UPDATED: I have updated my amazing predictions, post-event.
Actually, I don’t have any. But I am amused at how pretty much everything gets leaked ahead of time and yet Apple still clings tenaciously to its super-high levels of secrecy, as if they are unaware of the entire rest of the world existing around them (Steve Jobs snarkily acknowledged this in his keynotes, at least).
Apple is big, conservative, and evil, but in a banal sort of way. They are also becoming victims of their own hubris, thinking their Apple Poo™ smells better than other poo. It does not, it just costs more.
Okay, here are some predictions:
New iPhone models
New Watch models
Updated AirPods Pro, with updated (higher) price
Previews of Apple TV+ shows that no one will care about (even if they end up watching some of the shows)
Tim Cook will tap dance in the opening segment. Okay, he’ll actually just recite corporate boilerplate in that supremely bland way of his, but I would buy a new iPhone if he tap danced instead. UPDATE: No tap dancing, but he did kind of shimmy in place a bit, with lots of hand gestures, which could be interpreted as “white guy dancing”.
DISCLAIMER: Technically, I am talking about personal knowledge management (PKM) tools, which act like your own little personal Wikipedias, and not just plain note-taking apps. My main purpose for using a PKM is note-taking, though, and I make the rules here! Am I using a hammer instead of a screwdriver? Probably. Read on, anyway!
I love fiddling around with new stuff. It’s why I have three mice sitting on my desk (computer mice, not the living kind) and a bunch more stored away. It’s why I have more keyboards than I could ever need in five lifetimes, stuffed into drawers and scattered about my place.
And it’s why I’m a sucker for a shiny piece of new software, which leads to this post’s topic: note-taking apps.
Even if you have absolutely no interesting in note-taking apps, you probably still have one, anyway, whether it’s Notepad on Windows, the Notes app on Macs, or some built-in app on your iPhone (Notes again) or Android device. They are ubiquitous. And now, with the whole second brain1Go ahead, try looking up what a “second brain” is. Your actual brain will explode. thing being the new hotness, note-taking apps have started popping up like bunnies. Note-taking bunnies.
I noticed that after expressing some interest in technology on Medium (via my preferences), it started offering me stories on note-taking apps. I believe there are roughly a trillion of these articles on Medium, which nearly matches the number of note-taking apps themselves.
I thought to myself, “Self, you need to be more organized, somehow. For some reason. You need a note-taking app that will let you consolidate all your notes in one place, so you never need to figure out where your notes are. This future of unparalleled organization will be awesome.”
It’s a good theory. My notes were previously scattered all over. I used:
Paper. Actual paper, like cave people used to do
Drafts. An app on my iPhone that can send to other apps.
OneNote. I kind of stopped using it a few years ago and I’m not sure why.
Microsoft Word. Because I had it, so why not?
Apple’s Notes app on various Apple platforms. Because it’s there.
iA Writer. Not really built for notes, but…
Ulysses. See above, plus a subscription. Ew.
There’s more I’m forgetting, and this was all before the current explosion of note-taking apps. Since then I’ve tried:
Craft
Notion
Obsidian
And contemplated a million others, while absolutely only positively ruling out a few, like Evernote, usually due to what I deem excessive pricing.
For a time I thought I had settled on Obsidian. It supports markdown, is free, can work between Mac, PC and (somewhat) with iOS (it really wants you to use iCloud for your “vault”). On (virtual) paper, it provides everything I’d need in a note-taking app and also has all the second brain stuff, like backlinks and things.
I feel like I’m grossly under-utilizing it by not making proper use of links (back, forward or any other direction), tags and other means of keeping things organized. I mean, look at this guy wax poetic about how useful Obsidian is. It makes me want to install it again right now!
While I’m clearly not tapping into Obsidian’s potential, I am big on bullet lists, because I love lists. So now, as I think about whether to stick with Obsidian or not, I wonder: Why do I take notes? The answer is in a list. Right below!
Track ideas. These can be ideas for:
stories
blog posts
game design
comics
drawings
General reminders (I have moved these to actual to-do apps)
WIP stuff on my newsletter (five issues so far, published very intermittently)
Book and movie reviews (that get posted to my blog, Goodreads or elsewhere)
Random tips and tricks, usually associated with tech
Everything that doesn’t fit into the above
And Obsidian has worked reasonably well here. I’ve added plugins to expand on what it can do. Look how organized everything appears to be (I have redacted a few items, but it’s nothing scandalous, like panda porn or something, just stuff regarding the condo or other personal yet banal items):
And yet I feel like:
I am underutilizing Obsidian to the point where I probably could just use Notepad, for all the difference it would make
Maybe I don’t have the kind of personality to connect the dots, or in this case, the notes?
Maybe I actually don’t have a compelling reason to use backlinks and I’m overthinking things, as is my way
But it all seems so useful. There are so many articles! I want to do more! Yet I am not feeling there is a yawning chasm in my life because I have only clicked a backlink maybe once in Obsidian, and that was just to see if it worked (it did).
Anyway, have a look, there’s plenty to choose from!
I know where you think this is going. You think I’m buttering you up before announcing that I’m raising the price of a Six Colors membership, which has been at $6 a month (or $60/year) since the very beginning.
I’m not.
Instead, we’re doing here what we did over at The Incomparable from the very beginning (and what my pal David Sparks did with his website recently), and adding multiple membership tiers.
The “More Colors” tier is $10 a month, and it includes these things (descriptions excised for space, but check here for full details):
Regular video reports and Q&As
A special section of the Six Colors Discord for More Colors members
Six Colors podcast live stream and bonus material
The third item posted after this announcement is shown in the screenshot below:
Now, I can’t say for sure what kind of content this is, because I can’t see it (or even who the author is!), but it looks like a blog post, which is not one of the perks mentioned as part of the $10 More Colors tier. Bonus posts are specifically a part of the now basic $6 a month tier. Except maybe not so much anymore? (I am subscribed to the $6 tier, which until today was also the only tier.)
My reaction was to ask myself a few questions:
Do I have more content to sift through that I can reasonably manage? Yes.
Do I need to pay for the privilege of reading a site that regularly exhorts me to pay even more? No.
And so, while I enjoy Jason Snell’s and Dan Moren’s site and have been a paying member for a while, I found it surprisingly easy to turn off auto-renew on my sub. As of September 12th, I’ll no longer be paying and will eventually probably remove the bookmark. It’s ironic that Snell specifically mentions David Sparks’ multi-tier membership approach, because it was when his site started getting riddled with PAY PAY PAY TO SEE SEE SEE that I opted to DELETE DELETE DELETE the bookmark.
I’m not saying what Six Colors is doing is wrong. I’m saying that I’m not fond of paying and then being presented with locked links saying PAY MOAR. It makes me feel like I’m being squeezed. If they need the money, good luck to them. But they won’t be getting any more from me.
It shouldn’t surprise me that in 2022 this is a news headline, but Google is now saying it will prioritize real reviews over clickbait, something you might have assumed they’d be doing all along. But apparently not!
Click the image to see the Verge story
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my interweb searches for a few years now, and it’s fine. A lot of the results are still clickbait and garbage, but that’s because companies have spent years investing in gaming all search engines, it’s just Google still dominates search, so it has outsized influence.
One day, the elders will gather round to tell their grandkids how they would search (“What’s a search engine, Grandpa?”) for “best toaster” and get actual results comparing toasters, instead of thousands of pages of SEO-optimized garbage posing as information on toasters. And then the grandkids will go back to hunting mutant cows across the radioactive wastelands.
When logging into My Fitness Pal to record my food and exercise for the day, I see this under the section for food entries:
The idea that I’ve earned one whole extra calorie to burn as I see fit amuses me. I could make a list of things to do with that single, precious extra calorie:
Exhale
Blink my eyes once or maybe twice
Shift slightly in my chair
Think hard for several seconds
(After a minute or so, MFP synced with my watch and bumped the calorie burn up to something with four digits instead of one.)
To be accurate, the emoji are not actually 3D, they’re just shaded to give a 3D appearance. Microsoft recently made them open source via Github for anyone to use. And I want to use them (okay, maybe not all of them) because they’re just so adorable, odd or both.
Yes, it’s come to this. I mistype the word “humidity” so often, and I’m now talking about it so much, that I’m now using the Mac’s built-in text replacement tool to fix my persistent misspelling of the word:
I will always regret not taking that typing class in high school. With real typewriters and everything. I wonder if schools expect kids to start Grade 1 as advanced typists now. “Todd, you can’t take recess break until you hit at least 75 wpm!”
Current humidity is 55%
UPDATE: It’s not working! Apparently the text expander doesn’t work in Firefox or browsers or something. I am sad. And full of typos.
Here’s a comparison of the original photo of a jet flying overhead that I recently took with my Canon EOS M50 camera, and then a version of the photo after I tweaked the contrast and color a bit in Luminar AI:
The changes are pretty obvious:
The sky is no longer completely blasted out, allowing the mix of high cloud and blue to show
The blue of the aircraft underside has been boosted a bit, not to exaggerate it, but to make it look more as it actually appeared
The overall contrast of the jet was adjusted, to better bring out detail in the structure (when looking at a smaller version of the photo, it may simply look darker; the detail is best seen at full or near-full size)
Now, you could argue that the bright, overexposed sky of the original works because it puts the jet in stark contrast to it, effectively highlighting it more than my tweaked version. And I would agree–but it’s also a matter of preference. Overall, I like the tweaked version because to my eye it’s a better representation of what I saw, and does not try to misrepresent the object(s) depicted. For example, Luminar AI lets you add giraffes to the sky (yes, it really does), but I did not add any giraffes! Or hot air balloons, or bald eagles, or any of the other silly things you can put in to spice things up.
Tweaking photos is now something I find almost as enjoyable as the actual shooting of the photos themselves. Maybe I just have a need to fix things.
After referring to the possibly skeevy nature of the Microsoft Store app Inspire Writer, a fairly shameless Ulysses copycat, I noticed it had a 10-day trial, so I thought I’d download it and have a look. What could possibly go wrong?
The developer is Sunisoft, which describes itself thusly: “Established in 1999, Sunisoft is a developers tools software provider located in Zhu Hai, China. We are committed to providing more effective tools for software developers” (link). It apparently has fewer than 25 employees.
In terms of user interface, this is a straight-up copycat. You have the Library bar on the left, the list of sheets next to it, then the editor next to that. You can toggle these on/off the same way you can in Ulysses. You can export to multiple sources, including WordPress, which is how I’ve made this post (I’ll edit this if it turns out to not work, and I have to post the old-fashioned way in WordPress).
EDIT: While Inspire recognized all of my settings for my blog (categories, tags, etc.) it produced a simple error dialog every time I tried to export this post to WordPress:
There is an option to configure a proxy, but I have not successfully gotten that to work (yet), either. I'll update this post again if I do. Also, dumping in the straight markdown from Inspire into WordPress leaves a lot of clean-up to do. The rest of my look at Inspire continues below.
It supports markdown, of course, and you can set it to sync across devices, mimicking Ulysses’ seamless use of iCloud. You can also choose any font you have installed on Windows for the editor, unlike some markdown apps that restrict you to ones that are deemed most appropriate. Want to use Comic Sans? You can!
You know someone will do this.
But there are differences.
Missing features
While there is a Dark Mode you can toggle on, there is no support for themes or styles. You get Light and Dark modes, and that’s all. In this way, it feels closer to iA Writer.
Some shortcut keys are missing. For example, there is no shortcut for bringing up Preferences. Mac-first apps often use the Mac Preferences shortcut for their Windows versions, which would translate to CTRL-.
Clumsier or simpler features
Like Ulysses, Inspire Writer includes a word goal you can modify and invoke by hitting F5. Unlike Ulysses, there is no way to keep the goal open while writing, since its dialog takes control of the UI. You do get a ring icon in the top-right corner of the sheet in the Sheets view, which can be kept open. To its credit, the ring fills dynamically and changes from blue to green when you’ve hit your goal.
The documentation is obviously translated, but it’s never difficult to understand, so I don’t knock it too much for this.
Overall, it seems to do all the core things Ulysses does, just without the same degree of polish, and with some “extras” missing. It seems to work well otherwise, but it still feels like it hews a little too closely to Ulysses’ UI and would benefit from breaking free a bit and charting its own course. Ulysses is a fine program, but it’s not necessarily the definitive word on distraction-free writing apps.
I am unsure on what I will do when the trial ends. I really like the way it matches Ulysses’ use of indents, as it’s so helpful when writing fiction and most markdown editors simply don’t include this support or require you to at minimum add in an extra key for it (like hitting Tab), which eliminates the convenience of having indents in the first place.
Why do I care about indents so much, anyway, you may ask. Let me illustrate. Let’s say there is a scene where two characters are engaged in rapid-fire dialog, like this:
Bob tapped on the desk. “You see this desk here?” Jim nodded. “Yes. It’s very desk-like.” “It’s my desk.” “Says who?” “Says me.” “You and what army?” “The Swedish army!” “I’m pretty sure Sweden doesn’t have an army.” Bob sighed. “You need to see more of the world.” Jim folded his arms. “Yeah? How much more, smart guy?” “Twelve percent, minimum.”
Now, I was able to write that quickly (never mind the quality) because the indents happen automagically. In most text editors, I’d have to hit Enter twice after every line of dialog to get proper separation of paragraphs. I mean, I absolutely could do this, but having automatic indents is just easier. It’s the one concession to being Word-like that I approve of in a text editor.
All of this is to say, why is is that only a clone of Ulysses matches this feature among all the text editors I’ve tried. I was even hoping Obsidian would somehow have a community plugin that would mimic this, but I haven’t found one. It puzzles me, but maybe it’s a niche feature or considered “wrong” somehow.
Anyway, I will continue to tinker with Inspire Writer during the 10-day trial and render a verdict by the time it ends (curiously, it gives no indication of how much time is left, so I have no idea what will happen when the trial ends. Also, the app has only a single one-star rating on the Microsoft Store, and I’m really curious why).
Posting “online insults” will be punishable by up to a year in prison time in Japan starting Thursday, when a new law passed earlier this summer will go into effect.
People convicted of online insults can also be fined up to 300,000 yen (just over $2,200). Previously, the punishment was fewer than 30 days in prison and up to 10,000 yen ($75).
The law will be reexamined in three years to determine if it’s impacting freedom of expression — a concern raised by critics of the bill. Proponents said it was necessary to slow cyberbullying in the country
Cyberbullying is a real issue, of course. But I’m not a big fan of governments enacting sweeping, yet vague laws that punish people for online behavior. It also doesn’t get anywhere close to addressing what prompts the cyberbullying to begin with. And call me crazy, but in 2022 I am not keen on any allegedly democratic government giving itself this kind of power.
It ends, naturally, with this, which amuses me more than it should:
I’ve been mulling over the whole email thing myself, and my solution lately has been to approach it mercilessly. If I’m getting some kind of flyer that isn’t immediately relevant to me, I unsubscribe or block (blocking only when unsubscribing “mysteriously” fails). This alone has made things more manageable. But it does seem that email is stuck in this weird place, where the general internet is evolving (or devolving) and email mostly stays the same. I don’t have a solution to “fix” email, I’m just content to cut down on what comes into my inbox for now.
