Organizing 2019 with Capsicum

I’ve never been a heavy user of task management apps. I use Reminders for things like our shared shopping list and occasional to-dos and make checklists in Notes for features I want to add to Snapthread. I don’t use a bug tracker, I don’t track any of my habits, and I don’t do any daily journaling. There are many beautifully-crafted apps that are well-suited to accomplish each of those tasks, but the cognitive load involved with getting started is just too much for me right now. That’s why I was excited when developer Ish ShaBazz and designer Heidi Helen Pilypas announced that they were creating a new kind of digital planner called Capsicum.

Screenshot of Capsicum's daily view

Capsicum is like a daily planner, to-do list, habit tracker, and notebook all rolled into one. It takes me back to the days when I would linger in that corner of Barnes & Noble near the registers, the one with all the notebooks and calendars and Moleskines, and drool over all the beautiful planners I couldn’t afford. Capsicum is all about customization and aesthetics: you can choose a cover for your planner, select a primary color and style for the decorative “tape” that divides each section, choose from a fun variety of fonts for headings, and more.

Maybe that’s what I love most about it—the skeuomorphic design. When you open your planner, it literally looks like a paper planner (well, if a paper planner could magically show you the local weather forecast at the top of the page!). When you flip between days, it uses that nice page curl animation. The tabs that allow you to switch between daily, weekly, and monthly views look like real notebook tabs. It’s delightful!

I joined the Capsicum beta early on in its development, but couldn’t quite figure out how it could fit into my daily life. Then, a few weeks ago, something finally clicked.

Habit Tracking

I had been feeling a bit discouraged about how little time I had to blog, work on Snapthread, and generally do things that I enjoy. However, I was simultaneously encouraged that I was finally able to complete a year-long Bible reading plan in 2018. It then dawned on me that if I was able to inch my way through the Bible a few chapters at a time for 365 days, I could similarly work toward other goals in my life by completing a bunch of really small tasks.

I set up a list of things I wanted to track in the Habit Tracking section of Capsicum—things that would improve my health, like eating fish (apologies to my vegetarian readers) and flossing my teeth, and things that would make me feel happy and accomplished, like writing code and blog posts. I don’t have any particular goals in mind, I just want to track how often I do all of those things and see if the numbers themselves might either motivate or encourage me. So far it’s motivated me to open Xcode and make little tweaks to Snapthread, even if just for five or ten minutes, nearly every day this month. It may not be much, but it’s something I can feel good about.

Screenshot of habit tracking in Capsicum
Yes, I changed my notebook color just for this screenshot

Anecdotes

I don’t think Ish and Heidi meant for Capsicum to be used as a daily journal, but I’ve found myself jotting little anecdotes in the Notes section below my daily to-do list. They’re mostly funny things Charlie said or did, and honestly I’m not really sure why I’m doing it because there’s no easy way to go back and view them. However, I’ve failed at every other attempt to use an app like Day One or even a paper journal, so, I guess it’s better than nothing!

App Development

It’s not that I don’t try to keep track of bugs and feature requests for Snapthread. It’s that they’re stupidly spread out in a bunch of different places. Some of them are e-mails flagged as important, others are scribbled in a paper notebook next to my recliner, and still others live in a checklist in Notes. Yeah. It’s ugly, folks. I decided to consolidate that mess into two checklists in the “Loose Leaf” section of Capsicum. That way, they live extremely close to my daily to-do list, which is just a couple tabs away. I can simply look at my feature request list, break a feature down into bite-sized tasks, and add those tasks to my to-do list.

To-Dos

I really love Capsicum’s daily, weekly, and monthly views. The daily to-do list is nice enough, but when I switch to the weekly tab I can see all the things I accomplished (or didn’t) for the entire week. The monthly tab allows me to set goals for the month and see a list of birthdays. Capsicum will optionally migrate unfinished tasks to the next day which is handy for filling me with shame (How many more days will I push off writing that thank you card to my aunt? ?).

What I’ve learned from using Capsicum throughout the past few weeks is that I value the simplicity and convenience of having all these functions in one place over the robust feature sets of separate apps. It makes me happy to hear that Ish and Heidi are planning to add even more “modules” to Capsicum in the future.

Capsicum is available as a $1.99/month or $19.99/year subscription, with a 14-day free trial. From what I understand, you are not automatically charged at the end of the trial, so you can check it out without worrying about canceling if it’s not for you. If it is for you, make sure you give it some App Store rating/review love! It helps us indies out a lot.

2.0 Design Goals

Happy New Year! ? I hope 2019 is off to a good start for you. I’ve been slowly getting back into coding since my daughter was born, sneaking in 30 minutes here and there in the evenings after the kids are asleep. I’m hoping to get Snapthread 1.9 submitted soon; it contains bug fixes, rudimentary support for still photos, the ability to loop clips, and makes the app compatible with the new iPad Pro screen sizes.

That said, I’m already thinking about Snapthread’s big 2.0 update. I don’t usually do “major releases” because I prefer to get new features out quickly, but now feels like the right time to slow down and really do a lot of work and polishing. A big update also invites more press coverage, is an opportunity for marketing, and can get Apple’s attention…gotta work toward that Apple Design Award, you know. ?

My design goals for Snapthread 2.0 are simple and twofold:

  1. Improve accessibility. This will involve making my buttons even more button-y and using text labels in addition to icons for added clarity.
  2. Consolidate functions. Currently, every tool for editing a clip opens up its own modal view, with its own video preview. My goal is to make the clip editing interface more modular, swapping out tools below the same preview so that all editing (muting, cropping, trimming, looping, etc.) happens in the same view controller.

There are many more additional improvements that I’m hoping to cram into 2.0…but we’ll see. Some of them include: video transitions, the ability to add text to clips, Ken Burns effect for still photos, non-buggy support for time-lapse and slow motion videos, and auto-saving of recent projects to guard against losing work. I also want to continue improving the title card selections.

In order to finish 2.0, I’m going to need a good task management app. After watching the beta evolve over the past year, I believe Capsicum by Illuminated Bits may be the best app for helping me accomplish my goals this year. My next post will be all about how I plan to use it!

iPad Pro (2018) Impressions

(to the tune of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer)
You know ‘Ticci and Gruber, @panzer and Ritchie…
Marco and Jason, Joe and Rosemary…
But do you recall, the most famous YouTuber of all?
MKB(in)HD, had a very shiny Pro…

Um, so, yeah. A bunch of great iPad Pro reviews/impressions have trickled out over the past few weeks—so many in fact that I was hesitant to even write my own. I agree with much of what has already been expressed: the hardware is great, the software has numerous pain points, and the answer to “can this device replace your laptop?” is the same as it’s always been, which is “yep, maybe, probably not.” Yep for a ton of people that use computers for light work and entertainment, maybe for professionals in certain fields or with particular priorities and workflows, and probably not for the rest.

As an iOS developer, I’m forced into the “probably not” category until something resembling Xcode makes its debut on iOS. However, as a blogger, amateur photographer, and consumer of fine internet content (gross, sorry), the iPad meets my needs just fine. Here’s my thumbs up/thumbs down for the third generation iPad Pro.

My Config

I ordered a 12.9” Pro, 256GB Wi-Fi only model in silver to replace my iPad Air 2. I also bought an Apple Pencil, Smart Keyboard Folio, and an additional rose gold case made by Ztotop which, for $30, is really pretty darn good. It’s sturdy, attaches via magnets like Apple’s cases, is as thin as possible, and comes in colors other than black and white.

Thumbs Up ?? 

As a stay-at-home mom with a two year old and a two month old, the device I use as my primary computer has become a matter of accessibility. What allows me to sneak in tasks quickly? What can I carry around easily with one hand? What makes me seem more approachable and doesn’t create a physical barrier between me and my kids? An iPad is the best fit for this season of my life, so I’m overjoyed that Apple’s latest offering is smaller and more capable than ever.

First off, this device is aces for editing photos. I helped my sister-in-law “fix” her family Christmas card photo this year by lengthening someone’s shirt to cover their midriff. The Apple Pencil made a precise edit like that ridiculously easy. I also edited our own family Christmas card photo, as well as an entire photo book’s worth of pictures of the kids to send to my parents. I know someone’s said this before, but it almost feels like working in a darkroom, dodging and burning the old-fashioned way.

Yesterday my mom asked for a picture of the kids in their Santa jammies in front of the Christmas tree. It worked out better for me to snap a quick portrait of them during the day, but I still wanted to add some colorful bokeh from the tree at night (at which point I sadly realized my camera lens does not create perfectly round bokeh). I used Affinity Photo on my iPad to create this composite, which, while far from perfect, is still pretty cute:

Penny was less than enthused

Messing around with photos on my iPad has made me dream of an iPad model with an even better camera than the iPhone line-up. A “medium format” camera, if you will. Maybe Apple could even offer its own magnetic lens attachments. Shooting and editing using the same big, gorgeous display would be kinda cool I think. /end dream sequence

iOS 12 has improved the experience of transferring photos to an iOS device by leaps and bounds. It used to take forever to load hundreds of thumbnails from an SD card. Now, it’s really pretty snappy. I took a ton of photos at our family Thanksgiving with my Canon DSLR and within seconds was skimming through them on my iPad using the SanDisk USB-C card reader I bought for my MacBook Pro.

My favorite photo editing apps at the moment are Lightroom, Snapseed, and Affinity Photo. I’m also looking forward to the recently-announced Darkroom for iPad, which is currently in beta. Photoshop coming to iPad is more exciting for the role it might play in shaping the OS’s future than for its actual features.

Writing on an iPad Pro is pleasant. I’m currently typing this post in iAWriter using the Smart Keyboard Folio. I like the feel of the folio’s keys, and the dull “thwop” they make when you press them. The viewing angles for the 12.9” model are comfortable (a few people have complained that the angles on the 11” are too steep), and I don’t mind having the keys facing outward when in “tablet mode.” In fact, like Myke Hurley, I rather enjoy drumming on the keys and using them as a sort of fidget toy/musical instrument. (Where do I pick up my #MykeWasRight sticker?)

There’s a lot more to like about the iPad Pro, especially if you’re upgrading from an iPad Air 2 like I did. The display is top-notch, ProMotion is one of those things you don’t understand how you lived without, and the Apple Pencil is downright magical. It’s much heavier than the Air, of course, but still light enough to comfortably pick up with one hand. If you love iPads, don’t own last year’s generation, and have the dough: what are you waiting for? You should buy one.

Thumbs Down ?? 

Look, I’ll be straight with you. This keyboard case is boring as heck. I ended up sticking a small Apple logo sticker on one side along with an ATP sticker to spruce it up a bit. The lack of color options (and case options in general) made me pretty crabby on pre-order day and honestly, I’m still pretty annoyed about it. Like, what is Apple thinking? The creative professionals they’re seemingly targeting with the iPad Pro line are exactly the kind of people who like to buy unique accessories that fit their personality. I just don’t get it.

This is what life with a two year old looks like.

There’s actually very few things I need to do that I can’t do on my iPad. In fact, I can rattle them off rather quickly: I can’t use my preferred banking app, Banktivity, because its iPad app doesn’t allow me to import OFX files; I can’t compare or copy and paste between two Microsoft Word documents side by side (or have multiple tabs of any app besides Safari); I can’t create a slideshow for my church’s weekly service because the presentation software, Proclaim, doesn’t have a full-featured iOS app; and finally, I can’t work on Snapthread.

Of course, there are also a number of tasks that are just plain clumsy on iOS, like discovering keyboard shortcuts (and, as John Gruber recently pointed out, basic functions like “Undo”), shuffling files between apps, managing fonts, and multitasking. All of these things can be improved via software update, and hopefully iOS 13 will address at least a couple of them (though I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to temper my expectations for June).

It’s clear to me that I’ve only scratched the surface of what the iPad Pro can do. Some of that is because the device’s performance potential exceeds its software’s capability. Most of it, however, is that I just don’t know what I’m doing. Matt Cassinelli’s video on iPad gestures is somewhere on my “watch later” list, but aside from that I feel overwhelmed by the number of iPad productivity tips out there.

On a Mac, you can poke around in the menu bar and find all sorts of interesting and useful functions. On an iOS device, exploring isn’t quite as easy, and functions are far from consistent across applications, making it much more difficult (in my opinion) to become an iPad expert than a Mac power user. That’s frustrating.

And then there’s this: to really thrive, the iPad needs a richer ecosystem of pro applications. Besides filling the obvious holes in its software line-up like Logic and Final Cut Pro (also Aperture 4ever ❤️), Apple needs to offer developers more capable APIs and continue to improve its App Store guidelines and practices.

For example: improve the revenue split, aggressively purge scammy apps from the store, stop nitpicking every little thing from developers with a good track record (alternatively, make the guidelines more clear), continue to explore new business models, and make it a helluva lot easier for developers to implement subscriptions. To an outsider like me, this doesn’t seem like rocket science. Perhaps it’s just poor organization, or utter cluelessness, or maybe it’s a stubborn unwillingness to even acknowledge (let alone address) these issues because it might negatively affect the bottom line. Whatever the case, it’s holding iOS back.

I long for a day when iPad reviews aren’t by necessity reviews of iOS. A day when we’re just bickering over specs, colors, ports, and keyboard layouts. Some say we’ll never see such a day while Tim Cook is at the helm. I prefer to remain optimistic. 2019 will be the year, I just know it. 2019, y’all. You’ll see.

I think.

Well, I mean, maybe.

Penny Rose

Nothing reminds me of the steady, relentless march of time so acutely as having a newborn baby (well, except maybe having a blog that I don’t update often enough ?).

Penelope Rose Hansmeyer was born on October 15 via a scheduled cesarean section. For those interested, she was 7 pounds, 8 ounces and 19 inches long. Everything to do with her birth went incredibly smoothly—a stark but welcome contrast to my son’s birth two and a half years ago! And speaking of Charlie: he’s adjusted really well so far to having a baby sister. He calls her “Baby Penny” and likes to pet her hair (which, holy cow, she has a lot of hair!).

I’ve been incredibly blessed not to experience some of the darker challenges of motherhood, such as postpartum depression and difficulties with breastfeeding. Charlie was a terrible sleeper which resulted in us co-sleeping for over two years, and I guess time will tell with Penny, but overall I just feel overwhelmingly happy with my little family and our humble little life.

I just looked back at my post about Charlie’s birth and realized he was born shortly before the Apple special event which introduced the iPhone SE and 9.7″ iPad Pro. It’s fitting, then, that Penny was also born shortly before a special Apple event. I didn’t quite get my order in before the shipping dates slipped, but I’m looking forward to receiving a silver 12.9″ iPad Pro with Apple Pencil sometime before the 20th. It sounds like an amazing upgrade from my iPad Air 2, and I can’t wait to share my impressions with you.

In the meantime, though, I’m gonna cuddle with this little pumpkin. ?

Link

The Sweet Setup Review

The Sweet Setup Reviews Snapthread

I love this review of Snapthread by Josh Ginter, especially this paragraph:

These backdrops and Creative Commons music options are, again, very plain and simple. However, the point of the app is to be a quick and easy way to share Live Photos with non-iPhone users and with a little extra pizazz. Snapthread is not designed to replace iMovie, so feel free to export your video after the Live Photo conversion and do more major edits inside iMovie.

Josh really nails what Snapthread is all about: it’s meant to be simple and fast, with a few little extras for those who really want them. I’d absolutely advise people who want more control over music, titles, and other effects to continue editing in a more fully-featured editor like iMovie. I’ll continue to add more editing functions as time goes on, but my intention has always been to compete with super casual apps like Clips rather than bigger apps like iMovie.

I Forgot to Take Videos

I forgot to take videos for the first few days after my son Charlie was born. I made sure to pack a couple nice cameras in my hospital bag, and recall struggling against the harsh lighting in my recovery room (not to mention the constant stinging of my incision) to snap some semi-decent photos of my new little bundle. It felt like enough at the time, though now I wish I had done a little more.

Maybe I should have shelled out for the professional photographer. I definitely should have insisted my husband take more pictures of me holding Charlie. And I should have taken some videos, too. Over the past two years countless friends have had babies, and many of them took videos of some of their earliest moments. I find myself wishing I had done the same.

In a way though, I did. I was using an iPhone 6s when Charlie was born. I took a few photos of him at the hospital to easily send to family and friends, and of course took many [thousands] once we finally got home. I’ve always had Live Photos enabled, so each one of those snapshots recorded a tiny 3-second clip.

The clips are shaky, low-quality, and mostly lack sound (because the little guy was sleeping), but there’s just something about them. I’m glad they’re there. They add some “concreteness” to a time of my life that seems like a blur, in a way that a photo alone couldn’t quite accomplish.

When I’m considering how to record a moment, I almost always favor photographs over videos. After all, you can’t really hang a video on your wall. Live Photos make that choice even easier, and with an app like Snapthread, I can still salvage a great moment from a sub-par photo.

My hope for the future of Live Photos is that we won’t have to choose between taking the highest quality photo and capturing those precious little videos. Having portrait mode and adjustable depth data is amazing, but hearing my little boy’s laugh years later is perhaps even more so.

If all goes according to plan, I’ll be going in for a scheduled cesarean section two weeks from tomorrow and we’ll finally get to meet our little girl. You can bet I’ll be taking even more Live Photos (and longer videos too) this time around.

If you use Snapthread to share some of your favorite moments publicly, I’d love it if you’d use the hashtag #snapthread or tag @snapthread (either on Twitter or Instagram) in your post so I can find them. And if you’ve written an article or blog post about how Live Photos in general have affected your life, I’d love to read that too!

Link

Marzipan on Mojave

Benjamin Mayo on Marzipan

Marzipan apps are ugly ducklings. As soon as you use them, you can just know these are not at one with the system. You detect that there’s a translation layer of some kind at work here, just like when you use Slack on the Mac you instinctively feel that it’s a web app in a thin wrapper. The underlying implementation is exposed to the user with a bevy of performance sluggishness, UI quirks and non-standard behaviours. That’s bad.

Awhile ago I wrote about Marzipan and included a crowdsourced list of “what makes a Mac app a Mac app.” It was a pretty comprehensive list, yet lacking in minor details. I knew there had to be a bunch of nitpicky visual annoyances and UI oddities, and Benjamin covers those really well in his post. I feel like I have a much better understanding now of what needs to happen for Marzipan apps to feel native on the Mac.

 

Status

Here’s the new 40mm Apple Watch Series 4 on my tiny 6-inch wrist next to my original Series 0, and then on its own with my old Rose Red band attached to it (please ignore the weird white balance difference…the super pale one is correct).

Watch Series 0 to Series 4 Comparison

Displaying Photos by Moment with Section Headers

One feature I knew I wanted Snapthread to have from very early on was the ability to display a user’s photo library in a similar way to the native Photos.app: scrolled to the bottom, sorted by Moment, with selectable sections. What I ended up implementing is actually closer to the Photos app within the Xcode device simulator: it can’t “zoom” in and out of Moment clusters, but it can display assets organized in sections by location and date.

I created a sample project to demonstrate how I did that and put it on GitHub. This is the first time I’ve ever shared code on GitHub, and I know it’s not particularly good, but if you run the project on your device you should see just what I described: your most recent photos and videos at the bottom of the collection view, sorted by Moment. The project loads the user’s first 25 Moments immediately, and then performs a background fetch for the rest, refreshing the collection view only if the user scrolls to the top of the currently loaded content.

There might be much better ways to accomplish this. I welcome any feedback!

Here’s the project link again, for those interested: SwiftyPhotoMoments on GitHub.

Moving from Paid Upfront to Freemium: Logistics

If you’re thinking about switching your app’s business model from paid upfront to freemium and, like me, have no experience working with servers, I’m here to tell you that local receipt validation isn’t as horrible as it seems.

If you’re unconcerned about piracy and simply want to check to see which version of your app was originally purchased, I highly recommend following this tutorial by Andrew Bancroft: Local Receipt Validation for iOS in Swift From Start to Finish. What I did was skim through each step of the tutorial first to see what was involved. Then, I grabbed Andrew’s code from GitHub and read more carefully through the tutorial, copying files from his project to mine as needed.

Andrew’s tutorial doesn’t go into detail about how to check for original app version, which is why I’m writing this. Hopefully someone will find it useful!

Every time Snapthread’s main view controller loads, it runs a function called checkIAPStatus(). Here’s what that function does, in pseudocode:

if the “purchasedPremium” UserDefault has been set, don’t do anything because everything is already unlocked

else if a UserDefault that I set in the previous release of Snapthread called “originallyPurchasedPaidVersion” is true, unlock everything and set the “purchasedPremium” default (this covers users who paid upfront and have used Snapthread recently enough to have had the default set)

else retrieve and validate the receipt using the ReceiptValidator class created in the tutorial (it returns a ParsedReceipt struct if successful) and examine it for originally purchased app version

NOTE: One of the most important things to remember is that the receipt doesn’t list the original App Store version number that was purchased (such as 1.0, 1.1, etc.). Instead it lists the original build number. So you’ll have to note the final build number of your paid upfront version and check against that.

When you ask your ReceiptValidator to validate a receipt, it returns an enum that may or may not have an associated value (either .success, with a ParsedReceipt struct, or .error). So you can do a switch statement on the result, and do something like case .success(let receipt): to grab a reference to the associated ParsedReceipt so you can look at it.

The originalAppVersion property of the ParsedReceipt struct is a String, so you’ll want to convert it to an Int in order to do a less-than comparison.

The only real downside, in my opinion, to doing local receipt validation using Andrew’s method is that it uses OpenSSL, which requires you to disable Bitcode in your project because it doesn’t support it. Disabling Bitcode is easy, but can cause you to get a weird e-mail from the App Store after uploading a build telling you you’ve got extra symbol files, or something like that. It’s just a warning and doesn’t prevent your build from going through or anything, but I was confused by it.

So far I haven’t received any complaints from previous purchasers who can’t export long videos or are seeing a watermark, so I’m guessing I must have done something right!

Snapthread is Now Free!

Snapthread 1.8 is now available with a brand new business model and a gorgeous new icon designed by the incredibly talented Michael Flarup. The update includes mostly minor improvements, including the ability to select entire “Moments” of photos in one fell swoop as well as a button for quickly generating a video from your most recent photos.

There’s something about having a truly great icon that’s made me feel more dedicated to Snapthread than ever. There are so many improvements I still want to make as well—enough to keep me busy for a long, long time. In a way it’s become a sort of playground for me to practice and develop my programming skills, and I love the endless challenge of improving it.

Anyway, I hope you’ll consider giving Snapthread a try. You can use all of the app’s features for free with only two limitations: a watermark in the lower left corner and a 30-second limit for video exports.

Here are three things you can do quickly and easily with Snapthread:

  • Stitch together Live Photos of your kids, pets, latest vacation, etc.
  • Combine portrait videos for IGTV
  • Mix Live Photos and regular videos together

Thanks for all of your support, and extra special thanks to my awesome beta testers and translators. I couldn’t do this without you!

Status

I’ve always written blog posts in either Notes, the WordPress app, or the browser. This week I tried iAWriter and used Markdown for the first time. I like it! Next I think I’ll take MarsEdit for a spin. ??

Delicate Feature Dance

It’s mid-September, and as summer swiftly comes to a close it seems like a great number of other things are wrapping up in my life as well. The crops are nearly ready for harvest, I just submitted version 1.8 of Snapthread, and in exactly one month we’ll be welcoming a new addition to our family. Apple is busy wrapping things up as well, having debuted its new iPhone and Apple Watch models this past Wednesday, and preparing to release iOS 12 to the public this coming Monday (and macOS Mojave the following week).

As I watched Wednesday’s keynote, I was intrigued by the decisions Apple made regarding the iPhone lineup, particularly the differences between the iPhone XR (this is where I remind your brain to pronounce it “iPhone TEN ARRR”) and its considerably more expensive counterparts. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “driving conversions” and how to nudge people to make certain buying decisions. Snapthread is becoming a freemium app on Monday, and as anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I had a hard time deciding what features to gate off from my free customers.

Apple had to figure out where to draw that magic feature line too. The way I see it, if you have two models of the same product, a cheaper entry-level model and a premium one, you have two choices: present the cheaper one first and position the premium one as “this model has everything the first model has, PLUS all of these other must-have features,” or present the cheaper one second, and explain what features are missing, which kinda gives off a “sad trombone” vibe for anyone who can’t afford a >$1,000 cell phone. I’m fascinated that Apple chose to do the latter, and with a twist even: the iPhone XR is actually more compelling in some ways than the XS and XS Max. It has longer battery life, it comes in more colors, it has a bigger screen than the XS, all while sacrificing…what? Optical zoom and 3D Touch? An OLED screen? This phone is clearly meant for the masses.

It made me wonder what purchasing decision Apple is trying to drive customers to make, until I realized: they probably don’t care. Like, at all. Because regardless of which iPhone model turns out to be the breakout star of 2018, their average selling price goes up, up, up. My guess is that in the United States, the iPhone XR is going to sell like hot cakes. Everybody and their brother and their middle schooler is going to want one of those suckers, probably in yellow or orange.

Overall, the event made me even more excited for the iPad and Mac announcements likely coming in October. Will Apple make similar decisions with the MacBook lineup? Just like iPhones, MacBooks have gotten gradually more and more expensive. Will Apple make their entry-level laptops so fresh and compelling that choosing between them and a MacBook Pro is somehow more difficult? And what about iPad Pros? Certainly they’ve got more up their sleeve than just FaceID and edge-to-edge displays (or really really slim bezels, for the pedantic). It’s all very exciting, and if I weren’t having a baby in ~4 weeks I’d say the October event is the one thing I’m most looking forward to this year.

In the meantime, I ordered an Apple Watch Series 4 (GPS) in silver aluminum and a tangerine sport loop, which should arrive this Friday. There was something bittersweet about setting an alarm on my Series 0 for 1:59AM so I could order its replacement; on the other hand, I’m definitely looking forward to the enormous difference in speed and features I’ll get with the Series 4. I’m also looking forward to seeing what I can do with Siri Shortcuts to manage life with both a toddler and a newborn.

My list of potential blog topics continues to grow, so expect to read more from me soon!