Apple

Apple’s contact framework doesn’t understand how we actually connect. In my previous post, I wrote about how Apple’s Contacts app treats your relationships like a filing cabinet — a flat list of static cards with no context, no history, and no awareness of how people actually matter to you. That’s a product problem. But it’s also a technical one. Underneath the Contacts app sits a framework called CNContact, introduced at WWDC 2015 as a replacement for the widely despised AddressBook.framework. AddressBook was a C-based API with no Objective-C layer, opaque types like ABRecordRef, and virtually no error handling. When Apple announced its deprecation, the WWDC audience cheered — one of the loudest reactions in the conference’s history. ...

And it was never that good to begin with. When I was a kid, my dad carried a Filofax everywhere. A thick leather binder stuffed with business cards, meticulously organized. It was his most important professional tool — his grail. He could flip to any section and find exactly who he needed, with notes scribbled in the margins about when they’d last spoken and what they’d discussed. I sometimes wonder if he had a better handle on his network than any of us do now with our phones. ...

I’m sad to say that the whole process of upgrading to an iPhone 4S (or 4 Steve as some crazy analysts have been calling it), has been more difficult than I would have expected. I’ll admit that I didn’t take the most conventional route to set this phone up, but my experience has not been pleasant. I feel this is a bad sign for a post Steve Apple. Here’s my situation. I’ve been running an original Edge based iPhone 16 GB for the past 3+ years. I was waiting for the next new iPhone to come out so I could grab one. I was very excited for the announcement of the iPhone 4S, and unlike everyone in the media, I was not disappointed. I liked the design of the 4, and was happy that they were keeping it a little longer. I really have been wanting some more storage space. I like to have a lot of data on my phone, between my huge photo library and some videos to watch while commuting. So, all in all I was really excited about the new iPhone. ...

One of my friends, who will remain nameless for the purpose of this discussion, convinced me start playing around with a Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000. I got one at work, then I bought one for the home and I’ve been pretty happy with it. There are just a couple of things missing from my standard mac keyboard. Firstly, on my old computer, I used to be able to hit the a keyboard combination to get my machine to sleep. I believe it was something like Cmd – Shft – Eject. Well, the Microsoft keyboard doesn’t have Eject. So I’m out of luck there. It does, however, have a set of buttons reserved for favorites. So I decided to code up a little AppleScript and bind it to one of these keys. Here’s the script, and I just saved it as an editable application. Then you can go into the preference pane for the keyboard and assign the whichever key you want to this script. Good luck. ...

A while ago I wrote a post about my switch from OmniFocus from Omnigroup to Things by Cultured Code. Both do pretty much the same thing: allow you to make lists of tasks so you can keep track of what you need to get done. Each has their own feature sets. I originally bought OmniFocus, but after some time switched to Things. It’s a great App, and they have an iPhone version that is pretty handy. I work on a PC during the day, so it makes it a little hard to use Things as my primary means of tasks, but I use it for my secondary items. ...