. When asked why the apps shipped without print support, they said “Print is a high demand feature that we intend to introduce in due course,” and also indicated that since Office is a subscription service, they'll be shipping updates and new features far quicker than in the past. Promising, at least. Though, all features won't ever make their way over; macros, especially, aren't expected to be added to Office for iPad barring an App Store policy change.
Building Office for iPad was, as should be assumed, not something that just started recently. "The decision to ship Office for iPad was made before Satya became CEO. Steve Ballmer approved the plan to ship Office for iPad." It took such a long time because they wanted to get it right, delivering an Office experience that felt familiar to existing Office users but was also perfect on touch. “Since we were designing Office for iPad from a “blank slate” so to speak, we wanted to take the time to deliver the highest possible quality Office experience that is fully optimized for the iPad. A wise man once said, “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” That rings true for how we thought about it” said Kaberi, Technical Product Manager of Office for iPad.
It's impossible to say if they could have shipped Office for iPad sooner—I'd like to think they absolutely could have if they'd wanted to—but what really matters is that it's here, it's polished, and is something plenty of people will want to use. They're so serious about getting it working good, they have an entirelab of iPads to test it in every possible scenario. It's even built using native Objective C code for its UI, with the core engine behind the apps being the same C++ core that powers ever edition of Office. It's the real deal.
The question still remains if enough people will want to pay for Office 365 to use it, but there seems to be enough who do to have Word and Excel rather high on the top grossing list of the App Store. There were plenty of people asking if the Office apps will be available for direct purchase without a subscription on the iPad, but that was never answered—presumably, of course, the only option Microsoft will ever offer is the subscription.
Then, there's the future. In addition to the promise of print support coming to Office for iPad, the team confirmed that “Yes, we are working on the next version of Office for the Mac.” They also said that the work on Office for iPad will help with shipping the next version of Office for Mac. “The code for Office for iPad and Office for Mac is shared, as the development platforms for both are very similar. :) The iPad work required us to create an all-new UI and to redesign the interface between UI and the internal logic. That work actually helps us with de-Carbonizing Office for the Mac, instead of delaying or hindering it. We're able to create new Cocoa UI on the Mac and tie it into the new logic interface now.” That work will now help with shipping the next Office for Mac, and the touch interface research will presumably help as they make Office for the Windows Store and even Android tablets, both of which were promised during the IAmA (though at the same time, the idea of Office for Linux was shot down).
And yet, the most interesting part of the interview was the banner over Microsoft's Silicon Valley headquarters that the Office for iPad team shared (pictured above). "The most anticipated Office. Ever." That doesn't read like words from a team who begrudgingly released the minimum of Office compatibility for the iPad possible, just to keep competition at bay. It reads like a team that's truly proud of their work, of one who really does want the best of Office on the most popular platforms, whether or not they're Microsoft's.
“We want to bring great Office experience to our customers who want to be productive on their tablets," said Sangeeta Mudnal, Excel's Group Program Manager. That's the spirit needed if Microsoft wants to compete: making productivity tools we'll all want to use on any device. If they keep improving Office for iPad and adding more feature, there's a solid chance for that. There's still the fear that Microsoft will treat the iPad as a second-class citizen going forward, and give the best of Office to their own Windows 8.1 tablets—and yet, that banner above makes me think that's not what Microsoft's thinking.
They're proud to have Office on iPad. That's a very good thing.
eInk screens have intrigued me ever since the original Kindle was released. I’ve always loved reading, and switched to eBooks years back simply to save the shipping costs I’d otherwise incur reading English books in Thailand. And yet, that very same issue—cost—kept me from getting a Kindle. Kindles are cheap, but cheap is still relative seeing as a Kindle would only be for reading and only every other device I could buy would be multipurpose (and that pesky little shipping cost issue was still there—after all, Apple devices cost almost the same around the world, but a Kindle costs almost double as much when you throw in international shipping and customs).
I’ve referred to my iPod Touch, and later iPhone, as my “Kindle” since I’ve always used them so much for reading, everything from news and Instapaper articles to dozens of full-length books. An iPhone is small enough to comfortably hold for long stretches, and can hold an ok amount of text on one screen (especially compared to my laughably small HTC Excalibur’s screen that I read full books on years ago). And, most importantly, the iPhone’s always with you, so you’ve got a library of books in your pocket at all times. That, to me, was even nicer than the iPod’s old promise of a thousand songs in your pocket.
And yet, the iPhone’s screen’s small enough to make reading annoying. You sure don’t want to read books on your laptop after spending a day working on it (and yet, I have done so many times over), and the iPad gets heavy after a while (and still feels the same as reading on a laptop screen).
So, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, a 2nd generation ad-free one from a local reseller that threw in a case and charger for less than it’d cost from Amazon with international shipping. Interestingly, it came with 4Gb of storage, so presumably came from Amazon Japan where it’s shipped with 4Gb by default. Not that it matters much when you’re reading books—you can have hundreds of books and gigs of storage to spare. It was cheaper than an iPad Mini, or even a Nexus 7, though of course there’s plenty of cheap cut-rate Android tablets even cheaper than a Kindle today. But that wasn’t the real consideration. The real reason I wanted a real Kindle was for reading on a screen that felt more like paper and less like a screen.
Reading
And oh. Wow. eInk really does feel like reading on paper. The screen itself looks almost like slightly yellowed paper without the backlight, but turn up the Paperwhite’s backlight a bit and it’s almost the same as bright white paper under a light. Turn it down to the next-to-lowest setting, and it’s dim enough to read comfortably in the dark. Take it outside, and it’s clear as non-glossy paper in the sunlight. It’s the only screen I’ve ever used that looks better in sunlight.
If you’ve ever used any Kindle app, or honestly read on any touchscreen device, you’ll know how to use a Kindle automatically. Once you’ve signed into your Amazon account, your book library will be ready for you. Tap a book once to download it, then tap any book in your downloaded library to read it. The Kindle store works great on the Kindle—almost too good, if anything, since you can buy a book in literally one tap, no login required (that can be turned off if you want). There’s the famous “experimental browser” that’s worse than you could imagine, but then, it’s nice to have in a pinch (and allows Instapaper some neat Kindle integrations—more on that later).
The screen almost even feels like wax paper to touch. It’s the slightest bit rough, just enough to remind you you’re not swiping on a pane of glass anymore. You swipe or tap anywhere on the right 2/3rds of the screen to go to the next page, and tap the left 1/3 or so of the screen to go back. That’s enough difference to keep you from accidentally going back, while still making it easy enough to turn pages while holding the Kindle in one hand. And unlike the iPad, the Kindle Paperwhite feels just fine to hold one-handed for long stretches of reading.
I’d worried before buying a Kindle that the screen refresh—where the entire screen goes black before showing your page text periodically—would be annoying. And for the first few minutes of using it, my worst fears seemed true as it hard refreshed with every page swipe. After a bit, though, it settled down to the normal hard-refresh of once ever 10 page turns or so; it’ll refresh more when there’s graphics on a page, but otherwise, it ends up being unnoticeable.
The Kindle is an iPod for books, of sorts: it’s really a single purpose device just for reading. That’s all that matters; you could go for a week reading a book and never have to think about the tech aspects of the device. You turn it on, read, turn it off, then come back and jump back into the book directly. There’s no notifications, no games and YouTube videos and social networks to distract you. There’s just your reading. You can even tap in the lower left corner of the reading view, in the most recent update, and turn off the page number, position, and time left indicators to leave you alone with your text (that said, each of those are nice to have just one touch away). There’s font options (the default honestly looks better with most books, and I hope Amazon adds more typefaces in the future, but it’s ok as-is), search, table of contents, and more in the header if you top the top of the screen, but otherwise, all that fades away and leaves just your book.
It’s a smart book, though: you can tap-and-hold on a word to define it, use Kindle’s X-ray feature to see how often that word shows up in the book, or check Wikipedia about the term (and the Kindle smartly chooses the best pick of the three depending on what you select). Drag your finger over text, and you can highlight it, add a note (and easily copy them to your computer if you want), or share it on social networks. Uncannily enough, the text selection on the Kindle works better than it does in iOS, perhaps a testament to the benefits of a single-purpose device. Your page location, bookmarks, and highlights sync automatically just as they would in the Kindle app, so you can pick up reading in one of the Kindle apps if you want.
But you’re not going to worry about all that. You’re just going to read, because the Kindle makes reading as nice as on a book. No distractions, just a full page of text and the tiniest bit of smarts to make it feel perfect together.
And More
Now, there’s the whole thing of getting your reading material on the Kindle, but that’s nearly as simple as you could hope. Your Kindle library is always just a tap away, so anything you’ve ever bought there is easy to add to your offline library. Then, any DRM-free eBooks you own can be simply added to the Kindle by emailing them to your @kindle.com email address, as long as they’re in a compatible format (and you can convert other eBooks via the Kindle Previewer app on your Mac or PC). Next time you grab your Kindle, they’ll be ready for you to read.
There’s also periodicals on the Kindle, with a wide selection of both newspapers and magazines available for subscription. I got a New York Times trial subscription, since it’s the main news source I read online anyhow and the Kindle subscription lets you get unlimited access to their website and new NYTimes Now iPhone app as well. Every day (oddly enough, early evening my time in Bangkok since I subscribed to the American version, but that works out for me since I like reading in the evening) a set of today’s full-length articles will automatically show up on my Kindle, organized into sections and easy to browse. You can’t share posts directly to your social networks, but then, it’s more like a “real” paper. And that’s perfect. You can browse through articles quickly in a list view, jump to the next article with a tap on the bottom from any article, and search through a full “issue” or keep one day’s issue saved if you want to keep it around (otherwise it’ll be replaced with tomorrow’s issue).
And then there’s Instapaper, the killer app for Kindle. I’ve used it for years to save articles to read later, but it turns out, it’s best use is to save them and then let it send them to the Kindle automatically. You’ll then have a curated “newspaper” that works just like the New York Times or any other Kindle periodical, only one that’s filled with the stuff you picked, or you can send one-off articles directly to the Kindle using another Instapaper bookmarklet. Your Instapaper articles on Kindle even integrate with the Kindle’s browser with links at the end of articles to let you archive, archive and like, or delete them from your queue. That’s the perfect amount of tech to mix into your reading later list, and since reading on the Kindle is so nice, you’ll for once want to finish out your reading queue.
There’s one annoyance I’d love to get rid of: the row of suggested books on the home screen, even on the ad-free model. You can get rid of it by switching your books to list view, but I happen to like the cover view, and just don’t want the suggested books there. Show that in the store, perhaps, but let me see more of my own books when I’m on the home screen.
Update: Thanks to @maique, I've discovered that you can turn off the suggested books on the home screen. It's just a bit hidden. To find the elusive setting, open Settings, select Device Options, then tap Personalize your Kindle, and finally slide off the Recommended Content button. Then return to your home screen, and bask in the presence of 6 of your most recent books and periodicals, with no recommended books in sight.
Other than that, I cannot think of one thing I’d change about the Kindle Paperwhite. It’s that nice.
If you love reading, you should get one already. It’s absolutely a nicer reading experience than you’ll ever get on another traditional tablet, cheap enough to justify just for reading, and simple enough that you won’t end up feeling the urge to upgrade it semiannually along with your smartphone. It’s just a smarter book, and that’s quite enough for quite some time to come.
