Category: Apple

Hey, and Fastmail, and the app store

Okay, here’s my second blog post for today, this time about email (mostly). The guys who make Basecamp introduced a new email product, called Hey, about a week ago. I was kind of curious about it, since I like the Basecamp guys, generally speaking, and have used their products before. (I was a big user of their Backpack product for several years.) Anyway, it’s interesting, but not for me. It’s $99 a year and really wouldn’t be as good for me as Fastmail is, and that only costs $50/year.

But then there was a big kerfuffle when they tried to release a new version of their iOS client to the app store. Apple rejected it, for reasons explained here. Basically, Apple wants them to add an in-app purchase for subscriptions, thereby giving Apple a cut of their subscription revenue. Which they don’t want to do. DHH went on a bit of a Twitter rant over this. I think that he’s mostly right, though it’s not as simple an issue as some people would make it out to be.

This whole thing got me worried that, if Apple is going to go after Hey for subscription revenue, they might go after Fastmail too. I haven’t seen any indication that they’ve done that yet, but I’m concerned that, if they do, Fastmail will have to increase prices to take Apple’s cut into account. Or they could just discontinue their iOS client. Either way, it wouldn’t be good for me.

So that got me to go over to Fastmail’s blog and see if they had weighed in on it. They haven’t, but I did notice a blog post announcing their support for labels. So that’s cool. I had used labels in Gmail, and having to switch to folders was kind of a bummer for me. So if you’ve been thinking about migrating from Gmail to Fastmail, that’s one less thing to worry about. I can’t decide if I want to switch back to labels now that I’ve got everything working with folders, but I’m considering it. Fastmail has also revamped their rules system recently, and I’m liking that too.

Larry Tesler

I have to admit that I didn’t know that much about Larry Tesler prior to his passing last week. I was generally aware of Xerox PARC, and their place in the history of personal computing. And I probably had heard at some point that Tesler was essentially the inventor of “copy and paste.” And I think I was vaguely aware that he’d worked on the Newton, maybe? But I don’t think I’d ever put that all together in my mind, and realized that this was all the same guy. Over the years, it looks like he’s worked on a number of really cool things, from Smalltalk to Object Pascal to the Newton.

I first saw the news of his death on Hacker News, which linked to an obituary on Gizmodo. The Hacker News thread has some pretty interesting anecdotes and conversation, including a number of comments from Alan Kay. There’s also an obituary in the NY Times, written by John Markoff. And there’s a nice remembrance from Adam Engst at the TidBITS site.

I don’t have anything useful or pithy to say. I’m just here marveling at how much this guy did, and what a good guy he apparently was.

Software and subscriptions and stuff

This is going to be a follow-up to my last two posts (here and here). Sorry. I have some interesting ideas in my head that I want to turn into blog posts, but I’m still plodding through a bunch of largely mundane stuff, trying to see if I can streamline or realign some stuff in my life. Anyway, here’s a brain dump of updates on stuff from those last two posts, plus some new stuff.

Cable TV: I got my February cable bill, with the new rates. My initial understanding of the rate increase was that my bill would go up by about $35. But it actually only went up by $14. The base rate for my cable package is now $85 (plus a bunch of fees) and my internet package is $90 (plus fees), but they’re applying a “special discount” of $42 so the total bill didn’t rise more than that $14. So I guess I’m sticking with my current plans. Any changes to the plans would probably invalidate the discount. So, while I could save a little by changing or dropping my cable plan, it’s not enough to make it worthwhile for me. (I’ll have to keep an eye on that discount and see if they phase it out over time. If they do, then I can think about a change again.)

Web hosting: I haven’t done any more with this. My new contract starts on Feb 12, so I’ll have to review it then. And I have plenty of time to drop my .org domains if I want to do that. They renew in May and August.

AmEx card: I haven’t done much with this either, though I did drop all recurring charges from the card. And I’m planning on using up my rewards points so I don’t lose those. That way, I can drop it cleanly and easily, if I decide to.

Westfield Comics: I did place a February order with them, but it was a small one. And I still haven’t talked myself into dropping Batman and Detective.

Flickr Pro: I took the deal to renew for two more years at the old price ($100 for two years), so now I don’t have to think about that again until 2023.

Quicken: Quicken switched to a subscription model a couple of years ago. I bought a 27-month sub from Amazon for $54 in November 2017, which was due to expire next month. The regular yearly rate to renew it directly with Quicken would have been $50/year, which seems a little steep to me. I found that I could buy a 14-month sub from Amazon for $30, so I did that, and now I’m good for another year. I took a quick look at a few alternatives, including Banktivity, Moneydance, and See Finance, but didn’t find any of them compelling enough to get me to switch.

H&R Block tax software: I’ve been buying their “Deluxe” package every year to do my taxes, for quite a long time, going back to when it was TaxCut. (I took a break for a few years and used an accountant instead, but she was a lot more expensive and not really any more convenient, really.) I generally buy it from Amazon, but this year, H&R Block had a “flash sale” where I could buy it from them for $30, so I did. So now I’m set to do my taxes, whenever I can find the mental energy to sit down and get it done.

Fantastical: I’ve been using Fantastical on my iPhone as my default calendar program for several years. I bought the iPad version a couple of years ago, and the Mac version just a few months ago. And now they’ve just released a new version and switched to a subscription model. (Sigh.) They’re being pretty good about existing users of the paid version, so I can use the new version, but not the new features. So that’s what I’m going to do. The new features are great if you’re really a calendar power-user, but I’m not. I just use my personal calendar to keep track of birthdays and medical appointments, mostly. The MacStories review of the new version is thorough and worth reading, if you’re the kind of person that needs a really powerful calendar management program.

Other stuff I’m subscribing to: This could be a long list, but I’ll limit it to apps and services I probably haven’t mentioned recently and that might be worth reconsidering: Instapaper ($30/year), 1Password ($30/year, with discount), Twitterific ($10/year), Sleep Cycle ($2/year).

Other stuff I’m not subscribing to: In a few cases where an app switched from paid to subscription, I’ve talked myself out of subscribing to it, and either stuck with the “free” version, or dropped the app entirely: TextExpander (dropped), Day One (still using free “Plus” version), Drafts (tried the “pro” version for a week; went back to the free one), Overcast (still using the free version, with some features unlocked from my original purchase).

I recently listened to an episode of Mac Power Users with Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts. He seems like a good guy, and I do really appreciate the fact that subscriptions give small developers like him a steady revenue stream, and make software like Drafts possible. As a user, it’s frustrating to get pushed into all these subscriptions, and it’s often hard to justify the recurring expense for something that (for me) has limited utility. But I don’t agree with the idea that developers are getting “greedy,” which often crops up on places like Reddit or other online forums, when a developer switches to a subscription model. (On the other hand, I am kind of bothered when a large corporation like Apple or Amazon starts pushing subscription services. But that’s a subject for another day.)

So that’s about it for now, I guess. The stand alert on my Apple Watch has gone off twice while writing this, so I’ve been at it for more than an hour. I have another post bouncing around in the back of my head, similar to this one, but just about music and podcasts. The way I pay for and consume music has gotten a little complicated, and seems to be worth reviewing again. And there’s probably a post about buying and reading comic books in there too.

New Year’s Day 2020

It’s almost 8 AM on New Year’s Day, so it’s time for my annual New Year’s self-review post. This has become a tradition for me; here’s a link to last year’s post, which includes links to a few previous years. This year is also the start of a new decade. I had a few thoughts on the past decade that I posted on Christmas, so I won’t rehash all of that here.

Health, Weight, and Sleep

I’ve got a bit of a headache this morning, and I’ve been fighting a cold (or something) since Thanksgiving. So I don’t feel very healthy. I have an appointment with my doctor on Friday, so hopefully he can let me know if I’ve got a big problem or just a stubborn cold. Looking back at last year’s post, I see that very little has changed. My average weight may have gone up by a pound or two. I’m usually coming in at 136 or 137 now, rather than 135, but that’s fine. My doctor would actually like to see me put on a few more pounds.

I’m continuing to track my weight and diet with Lose It every day. And I’m continuing to use my Apple Watch to track my exercise. I manage to fill my exercise ring on most days, and I generally fill my move ring about five days per week, on average. My move goal is currently at 500.

I’m still using Sleep Cycle to track my sleep. I guess I’m doing OK with sleep, but I do have some rough nights. I bought a bottle of melatonin gummies on Amazon a year ago, and I take two before bed occasionally. I think it helps. I don’t use it too often. Taking melatonin is probably safe, in moderation. I thought about getting a new mattress last year, but I’ve held off. I might go ahead with that this year.

I mentioned last year that I’d gotten a prescription for progressive lenses from my eye doctor. I did get that filled and I’ve been wearing those new glasses all year. Honestly, they haven’t helped much. I had my yearly checkup a few weeks back, and he suggested maybe trying computer bifocals, but I didn’t want to have to pay for another pair of glasses so soon, so we decided to wait and maybe try that next year.

I also mentioned last year that I should go get my hearing checked, and I never did that, so that should probably be near the top of my to-do list for this year.

Work and Professional Development

There’s not much to report on this. I’m doing fine at work. I got a very good performance review for 2019. I did a fair bit of work in Azure over the last year, so that was interesting.

Here’s a list of tech books that I read last year, from my Goodreads history:

  • ASP.NET Web API Security Essentials
  • Beginning Azure Functions: Building Scalable and Serverless Apps
  • C# and XML Primer
  • Instant Nancy Web Development
  • Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches
  • Take Control of Catalina
  • Take Control of Photos
  • Take Control of Upgrading to Catalina
  • Take Control of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13
  • The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

That’s a pretty random list, but there were a few good ones in there. I think that I read all of those via my O’Reilly subscription that I get through my ACM membership, so I’m getting some value out of that.

I’m also still paying for a Pluralsight subscription. Checking my history there, it looks like I’m getting some value out of that too. Here’s the list of courses I watched in 2019:

  • IIS Administration Fundamentals
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Create Serverless Functions
  • Getting Started with OAuth 2.0
  • Implementing and Managing Microsoft Azure Multi-factor Authentication
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Securing Data
  • Fiddler
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Implementing Application Logging with Diagnostic Logs
  • Instrument Application with Azure Monitor Application Insights
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Monitoring Performance
  • Play by Play: Care and Maintenance of Development VMs
  • Beginning PowerShell Scripting for Developers
  • Managing Azure AD
  • Play by Play: Azure Beyond Websites
  • Play By Play: Azure Deployment with Scott Hanselman

Again, kind of a random list, but I learned some stuff.

For 2020, I’d like to learn a new programming language, but I’m not sure about which one. I’ve considered trying to learn Rust, but I’m not too enthusiastic about it. Maybe I should try to learn Swift? I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.

Finance

I did a year-end financial review last weekend, and I’m in pretty good shape. I still kind of want to do a one-time sanity check with a good financial advisor, but I didn’t get around to that in 2019, so I should really try again in 2020. I also see in last year’s post that I wanted to read this book last year, and didn’t get around to it. So I should probably do that.

Reading

I wrote up a post just a few days ago on my reading plans for 2020, so I won’t rehash that. But I’ll go ahead and post a few book lists that I culled from my Goodreads year in books. I read 115 books this year, according to that. Most of them were comics / graphic novels.

Here’s a list of the stuff I read from The Great American Read list last year:

  • Catch-22
  • Gilead
  • Looking for Alaska
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • The Help
  • The Intuitionist
  • To Kill A Mockingbird
  • War and Peace

War and Peace took a lot of time to get through, so that was really my main reading accomplishment for 2019. I only read a few fiction books that weren’t related to my TGAR group:

  • Angels and Visitations
  • Pump Six and Other Stories
  • Zoo City

Of those, only Zoo City is actually a novel. So War and Peace, and the other TGAR books, really swallowed up a lot of my reading time. For non-fiction, I did get around to reading 10% Happier and Search Inside Yourself, both of which I’d mentioned in last year’s post as wanting to read. (I can’t say that I really stuck with my meditation practice in 2019 though. That’s something I may want to try again in 2020.)

Hardware

I got an iPhone XR about a year ago, along with a new Apple Watch. And my MacBook Air is only about a year and a half old. I bought a pair of AirPods in November, and they’re working fine. So I’m pretty well set for Apple gear. I’m not planning on giving Apple any more money in 2020, at least for hardware.

And I talked myself into buying an Xbox One back in May. At this point, I’m mostly just using it as a DVD and Blu-ray player. When I bought it, I kind of knew that I was going to be playing games on it for a couple of months, then lose interest, and that’s pretty much what happened. But it’s a decent Blu-ray player, so it’s not like it’s just gathering dust; it’s getting some use.

A friend bought me a new TV for Christmas, so I now have a new 43″ LG TV. That spurred a couple of related purchases, including a stand and a DAC so that I can route the digital audio output to my old analog receiver. It might spur one more purchase: a 4K Apple TV box. My current Apple TV box is the older one, that only outputs 1080p. (It looks like they still sell that one, as the Apple TV HD.) So maybe my earlier statement about not giving Apple any more money for hardware this year isn’t quite correct.

Summary

I have a bunch more stuff I’m thinking about, and that I could include here, but it’s now almost 10 AM. So I should wrap this up and maybe go out for a walk and get a cappuccino and a croissant from Starbucks or something like that.

 

sick day

Back in November, I realized that I had two PTO days that I had to use by the end of the year, so I took today and next Friday off. I kind of thought I might use today to go see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But I got very sick over this past weekend, and have been struggling through the week. I’ve actually burned an extra day and a half, by taking Monday off and a half-day Wednesday. So I’m feeling a little better today, but not “go out to see a two and a half hour Star Wars movie” better. More like “sit on the couch and binge-watch the original trilogy” better.

Anyway, I’m well enough to kill some time writing a blog post. And I have a bunch of random thoughts I’d been meaning to organize, so I’m going to make this a bit of a catch-up/catch-all post.

First, some post Catalina upgrade thoughts: As I mentioned previously, I don’t have any major issues with the new Music app. I’m a little disappointed in the TV app though. While there is still a list view, there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn on the old column browser for it. So if I want to filter it down to show just, say, my Doctor Who season 10 episodes, there’s no quick way to do that. It’s also gotten the seasons and episodes of Doctor Who quite mixed up at this point. (That may have been the case previously, but I hadn’t noticed it.) See the screenshot below for an example of how a bunch of random stuff has all ended up under “season 1, episode 1.” Doctor Who is maybe an edge case, since I’ve purchased several different seasons and collections, and there are a bunch of odds and ends, like Christmas specials and stuff like that. But there should be a better way to organize it all.

I’m also a little disappointed in the new Finder interface for syncing my iPhone and iPad. It’s mostly fine, but they’ve lost the old status display that used to show at the top of the iTunes window. Now, you just get a tiny circle in the Finder sidebar, so you can’t really tell what it’s doing. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a pain, and there’s no reason they couldn’t fix that. I guess we’ve gotten to the point now where syncing an iDevice to a Mac is the exception rather than the rule. I assume most people either sync to iCloud directly, or don’t sync at all.

Next topic: VPNs. There’s been a bit more news about PIA since I last mentioned them in my blog. Here’s an interview with the COO of the combined KAPE/PIA company. And here’s a recent blog post from PIA. They’re saying a lot of the right things, and it’s cool that they’re open-sourcing their desktop client. On the more general privacy today, the NY Times is running a series on the smartphone tracking industry that looks interesting. There really wasn’t anything in the first part that I didn’t already know. The second part has a fairly simple guide to what you can do on your phone to limit tracking. Again, not much that I didn’t already know, but useful for a more general audience. I found it interesting that they recommended a specific VPN app, Privacy Pro SmartVPN. I wasn’t familiar with that particular app/service, but it’s worth looking into. The third part talks about national security implications, which is pretty important, though again, there was nothing in there that surprised me. The series is still ongoing, and it might be worth reading the rest of it.

Last topic (probably): music. I enjoyed reading The Catastrophist’s 2019 Tech Gift Guide in the NY Times this morning. I wouldn’t give any of these items as a gift, and the only item on the list that I own are the AirPods. And, even on those, I kind of agree with their observations about disposability and the darker side of Apple’s ecosystem. (Though maybe “Your nephew dies alone.” is a bit of a stretch.) And I’m still thinking about streaming music services, though I still can’t quite talk myself into signing up for one. On a practical level, I think either Spotify or Apple Music would make the most sense for me. Spotify is the most popular and has a lot of interesting public playlists available. Apple Music is less popular, but would work better in terms of syncing my existing library to the cloud. And it has a 100,000 track limit, vs Spotify’s 10,000 track limit. (This article is a couple of years old, but as far as I can tell, that’s still the case.) And even if the track limit was higher, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get my iTunes library into Spotify without third-party software. So, I’d probably opt for Apple Music if someone held a gun to my head and told me I had to sign up for a streaming music service today. Of course, nobody’s holding a gun to my head. But every time I look at an artist’s web page and see links to their music on Spotify and Apple Music but no obvious link to buy it in MP3 format, I get nudged a little closer to signing up.

I still have a few thoughts rolling around in my head, but it’s time to give up on this blog post and go do something else. Maybe start into that Star Wars binge I mentioned at the top.

 

macOS TV app

Catalina upgrade and Buffy comics

I’m been fighting a cold, on and off, for the last few weeks. I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’d like to do that involves leaving the apartment, but I think that staying home and drinking herbal tea is a better idea right now. So I managed to get my MacBook Air upgraded to Catalina yesterday. It went smoothly, no snags at all, as far as I can tell. I’d read the Take Control books on upgrading to Catalina and using Catalina, so I knew what to expect. I was a little worried about the new volume group thing, but that doesn’t seem to have broken anything.

And I was worried about the split of iTunes into separate apps, but that also, surprisingly, isn’t as bad as I thought it might be. The Music app retains (nearly) all of the music-related functionality of iTunes. Apparently, the column browser disappeared in 10.15.0 but reappeared in 10.15.2, which is the version to which I just upgraded. So I’m glad I waited before upgrading.

I need to decide if I want to switch my default shell from bash to zsh. It’s probably fine, and I should go ahead and do that, but I do have a few little aliases and scripts that I should review first.

I also just finished reading the Angel & Faith season 9 series. It was really good! I blogged about my recent Buffy kick about a month ago. I think I’m almost done with it, and ready to move on to a new kick. I still need to read a couple of spin-off mini-series, Willow: Wonderland and Spike: A Dark Place. But, after that, I think I’ll take a break from Buffy. I’d been looking at acquiring the season 10 books, but they’re all out of print and some are a bit expensive right now. It looks like Boom is finally going to start reprinting Dark Horse’s Buffy books, so hopefully they’ll get around to printing new editions of the later Dark Horse stuff that’s currently hard to find.

So that’s some random thoughts on macOS and Buffy comics. I was going to toss some unrelated music thoughts into this blog post too, but I’m running out of energy. I need to get some more tea, or maybe take a nap.

backups (and maybe upgrades)

I haven’t upgraded my MacBook Air to Catalina yet, but I might do it soon. I should probably wait for 10.15.2, really, but 10.15.1 might be good enough for me. I did a full backup with Carbon Copy Cloner today, and also ran a Time Machine backup, so I’m ready, I guess.

Between CCC and Time Machine, I’m pretty well covered on the Mac. I’ve been having trouble finding a good backup solution for my Windows 10 desktop machine though. After my problems from last last year and into early this year, I’ve been trying to find something that works well. I’ve had problems with both Macrium and Acronis, which seem to be the two best consumer-level Windows backup tools out there. I gave Arq a try, back in February, but had some issues with it and didn’t go back to it. And I gave Macrium one more try in September and couldn’t get it to work.

I do keep most of my important files in OneDrive, so I’m not really too worried about losing anything. And I have File History set up and working. (Though the drive I’m using for that is a little finicky.) So I’m mostly covered there. But I wanted to get something a bit more like a full backup going.

I tried something called Bvckup today, and it’s not exactly what I’m looking for, but it worked well, and it might be close enough. It’s more of a file sync program that a backup program, so that’s the main issue. It doesn’t create full system images, or even compressed files. It just mirrors one folder to another folder. I have it set up to copy all of the data folders from my hard drive to a second drive. I’m excluding my Windows and program folders, but including pretty much everything else. The backup ran pretty quickly, considering how much data it had to copy. It hit two errors, but reported them clearly in the log and proceeded past them without any issues. The two errors were CRC errors on a couple of fairly random PDF files. Both files were in OneDrive, so I replaced the copies on my hard drive with good copies from OneDrive.

I’m a little worried about these random errors, but I hope they’re just leftovers from the mess in November 2018 (or the related mess in January 2019). Anyway, I’m going to try to get regular backups going with Bvckup now. I’m on a two-week trial. If things work out, I’ll probably spend $50 on the pro version. I may also swap out the drive I’m using for File History with a slightly more reliable one. (Drives are cheap enough that I should be able to talk myself into dumping the slightly dodgy one…)

I’m also getting close to finally giving in and paying for a cloud backup solution. If I do that, it’ll almost definitely be Backblaze. If I were to decide to run it on both my Mac and PC, though, it’ll be fairly expensive, so I don’t know about that. I’m thinking about it though.

 

AirPods

I finally broke down and bought myself a pair of AirPods yesterday. I didn’t get the fancy new AirPods Pro, just the regular AirPods, with the regular case (not the wireless charging case). They were on sale for $140 at Costco. I’ve considered picking up a pair a few times over the last year, but never quite talked myself into it. But I’ve been reading and watching a bunch of headphone reviews recently, and stopped at the Apple Store over the weekend to try out both the older AirPods and the newer AirPods Pro. The “Pro” model didn’t fit my ears well, though I only tried the medium tips. But it was the kind of thing where I was pretty sure that none of the tips was going to be quite right. (And I didn’t want to pay $300 either.)

The AirPods don’t fit my ears that well either, honestly, but they’re good enough. My “use case” for them will probably be for listening to music at my desk at work, podcasts and audiobooks at home, and maybe podcasts & music on the train occasionally. So I’ll usually be fairly stationary when I’m using them. Still, I may pick up a pair of these tips from Comply or these Earhoox things to get a better fit.

I had a lot of resistance to adding a new battery-powered device to my life. I feel like I have too many of those already. I had a lot of resistance to the Apple Watch for that reason too, but I’ve really gotten to like the watch. I suppose I’ll get used to the AirPods too. I plan on charging them right next to the Watch, on my computer desk, overnight. I had to buy a new two-port USB charger so I could do that, since I didn’t have a spare AC outlet near there. (And the AirPods don’t ship with an AC adapter anyway, just a Lightning/USB cable.)

I used the AirPods a bit at work today, and they worked well. The sound quality is similar to the old Sony earbuds that I’ve been using at work, but maybe a little better on the bass end. I listened to some rock, classical, and ambient music today, and they sounded fine on all of that. The ambient music sounded best, probably because it had the most bass. The classical (some Itzhak Perlman Mozart stuff) was not terribly impressive, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. You need good headphones or speakers to really get the full effect from something like that.

There are a few semi-interesting things that you can do with the AirPods that you can’t necessarily do with other headphones. I played around with Live Listen for a bit yesterday, and I’m curious to play with that some more. I do have some problems hearing, and I feel like that might help me out in certain circumstances.

I’m also curious to try them with my Apple TV. I do sometimes use headphones while I’m watching TV, but the way I do it now is a little inconvenient. (I’m using wired headphones connected to my stereo receiver.) I’m curious to see how the AirPods would work when watching a movie on Apple TV.

I haven’t used them for a phone call yet, but I’ll try that at some point. And I need to look at the Apple documentation to see if there’s anything else I can do with them that might be worth trying.

Overall, they’re fine, but they’re not life-changing, and I’m not sure they’re really worth more than $100. (But hey, what else am I going to spend my money on?)

like Goodreads, but for movies

It’s common (even clichéd) to describe a web service or app as “like X, but for Y.” It’s especially clichéd in cases where X=”Netflix” or “Uber.” But it’s the best way to describe what I’m looking for right now: “like Goodreads, but for movies.” I get a lot of use out of Goodreads, and, at this point, track pretty much every book I read and/or buy on it. The mild discomfort I get from sharing my entire reading history with Amazon is offset by the incredible usefulness of the service. (Which, now that I think about it, describes quite a lot of free, but troubling, web services. But that’s a subject for a different blog post.)

I have quite a collection of DVDs and Blu-ray discs. And I have digital movies in iTunes and other services. (Now all, thankfully, centralized in Movies Anywhere.) And I, of course, watch movies in movie theaters, and rent them occasionally, and watch them on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and so on and so forth. And I’ve really lost track of what I’ve watched and what I haven’t. I’ve started keeping track of some of this stuff in Evernote, but not in a really systematic way. And I try to add a note to Day One every time I watch a movie. But I’d really like something like Goodreads to get all of this information together in an organized fashion. (And I’d really like something that lets me scan the UPC codes off all my DVDs and Blu-rays, because I really don’t want to enter them by hand.)

So I did some internet searching and found a bunch of possibilities. First, it occurred to me that, since I like Goodreads so much, maybe Amazon owned something similar for movies. Amazon does own IMBD, and that seemed like a good place to start. IMDB allows you to create an account, and you can add movies to a watchlist, but it doesn’t have anything at all like the capabilities you get from Goodreads. So that’s one down.

And it also occurred to me that this might be something that Rotten Tomatoes would be in a good position to do. But, as far as I can tell, they don’t really do that either. So that’s another one down.

At some point, I might have had some of my DVDs cataloged in Delicious Library on my Mac. I stopped using that a long time ago, but apparently it still exists. But I don’t think it’s really a good candidate for what I’m trying to do either.

Searching for like Goodreads but for movies in DuckDuckGo led me to a number of semi-useful Quora questions, reddit discussions, and random blog posts. But a lot of them were pretty old and out of date. Sifting through recommendations, I found a few possible candidates that were still in business.

First, there was iCheckMovies. It allows you to create lists, and track what you have and haven’t watched, but there’s not much more to it, as far as I can tell. There’s no iOS app to scan discs.

Next up was Letterboxd. I liked this one enough to create an account and play around with it a bit. The web site looks really good, and there’s an iOS app too. But the iOS app doesn’t allow barcode scanning. Other than that, it’s a really nice service. You can easily track which movies you’ve watched and haven’t watched yet. And you can create your own lists to track things in other ways. There’s a CSV importer, but I don’t have my movies cataloged at all right now, so that’s of limited usefulness to me. There’s also a Pro tier for $19/year that gives you a few extra features. I’d be all-in on this one, I think, if only there was a way to scan barcodes.

The last thing I tried, which I only really stumbled across when searching for something else, was Blu-ray.com. I’d gone to the site in the past to read news and reviews, and I was aware that they had a forum, but I didn’t know that they had built up a system for tracking Blu-ray collections. Well, they have, and it’s pretty good. They have an iOS app with barcode scanning, so that’s my one big feature need checked off. I used it to scan about a dozen DVDs, and that worked pretty well. Two or three of them weren’t in their database, but most of them were. And, since they’re disc-oriented rather than film-oriented, I’m not just tracking that I’ve seen (for instance) The Matrix, but that I own a copy on DVD or Blu-ray or whatever. So that’s helpful. They have certain standard categories, like “owned,” “rented,” and “wishlist,” but you can also add your own. The organizational features aren’t quite up there with Goodreads, but they’re ok.

So I guess that, for now, I’m going to try to get a bunch of my discs scanned into Blu-ray.com and go from there. I’m not sure how far I’ll go with it, but it’s better than anything else I’ve tried.

(I have a few related topics I want to write up at some point, but I probably shouldn’t try to shoehorn them into this post. One topic relates to a recent attempt to rip a DVD on my PC. Another has to do with my attempt to whittle down my DVD collection a bit. And yet another could cover my related attempt to actually watch some DVDs that I’ve had sitting on the shelf for 10+ years. But I’ll get to all that eventually. Maybe.)

iOS scanning apps

I have a bunch of stuff in my head that I’ve been meaning to organize and turn into blog posts, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. So I’m going to take a little time today, on a Sunday morning, to try to get a few of them out. So I may post three or four items today. Or I may post just one, then the schedule the rest to go out over the next few days. Or I may get halfway through this one, and get distracted by something, and post nothing. So you’ve been warned.

Anyway, my first item is going to be on iOS scanning software. By this, I mean apps that make it easy to take a photo of a document, then clean it up a bit and store it somewhere. I think that the first app like this that I ever used was something called CamScanner. I first found out about it when a client at work sent me a printout that he’d “scanned” with a free version of CamScanner that put a watermark on the scan. (At the time, there was a free version that watermarked the scans and a paid version that didn’t. This was probably ten years ago.) I thought it was kind of a funny way of sending me the information I needed. The “right” way (in my mind) would of course be to have printed it to PDF and sent me the PDF. (Or to take a screenshot and send me a JPG or BMP or whatever.) Printing it on paper, then taking a photo of the paper with a cell phone struck me as a deeply weird workflow. (Printing it, then scanning it with a traditional desktop scanner would also have seemed weird, but a little less so.)

Anyway, using your phone as a scanner has become a much more accepted workflow over the years, and there are now a bunch of apps that you can use for that. And the ability to scan a document is built into a bunch of other apps. I’ve continued to use CamScanner myself on and off over the years, and paid for the “pro” version (or whatever they called it) quite a while ago. But, at some point, the design of the app changed and they started adding a bunch of ads and popups and cruft to it, and it started to seem a little scammy (for lack of a better word). I would still use it once in a while, and it still worked well enough. But, recently, the Android version of the app was found to have some malware in it. The malware was coming in from their advertising library, and was not built into the app itself. (And it only affected the Android version and not the iOS version.) Still, it’s not a good thing. So I decided to delete it from my phone and look at alternatives.

The Evernote app has had the ability to take and add photos to your notebooks for a long time, of course, and they can treat the photos as documents, and straighten them out and OCR them and all that stuff. So I’ve been using Evernote for that a lot anyway. Evernote also has a standalone scanning app called Scannable. I’m honestly not sure why you’d want to use that rather than just directly using the Evernote app, but maybe it’s worth looking into.

There are a number of other apps that have document scanning built into them, generally with the idea that you’d scan a document in, and store it in the service associated with the app.

  • The built-in iOS Notes app has a document scanner. It was added in 2017 and is apparently really good. I don’t use Notes though, so it’s not the best option for me. (I know I can get the scans out of Notes via the share sheet, but it’s still not a great workflow for me.)
  • Google Drive has a document scanner built-in on Android, but not on iOS. The iOS app does allow you to take photos and add them to Google Drive, but it doesn’t have any of the usual document scanning extra features.
  • Adobe has a scanner app that looks pretty good, but I honestly don’t even want to try it, since I don’t want to have to get into the whole Abode ecosystem if I can avoid it.
  • The Dropbox app has built-in document scanning, but I’ve been trying to move away from Dropbox.
  • The Microsoft OneDrive app can scan documents and store them in (of course) your OneDrive account. I use OneDrive, so I tried that, and it works OK, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the workflow. (And I often want to scan something to my camera roll, not to OneDrive.)
  • Microsoft also has a standalone app called Office Lens that does a pretty good job of document scanning and can easily save the scan to your camera roll (or OneDrive or OneNote or a few other places). That works well enough for me that I’ve decided to use that as my CamScanner replacement (for now).

There are a handful of dedicated scanning apps that might be worth looking into. I’ve bookmarked a few, but haven’t actually tried any of them out.

  • Genius Scan looks kind of interesting. There’s a free version, an $8 “plus” version and a subscription version that costs $3/month.
  • Scanner Pro is a scanning app from Readdle. I’ve never used any of their apps, but (last I checked) they have a good reputation. It seems to be oriented mostly towards scanning to PDF and doing OCR. It got a good review on MacStories a few years ago. It currently costs $4.
  • Scanbot is another app that’s been around a while and seems to have a good reputation. The Sweet Setup lists it as their best scanning app for iOS. The pricing is a little confusing. There’s a free Scanbot app in the app store, with an in-app purchase of $7 to unlock the “pro” version. But there’s also a separate “pro” version, priced at $70. So that’s weird. And when I dug into it a bit more, it looks like they’re going to a subscription model. If there’s any information about the subscription pricing on their blog, I couldn’t find it, but I found a blog post from a user that indicates that it’ll be $22.50/year. (I guess this was announced just recently.) So I guess I don’t want to get mixed up in that right now.

In a nutshell, I’ll likely be using a combination of Evernote and Office Lens for my scanning needs, for now. I’ll use Evernote for stuff I want to store in Evernote, and Office Lens for stuff I want to save to my camera roll or OneDrive. I might give Readdle’s Scanner Pro a try at some point, or maybe play around with the scanner in the iOS Notes app, but I guess I’m OK for now.