2025-12-17 10:51:46
Drafts, an app by Agile Tortoise (AKA Greg Pierce), remarkably won App of the Year for 2025 at Mac Stories, a full thirteen years after its release. Three years ago, Drafts was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the same crew. I think it's a real testament to the developer's commitment to continued development and support. The currently at version 49, with new features added regularly. Originally solely for iOS, today Drafts is a Universal App with multiple use cases on mobile and desktop/laptops. It's been in the dock of my iPhone for 11 years and on my Mac since its release. It's just about the only place I enter text on that platform because its huge automation catalog enables me to send what I type to other apps with ease.
Drafts has a robust and long-lived community with a lot of smart people generously helping newcomers on the regular. Every single time I have ever had a question about Drafts, either Greg himself or one of the other community regulars has given me the answer.
In the past, I've also used it with OmniFocus, Bear, ToDoist, TickTick, Gmail, Google Docs, OneNote, Spark email, DevonThink, IAwriter, Notion, Roam Research, Evernote, Twitter, and Facebook.
There are hundreds of free workflows available in the Drafts actions directory for a long, long list of situations and apps.
The Things 3, Fantastical, Day One Combo
The Quick Journaling Action Group lets me keep one running note that I can process at day's end to send the individual lines as entries into Fantastical, Things 3 and Day One. The appropriate parts of one draft get sent to three separate apps with one command.
Things Parser
Using TaskPaper syntax, I can create a note in Drafts complete with due dates, areas, projects, and tags that get correctly imported into the Things 3 task manager using the Things Parser. I use this with a Drafts template to create daily and weekly checklists for recurring tasks. I also use the action group, Things for Things, which includes actions for:
Copy to Obsidian Inbox
I am all in on Obsidian, the massively popular notes app with a robust 2000+ plugin architecture. It does a lot of things amazingly well, but mobile quick capture is not one of them. To solve that, I use this Drafts action which saves the text to the default save location in my vault and uses the first line of the text as the note title/file name. I use a couple of other Drafts to Obsidian actions, including Add to Obsidian Daily Note and Add to Daily Note Plus, which add text to my daily note in different ways using a time stamp and a geolocation.
Yes, Drafts Pro is a subscription app, and if you want to create custom actions, you are going to have to pony up 1.99M/19.99Y. I would sell plasma to pay for Drafts if I had to. Drafts is also a text-only app. There are no images or file embeds available. You don't have to be a tech writer or a blogger to use it, though. In my former life in IT support, I used it all the time for email, closing tickets, and documentation. You can do an amazing amount of work with Drafts, but you aren't going to master it in a day. There is a learning curve, but in my experience, it's always been fun to see what new things I can do with the app.
2025-12-15 22:30:13
Hazel is an automation utility that uses user-defined rules to automatically perform file operations on user-defined folders. It uses a variety of metadata to move, copy, compress, decompress, open, delete, rename, and sort files and folders automatically.
The primary drawback of using Hazel for some people is the price. A license is $42, and upgrades are typically about half of that. For what it does, I find that well worth it, but it's understandably steep for some folks.
2025-12-14 19:44:19
The difference between a backup service and a syncing service is subtle but important. iCloud keeps the same version of your documents and photos in the cloud and on each of your Mac and iOS devices depending on your settings. That's great until something goes wrong. If you delete a photo on your phone or a file gets corrupted, that change syncs everywhere. The damage spreads instantly because sync’s job is to mirror whatever state your device is in, good or bad.
A true backup service works the opposite way. It freezes copies of your data at different points in time and stores them safely elsewhere. If you delete a photo by accident or a file becomes corrupted, the backup stays untouched. You can roll back to yesterday, last week, or last month. That’s the whole point: preservation, not mirroring.
This is why iCloud isn’t a backup for your photos or files. It’s convenient for keeping devices in sync, but it won’t protect you from accidental deletions, corruption, or a bad software update. Backup keeps history; sync copies the present. The distinction shapes whether your data survives mistakes or vanishes with them.
Additionally, as recent news shows, administrative issues with an iCloud account can cut off your access with no warning and limited recourse. The best recourse is a regular backup of your data. Just using Time Machine won't accomplish this. Time Machine backs up what's on your hard drive only. If you've selected the option on your Mac to upload to the cloud to save disk space, you have little control over exactly where your files exist at any given moment. It gets confusing.
The solution is available in the Mac App Store for just $4.99. Parachute Backup, an app by independent developer Eric Mann, is a set-it-and-forget utility that performs true incremented backups to your own storage device or to another cloud provider. If you have a lot of data or a slow connection, the initial backup can be slow. After that, unless you've made huge data additions to iCloud, the backups are pretty speedy. If you prefer occasional manual backups instead of having the app run in the background on a schedule, that is also an option.
One last tip - You can find great deals on hard drives at places like Disk Deal. Buy a large, refurbished 3.5-inch internal drive with a warranty and get a case for it that offers Thunderbolt speed. When you set up the drive, create two partitions with Disk Utility. Use one of them for your Time Machine backups and the other for Parachute Backup.
2025-12-13 18:22:53
I've been on a small crusade for the past year to persuade people who have gone all in on the Apple ecosystem to diversify the back end of their digital lives. Anyone who scoffs at using third-party services for mail, contacts, messages, reminders, cloud storage, music, books, notes, etc. in the name of frugality or out of love for a corporation is putting themselves in a situation that is one step away from a nightmare should they lose access to their Apple ID. Most people think it could never happen to them, but they are wrong. It can happen to anyone.
There's a story making the rounds today about a man whose account was locked by Apple after he unwittingly bought and tried to use a compromised $500 Apple Gift Card from a major brick-and-mortar retailer. Some sort of automatic fraud prevention closed his Apple account, and no amount of phone calls to support and every other available means of contacting Apple has been able to remedy this disaster. This is no ordinary user. The victim in this case is the author of numerous books on Apple programming languages and the organizer of the largest Apple conference in his native country (Australia). His relationship with the company goes back decades.
He can no longer sync his devices. He can't access thousands of dollars in App Store purchases. He's locked out of terabytes of family photographs. He says, "My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media."
This is the exact reason why I chose to use different providers for as many services as possible. If I were in his shoes, I'd still lose a lot, but I wouldn't lose everything like he has. I wasn't aware until I looked into it that you can use many of Apple's apps without using iCloud as the back end. Mail, Calendar, Reminders, Contacts, and other features work just fine with other service providers.
My personal stack that works just fine on my Apple hardware includes:
Lest anyone accuse me of being some sort of Apple hater, let me assure you that I am not. I've held Apple certifications since Mac OS X 10.2 Tiger. I've been a Mac user since the 90s. I'm retired from a career in ed-tech that involved supporting tens of thousands of Macs. I've owned Mac laptops, desktops, iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, and Apple Base Stations. My Mac App Store lifetime purchases are over $6,000. My post-retirement hobby is running an Apple software blog. Don't @ me.
2025-12-12 19:59:37
As I enter my third year using Raycast, I'm still impressed with the sheer volume of use cases into which it fits. I’ve been using a keyboard driven application launcher since 2006. For the majority of that time, I was a devout Launchbar fan. installing it on Mac after Mac and dutifully paying for the infrequent upgrades. When I initially heard about Raycast, I wasn’t interested, but the uproar just kept getting louder. Tech bloggers and Reddit sang its praises and kept pointing out new features one after another. I finally relented and downloaded it. Having also tried Quicksilver back in the day and Alfred, I can honestly say that I was surprised at what I could do with Raycast.
Free extensions and built in Raycast features eliminated the need for a whole list of utilities I previously used.
The other side of Raycast's versatility is its ability to provide access to your application stack's functions without you having to open the app and navigate to the feature you want to use. Here are some examples:
2025-12-11 20:10:24
In 2025, the world takes more photos in a single day than it used to take in a decade. For most Mac users with an iPhone, this means an ever-increasing Photos library. If you also own a DSLR or use Adobe Lightroom or Capture One and use RAW in your editing process, you can end up with copies all over the place, especially if you make multiple backups. When you eventually get around to bringing order to the chaos, choosing a good duplicate finder is a must.
Some popular choices include:
The app I keep coming back to is PhotoSweeper by Overmacs, an app that's been under continuous development since 2011. Version 5 was released in the summer of 2025 and new features were added as recently as November. It's a $15 one-time purchase with free updates. A free trial is available, but the actual deletion of files is limited.
If you need a straightforward tool to streamline a large Mac photo library and are open to adjusting settings instead of relying solely on AI, PhotoSweeper gets the job done well. It doesn't aim to be a complete photo management suite like Luminar or Lightroom, focusing instead on its specific niche.
