Let’s play a game. One of your customer calls you and ask for a meeting (virtual or in person). Before answering this request, you have to look at your calendar to see your free/busy time. It’s a time consuming and error prone process. What if your favorite calendaring app could generate a map of your weekly schedule with all sensible information masked out, like in the following example (made with Fantastical). This could be sent as a PDF file to the customer, would save a lot of time. It’s surprising that, to my knowledge, no calendaring app offer this option. I would pay to get this.

Gruber publishes a piece today about how hard it can be for some people to accept that Apple is yet again did the unthinkable.

This one is simply priceless: “Intel and AMD have learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make decent PC chips. Apple hasn’t just magically figured this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

It’s a liberal transposition of a famous quote on how Apple, a PC guy, just can’t walk in and make a great phone. With the M1 chip, yes, Apple just walked in and did it. Again.

Many pundits were quick to jump the gun on software compatibility issues, the translation layer called Rosetta, the meager 8 GB of RAM, the lack of ports, etc. As proven by the numerous independent reviews, none of these “issues” are affecting the value of what Apple just did.

It will take a few years before Intel and their friends finally realize what just happened in late 2020 and recover from it. Years.

Following this statement from Microsoft, here is one question for you, Microsoft: why haven’t they thought, at the very beginning, that this Office 365 feature wasn’t a good idea to begin with? Here is another question: Who do you think you are to devise a “Microsoft Productivity Score”? “a tool that helps organizations measure and manage the adoption of Microsoft 365” — Microsoft

There is a difference in semantic here: measuring adoption vs measuring productivity score. What is “being productive” anyway? The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.

“…until there are some changes with either iOS, the iPhone or both, bigger isn’t really better. It’s just bigger.” — James Rogers writing for iPad Insight about the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Things like picture-in-picture is a step in the right direction on the iPhone. The situation is obviously better on the iPad, yet there are still many low hanging fruits.

Just saw that tweet today. It’s too late. I’ll be installing my new M1 Mac mini along the side of my 2017 iMac. Thwy will be both in direct competition. I’m afraid that I’ll find my beloved iMac too slow. I’m not there yet. I’m still waiting for my new thing to get delivered. I’m getting myself mentally ready for the shock. I’ll have to keep my iMac for a while for my daytime job.

I hate those screenshots montage. They lack emphasis on the application itself, the product. They waste precious space. At the very least, why not put a video showing the application in action. People don’t like to read long application description page. Is it Apple’s fault. Probably. Not sure. Apple is not enforcing their own rules on these screenshots.

This post was triggered by another Matt Birchler post.

Steve Jobs once downplayed flash memory based MP3 players when the iPod was just beginning its ascension. We know what came after the iPod with a small drive. The iPod nano, an MP3 player using flash memory. If you see a stylus, they blew it. The iPad eventually came with support for a stylus… oops, a pencil. What came after that? Support for a mouse with iPadOS 13.4. See the trend? Are you getting it?

Now, about the Mac. Sure Apple could have used this historic moment to a add touch screen to the M1 MacBook. It didn’t happen. I, myself, was one of them, thinking it was about to happen as exposed in this blog post. My short experience with macOS Big Sur updated design screams out loud that we are far closer to a touch supported Mac than Apple is willing to admit.

I don’t know when, but it will come, in a perfectly chosen moment by Apple. Apple likes to move forward, one step at a time. The next window of opportunity is next year with a redesigned MacBook body. This year’s was about the internals while keeping familiarities: performance, battery life and transition. Next year is about redefining the way we look at the MacBook and enhance the way we always knew how to interact with it. The Big Sur update this year is just the first step toward a touch friendly operating system. In a typical Apple way, they will have thoroughly thought about all this and we will be amazed about why it wasn’t done this way before. Next year has the potential to be exciting.

This blog post by Matt Birchler triggered this one you just read. 👀😎

I don’t know if this is because I’m eagerly waiting for mine, I’m in a distortion of reality, but the Mac mini seems on the verge of a major regain of popularity. Sales of the little box are booming in Japan and now AWS is offering an Intel version as an EC2 instance… while waiting for the real deal, a M1-based version. The latter brings renewed interest in a platform a lot of pundits were considering dead a few years ago, thanks to Apple’s apparent lack of interest.

How many To Do apps are available on the App Store? A lot. They all have a different take on how we should create, manage and check our To Do. The best one maybe just in front of your eyes, on your iPhone and iPad: Apple’s Reminders. Here is why for me it does the job quite well.

I’ve been using OmniFocus and Things in the past, but after Apple redesigned Reminders in iOS 13, I came back to using it. Besides supporting basic things like URL, images and notes, you can group To Do lists in folders, lists can be shared with others, Shortcuts are supported, it synchronizes seamlessly across my devices.

Apple’s Reminders is one of the app at the center of my blogger workflow to help me process information and publish content online.

In light of all the raving reviews about the M1-based Macs, you might wonder why someone would still need and buy an Intel-based Mac Pro? For many reasons. First, some high-demanding pro software might not be compatible on M1 Macs. Second, if you run software who takes advantage of multiple cores, the Mac Pro with its Xeon processor is hard to beat. Example of this is VMware Fusion. Other use cases demand the most powerful CPU you can get, and they come in the Mac Pro, for now. Third, the Mac Pro is still the most expandable Mac out there. I’m one of those contemplating the Mac Pro for my SDDCbox project, but I must say that my priorities shifted a bit. I’m a few days away from receiving a M1 Mac mini. It will keep me busy until the beginning of 2021.