SwitchGlass looks like the Dock, but unlike the Dock, only shows you apps that are currently running. Depending upon how you use your Dock, this bedrock OS feature is not necessarily a useful piece of visual information about which apps are running.

Command-Tab is Apple’s official app-switching solution, and it’s great. You can mash away on the tab key to move serially from application to application, or hold the Tab key down to scrub through the list. You can even mouse the list–and why not? You can even activate App Exposé with the tap of an arrow key.

SwitchGlass supports a ton of customization options. In addition to visual tweaks, it offers a bevy of keyboard modifiers. Read the FAQ for a full list.

Best of all, you can drag files to the app icons in the menu, and they’ll be opened in the app that you chose.

I set things up so that it’s not very Dock-like: small icons, auto-hiding, with tooltips (this was key for me). I love it.

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MacBook Neo

Rhonda got the Citrus MacBook Neo; it was delivered on Thursday. I set it up for her but I got to play with it a bit, too. Some thoughts:

Trackpad feels fine. Rhonda really liked it after using it at work on Friday.

The bezels are much larger than the Air and Pro, but they are not so large that I think they’d bother me.

The Keyboard is tight and crisp. I miss the backlighting for sure and I’d pay more for it as an option or in the form of another model. But it’s a great feeling keyboard..

The Citrus theme in the OS looks great.

Helium Browser

When Mac OS X first came out, I was an early adopter, and especially keen to find applications that used the new Cocoa layer (as opposed to Carbonized applications) where possible. The first web browsers that came out for the Mac at that time included Internet Explorer and OmniWeb, both of which I used extensively.

There can’t be a more stark contrast between the two applications, and the companies that made them. In the case of Internet Explorer, we had a Carbonized application from a company with a small but popular suite of applications that made their mark on the Mac and the original Mac OS operating system. OmniGroup, on the other hand, was a small company who followed NeXTSTEP over to Apple, and provided applications that ran only on Mac OS X using Cocoa.

Other browsers were available in the early Mac OS X days, too, including Netscape and Mozilla, using the Gecko engine. Camino emerged and quickly became my primary browser: it was fast, with a clean interface, and basic feature set. It was perfect for my needs, and I used it until Safari came out. Like OmniWeb, Camino was a Cocoa application.

I’m still primarily a Safari user, but I do need Chrome for a few things, including our Google-based system at work. Google Meet on Chrome is a much better experience than Safari, for example.

But I’ve kept up the search for something with Chrome’s reliability and prominence in the market, which leads to a good user experience on sites and services where Safari doesn’t.

Nicholas Magand recently featured Helium on his blog, describing it thus:

Earlier this year, I gave Helium Browser a try: a newish, smartly named, Chromium-based browser, aimed at being light, fast, and stripped of all Google surveillance technologies. The trial was a success, and, after switching back to Safari for a fair fight, I realised that Helium was the most efficient browser to use for work.

I’m hoping for a Camino-like experience in a Chromium-based browser.

Helium

Expanding with Keyboard Maestro

I’ve been a lifelong TextExpander user, but something about Typinator drew me in after TextExpander grew to be less Mac-like (Electron!) in becoming multi-platform. Typinator does exactly what I need it to do, which isn’t much, because I don’t write as much as I used to, and my writing is less boilerplate-dependent. I still have a handful of snippets that I use all the time, though, and while macOS’s keyboard expansions are pretty good, I don’t prefer them to a dedicated utility. I like Typinator’s integration with PopChar, too.

While Typinator was a good price when I got it from Bundlehunt, the newest update would require me to buy several upgrade licenses or a subscription, (the latter of which I did). But now I’m running up against the licensing limit imposed on machines, which I’d be able to remedy by purchasing a more generous plan. Considering my modest usage and the cheap annual subscription I’m grandfathered into with TextExpander, I don’t know if Typinator makes a lot of sense for me.

I figured this would be a good time to try Keyboard Maestro’s text expansion features; I’ve had the storied multi-purpose utility on my Mac for a while, but I haven’t used it much save for a couple of things. So I plugged most of my most used snippets in and… it’s great!

One thing I got excited about, but was quickly schooled on, was using the expansions group as a palette. I learned about the conflict palette from David Sparks, and I like this feature a lot. I have one global shortcut that calls up a couple of palettes, so when I type ctrl-backtick, I get a conflict palette with a list to choose from. I had my snippets showing up on that palette, and I really liked this option. (Here’s a good Dr. Drang article on the MPU podcast I linked to.)

But setting up a palette causes the expansions not to work in the normal way; similarly, you can’t search for an expansion user the Trigger Macro by Name function. So that didn’t work out after all. But the old way, where I type things like “ddate” to get today’s date? Works perfectly. And it handles date math, too.

Pretty exciting!

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Rhonda and I treated ourselves to dinner at the Savoy on Friday night. They had fried squash blossoms on the menu as an appetizer, and we split those. I love squash blossoms; they’re a perfect vehicle for delivering something fried and unctuous in an exotic, time-constrained wrapper.

We used to frequent a restaurant around the corner called Brassie’s, which was a bar that was famous for serving crabs in the summer. A fellow named Keith took it over after it had been around for a long time, and he brought in a new, more upscale menu. He was talking to us one night about how a purveyor was tryin to get his business, and Keith delivered a challenge to him: get me squash flowers and I’ll use you. The purveyor came through, and we were treated to his treatment of the dish.

Shortly thereafter, one of the farmers who property borders ours started growing zucchini, and kindly offered us our pick of whatever we saw growing in the field. So for a couple of weeks, Rhonda was frying up blossoms every night, sometimes with ricotta and sausage, and other times with… well, I don’t remember. But it was delicious, and made all the more special by the fleeting availability of the flowers. Like our local Jersey tomatoes and watermelon in the summer, zucchini flowers are a seasonal treat.

Tear-Off Application Switcher Using Keyboard Maestro

One of my favorite features from the classic Mac OS is the ability to “tear off” the application palette from the application switcher. You didn’t have to have the switcher open all the time; it was there if you wanted it, and the mouse gesture was intuitive and a joy to use.

Mac OS X removed this feature, as it offered the iconic Dock in place of the application switcher. The Dock is a great bedrock feature, but it’s not the same thing.

DragThing, a utility created for the Mac by James Thompson, the same developer who created the original Dock, did have a feature that harkened back to the classic Mac OS application switcher–or at least allowed you to create a palette in the same vein.

Months ahead of DragThing’s retirement, Keyboard Maestro introduced the Application Palette, which allows users to create all kinds of versions of the application switcher. In its default form, it looks very much like the Dock, although it’s a highly customizable palette. Enter my tribute to the tear-off application switcher or yore:

I like to keep it near the top right corner of the screen, which was where I usually left it in the classic Mac OS.

HeyNote

Andy Inhatko sung the praises of Heynote on MacBreak Weeklyearlier this month, and I was compelled to try it out for myself. It’s such a clever notes app for software nerds. It introduces the concept of a buffer as an organizing principle; each buffer is a tab in the app. You add text blocks to a buffer, which you can review vertically in each buffer. Programmers can change the language in each buffer, and happily, Markdown is supported for basic note taking. It’s most certainly worth checking out.

PaperTrail–TaskPaper Client for iOS

TaskPaper developer Jesse Grosjean helpfully recommended PaperTrail to his rabid base of TaskPaper users via email over the weekend. PaperTrail implements the TaskPaper format for iOS and iPadOS, and it’s been a long time coming: Like Jesse’s excellent Bike app, TaskPaper has been a Mac-only affair, despite some interesting support from Agile Tortoise’s Drafts and some other apps.

OmniFocus, my to-do manager of choice, even supports importing and exporting from and to the TaskPaper format, which is helpful if you like to start planning in apps like Drafts, or even TaskPaper the app.

TaskPaper and OmniFocus, however, approach task manager and project management in different ways. OmniFocus is a database of tasks, organized by project; TaskPaper is a document-based system, and isn’t intended to be one giant document with all of your projects in one document (I suppose the flexible nature of TaskPaper makes this negotiable). It’s a flexible format for sure that lends itself to varied workflows.

PaperTrail isn’t a barebones viewer and editor of TaskPaper files: it brings some of its own ideas to working with this amazing document format. It supports due dates with a cool due date picker toolbar command, introduces “progress” tags, and offers outline-level formatting, which is customizable by the user. It has a helpful tool bar (or tool belt) that runs along the bottom of the document, which is user-customizable.

It’s a new app, so the otherwise first-class presentation on an iPad is limited somewhat by the lack of menu bar items. But boy does it look good, and finally offers a native, first-class TaskPaper experience on the iPad and iPhone. Typing command-p on your iPad’s extended keyboard will bring up a the Go To Anything palette, while option-command-p opens the Go To Project palette. Very nice.

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Garlic Soy & Lime Chicken Marinade

Vietnamese Grilled Lemongrass Pork Chops (Paywalled, alas)

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I mentioned Dredge+ last week, and I have been playing the game all week. I just love it. I haven’t felt compelled to play a game this much since Limbo (and Balatro maybe). I described it as a fishing game, which is the grind mechanic you need to do to stay solvent, but it’s not really a fishing game. Lots of descriptions are “Lovecraftian,” and in that vein the game reminds me very much of On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness. I used to play that game on our Mac in the living room with Joe sitting on my lap. What a blast we had. I ran the keyboard but consulted with Joe before each move.

The Bagliani Salami

It occurred to me that while I mention our ongoing love affair with Bagliani’s spicy salami, I never say much more than that. This is because I know nothing about the salami: the provenance, the ingredients, nothing. The red rubber band means it’s spicy. They sell them out of a deli case and by the pound. One of the checkout girls remarked, “you got an extra slimy one” when ringing one up once. My father, an aficionado of these things, has gleefully marveled about the possibility that they’re not legal in the normal sense of the word, as it applies to groceries.

Stokelan Estates Winery

Nothing new here and I’m conflicted about including it here in this week’s post, but we had such a nice visit over break, cementing the primacy of their 2024 Myra as one of our very favorite rosés.

White Horse Winery

Hammonton, NJ, has a tremendous variety of wineries within and just beyond its borders. Rhonda and I tried their oaked Chardonnay after our visit to Stokelan. It was pretty good, although a little tart on my palette. Something in the flavor profile reminded me of Cedar Rose’s Chardonnay.

Togethering

Rhonda and I spent the whole break together, taking Aaron back to school after making Easter dinner on Saturday, and then running errands and finding pleasant diversions.

There are a number of benefits to marriage that people overlook all the time. I have a built-in best friend I can try all kind of experiences with, often negotiated at the very last moment.

That’s me being glib; our relationship surely resembles some others, but is entirely unique. I remarked the other day that while some of the locations have changed, we don’t do anything that different compared to our twenties, when we first met and we’d find places to eat and brew pubs to try, which were new to us back in the late nineties. We’ve known each other for 30 years. You can’t fake that.

I’m very thankful.

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PCalc

My favorite calculator app for the iPhone has long been Calcbot; it’s the perfect size and design for my elementary needs, and the conversion feature is both useful and thoughtfully designed. Alas, it doesn’t work on the Mac anymore, which saddens me. I just don’t like the official Apple calculator very much.

PCalc is a famously fun calculator for macOS (and iOS), with a gazillion customization features, and a deep set of features for more demanding use cases. The About screen even had a game stuffed into, which was wild; developer James Thompson pushed it out into its own app, though.

Thompson’s blog is a great read, too; he’s shared many great stories about working for Apple as a developer during the switch from OS 9 to Mac OS X, and he wrote the original Dock. That was an exciting time for Mac nerds.

Dredge+ on Apple Arcade

I tried the demo of Dredge a while back on my iPad, but didn’t take the plunge of a purchase; it had a great art style, and simple mechanics, but I didn’t spring for a purchase. I tried it again when it came out on Apple Arcade, and it’s incredibly enjoyable.

In Dredge, you play as a fisherman whose job it is to catch fish, sell them, and use the money to upgrade your boat. There are a gazillion mini-missions that you are tasked with, as well: delivering dredged supplies, catching specific fish, and delivering packages. All of this happens in the backdrop of a story about a mysterious red glow in the sky, and malicious creatures in the water. It feels a bit like the side missions that you encounter in a Zelda game.

Living Colour

I was coming up with material for last weekend’s Sunday Serial, and “Nothingness” by Living Colour came on the HomePod while I was researching. It’s one of my favorite songs by them, and one of my favorite songs of all time. I got to thinking that Living Colour wrote a number of my favorite songs. I remember in high school, our religion teacher tasked us with bringing in an example of a song that represented a certain version of love. I chose “Solace of You” and she agreed that it was a good choice, and exemplar of the kind of love she was talking about.

I listened to Living Colors debut album, “Vivid,” over and over when I was finishing middle school and starting high school. I’d ride around on my Haro BMX bike and listen to the cassette using my walkman. It’s a great album start to finish, and I love their cover of the Talking Heads “Memories Can’t Wait”; I learned it on my guitar in college.

Their second album, “Time’s Up,” includes another of my favorite songs of theirs, “Under Cover of Darkness,” which featured Queen Latifah on the track. Their third album, “Stain,” might be my favorite of theirs. I love “Nothingness” most of all, but eight of the first nine songs are incredible.

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It’s wild to think that there are people who are using Apple devices who didn’t experience this period, and then again people who weren’t even born at the time, who are doing same.

If you, like me, can’t get enough of this kind of chatter, the Verge’s How Steve Jobs Saved the Macintosh episode of Version History is a great watch (or listen).

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I also replaced the drive belt in our washing machine yesterday; Rhonda noticed that the spin cycle wasn’t ringing out the clothes as well as it should, so I ordered a new belt from Amazon. The particular model makes it easy to replace the belt; the only problem I had was actually getting it onto the pulleys. I cribbed a trick that I’ve seen the boys do a thousand times with action figures whose joints are too tight: boil some water and sit the item in the water for a few minutes. That worked nicely, and I got the belt on after my initial frustrations.

Things that you think are going to be easy often turn out to be a bit more difficult, while things you imagined are going to take a lot of time are often done in a few minutes. Ultimately, there was plenty of time to hit Bellview for wine and cheese, after squats and bench presses, which I do on Saturdays.

Check Your JND

Jason Anthony Guy linked to this gamewhich tests the smallest color change you can see, which is called just noticeable difference.. I tried it yesterday in bed on my iPad mini, and I got a pretty good score on the first test, but a more average score on the “hard” version. I recall the concept of JND from college, I think from the experimental psychology class I took in my sophomore year, but I can’t remember for sure.

Bass: How Low Can You Go?

Joey’s girlfriend let us borrow her bass guitar (I think she’s open to selling it), so I ordered some Ernie Ball strings for it, as the ones on there are a bit rusty and the G string broke when I was tuning it up. I’m pretty excited to have a bass guitar to play around with. I really would like to record some tracks for songs I’ve already recorded in Logic. There are also a few songs I’d really like to try to learn and record, where I’ve appreciated the base lines. I was working on Promises Promises by Incubus a while back, and since it’s not much of a guitar song, I’ve always really paid attention to the bass line. I really love the line in Mr. Brightside by The Killers too.

Penny Skateboards

Inspired by Sal’s post about (not) being to old to start skateboarding, I checked to see if Penny skateboards were still a thing. And happily, they are. I bough a couple of them to skate with the boys, and we had a good time; I wrote about it 13 years ago. There was a hardware store around the corner that sold them, and disc golf supplies as well, which I also bought and Aaron and I tried at nearby Landis Park. But back to the skateboards, I purchased a small 22” yellow penny first, and then a larger 27” at a Zumiez in the mall.
I put grip take on the 22”; it was, much to my surprise, my favorite of the pair. It’s much smaller than the decks I was used to as a kid, but it’s tight and responsive. I see them every time I go into the shed, and think I should grab the 22” and roll down the street just for fun.

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Glenn Fleishman is back with a brand-new book that helps Apple users manage notifications and the many varieties of audible, visual, and tactile alerts across their devices. Take Control of Focus shows you how to use Apple’s Focus feature to impose order on the many beeps, buzzes, and “Pay Attention to Me Now!” doohickeys we encounter all day long.

On a related note, an Applescript I found to clear notifications on the Mac:

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "NotificationCenter"
        try
            perform (actions of UI elements of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of group 1 of window "Notification Center" whose name starts with "Name:Close" or name starts with "Name:Clear All")
        end try
    end tell
end tell

You can run this as an Applescript, of course, or make a Shortcut, Keyboard Maestro macro, or ExtraBar action.

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