Only a few new ones, and even they were mostly consolidating back to things I’ve already tried, plus using the new Camera Control button on my iPhone to take photos.
Home Screens
Finally, I figured I’d share my home screens as we round out the year.
iPhone Home Screens Dec. 2024 ⌘
iPhone Lock and Today screens Dec. 2024 ⌘
2️⃣ Sarah Shuda shared an awesome resource on the Giftster blog with examples of how wrap gifts really beautifully — even if they’re a bit odd-shaped. [🔗giftster.com]
3️⃣ Hilarious video. Read the names. [🔗mstdn.social]
4️⃣ Great little reminder that a disability is only considered such because the world isn’t designed for it. It’s not a given and the world can change. [🔗instagram.com]
5️⃣ Robert Simmon shared a ton of cool Earth photography in this admittedly long post. I won’t tell on you if you just scroll through for the photos. [🔗medium.com]
6️⃣ Gui Rambo got Apple’s Private Cloud Compute to run Doom. 🤣 [🔗mastodon.social]
7️⃣ Want a 10x increase in battery life for your AirTags? Elevation Labs has you covered with their case thing that swaps in AA batteries for power. [🔗theverge.com]
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
Imagine this: You’re driving down the road when a Very Good Idea springs to mind. You need to capture it quickly without fumbling through screens or struggling with Siri, which often requires internet access and can be hit-or-miss. What you need is a seamless solution that promptly activates a voice recording, saves your thoughts, and sends them to your preferred app without any fuss.
You need a button — a hardware button — that activates the shortcut without requiring a glance at your screen1. Enter ‘Dictate a Note’ and the Action Button, available on newer iPhones like the iPhone 15 Pro and later. With this button, you can trigger the shortcut instantly, dictating your ideas or tasks, which are then transcribed and saved to your app of choice.
I designed this shortcut for situations where I can’t (or shouldn’t) be distracted by my phone — like driving or hiking. But its utility doesn’t stop there. It’s equally handy for jotting down ideas during workouts, while cooking, or anytime you need to capture thoughts on the fly without breaking your stride. It’s a fantastic accessibility tool if you have limited mobility or when it’s cumbersome to interact with your phone in cold weather. Simply press the button, talk into your phone, and just know that the idea was saved.
If you allow me a spot of pride, I think I nailed it with ‘Dictate a Note’. Let me walk you through the shortcut.
The core of this shortcut is dictating text and saving it to an app. ⌘
While this isn’t the beginning of the shortcut, it is the whole foundation. You run the shortcut, it listens, you stop recording, it saves the text and lets you know.
I made sure to have it copy the text to the clipboard right away, just in case something goes wrong and it can’t finish saving to the app. You won’t lose your idea. I also have it show an alert with the text it transcribed. Honestly, I don’t look at this very often, but it gives you the option to open the app right to the note you saved or to ignore it and move on.
Running without tapping the screen
It was crucial for this shortcut to work without needing any input on the screen. Why? Because I’m often wearing gloves while I’m out hiking or climbing. Some of my best ideas spring to mind out there, but I can’t be taking off my gloves in the middle of winter every time I want to capture an idea. I needed something where I could activate the shortcut while I’m pulling the phone out of my pocket, dictate the idea, and then verify that the shortcut is stopped and the screen is off as I return my phone to my pocket. All with physical buttons.
Luckily, all that works using the Action Button to activate and the Side Button to deactivate/lock. The dictation interface appears right on the Lock Screen, and pressing the Side Button ends the dictation while still allowing the shortcut to finish running in the background to save the transcribed text. When you end the shortcut in this way, it doesn’t reactivate the screen to show that alert. It just quietly saves the text; no need to worry.
Don’t have an Action Button? Not to worry! You could set ‘Dictate a Note’ as a Lock Screen or Control Center widget. But I recommend setting it to activate with Back Tap. Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap → Set it to double or triple tap. Then you just double- or triple-tap on the back of your phone to kick it off.
You could also try a Vocal Shortcut (also under Accessibility), where you set a custom phrase to activate the shortcut — no Siri prompt required.
The video below demonstrates the shortcut in action, from activating it with the Action Button to dictating and saving your note. It shows just how seamlessly ‘Dictate a Note’ fits into your workflow without requiring any extra taps or interactions.
Now, personally, I use Drafts as my inbox for nearly all my ideas (and often tasks), so that’s where I have my notes saved. But as I grew more and more pleased with this shortcut, I knew I’d want to architect it to work well with other apps, too.
Allowing the user to choose their preferred app
Here’s where things get interesting. I got to try out a few new advanced techniques to get it all to work.
I wanted to provide a list of compatible apps that a user could choose to save their notes to. Drafts I already built for me, but Notes, Bear, and Obsidian (via a text file) were other popular apps that I figured folks might want to use. And then other people might prefer a task manager like Things or Reminders to save these little notes.
This technique allows me to support more apps in the future without much trouble. ⌘
1️⃣ Using a technique I think I recall seeing from Federico Viticci, I used a ‘List’ action to, well, list out the apps that would work. By following it with a ‘Get Item from List’ action to get the first item, I can account for both people who read the instructions and just move their preferred app to the top of the list, and those who don’t and might delete unwanted apps instead. The top app in the list gets saved to a chosen-app variable.
2️⃣ Next, I saved an optional-title variable using the date and time the dictation was made.
3️⃣ And, in case someone deletes everything by mistake and still tries to run the shortcut, I put in an error check for the chosen-app variable.
Saving the note to different apps
This is why adding Shortcuts actions is so important for developers to do. It allows them to plug and play with tools that users create for themselves. And I guarantee you, it’s those custom tools that stick.
I used similar techniques to save the drafts to a note app, text file, and to-do app. ⌘
In each case, an ‘If’ action checks the chosen-app variable, and if it matches, it will line up the corresponding actions for that app.
4️⃣ For Bear, its ‘Create Bear Note’ action is all that’s needed. But it opens the note automatically, so we don’t get the opportunity to decline that.
5️⃣ For the text file, I used a ‘Set Name’ action on the output from a ‘Text’ action to turn it into a file. Then, that file is saved to the Files app, and the user is given the option to open it with their default text editor. In my case, it opens in iA Writer.
6️⃣ For Things, you create the to-do — this time using the optional-title variable as its title and the dictated text as its note — and, again, use ‘Show Alert’ to give the option to open the task up in the app.
Final check for error
If you accidentally remove all supported apps or select an unsupported one, the shortcut has you covered. It displays a clear error message with step-by-step instructions for resolving the issue. Plus, it automatically opens the Shortcuts app, so you can fix it right away without hunting around.
I needed to make sure the shortcut could fail gracefully. ⌘
7️⃣ If the chosen-app variable doesn’t match any of the apps in my pre-built ‘If’ blocks, it will show a final error message with instructions on how to fix the issue:
Please edit the Shortcut to use one of the supported apps. It will open automatically when you press “OK”
Edit this shortcut → “i” info button → Setup → Customize Shortcut…
8️⃣ And, yes, I also set it to open Shortcuts up to this very shortcut so that the user can fix it right away.
So, yeah. I’ve been using this shortcut as my default automation assigned to my Action Button for nearly a month now. It’s simple, reliable, and customizable — making it my go-to tool for capturing inspiration anywhere. I’ve started relying on it so much day-to-day (not just while hiking and driving) that I removed some conditionals from my overall Action Button shortcut so that it will just let me dictate things in more cases.2
Whisper Memos
Perhaps you’ve heard about Whisper Memos, an app that David Sparks of Mac Power Users and MacSparky has evangelized for many months now. It provides a very similar solution to this problem in that it, too, records, transcribes, and saves text. And, by using OpenAI’s powerful models, its transcription clean-up and accuracy are unmatched.
I’ve tested it a little bit on its free trial, and I’m quite impressed. It works better than my shortcut on the Apple Watch (shortcuts still don’t run very well there). And because you can set it up to send the transcriptions to an email address, I can get all of them into my beloved Drafts using the secret Mail Drop email address that Drafts provides. But there are some downsides to it, too.
Because Whisper Memos has to route all its recordings through OpenAI’s servers, it’s necessarily slower. Transcriptions take a few minutes at least to get back into the app. Furthermore, its transcriptions are locked within the Whisper Memos app unless you set up a Zapier automation or that email address.
Let’s break down those differences:
‘Dictate a Note’ Shortcut:
Free to use
Works offline, directly on your device
Fully customizable
Whisper Memos:
$40/year subscription
Requires an internet connection
Superior transcription accuracy with AI (slower processing)
While Whisper Memos excels in long-form transcription accuracy, ‘Dictate a Note’ is faster, more private, and entirely offline — making it my go-to for quick captures.
Okay, you got me. You do need to glance at your phone for this to work. It won’t run correctly if the phone is locked. But, I assure you, with Face ID, iPhones unlock so quickly now that I truly don’t find it to be a distraction. I had to specifically test it a bunch of times tonight with the phone pointed away from me even to figure out that it doesn’t work when locked. I’ve been using it on drives and hikes for weeks, and I thought it did work when locked. It turns out that it just unlocked so fast and easily that I didn’t notice.↩︎
That said, I haven’t yet nailed down exactly how I want my Action Button to function in different situations. Here’s a sneak peek of some ideas I’m playing with:
Shortcuts can check your current Focus and open apps to decide which actions to take. ⌘↩︎
Yesterday, James (of James’ Coffee Blog) announced his newest web project, Artemis. He billed it as “a calm web reader” that he uses “to follow my favourite blogs and websites” with three main design goals:
I want Artemis to be part of a web exploration journey, so every web link takes you to the author’s websites.
I want the interface to make me feel calm, not overwhelmed like other readers.
I want the tool to be slow so I don’t feel compelled to check it regularly.
He delivers on all three fronts!
Headlines, sorted by day, that guide you to the author’s website. ⌘
When he wrote an earlier blog post talking through its design and purpose, he said two things that resonated with me:
I wanted the reader to be the interface through which I found blogs that I could then open elsewhere. This drastically limited the scope of the project. Rather than having to design panels for how to show blogs, I decided I would read them on everyone’s personal websites. Indeed, I love going to people’s websites to see what’s new. A reader could encourage this by directly linking to websites.
and
The reader updates once per day: every day in the early morning. So, when I wake up, I have my morning paper.
So, when James opened up a beta to the public yesterday, I jumped at the opportunity to try it out. I tinkered around with it this evening, adding 14 authors to my account and hoping back and forth through all the things they published in the past few days.
In his invitation email, James asked for feedback and for me to share the project with others. I thought I’d feed two birds with one scone. Here’s the feedback email that I sent to James tonight:
Thanks for the invitation to Artemis, James! I tinkered around with it for a bit this evening.
So far, I’m very impressed. It’s clean, it’s fast, and it’s easy to use. I’ve been thinking for some time that I’d like to have a reader that defaults to going to the author’s website. Ideally, it could cache the pages in their given style for offline reading, but that’s not super necessary. I like Artemis for, as you said, being a newspaper-like experience for my favorite sites.
Bonus: Using Artemis got me to finally learn the keyboard shortcuts for going back through a tab’s history! Spacebar-ing through articles and then hitting ⌘ [ to go back to the list is nice.
A couple of small notes:
It would be nice to be able to rename authors. Some don’t have their author names quite right, and I just know it’ll bug me to see that day after day.
A dark mode would be easier on the eyes when the rest of my system is dark in the evening.
I added the web app to my home screen on my iPhone — also a good experience! But it definitely needs your little coffee cat as an icon… maybe reading a newspaper?
Perhaps a style could be added to viewed links so that one can more easily keep track of their place if they’re jumping around from article to article?
Great start. I’m excited to see where this goes.
Good luck!
— Jarrod
If this project sounds of interest to you, I encourage you to give it a try! You can sign up here and use the invite code coffee to get into the beta. (James permitted me to share it. 🙂)
It’s most likely to be populated by gadgets, but I might throw some outdoor gear or other knickknacks there that I’m looking to find a new home for.
As I mention at the top of that page, I take good care of my stuff, and I’ll do my best to price things fairly. I’ll ship for free anywhere in the continental U.S. These things will likely also be for sale via Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and/or OfferUp1, so act fast (email me) if you see something you like. I just think there might be a higher concentration of people with my interests and tastes right here and, therefore, more likely to find a happy buyer.
I’ll (probably) write a blog post as each new item goes up, and I’ll (definitely) post to my microblog about them. Keep an eye out!
But you won’t get free shipping through those sites! You get that here because I love you. 😘↩︎
I really should have more to say about this after many years of waiting it out to get one, but the simple truth is that the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID is just a great keyboard. I probably should have caved years ago to purchase one.
Don’t get me wrong; there were things that I quite liked about the Keychron K3 Ultra-Slim keyboard that I used to use — namely, its fun, light-up colors, slick design, and trendy mechanical keys. But no one else can make a keyboard with Touch ID, and that’s the killer feature.
The feel. I like the key travel and that it’s now more similar in feel to my iPad’s Magic Keyboard.
The Lightning connector. That’s right, I said it. I got a Lightning version specifically. Now, my trackpad, mouse, and keyboard all use the same connector. I keep a 3-in-1 cable connected to my Mac mini, so it’s easy to hook just about anything up to it, but I won’t need to swap the tip between USB-C and Lightning so much anymore.
The color. I love orange. I don’t love this orange, but it’s alright. I somewhat regret not just getting classic silver since the keys are white anyway.
The Bad
The arrow key layout. I didn’t think I would mind it, but everyone is right. The arrow keys should be in an inverted T layout rather than half-height up/down arrows and full-height left/right ones. Everything should be half-height so it’s easier to distinguish them by feel.
No backlight. For this price, it should be backlit, right?
The lack of multi-device pairing. With Universal Control, this isn’t as big of a deal, but it’s going to become more of a problem for me in the future. When I get a MacBook Air and use it at this desk but keep my current Mac mini hooked up as the “family computer”, it will be tricky to get all my peripherals to swap to the laptop. Multi-device pairing would have made it easier to use the keyboard with my Vision Pro, too. My fingers are crossed for some sort of AirPods-like magic device swapping in the next version.
The Great
I’ve saved the best for last.
Touch ID! Not typing passwords to login, access my 1Password vault, and grant numerous other system permission is fantastic. Weirdly, the App Store doesn’t seem to have gotten the message and asks me to type out my Apple Account password for every purchase.
It’s quiet. I know people love the clickity-clackity of their mechanical keyboards, but that wasn’t a huge draw for me. I do better with the quiet when I’m trying to concentrate.
Speedy connection. It connects super quickly to my Mac. My Keychron would struggle to wake the Mac, and even when it did, it took multiple seconds of my mashing keys for it to figure out its shit to start typing in my password. The Magic Keyboard has no such issues. When I press the Touch ID button, it dutifully and promptly wakes and unlocks my Mac right to my Desktop.
Alright, I guess I had enough to say about this keyboard after all.
P.S. I have a Keychron K3 Ultra-Slim, RGB backlit, 75% (84-key) layout keyboard with optical brown switches for sale. 😆 It’s in great shape. Although I’ve moved on from it, I’d love for it to have a nice home where its mechanical switches and sick blacklight will be appreciated.
I’ll match Amazon’s used price at $70 and free shipping. (Seems like it’s out-of-stock at Keychron, but it retails at $95 new on Amazon.) Let me know.
Apple’s App Store Awards video for this year is mesmerizing. I’ve watched it many times already.
There are some really good-looking apps on the list, and I just had to buy the Apple Watch app of the year, Lumy, because it does such a beautiful job of keeping track of the golden hour, sunset/sunrise times and more.
Lumy’s developer actually has an app bundle (those still exist!) with Lumy, Calzy (a calculator), and Currenzy (a currency converter). They’re all really pretty, but what sold me on the bundle is Calzy. It has a modern, interactive widget that can replace the old PCalc one we lost this year! I, once again, have a calculator in its rightful place in the Today View.
Maybe it’s just me, but I love being able to swipe over to a persistent calculator. ⌘
The bundle of three apps cost $10 versus the $7 of Lumy and $5 for each of the others. Congrats to all the awardees this year!
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Apple’s annual holiday ad gets a big thumbs up from me this year. [▶️youtube.com]
2️⃣ James G made his own little web reader that updates once per day so that he can read his favorite websites like a daily newspaper. I love when people build tools to meet their own specific needs. [🔗jamesg.blog]
3️⃣ For the Apple New+ readers out there (and probably regular Apple News publications, too), Parker Ortolani has a good tip for quickly getting to your favorite news sources from the Home Screen. [🔗mastodon.social]
4️⃣ The folks behind Trello created a 40-second audio track designed to banish earworm songs stuck in your heads. I can’t speak to its efficacy, that’s just what it says on the tin. [▶️youtube.com]
5️⃣ If this Mufasa story has been told before, I’ve missed it. And that’s okay! It’ll be fun to go into something new without comparing it to an older film, one that’s been long-held dear. [🦁youtube.com]
6️⃣ Jack Wellborn worked on an AppleScript to automatically mark items in NetNewsWire as read if they’re older than 36 hours. Helps keep things from piling up in the read-later queue. [🔗mastodon.social]
7️⃣ Thanks, Kottke, now I want this $420 one-time use timer that counts up for over 2,000 years. [🔗cwandt.com]
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
Microsoft has confirmed to _Windows Central_ that it has ended production of the Surface Studio 2+, a premium all-in-one desktop designed for creative professionals. With remaining stock now limited to retailers and partners, there is likely no successor to the Studio 2+ planned. This effectively ends Microsoft’s efforts to compete in the high-end all-in-one market dominated by Apple’s iMac, a fixture of creative workspaces for decades.
For years, Apple fans have looked at the Surface Studio longingly, wondering what a version of a tilting Mac desktop could look like. Many wondered if Apple would ever do anything like this machine, adding Apple Pencil and touch support to macOS, or doing some wild Mac/iPad hybrid.
It me!1👋 I’m sad to see this computer go. Its ability to transform into a giant drafting-table-like touchscreen workpad brought something new and exciting to the desktop paradigm. (I still remember the “Pure Imagination” introduction video.) Maybe we’ll eventually see something like this from Apple as macOS and iPadOS grow ever closer, but I think it’s less likely now without a rival on the market.
Microsoft has historically taken big swings with the Surface line, but that era appears to be coming to a close. Was Surface lead Panos Panay’s exit a cause or an effect?
Although I think David Sparks of MacSparky has been the mostvocaladvocate I know for a Surface Studio-like revamp for the iMac.↩︎
Each December, I look forward to the annual “Best of Music” episode on MacStories Unwind because John Voorhees and Federico Viticci both have really good taste in music. It mostly matches up with my taste, but I always find something new to expand my musical horizons by listening to their recommendations.1
I put together a collection of platform-agnostic album.link bookmarks for all the albums the guys shared this year so that it’s easy to jump to them on your music platform of choice. I also made an Apple Music playlist, and it’s saved to the collection as well.
(If anyone else were to put together a similar playlist with all the full albums for other platforms, I’d be happy to add the link to this collection! Just let me know.)
It’s from previous “Best of Music” Unwind episodes that I discovered Mitski, Maggie Rogers, and boygenius, all of whom are excellent. I’m looking forward to playing through 2024’s list today and finding some new favorites.
Though they’re undoubtedly more on the cutting edge when it comes to new music discovery, as evidenced by the fact that they have the ‘best of’ list of albums just for 2024, whereas I don’t know if I could even name enough albums that came out this year to fill a handful.↩︎
Maybe it’s just me, but I love being able to swipe over to a persistent calculator.