Technology

Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter

• Reading, Technology • 4 Comments

I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.

A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.

The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.

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Why Blogs Matter

• Technology, Writing • 17 Comments

This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.

I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.

An odd assortment, I know.

Readers from sixty countries have visited my blog. I have corresponded with dozens of people with questions or comments about what I’ve written. I’ve also become friends with other bloggers who care deeply about many of the same things. It’s a marvel of the internet age that we have this medium to find each other, rare and valuable needles in an unending hayloft.

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How A Hidden Feature in Bear Changed the Way I Review Notes

• Technology, Writing • 9 Comments

This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.

If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.

You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?

A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.

In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.

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Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking

• Technology, Writing • 29 Comments

For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes.  This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.

Craft and the Value of Connected Notes

I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying.  Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box.  In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.” 

The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown.  I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system. 

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Quicken Classic for Mac – A Long-time User Review

• Money, Technology • 58 Comments

I’ve used some version of Quicken for 35 years. That puts me in a stodgy demographic that manages money in a certain “this is how I’ve always done it” way. For the uninitiated, Quicken is a personal finance software program that helps manage your checkbook and credit cards, pay your bills, keep to a budget, and track investments. It’s available on Windows and Mac, though there are differences in capabilities between the two. There are companion apps for iPhone and iPad, but they feel like afterthoughts, lacking key functionality of the desktop software. Quicken Classic is sold as an annual subscription across three offerings: Deluxe, Premier, and the recently released Business and Personal edition.

Seven years ago, I switched from Quicken Premier for Windows to the less capable Mac version. I’ve written previous blog posts about using Quicken on the Mac: in early 2018 when I switched and follow-on updates in 2019 and 2020. In large part, I was critical of the Mac version of the software, particularly its inability to export investment data.

In the intervening four years since my last post, Quicken has improved in many ways, including the ability to export all its data, including investments, to Quicken for Windows. With this critical functionality in place, I thought it was time to provide an updated and favorable review of the Mac version of Quicken and how I rely on it to manage almost every aspect of my financial life.

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