Another little app that I discovered to aid my Mac life recently is another free one. I discovered this one through a post by fellow micro.blogger , and it has become a staple of my Mac usage ever since.
Do you ever have to go digging around in finder to head to the same usual folders time after time? Me to. We have a Dropbox shared archive at work that drives me insane with the amount of level changes I need. Sure, I could set up a load of messy aliases or dock folders, but this apps solves all of that. Placing a nice and neat icon in my menu bar and storing all the folders I require.
I can also navigate around with ease to other destinations, see a preview of the file, or open the file I require without leaving my desktop. There are so many delightful little touches that it's hard to point out them all. My favourites are right-clicking on the icon opens the folder in finder, and that I can set a few different folders to all be accessible from one menu bar icon. Although it is starting to look a bit full now!
I am so impressed with this app I’m also testing a few other ones by the same developer Sindre Sorhus as they all seem very high quality. I have already installed, Today to put my calendar in my menu bar (menu bar all the things) and also Actions to extend Shortcuts abilities. I have a feeling that I might be going all out on customising my Mac currently so I hope you don’t mind me sharing what I find along the way.
This afternoon, I randomly decided I was going to go into town and buy a bullet journal. No idea why, just seeing all the new year posts around and numerous people setting theirs up made me want one. The only issue is that I already know this wouldn’t work for me, I’ve tried it, and only a few days ago writing two posts outlining why this wouldn’t work for me. That wasn’t going to stop me though.
Watching YouTube and looking online for the journal I was going to buy, and it only took about an hour for me to realise the error in my thinking. I would happily pay £20-30 to get a book and some pens etc, but not £20 for a year if Day One (there’s a new years offer until today). I already know that digital tools are better for me to use. The only attractiveness of using something manual is that I will have even less reason to use my phone. Which is still quite attractive, I must admit.
What I did instead was stump up for a year of premium in Day One, so I can have a few different journals. One for morning pages. One for random thoughts and feelings whenever I feel like writing, and perhaps another for logging what we get up to as a family with photos. I really like the idea of getting one printed each year with our adventures in.
So, I went full circle in a matter of an hour or so, just like I always do, but I do feel like this will really help me, I feel positive about this decision.
I’m on a bit of journey at the moment. One that I am determined not the be preachy about but one that I will share some thoughts and feeling about along the way. Since quitting Twitter, I’ve been assessing where and how I want to spend my time and due to random Googling about social media topics I came across a video by Sam Massey.
He talks about quitting social media and references a video by Dave VanDonge as his main inspiration. The talking point is this - the average American spends 705 hours a year on social media. In 8 hour work days that is four months of work!
Just think about that. 705 hours of doing nothing but scrolling through social media and often being exposed to the worst that humanity has to offer. There’s exceptions here of course. To all those screaming “yeah but…” I am sure your feed is curated perfectly and the time you spend there is be beneficial to you. Awesome. But just think about all that time.
The average (so there’s some people out there doing much more to make up for me) American puts in four months work to social media. Think about all those people that don’t have time to see friends. Or exercise like they want to. Or learn a new skill. Whatever it is, the time is there, it’s just not being used.
Like I said, no preaching. I’m not telling you to go delete all your social media accounts right now. But man. That’s a load of hours to just waste away. Actual figures could be even worse, some places found around 147 minutes a day (just under 900hours a year). I’m still in a bit of a shock.
For once, the YouTube algorithm came up trumps and I stumbled, across a new channel to subscribe to. Jeff Su makes productivity videos (doesn’t everyone on there) and I’ve found some of his content really helpful. First whilst researching improvements for my productivity, and I then watched a video on simple Mac that he thinks are underrated.
Two stuck out straight away for me and I have been using them ever since. They are Shottr and Latest, both of which combined to produce this post yesterday when the new micro.blog Mac app update came out.
I really love Cleanshot x, it offers more options but it’s also £30. Whereas Shottr is completely free and gets you 80% of the way there. With powerful keyboard shortcuts, the option to include backgrounds and also mark up your screenshots, it’s outstanding that you get all this for free.
It also has built in OCR and you can blur out text without blurring the rest of the image, which helps when you share as many screenshots as I do.
For all the apps you have installed from outside the App Store, Latest offers a nice update interface. Instead of setting each app to check for updates and call home every so often, you can turn these all off and just check Latest once a week or so.
The reason that app is so appealing is the awkward updates that seem to pop up when you are trying to do something, and this simple app puts you back in control. It will present all updates in an essay to understand interface and even pull in all the information such as descriptions and changelogs.
I hope that these two free apps can be as helpful to you as they are to me. I am always on the lookout for new things to make my Mac better considering how much time I spend sat at it so I will keep posting new things I find.
A couple of days ago I wrote a link post, the same as I have done hundreds of times before. Found an article online somewhere, read it, picked out a few things that stuck out and threw them into Apple Notes. I typed out my thoughts on the couple of highlighted areas and published these to my blog.
No more thought was put into this than I have put into every other link post I have ever published. Unless I am specifically subscribed to the author, I have absolutely no knowledge any further than the post I consume, or perhaps some supporting links they post in said article. However, this linked post I published happened to be by someone who has some terrible ideas about trans individuals, and this was only pointed out to me yesterday evening.
Thankfully, this was by the excellent podcaster Alex Cox (you can see the replies on the post) making me more aware of the person I was linking to. To be clear, these ideas are not in the post I liked to, I just read a post talking about ancient aliens and thought the ideas surrounding disagreement were poignant in the current climate. However, this doesn’t stop me feeling terrible about it.
As soon as I received the reply, I began to worry and think about what I should do. My heart was absolutely in the right place, and I immediately wanted to make sure I have done the right thing. I think it is OK to separate some ideas from the person who has them, but at some point publishing online I do have a certain responsibility, even with the tiny platform that I have. It would break my heart that someone would find this person through my post and then consume other terrible posts and ideas.
Let’s just say I didn’t sleep much last night thinking about this, but I decided in the end to keep the post up, but with a clear disclaimer at the top. I believe the post still stands up on its own. I hope people understand that I read this at face value, however I genuinely understand how it could read if you are aware of the backstory (which I was clueless about).