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Category: Productivity

Adam Engst 15 comments

Here Be Digital Dragons: Musings on Modern Mapping

Internet mapping services have democratized cartography and brought it to the masses. Adam Engst has been working with maps of late and shares the most effective services, techniques, and tips that he’s found.

Adam Engst No comments

Fantastical 3.6 Adds Self-Scheduling Service

The full-featured calendar app Fantastical from Flexibits has received a significant upgrade in the form of Fantastical Scheduling, a two-part feature that simplifies setting up meetings with others.

Adam Engst 44 comments

Cloud Storage Forecast Unsettled, with Possible Storms

Triggered by a conflation of recent cloud storage issues, Adam Engst examines the real-world experience surrounding cloud storage and explores a variety of quirks, irritations, and gotchas with Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive.

Adam Engst 14 comments

LittleBITS: iCloud Delivery Issues, Naples MUG, Howard Oakley

Many Mac user groups have dissolved or are a shadow of their former selves. Not so the Naples MacFriends User Group, which has embraced the Internet and attracted hundreds of members from around the world. Adam Engst shares more on that, plus recommends Howard Oakley’s work at the Eclectic Light Company blog and provides an update on iCloud delivery problems for TidBITS subscribers.

Adam Engst 8 comments

LittleBITS: watchOS 8 Birthday Wishes, Printer Predicaments

watchOS 8 wished Adam Engst a happy birthday recently, which was both a nice touch and a small surprise. He also discusses some quirky problems related to printer drivers.

Josh Centers 16 comments

New FaceTime Features: Links, Grids, and a Web App

New FaceTime features like links, grid view, and a Web client make FaceTime in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey more competitive with video conferencing apps like Zoom.

Adam Engst 23 comments

LittleBITS: TidBITS Formatting Bug, Ransomware Protections, More OCR in Images

This week, Adam asks for help tracking down an email formatting bug in TidBITS issues, points those worried about ransomware to RansomWhere and Retrospect 18, and looks at more utilities that perform OCR on text in images.

Adam Engst 9 comments

LittleBITS: Temporary iCloud Backup, Screen Time Oddity, Server Swap, TidBITS News App

In the ongoing saga of things rattling around in Adam Engst’s head that don’t merit their own articles, Adam shares the fact of Apple’s new temporary iCloud Backup storage, passes on a story about Screen Time settings inexplicably changing, talks about moving TidBITS to a new virtual private server, and notes an upgrade to the TidBITS News app.

Adam Engst 14 comments

LittleBITS: Crab Fit, Insta360 GO 2, myCharge MAG-LOCK, Windows on M1 Macs

Frustrated by wanting to write about various topics that are either too big or too small (or too something) for a full article, Adam Engst resorts to sharing some short stories that may be enlightening, enjoyable, or just allow him to close a loop in his head.

Sharon Zardetto 10 comments

Charts in Apple’s Numbers Spreadsheet: Which One When?

Apple’s Numbers and Pages apps provide a plethora of charting choices. But neither helps you with the crucial decision regarding what type of chart to use for which kind of data. Here’s a roundup of your choices, and some advice as to when each should be used.

Adam Engst 41 comments

iPadOS 15 Finally Makes Multitasking Discoverable

Multitasking on the iPad has been a mess for years, thanks to relying on obscure gestures. With iPadOS 15, Apple has added a new Multitasking menu that provides a visible interface along with a new center window option, a shelf for open windows, and a radically enhanced App Switcher.

Glenn Fleishman 165 comments

How I Learned To Love Quicken Deluxe and Give Up on the Past

Glenn Fleishman’s 14-year relationship with Quicken 2007 finally ended this year. But it took a dead motherboard, an old Mac mini, and a conveniently timed tip for him to break with his accounting software past.

Adam Engst 12 comments

Work with Text in Images with TextSniper and Photos Search

With these utilities from different developers, you can extract text from any image on the Mac or search for text in your photos on either the Mac or iPhone. Text in images is no longer just pixels.

Adam Engst 23 comments

Try MapQuest for Many-Stop Route Planning

Faced with a need to drive to as many as 43 different spots in the same trip, Adam Engst found a mapping solution that calculated the optimal route and provided stop-by-stop voice navigation on the iPhone.

Adam Engst 14 comments

The Hidden Trick for Capturing Document-Modal Dialogs in Mac Screenshots

Sometimes you want to take a screenshot of a dialog that’s attached to a window. It turns out you can do this by pressing Command-Shift-4, pressing the Space bar, and then holding down the Command key when you mouse over the desired dialog.