I both love calendars and find myself increasingly frustrated with them. An ideal calendar situation would allow me to add events on my work laptop, personal laptop, and iPhone. I also want to view events on my iPhone and Apple Watch widgets. With this requirement Google Calendar is out of the picture. It just doesn’t work. I tried it for over six months, the syncing is too slow and requires opening the app on iPhone in order to get it to propogate to the wigets. 

Apple Calendar is the clear default here, but my work events come through on Google Calendar. When I setup my laptops and phone to allow for creating events I kept running into sync issues. An event I added on one laptop wouldn’t show up on the other. An event added on mobile wouldn’t show up on desktop. It just takes 2-3 times for this to happen for someone to completely mistrust the entire tech. 

So I simplified things.

I only add events on my mobile phone. It’s annoying and slow because I don’t have a proper keyboard, but it’s the source of truth I can trust. Whenever I add laptops back into the mix I seem to run into sync issues again. 

The biggest friction from all this comes in when I need to schedule a personal event with multiple people outside Google. Apple’s calendar invite just does not seem to work. I send out invites and hear from people that they never got them. 

I hope there’s a way to improve this going forward, but it’s the best I’ve found so far. 

I’m slowly getting back into video games. It’s a nice way to relax a bit at the end of the day.

Currently I’m switching (very slowly over months) between the Switch, iPhone, iPad, PC, and PlayStation. The latter two are on loan from my brother with their own libraries. 

This approach to playing games is lovely. I find something I enjoy and play it slowly, 20-60 minutes/night a few nights a week (sometimes more, sometimes less). Then I pause for a while until I find another game, rinse and repeat. 

My requirements are pretty simple. In general it needs to be a single player game, and I need to be able to pause it at any time (there are a few exceptions, namely if I’m playing with my family). Beyond that I prefer action roleplaying type games. Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassins Creed Odyssey, Witcher III Wild Hunt, and Breath of the Wild have been some favorites over the last five years. 

Next on my list is to get a SteamDeck and PlayDate, but again I’m in no hurry. 

It’s fun to approach games with a much more chill perspective than when I was a kid. I’ll get to it eventually and I’ll enjoy it over time. 

One game I’m looking forward to, mainly for my kid’s sake, is Lego Horizon Adventures. It combines my son’s favorite game genre with my own. It will be fun to try it together. 

i got injured over the weekend and have lost about 80% of motion in both of my arms as I recover, even sitting at a laptop is too hard for me – but the Apple Vision Pro has truly been a life saver.

The Vision Pro remains an intriging device. I’ve only used it a little, and am curious how it will fit into my life longterm. But to hear someone’s story like this is heartwearming. I’m so glad a product in this category exists. 

(Via Threads.)

Dribbble became a staple for many designers. We scrolled endlessly, saved our favorites, and even posted a few. It was the promise of a better place where great ideas would thrive. Some of us even built freelance careeres of its job listings. 

While I still love places like Dribbble for what they provided, and got many great ideas from them; nothing beats in production designs. Over the last three years I’ve transitioned to getting my inspiration from ideas that exist out in the world, not just pretty shots that display an idealized version of what a designer would have preferred to create. 

My phone has thousands of saved screenshots, and I make use of sites like Mobbin to look for examples of UI and UX based on what’s been tested and published. That’s not perfect, of course. Copying some else’s design without understanding the context of why it was created has its risks. But as I’m looking for design ideas it helps to see what else exists out in the world and use that to push my own concepts forward. 

I have ideas all the time. Most are fleeting and not fully flushed out. Some ideas are for things I want to write, others are things I want to say, and still more are creative projects I want to try.

Recently I’ve started putting all that into Apple Notes. I have different notes for each, and put the ideas as bullet list items. Over time I forget most of them, but the act of writing them down is comforting. 

Sometimes, though, it’s worth it. The idea right before bed is actually a good one, and I run with it. 

One of my favorite moments of idea capture came four years ago. I woke in the middle of the night, around 2:00am, and had the initial idea for a novel. I grabbed voice memos and started talking to myself on my iPhone. I still have that voice memo and turned that short clip into a full transcript (the book isn’t published yet).

Failure is an interesting word. My brother and I were talking about it earlier today. 

First, I love how stories get to the heart of so many things we wrestle with each day. From a recent quote I learned, attributed to Cassandra Clare:

Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact.

I’ve found this to be true over the last few decades. I’ve learned so much from the books around me. 

From Jonathan’s post:

I’m drawn to continuous improvement, to progress over perfection, even as I struggle internally with accepting that plans not working as expected is OK, is unavoidable, is human, and as part of a forward-moving process is essential to building something that lasts.

I don’t have as much negative feelings toward the word failure, but I do get it. We should talk about the work we do (whether it succeeded or not) in ways that don’t strike us as negative. 

From the book Burnout:

We thrive when we have a posiitve goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from. If we hate where we are, our first instinct often is to run aimlessly away… We need something positive to move toward

Everybody’s dunking on Magic Mouse, meanwhile I’ve tried all the MX’s and MSFT mice, and always come back to it. Even prefer it over Magic Trackpad.

From Stephen Robles on Threads. 

I’m a massive fan of the Magic Mouse. When I’m working away from a desk I use the builtin trackpad on my Mac; but at a desk I use a Magic Mouse exclusively. I love the swipe gestures, and even though it’s likely not as ergonomic as others, I’ve gotten so used to navigating through a Mac interphase with swipes that it feels slow to do it any other way. 

I remember the days of working in an office, nearly a decade ago, and can compare that now to working remotely; and the common thread through that is the value of my work has been tied to autonomy, clarity, and combined trust between me and my colleagues. 

When it comes to the remote versus in office debates, it matters less where you work (although I 100% prefer remote and love to occassionally meet up with my colleagues), and more whether the right ingredients are there for a team to function well. 

Because of the types of companies I’ve worked with (mostly startups), and because of years of freelance with smaller teams, I’ve had the privilege to work with a ton of people since 2007.

In all that time the biggest factor that came down to my personal enjoyment of the work was the people. 

Yes, the work matters. I want to be part of projects that are going to have an impact, that will help people, and that will help me learn and grow. All those things are important, and if given the choice I want them all. 

But, above all the top factor is the few people I’m working with day to day. Do we feel like we’re in it together? Are we wrestling through a problem and trying to figure it out, or is one person dictacting to the rest what will happen? 

There are so many intricacies to being part of a team, and I’m still trying to understand them all. But, after all these years I am getting a good gut sense for whether the people aspect is in place, and when it is my joy for work shoots up.

A half apology is a little like half a balloon. It takes effort, but it doesn’t have much utility.

Seth, as usual, nails it. 

The opportunity for an apology is just that–an opportunity to demonstrate to the person you care about that you see them, understand them, and are concerned enough to extend yourself.

This is something I think many, including myself, struggle with. I’m working on getting better at my apologies and making sure when I say them that they’re meaningful. See also, it does no good to force apologies from others. 

Apple Inc. will introduce a new homegrown app next week called Passwords, aiming to make it easier for customers to log in to websites and software, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

From Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. 

This was a topic with my cohosts on Ultra Pro Max a few months back. Apple’s solution to passwords isn’t good enough for my use case. But if they end up coming out with a standalone app I would seriously consider switching from 1Password; an app I’ve used and happily paid for over a decade now. 

This week we were joined by the fantastic Heather Corallo as she came back on Fractional to talk about finding customers as a fractional business owner. It was a fantastic chat. If you’re interested in being in freelance/fractional work in general you’ll find the topic fun to listen to!

It’s Ben Surtees, the original developer of Bartender. Twelve years ago, I embarked on a journey to create Bartender, a macOS app designed to help you manage your menu bar items. Over the years, it has been incredibly rewarding to see Bartender grow and become an essential tool for so many of you. Your support and feedback have been invaluable in shaping the app into what it is today.

Posted by Ben Surtees.

Over the last few days Apple internet has been blowing up with folks talking about Bartender and the concern with it being taken over by a new owner without clear transparency on the shift. I’ve been a Bartender user for years. Love the product, and how it simplifies the menu on my Mac. 

This letter feels like one forced out of necessity with the new company not wanting all their customers to abandon them. 

I appreciate the apologetic tone, and I also personally get it; if I’d worked on something for years and finally saw an opportunity to take a break and potentially have revenue, that’d be interesting. 

But to do so without letting anyone know ahead of time feels off a bit. 

What I hear over the next few days will likely decide whether I keep using Bartender or not. 

Over the last year I’ve started to share my thoughts on something before digesting what others think. It’s really fun! In the past I would hear a bit of news and instantly try to understand it through the lens of someone else. Taking a moment to write out my own thoughts first, then seeing what others have to say, is incredibly fun. Sometimes my initial gut reaction is right, many times its wrong, but I learn more by pausing to gather my own thoughts first. 

From Adobe’s new terms, according to 9to5mac:

Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate with others, such as enabling you to share photos

I’ve been following the saga of Adobe and generative art for the last year, with their claims that they are taking a different approach to things. Instead of scouring the web for their source data (which would be breaking copyright of art), they’re pulling it from sources where they own the license. That’s interesting, but as Ben Thompson has pointed out in podcasts, they’re banking on being the place that corporations go to avoid any issues with copyright infringement. 

That may win out in the end, but this now seems to be the other side of it. If they’re now claiming that the art I’ve done, as an illustrator for 20+ years, could all be theirs? I find that absolutely outrageous. I’ve been on the fence for a while now about discontinuing Adobe products; this just might be the final piece to make me walkaway for good. 

Study consisting of 600 UK and US software engineers finds projects adopting Agile Manifesto practices are 268% more likely to fail than those which do the opposite.

From the Engprax blog.

This headline is catchy. So many of us have been involved in Agile projects over the last 10-20 years, and many designers, engineers, and managers, have felt the frustration with Sprints, Scrum, Kanban, Agile, etc. However, I’m struggling a bit with the premise of this study. I’d like to understand more about the why.

I don’t necessarily thing the study is wrong, but there seems to be more to it. 

If the trial is successful, the researchers hope the drug will become available for all forms of toothlessness sometime around 2030.

From Popular Mechanics.

A bit of a random topic, but I’ve spent more time thinking about this than is warranted. Seeing articles listing the ability to grow new has me wondering if this is the future.

Talked to a friend (who is also a dentist) about this, and he explained the obvious thing I’d missed. Would adults have the patience to wait a few years for a tooth? In America would the cost ever come down enough to warrant this?

Also, who knows if this ever comes out. But I’m excited to see sciency things happening.