Category: Apps

CARROT Weather 5 Launches as Free App with Impressive Customization Options ⇢

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I’ve used CARROT Weather for several years. I love weather apps, and I love apps that take advantage of everything Apple has to offer on its platforms, and CARROT sits right at the intersection.

The design is all-new, and more liking to my tastes than before, with less artwork and better data density. It comes with several themes, any of which you can customize. Here is how I have my CARROT Weather set up:

CARROT Weather 5

The previous version of CARROT Weather was $4.99, with in-app subscriptions available for additional features. With version 5, it is a free download with three tiers of subscriptions:

  • Premium ($4.99/month or $19.99/year) provides additional features like weather data sources, notifications, customization, widgets, and Apple Watch complications.
  • Premium Ultra ($9.99/month or $39.99/year) includes all the features of Premium, plus rain, lightning, and storm cell notifications (where available), a weather maps widget, and quick data source switching.
  • Premium Family ($14.99/month or $59.99/year) includes all the features of Premium Ultra, with the added benefit of being shareable with up to five family members via Apple’s Family Sharing service.

For more info on how this affects existing users, check out this post on Reddit. In short, users automatically get moved to the new tier that corresponds with the features they were paying for previously.

CARROT is a truly important app to me, and version 5 makes it better than ever. If you’ve never checked it out, now is a great time.

Panic Revives Audion ⇢

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Michael, writing on the Panic blog:

Once upon a time, we made one of the earliest MP3 players for the Mac, Audion. We’ve come to appreciate that Audion captured a special moment in time, and we’ve been trying to preserve its history. Back in March, we revealed that we were working on converting Audion faces to a more modern format so they could be preserved.

Since then, we’ve succeeded in converting 867 faces, and are currently working on a further 15 faces, representing every Audion face we know of.

Today, we’d like to give you the chance to experience these faces yourself on any Mac running 10.12 or later. We’re releasing a stripped-down version of Audion for modern macOS to view these faces.

I can’t tell you how much self control it has taken not to spend a day fiddling with this.

My 2020 Tasks, by the Numbers

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Thanks to Todoist’s annual reporting, I have found a lot of information about how I worked last year. In total, I completed 4,362 tasks in 2020, which breaks down to these averages:

  • 11 tasks per day
  • 82 tasks per week
  • 363 tasks per month

April was my most productive month, as you can see from these numbers showing how many tasks I completed by month. You can see that March wasn’t very good, and that I put my head down in April to work through the panic:

  • January: 388
  • February: 362
  • March: 192
  • April: 449
  • May: 398
  • June: 400
  • July: 376
  • August: 373
  • September: 400
  • October: 330
  • November: 336
  • December: 358

By far, I tend to do the most work on Tuesdays. I have no idea why, but here we are:

  • Sunday: 245
  • Monday: 553
  • Tuesday: 899
  • Wednesday: 629
  • Thursday: 565
  • Friday: 789
  • Saturday: 682

My most productive time is 5 PM, but I defer more tasks around 6:30 PM than any other time, especially on Fridays.

Go figure.

Flash is Dead ⇢

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Adobe:

Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.

I wonder how many Mac users still have Flash on their systems today.

Becky Hansmeyer, on Being in the App Store for Five Years ⇢

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Writing on her blog, after sharing how much she has made on her apps over the last few years:

It’s simultaneously a lot and a little. It’s a lot for most developers. It’s a little for the developers I follow on Twitter. Early on, someone asked me how I would define success for myself as an indie developer. I remember stressing that my apps were just side projects (they are) and that I’d be happy if my revenue could cover the cost of my personal device upgrades (it has). At the time, I think I forgot to say something about how I wanted to make things that improved people’s lives, or just made them smile. In that way, I’ve also succeeded, and hearing from happy customers has been incredibly rewarding.

Fitness Totals ⇢

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Timothy Buck has a new app out that makes it easy to monitor and manage fitness progress over time. It makes seeing this information much, much easier than anything Apple’s Health app has to offer.

Apple’s Music Memos App Headed to the Great App Library in the Sky ⇢

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Apple is encouraging users to use Voice Memos and GarageBand:

Use Voice Memos to quickly capture your ideas on your iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch. And with GarageBand, you can take your recordings even further with powerful music creation tools.

The Music Memos app won’t be updated after Music Memos version 1.0.7, and you won’t be able to download it after March 1, 2021. If you have an iPhone with iOS 14 or an iPad with iPadOS 14, you can continue to use Music Memos. And if you’ve previously downloaded the app, you can still access it from your App Store purchase history. But you should export your Music Memos recordings to your Voice Memos library to make sure you keep all of your recordings.

Anyone out there surprised?

Using BetterTouchTool and Keyboard Maestro to Make the Touch Bar Much More Useful

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Love it or hate it, it seems that the Touch Bar is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. As such, it seems wise to me to make it more useful.

A little backstory first, though… earlier this year, David Sparks finally talked me into buying a Stream Deck to use at my desk. As with most things, he was right about how much I would come to love it.

The Stream Deck is incredibly flexible, but one of my most common use cases is to tap a single button on it to open a bunch of related Safari tabs when it comes time to prepare for a show.

For example, if I press the button with the MPU logo, it opens these pages:

  • MPU episode schedule
  • Folder of MPU Outlines
  • The MPU page in Relay’s ad-tracking system
  • The MPU page in the Relay FM CMS

I’m doing this via with Keyboard Maestro, another incredibly flexible tool. Here’s what that looks like, with my secret URLs redacted:

As you can see, on my Mac Pro, this is triggered by a specific button my Stream Deck, as pictured above.1

To re-use these macros on my MacBook Pro, I made a copy of them in Keyboard Maestro, which I have sync its data over Dropbox.

I then fired up BetterTouchTool, which among many other things, allows you to create custom UI elements on your notebook’s Touchbar, tying them to a wide range of actions. Turns out, you can even have BetterTouchTool become a trigger for Keyboard Maestro.

First, create a button in the Touch Bar section of BetterTouchTool, or a group that you can place buttons in, like I have:

The action you need to use is named “Execute Terminal Command (Async, non-blocking),” which makes the button fire off a script. Here’s the script itself:

osascript -e 'tell application "Keyboard Maestro Engine" to do script "PLACEHOLDER"'

Where I have that placeholder text, you’ll need to paste in the UUID of the Keyboard Maestro macro you want to execute. To get that, you will need to select “Copy as UUID” in Keyboard Maestro:

… and then paste it into BetterTouchTool.

(While in Keyboard Maestro, be sure to set the trigger for the macro to be a script.)

When this is all done, you can tap a button on the Touch Bar and fire any Keyboard Maestro macro you desire.

Happy automating!

  1. The non-show buttons control various lights in my office and control media playback on the computer. The Migration Assistant icon launches my normal set of apps after a reboot. ↩

RIP, Growl ⇢

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It’s the end of the road for the once ubiquitous Mac app, as its creator Christopher Forsythe writes:

Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

It’s been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career. However at WWDC in 2012 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Ironically Growl was called Global Notifications Center, before I renamed it to Growl because I thought the name was too geeky. There’s even a sourceforge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it.