Rocket Panda

A Jeff Perry Website

You are here: Home / Archives for Linked

Announcement: Build Your OmniFocus Workflow

by

Today I’m very excited to announce a book: Build Your OmniFocus Workflow. I’ve been hard at work on this for the last 3 months – but not alone. My fabulous co-author, Ryan Dotson, has been hard at work right along side me (admittedly with a timezone difference) – and we have 150 pages ready for you!

This book is designed, as the name implies, to help you build a workflow which works for you with OmniFocus – whether you’ve never used the app before, or if you’ve used it for years and just want to improve your setup. It is comprised of five sections:

  • First Steps: Getting OmnIFocus set up with a basic setup.
  • Fundamentals: Walking you through the default perspectives, and expanding on your current setup – plus diving into settings.
  • Advancing: Diving much deeper, including custom perspectives, creative uses for tags, review and onwards.
  • Final Horizons: Honing your workflow to get the most out of your system.
  • Our Workflows: Ryan and I get personal and tell you about how our setups work.

Throughout the book there are tips, notes, personal comments, and most important of all: activities for you to complete in order for you to create a set up which allows you to be productive and which will hopefully also allow you to feel like you’re fully in control of your life.

Rose has been doing amazing work as long as I have followed her and this is no exception. I bought this instantly and I am about halfway through it right now. While some of the things aren’t new for me (I have been using OmniFocus off and on the past 5 years), it is still a great way to rethink how I use OmniFocus. I am taking this book as an excuse to start a whole new database and use the teachings of this book as my guide. So far, it’s working great for me.

Go buy yourself, or someone you know, a copy of this now before the price goes from $25 to $30.

Katie Floyd is Leaving Mac Power Users, Stephen Hackett Filling Her Shoes

by

Katie Floyd from Mac Power Users Forum:

After nine years and more than 450 episodes, the time has come for me to say goodbye to Mac Power Users.

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined the success of this podcast or the opportunities it would create. I would not be where I am today, personally or professionally, without this show. I owe a debt of gratitude to our sponsors, listeners, and most of all, to my co-host David Sparks. You have lived with me through life, loss, new homes, careers, and nearly every other significant milestone. Throughout it all, MPU has been there.

To everything, there is a season. I’m turning to a different season in my life. December 31st will mark my last episode of Mac Power Users. I have not come to this decision hastily, it’s something David and I have been talking about for several months and the end of the year seems a natural time to wrap things up.

The show will go on. We are pleased to announce Stephen Hackett will be the new co-host of Mac Power Users with David starting in January. I can think of no one better. Stephen is passionate about the Mac platform, and I am confident leaving knowing that the show is in good hands with David and Stephen at the helm.

Stephen Hackett on 512 Pixels:

Katie is leaving big shoes to fill, and it’s why I was deeply humbled when David asked me to step in as his new cohost. I am beyond thrilled to announce that I will be taking up the mantle on Mac Power Users starting in January.

[…]

David and I have been hard at work planning our first episodes. If you are a MPU listener, let me put your mind at ease: we aren’t radically changing what has made the show so good for so long. We will still be diving deep into topics, comparing apps, interviewing guests and getting our nerd on about all sorts of topics.

If you don’t subscribe to Mac Power Users, I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s pretty different from my other shows, and a challenge I look forward to meeting each and every week.

Mac Power Users was one of the first tech podcasts I ever listened to and I have had a long-standing relationship with this podcast.

I was just listening to an older episode about setting up a new Mac (more on that later) and I just loved the back-and-forth both David and Katie had about David first getting an iPad Pro, then later “stealing the thunder” from Katie after buying a new MacBook Pro like she had. Something about the two of them doing that show was infectious and one of the few podcasts I would have go straight to the top of my queue when it came out.

I think Stephen will be a good match as a co-host with David. To be the yin to his yang as Katie said. It is sad (but also exciting for Katie’s “offline life”) to see Katie go, but I couldn’t have thought of a better person for her to pass the preverbal baton to then Stephen Hackett.

I look forward to what the next few episode of MPU will hold with Katie, and I am equally excited to see what comes in the new year with David and Stephen having a podcast together.

Apple’s Radical Approach to News: Humans Over Machines – New York Times

by

Jack Nicas writing for New York Times:

In a quiet corner of the third floor, Apple is building a newsroom of sorts. About a dozen former journalists have filled a few nondescript offices to do what many other tech companies have for years left to software: selecting the news that tens of millions of people will read.

One morning in late August, Apple News’s editor in chief, Lauren Kern, huddled with a deputy to discuss the five stories to feature atop the company’s three-year-old news app, which comes preinstalled on every iPhone in the United States, Britain and Australia.

National news sites were leading that day with stories that the Justice Department had backed an affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard University — a good proxy that the story mattered, said Ms. Kern’s deputy, a former editor for The New York Times whom Apple requested not be named for privacy reasons. He and Ms. Kern quickly agreed that it was the day’s top news, and after reading through a few versions, selected The Washington Post’s report because, they said, it provided the most context and explanation on why the news mattered.

[…]

“We put so much care and thought into our curation,” said Ms. Kern, 43, a former executive editor of New York Magazine. “It’s seen by a lot of people and we take that responsibility really seriously.”

Apple has waded into the messy world of news with a service that is read regularly by roughly 90 million people. But while Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under intense scrutiny for their disproportionate — and sometimes harmful — influence over the spread of information, Apple has so far avoided controversy. One big reason is that while its Silicon Valley peers rely on machines and algorithms to pick headlines, Apple uses humans like Ms. Kern.

The former journalist has quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media. The stories she and her deputies select for Apple News regularly receive more than a million visits each.

[…]

Apple’s executives grandly proclaim that they want to help save journalism. “There is this deep understanding that a thriving free press is critical for an informed public, and an informed public is critical for a functioning democracy, and that Apple News can play a part in that,” Ms. Kern said.

For me, I will always choose human over machine when it comes to getting news, and Kern seems to be the perfect person to lead the way for the Apple News team.