Tab Groups were introduced last year to Safari1 in the iOS/iPadOS 15 and macOS 12 releases, but it’s only just now dawned upon me the extent to which that feature has crept into my life. If you’re not familiar with Tab Groups, they’re basically collections of tabs that stay in whatever state you last left them regardless of if you close your browser window or switch to another group. You can have many different Tab Groups, and the group takes over the browser window when you switch to one. Even better, the groups sync across devices — so I can open a Tab Group on my iPad, add a new tab to it there, and then it’ll be waiting for me on my Mac or iPhone later.
That’s the concept, and in practice, it’s been working great for how I like to browse the web. You see, I’m a tab closer. When I’m done with the site — be it a restaurant webpage, an online article, or a shopping site — I banish it. I can’t stand to leave dozens of tabs open when they’re no longer in active use. But…sometimes I’m working on something that needs a tab, or tabs, open for days or weeks at a time. In the past, that meant going against my natural grain and leaving a breadcrumb trail of tabs without any context of what they were for. The best I could do was drag the relevant tabs next to each other. Tab Groups have rescued me from that tab-glutenous hell and helped me to be more productive.
Project Groups
I’ve been using Tab Groups mainly for ongoing projects, or to save pages that I want to view specifically in Safari as opposed to a read-later or to-do app. For example, the Tab Group I’ve been coming back to most often is titled ‘Blot Migration’. It holds my Squarespace admin page, Blot backend pages, an FAQ, and my new Blot site. Whenever I sat down to move a few more posts or tweak the site’s code, I switched over to that Tab Group, and everything’s right where I left off. There are no miscellaneous tabs lurking around to distract me. It’s a clean workspace, like switching to a purpose-built Focus mode on my phone. (Which, incidentally, Focus modes and Tab Groups do play nicely with Focus Filters in iOS 16.)
Tab Groups live in the Safari sidebar, but can also be selected from the sidebar menu dropdown for quick selection. ⌘
Some other Tab Groups that I’ve been using include a House group for home listings that my wife sends me. I load them into that group and then close the ones that don’t appeal to me. Then when she asks what I think, I can just pull up that group and know they’ve been curated to potential winners. I also have a Reading group for long-form articles that have special formatting that looks best on a native webpage (like Federico Viticci’s iOS reviews for MacStories). My Shopping group is useful for comparing items that I’m actively researching to purchase. (Otherwise, bookmarks to potential purchases get saved to Raindrop.io.) And when I was going through all the rigamarole necessary to apply and test for my New York State guiding license, keeping all of the obscure government webpages, study guides, and regulations together made it easy to get back into the thick of it when the Department of Environmental Conservation finally deigned a return
call or email.
All in all, I’m up to nine Tab Groups that house various projects I’ve got in various positions from front to back burners. They don’t take up mindshare like a huge line of tabs used to, and I’m less likely to close a tab by mistake. When a Tab Group is no longer needed, it’s a very deliberate right-click and delete to close everything out.
Give Groups a Go!
If you haven’t yet tried out Tab Groups, there’s no time like the present. They’ve gotten better integrations with the latest Apple OS releases, like the aforementioned link to Focus modes, new Shortcuts actions, and collaboration support to share and manipulate tabs live with others. I think shared tabs will be perfect for collaborating on that House group with my wife.
By the way, I saw an update splash screen in Google Chrome on a work PC a few days ago that mentioned Tab Groups. I haven’t looked into it, but I imagine the Chrome version works similarly to what I’ve described here for Safari.↩︎
As the two services become one, Google is leaning on Duo’s mobile app as the default. Pretty soon, the Duo app will get an update that brings an onslaught of Meet features into the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet app will be called “Meet Original,” and eventually deprecated.
Let’s check in on how that merger is going. Here’s Chris Welch, also writing at The Verge, just a couple of months later:
But apparently, not all customers have been happy with Duo’s sudden identity change. With the latest update to the Meet app for Android, Google has brought back the original Duo icon and name as a separate shortcut that appears in the app launcher. Tapping on Duo opens Google Meet. So you’ve now got two ways of accessing the same application.
I wish Google the best of luck, and a strong will to actually see a vision through.
As an example, Best Buy cites a base M1MacBook Air priced at $999.99. Through the Upgrade+ program, a customer can pay $19.99 per month for 36 months toward the machine. At the end of 36 months, the user has the option to make the remaining $280.35 payment and keep the machine, return the machine and leave the program, or upgrade to a new Mac laptop. If they return the machine, either to leave the program or upgrade to a new Mac, no final payment is required.
Wow! You can use a Mac for three full years, and then return it having paid less than the retail price (or re-up and get a brand new laptop). I suppose that’s how almost all leases work, but this strikes me as a particularly good deal for folks who are already on a regular upgrade cycle. Kudos to Best Buy for beating Apple to a non-iPhone hardware upgrade program, but, with everythingthey’redoing in the finance space these days, my gut says we’ll see a first-party version from Apple soon enough.
They ask me to rate my “experience”. Thing is, I didn’t have an experience. The delivery person just left the package by the mailbox and I grabbed it when I got home. And what does it mean to even rate a delivery like this? It showed up, it was correct… Is that a 5-star experience? Would it only be worth 3 stars if the package was lying on the ground instead of propped up against the wall? There isn’t enough there there to even establish a value.
If you’re going to ask anything, a more apt question might be “Did the correct prescription show up on time?” Then I can answer yes or no. But rate the experience? And every time I get a prescription, it’s the same question about the experience.
He’s right. I’d be way more likely to tap a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ link if you ask me a single, simple question. And then, if I answer “no”, you’re welcome to follow up with more questions. But just ask what you actually want to know, and make it easy.
A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Cards Against Humanity is back on their shit. [Link - clams.lol]
2️⃣ Amy Pechacek surfaced 20 super cool websites that you should tuck away into your back pocket. Some of them I knew about, but others blew my mind. My favorite is doesthedogdie.com. [Link - @pechacek_amy // twitter.com]
3️⃣ Other people are talking about a different album this week, but I was more excited to discover that dodie dropped a great new EP recently. It was sneaky; I hadn’t known it was coming up! [Link - dodie // album.link]
5️⃣ How is it that Nathan Fillion looks younger in his latest role starring in The Rookie than he did in Castle? The guy’s got a thing for police shows. Also, Nathan Fillion is a national treasure. [Link - The Rookie // imdb.com]
7️⃣ I can’t believe I haven’t linked to this before, but the ‘BEATstrumentals’ playlist from Apple Music is my go-to while writing — or really any time that I need to focus. No lyrics, cyclic rhythms, and still being updated years after its debut. It’s what I’m listening to right now. [Link - BEATstrumentals // music.apple.com]
Hey there! Since you’re reading these words, that means that, as was foretold, I’ve launched version 2.0 of HeyDingus.net. 🎉 And if everything has gone according to plan, you should hardly even notice that the site has changed. But changed it has — and drastically at that. In fact, the backend is hosted on a whole new (less expensive) platform; every single post and page has been rewritten; the font has changed and its formatting adjusted; my publishing workflow is terrifically simpler; it’s easier to read on mobile devices; in short, everything has changed.
It may be easier to explain what hasn’t changed.
The URLs should all be the same or redirect automatically to their new homes.
The general format of the site is the same, with menu-level access to Archives, ongoing projects, my Now posts, and About page.
The color scheme is still rocking that six colors goodness.
And you can still read everything I’ve ever published.
It took many sleepless nights over the course of a month to get it in a shippable state — which is to say, looking almost exactly like the old site without any (I hope) broken links.
Shouldn’t you have just spent the time writing new posts rather than fiddling?
Yes.
So…why did you do an overhaul instead?
Good question. The short answer is that when Squarespace announced a price increase, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I wasn’t thrilled about paying more for a product that I wasn’t truly happy with, and that I felt was as much a roadblock in my writing process as it was a gateway to publishing online.
The long answer is that I’ve yearned for finer control over the look and feel of my site since the very beginning. And I finally found a blogging platform that makes publishing as easy as saving a text file — that’s the dream! I’m actually excited about publishing again now that I’ve removed the song and dance I had to do to get my Markdown text onto Squarespace. Plus, I was eager to jump into learning a bit about CSS and HTML. That process has been a really fun challenge (and hopefully useful for future endeavors). And I wanted to. But yes, I should have just spent the time writing.
I’ll write more soon about what I had to do to transition the site from Squarespace to Blot.
Some Nifty Tidbits
Since every post’s source of truth is now just a text file in Dropbox on my devices, making corrections for typos or updates is as easy as reopening the document in my favorite text editor and saving the changes.
I’ve spent time trying to make sure that every image has Alt Text to make it a better reading experience for folks using screen readers. And I could finally style image captions differently than regular body text.
Every image should now have a hyperlinked “⌘” symbol in the caption to view the full-size original version.
My tagging structure has been cleaned up quite a bit. I tend to struggle with applying all the “right” tags to a post, so I’ve cut them down to just the handful that I think are actually useful collections — rather than trying to apply a tag for every topic a post covered.
I haven’t gotten the site quite how I want it yet. But I needed to get it out into the world lest I spend several more weeks witting CSS and HTML rather than blog posts. Here’s what to look forward to:
Landing pages for projects like 7 Things and Now, which will explain what they’re about and then list each post. Those menu links just point to generic tag pages at the moment.
A more readable Archives page. I’m waffling between its current condensed style, and something that is more spacious and temporally aware (grouped by month).
Splitting up the About page into smaller parts, rather than the wall of text it’s been since the beginning.
Thank you and stay tuned
I don’t know how many of you out there are still visiting this site after its extended hiatus this summer, but I appreciate you. I encourage you to explore the site, and let me know if you find anything weird. But more importantly, you can look forward to more on HeyDingus going forward. Thanks for reading.
It’s been a while, but I believe strongly in this cause and wanted to make some time to bring your attention to it. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and the Relay FM podcast network (and, through them, the Apple community at large) rallies to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the treatment of kids and research to stop cancer in its tracks. St. Jude’s schtick is that it never charges the families of its patients for anything. Not the exorbitantly expensive treatment. Not housing. Not even food from the cafeteria. And they share their research worldwide.
What more can I say? In a month when many of us in the Apple community spend lots of money on tech that we could do without, it’d be great if you could join me in throwing a few bucks toward this great cause.
My goal is to raise $500 for the Relay FM campaign. I’ve put my money where my mouth is and donated $250 of that, and I hope that a few of you who read this site will have some cash to spare to match it. I’ll probably put up some reward stunt if we reach the goal…like posting a how-to on a reader’s choice topic or a game night with donors. Oh, and you can get some cool rewards from the overall Relay FM campaign, too, even when you donate through my portal.
Let’s cure childhood cancer together! You can donate to my campaign right here. Thank you.
A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Dictation enhancements. I’ve always aspired to be a Dictation user. But I usually find it clumsy to premeditate the punctuation, so I default to typing since I’d have to go back to correct it anyway. The one-two punch of automatic punctuation and live keyboard editing while dictating may finally win me over.
2️⃣ Medication Reminders. I think this will be the next significant feature that gets folks to buy an Apple Watch for their parents. The first one was heart monitoring. The second was fall detection. A medication reminder strapped to the wrist, warnings about drug interactions, and the dosage log can be shared securely with your loved ones and doctor — I think it’ll be huge.
3️⃣ Workout app upgrades. My outdoor running workouts are about to get supercharged with watchOS 9. Matt Birchler put together a succinct rundown of the new features on Twitter. [Link - @mattbirchler // twitter.com]
4️⃣ Stage Manager. Oddly enough, I may be more excited about this feature on the Mac than on the iPad, where it unlocks a whole new multitasking paradigm. I’m a heavy user of Spaces on the Mac, but Stage Manager might be a better fit for me. Also, I don’t have an M1 iPad, so I won’t be able to try it there for quite a while.
5️⃣ Display Scaling on iPad. On the other hand, I’m very excited about the ‘More Space’ display scaling option on the iPad. It’s always bugged me that the smaller iPad Pro sizes were limited on app size classes. As long as it works on pre-M1 iPads, I should be able to put two full-sized apps side-by-side, just like on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
6️⃣ SharePlay in Messages. I’ve only used SharePlay with FaceTime once, mostly because I don’t like phone calls in general. But a text chat while watching a movie or playing a game together is right up my alley.
7️⃣ Live Activities. My Notification Center is spammed daily with notifications that become irrelevant as soon as the next one comes in. I think Live Activities is an elegant solution that I hope will be used by the likes of Instacart and delivery and weather apps.
Rather than a drawn-out thesis for every hope and rumor out there, I’ll give you a few broad thoughts on what my gut says we’ll see tomorrow at Apple’s keynote. (Some of us will be avoiding all social media and notifications until we get out of work to preserve some of the magic.)
The Conference in General - It could just be a secondary effect of this being the first in-person event in a while, but it seems like something big has been cooking. AR headset? Significant improvements in the existing OSes? A surprise no one has predicted? I’m not sure what it is, but this WWDC feels extra special. At the very least, we’re sure to get more insight into Apple Park with all these new folks getting the chance to visit.
iOS - Though it’s my most used platform, it’s the least exciting to ponder, in my opinion. The phone is so mature that I lack the creativity to think what would knock my socks off beyond app improvements. But I do appreciate refinements each year, so I’m looking for those.
iPadOS - Perpetually on the edge of something greater, I don’t envy the burden on the iPadOS team’s shoulders. Do they throw caution to the wind and unlock the iPad’s potential to be a better all-around computer with Pro apps, more complex multitasking, and additional versatility? Or do they stick to its original premise as a device between the iPhone and the Mac, better at just a few key things? As someone who has uses an iPad Pro as a laptop but an iPad mini as a casual computer, I think I lean toward the former. But I’m not unhappy with the iPad as it is. (Except for the aspect ratio and cramped interface on the iPad mini. But that’s a story for another time.)
macOS - It’s my least used and least important OS, but, strangely, it is the one I’m most keen to see what’s new. I think usability has taken an unfortunate downturn since the Big Sur redesign, and I’m curious if the recent about-face on hardware missteps will also come for software. Unleashing widgets from the Notification Center, a rethink of the Notification Center itself, and a return to more obvious interface elements would go a long way. I’m also very interested in the next chapter for Shortcuts as the future of automation on the Mac.
watchOS - I’ll admit it, I’ve become bored with the Apple Watch. Its strength for years has been in notifications and fitness tracking, but I’ve held onto the idea that it could and should be more useful and capable. And yet, I rarely dive into apps. I’ve settled on a few watch faces that get the job done but no longer spark much joy to use. I’ll give it that having Siri always within arm’s reach (heh) is handy (heh-heh). But I’m really hoping for something that gets my blood pumping again. And no, not just another workout type.
tvOS - Content, games, and home hub. Apple should triple down on those three aspects. Make it easier, faster, and better to get in and out of what I want to watch. Do whatever it takes to make the Apple TV a legitimate part of the gaming question. Make my TV more useful as a home control and information center. Rather than apps, I’d prefer to see glanceable information that would make my TV screen more useful when it’s not playing a show, movie, or game.
Hardware - My heart says that we should see the conclusion of the M1 family in the Mac Pro before the M2 starts rolling out. But I’m unsure if that’s how the cards will fall. Perhaps we’ll see only a preview of the Mac Pro (with an M1 Extreme 🤞), but a proper introduction of the next generation of MacBook Air (and Mac mini?) with an M2 in this event. Getting a MacBook Air out before the back-to-school season would be a nice change of pace. AR headset? I’ve long thought WWDC would be the right place to introduce its new platform, especially if there was an in-person aspect. Well, there will be developers and media present, but rumors point toward its further delay. Perhaps we’ll be surprised!
Okay, okay, here’s a list
For a bit more specificity, I’ve kept a running list of improvements that I’d like to see Apple make to its hardware, software, and services in 2022. (In fact, I keep a shortcut handy for adding them to an Apple Note whenever an idea strikes.) These straddle the line between wishes, predictions, and quality-of-life fixes, but I thought they’d be fun to share nonetheless and then grade after the event.
Hardware
‘iMac Pro’ makes a triumphant return with Apple Silicon
Preview of AR/VR headset
Software
Let me use the full maps application on iPhone when navigating with CarPlay
Option to sync CarPlay app home screens between cars
Lock any app or folder of apps with a passcode/FaceID
Pinned playlists in Music
PiP video for Apple News videos
Compact ‘Now Playing’ widget on the Lock Screen
‘Quick Open’ in more apps (based on Files Go-To menu? CMD-Shift-G?)
Extensions and Safari Shortcuts actions available in Safari View Controller
Clipboard manager for iOS (or third—party support)
Smart rotate (based on face recognition?)
Use any SF Symbol for Shortcuts icon (with search function)
Health widgets with trends
Proper share sheet for macOS
Shortcuts actions for TV app (and/or widget to search TV app)
System-wide highlighting (bonus points for allowing it to hook into an API like Readwise)
Allow alternate launch phrases for shortcuts using Siri (like synonyms for menu items)
Option to pull notification settings from other devices using iCloud upon app install
When adding shortcuts to folders, add them to the bottom so as not to disrupt widgets and other shortcuts which display from folder order
First-party way to use iPhone as Mac webcam
On-device transcription (offline) for watchOS
Clipboard manager support for iOS/macOS
Alternate app icons on macOS
SF symbols everywhere
Add to Control Center option for shortcuts
Fix Handoff music playback via third-party apps and widgets.
Dismiss Share Sheet after completing a shortcut (could be an action to be added in the shortcut)
Reorder spotlight results
Services
Improvements to in-app purchasing with third-party payment processing
Solution for cloud gaming services in App Store
Group workout support in Fitness+ (multiple Watch metrics on screen, both get credit)
Initiatives
Overhaul of Bug Bounty Program with promises of faster turnaround and better communication/transparency
In any case, WWDC is the epicenter of the Apple universe, and we’re sure to be in for an exciting summer of new releases. See you on the other side!
