Chris Hannah

My New "Wrathion"

My new MacBook Pro has arrived! So this is a sort of preliminary post, before my actual write up on what I think of it.

Spec

For starters, this is the configuration of my new Mac:

  • 13″ MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
  • 3.1GHz Dual-core Intel Core i5
  • 8GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM
  • Intel Iris Graphics 550
  • 256GB PCIe-based SSD

Name

The name you may of guessed already, is “Wrathion”. I started this very recently, in which all of my devices are named after Dragons in WoW. For a bit of back story, the Black Dragonflight were my favourite, until they became corrupted, until one little egg was rescued and is now the only uncorrupted Black Dragon. He is still a whelp (like my 13″ Mac), and is Black (sort of like my Space Grey Mac), so it sort of fitted!

Stickers

Yes, I’ve already put stickers on my Mac. Eight to be exact. I do plan on covering it even more, but I didn’t want to rush into anything!

Anyway, here’s a little GIF I made of my sticker situation:

Thoughts So Far

This MacBook is amazing, and actually a lot better than I thought. Also, something which may be unique, I love the new keyboard.

I’ll get on using my Mac, and pretty soon I’ll be writing a better piece on what I think about it.

iA Writer 4

iA Writer has just become version 4! It coms with some really impressive features, that definitely makes it more than just a basic text editor.

There’s better way to add images (with support for better captions), stress free tables with .csv file embeds, embedded text files, and all of these "content blocks" can be chained together! Which means you can have a book outline document, with references to the title page, individual chapters, etc. But within those chapters you could have references to images, or maybe even more text! The possibilities are endless, and I’m really impressed.

I was going to write a big article about this update, but I saw on the iA blog they have a super helpful video that explains everything!

Read the full article about iA Writer 4 on the iA Blog.

The In-Between Macs

Stephen Hackett begins his monthly column on MacStories, with a really interesting article about where the been MacBook Pro fits in.

The current MacBook Pro line is a little bit of a mess. Even after brushing aside the last-generation machines that are still for sale, the current offerings are confusing. Both 15-inch models come with the Touch Bar, but only two of the three 13-inch models offered do.

That $1,499 non-Touch-Bar-but-still-in-the-new-skinny-case 13-inch MacBook Pro is what I’m typing on right now. It’s a great little laptop. The screen is gorgeous, battery life is great and it’s more than fast enough for what I need when I’m not in front of my 5K iMac.

You can clearly see Stephen has left his mark already, by quoting a piece from 2006.

Read the full post.

Qwiki Got Even Better!

My app Qwiki received it’s second update the other day, and I’m really happy with the progress it’s making!

Here are the release notes for 1.2:

In the latest update there are things that make Qwiki a bit more of a polished product.

Including things like being able to set Qwiki to launch on startup (Which was a lot harder than expected), a slightly more "lit" icon (Brighter colours, bigger stroke, and a gradient), some extra accessibility support, and also some behind the scenes efficiency work (But we all know you don’t care about that).

One More Thing

Qwiki now supports every language Wikipedia does! Just select it in the Preferences window, and you’ll be reading articles in whatever language you select. I recommend trying out "Scots", that’s pretty funny!

P.S. TouchBar support coming in the next update!

As I said above, I’m working on adding some form of functionality for the TouchBar in the new MacBook Pro’s. Mine should arrive soon, so I can fully test that out and ship it to everyone! I also redesigned the website, which you can check out.

For now, you can buy Qwiki on the Mac App Store for £2.99.

New MacBook Pro Has Already Outsold All Competing Laptops This Year

Joe Rossignol has reported over at MacRumors, that the new MacBook Pros have already outsold their competitors for the current year.

Slice Intelligence says the new MacBook Pro accumulated more revenue from online orders during its first five days of availability than the Microsoft Surface Book, ASUS Chromebook Flip, Dell Inspiron 2-in-1, and Lenovo Yoga 900, based on e-receipt data from 12,979 online shoppers in the United States.

The new MacBook Pro generated over seven times the revenue that the 12-inch MacBook did over its first five days of availability, according to Slice Intelligence. If accurate, that means it took the new MacBook Pro just five days to accumulate 78% of all the revenue generated by the 12-inch MacBook since its April 2015 launch. – MacRumors

If this is true, I think it’s pretty impressive!

Pokémon GO Will Start Daily Bonuses

We want to provide you a detailed look at a new feature coming soon to Pokémon GO – Daily bonuses! Trainers will soon be able to receive a bonus for certain daily activities, including catching a Pokémon or visiting a PokéStop once a day. You’ll earn a larger bonus if you do this seven days in a row! – Pokémon GO Blog

This seems like a nice idea for continuing players, but most people have stopped playing now. So is this there idea to try and attract people back to the game?

Read the blog post for the exact details on the bonuses.

Writing With Bear

Since Bear has been officially released for both iOS and macOS (also been selected for Editors choice!), I thought I’d share my thoughts on the app.

I’ve actually been using Bear for a while, ever since it entered beta. And it’s been a remarkable tool for me, whether it’s writing blog posts or even just jotting down small notes.

Bear actually differentiates from other apps quite a lot, but mainly in the way it looks. It has its own version of Markdown that it uses, but you can always change that to support the original Gruber version. Then you have the 9 really cool themes to choose from, and there’s more variety then other apps. I personally use Panic Mode.

As it’s available for both macOS and iOS, there are slight differences in the design, but these are just platform differences, not how the app functions.
It’s split into three different views, the tags view which is on the left, the list of posts in the middle, and then the actual post on the right. On the Mac you can choose which views you want visible, and on iOS it appears differently based on what orientation/device you are on.

Editor

The editor is clean, and it lets you focus on the content. It’s a style used by most of the modern apps, and I really love it. There’s an Information panel you can bring up, by just tapping the (i) button in the top right corner (iOS and macOS). It brings up some some handy information like read time, last editing device, and also gives you the option to export to different file types.

You can do the standard markdown formatting like bold, italics, underline, and strike through text. Of course it supports links, but it displays them slightly different with a link icon and the title. You don’t see the underlying Markdown code or URL, but with a tap/click on the link, you can change the
title or url easily.

Another benefit over other apps is the ability to insert inline images in a post, which isn’t especially useful for me when I’m writing these types of posts that require screenshots.

There’s also support for embedding lines or blocks of code, and you can actually specify a language to get better formatting.

When you’re typing on iOS, a custom shortcut bar makes it even easier, with quick access to different formatting, links, photos, and code blocks.

Organising Notes

The way you organise your notes in Bear is by adding tags, you can add these anywhere in a note. It allows you to see them clearly separated in the Tags view, or even search or them.

It’s a format I quite like, as it allows to be more flexible when writing. I for one lose track of notes when I have to place them in certain folders, so being able to just add a “RadThinker” tag, I can quickly find all the posts I’ve written for my blog.

Something else I don’t really see on other apps, is a trash folder. In Bear you can view any document you’ve deleted, and then restore it if you’ve done it by mistake.

Import/Export

Most people already use a note taking app, so you’ll want to move it all to Bear. Well you can import text files straight in to Bear, and it also features an import feature for Vesper users.

Exporting is even better, with the ability to export a note into .MD, .PDF, .HTML, .DOCX, .JPG, and .RTF. It also supports the standard share sheet, which is very useful.

What makes exporting even better, is when you combine it with an automation app like Workflow. For example you could export to Markdown (MD), and then share that to a workflow which posts it to your blog.

Pro Subscription

Bear is free to use on macOS and iOS, but there is a Pro subscription which will unlock loads of awesome features. Of course I signed up straight away.

With Pro you get access to things like syncing between your devices, access to all the themes, and exporting to every good file type.

You can choose to subscribe monthly, or yearly. With the prices being $1.49 per month, or $14.99 per year.

Final Thoughts

Overall I think Bear is great. It’s my note taking app, and also the app I use to write for this blog. Now I have syncing across macOS and iOS (Wasn’t available in beta), it’s even better.

The few things I think could improve Bear would be the ability to have some form of sub tags? to further organise notes, the option to have a link preview, and maybe even shared notes, but I know that’s a lot harder than it seems.

One big feature that I would love is Ghost integration, as that’s what RadicalThinker is run on. So being able to post directly from a text editor, would save uploading images, entering tags, and more importantly even opening my browser to access a (quite annoying) web interface.

I can see a bright future for Bear, and it’s started out with such a high standard, it can really become everyones default notes app right now. Of course there’s so much more Bear can do than I’ve written here, so the best place to find out more is on their website , or by checking it out yourself.

Download Bear for iOS and macOS , and then make sure you support them by subscribing to Pro!

Switching Workflows to iPad

Matt Gemmell is another person that is switching to an iPad lifestyle, and with that he’s posting a series of iPad related articles as he moves platform.

As he writes a weekly newsletter, there is a few things he does on a Mac that needed to be ported over to a new way of thinking:

I offer a membership option for this site, which comes with some cool benefits including an email newsletter every Monday morning (with an exclusive essay, and behind-the-scenes info on my current writing projects, amongst other things).

Because my beloved members support my writing during the long periods between releasing novels, finding a workflow for preparing the weekly newsletter was my first priority for going iPad-only. – MattGemmell

I find these types of posts quite interesting, as I’m always looking for more things to do on my iPad. Although I don’t plan on fully switching platform, as I’ve just ordered a new Mac!

Read the full article on MattGemmell.com.