Play

A very unexpected addition to my digital life lately has been Play by Marcos Tanaka. Available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV (🤩), Play is a tool for saving YouTube videos to watch later and syncing your queue across devices. And it is excellent.

When I first heard about Play in the Club MacStories Discord and had the opportunity to beta test it, I assumed it wasn’t for me. I don’t watch a ton of YouTube videos, so the Watch Later playlist built into the service has always served my needs just fine. But a series of events not long after the app’s official release changed my mind.

First, I started using a Safari extension called Vinegar by Zhenyi Tan. Vinegar replaces YouTube’s video player with Apple's built-in video player which, among other things, enables picture-in-picture and background audio playback. Once I found this extension, I stopped watching videos in the YouTube app and started watching in Safari.

So at that point, I was just using the YouTube app to manage my Watch Later queue. That’s when I decided to give Play a second look, and it just so happened that one of the app’s first major additions after its release was the option to open YouTube videos in Safari rather than the YouTube app. This made Play the perfect way to manage my watch later queue and, combined with Vinegar, it gave me a much better YouTube experience than I had with the official app. I'd call this my ideal YouTube-watching setup.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. Since I’ve switched over to using Play, I’ve dug into many of its features and found them to be really helpful. It’s not only a great way to keep track of videos I want to watch, but also videos I’ve already watched in case I want to go back and look at them again.

But before we get too into the weeds, let me break down the basics: At its core, Play is just a list of YouTube videos that you’ve imported. You can import a video by copying its URL and pasting it into the app’s Add Video screen, by dragging a YouTube link from another app into Play, or via the share sheet (my preferred method). When importing a video, the app will save all of its metadata including thumbnail, title, channel, and length. This data is really useful down the line.

So you import videos into your Play queue, but then you want to watch them, right? When you tap on a video in the list, the app will present you with all of its details as well as a button to watch it. Once you’ve watched a video, it no longer shows up in your main video list but still remains in the Watched section in case you want to go back to it later.

You can organize your video library in Play with tags. For example, I watch a lot of tech videos on YouTube, but I also like to check out trailers. By creating one tag for tech videos and another for trailers, I can keep those videos separate from each other when I’m browsing my queue.

My video library in Play.

But videos don’t have to be tagged manually, and that’s where metadata comes in. In Play’s settings, you can create rules to automatically tag videos when you import them, the same way your email app might automatically flag certain messages in your inbox. If I import a video with the word “iPhone” in the title, Play knows to add the tech tag to it. This saves me a ton of work organizing my library.

Auto-tagging rules can be set based on words in a video’s title, the channel a video comes from, or video length. Multiple rules can even be combined, so you can have a separate tag for long cooking videos and another for short videos you can watch quickly. The possibilities are endless, and auto-tagging does a lot of the work for you.

As you can see, Play isn't just about keeping a list of videos to watch. It's a comprehensive tool for importing, organizing, and watching all of your favorite YouTube videos. And it does its job beautifully, but there are some nice extras that make the app even more of a joy to use.

Play’s widgets make it easy to see what’s in your queue from your home screen. It’s fun to have a little stack of video thumbnails that I can tap into anytime. Widgets can show your entire queue or just videos from a particular tag.

The app is endlessly customizable as well. You can change the accent colors of Play’s widgets and the app itself to fit whatever color scheme you prefer. As I mentioned above, you can change where you want your videos to play, whether it be in the YouTube app or in a browser. And you can adjust the way the app handles and displays (or hides) watched videos in your queue. I like apps that I can tweak to work just the way I want them to, and Play is definitely one of those apps.

It's also constantly growing. Even though Play is relatively new, it's received a bunch of updates already, including a whole new user interface on iPhone and iPad that's just stellar. I also really appreciate the addition of an Apple TV app to Play’s offering. Any video is better on the big screen, so it’s nice that you can pull up your queue on the Apple TV and jump right in to watching.

The one thing I’d like to see added to Play is background syncing of my video library. When I import a video via the share sheet, I have to explicitly open the app to ensure my video syncs up to the cloud. (This problem is a little bit easier to deal with thanks to Play's Shortcuts support and this basic shortcut I made to simplify the process.)

But even then, the app doesn't sync in the background on my other devices. This means that widgets on my various devices are often out of sync, so I always have to open Play to make sure I've got the latest data. I can't imagine background syncing is a trivial feature to add, but I think it would be a worthy addition and make Play perfect in my eyes.

I'm really thankful I decided to give Play a try. I don't see myself as a YouTube power user, but even for the relatively few videos I watch, the experience is much nicer thanks to this app. If you like to watch YouTube from time to time but don't have a good system for saving videos for later, I highly recommend checking this one out.

Play is available on the App Store for $2 as a universal purchase for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, with Family Sharing included.

Finding Room In My Life for the Mac Again

How we relate to our technology changes over time. One thing that’s always been in flux for me is the way I divide up my computing life between the traditional Mac platform and the relatively newer world of the iPad. Honestly, that balance has always been a bit murky.

Part of that murkiness may stem from the fact that, unlike many Apple fans, I didn’t have a years-long history with the Mac before being introduced to tablet computing on the iPad. In fact, both platforms came into my life at roughly the same time.

In the spring of 2010, my parents gave me a MacBook Pro as a gift for my high school graduation. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) Then that summer, I took some of the money generously given by family and friends as graduation gifts and bought the first-generation iPad that was just starting to take the world by storm. The two devices have gone hand-in-hand from the beginning for me.

They’ve fulfilled different roles in my life at different times. Originally, the Mac was my main computer that I carried with me, and the iPad stayed at home for entertainment. At one point, my MacBook’s battery got so bad that it was relegated to a desktop, and I took an iPad mini with me everywhere I went. Still, I did the bulk of my “real work” on the Mac at home.

About five years ago, though, something shifted. I picked up an iPad Pro as a treat for finishing grad school, and it instantly became my favorite device ever. I started writing on it, designing with it, even editing video and audio on it. Katherine and I planned our wedding and the construction of our house with it. I loved that thing, and it got me deeply invested in the iPad platform in a way I never had been on the Mac.

The iPad has been my main computer ever since. And as its presence in my computing life grew, the Mac’s began to shrink.

Over time, I started to view the Mac as a necessary evil in my life, only to be used when I had no other choice. There are a couple of important tasks I do at work that still aren’t possible on an iPad, and so I never stopped using the Mac completely. But as I got more and more accustomed to the iPad platform, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated when I had to use a Mac. It wasn't as responsive or reliable as my primary computer, and the experience simply wasn't as good.

I didn’t do this on purpose, but eventually, I came to develop very negative feelings towards the Mac and avoided it as much as possible. The iPad was the device for me.

It was honestly easy to justify these feelings a few years ago. We all know the Mac went through a rough patch for a while, and that just happened to coincide with my transition to the iPad. Every stutter, every restart, every beach ball was just another reason for me to move as much of my workflow as possible away from the Mac, and so I did.

I sat by and watched the Mac's Apple Silicon transition from afar. The M1 chip made its way into my life through the 2021 iPad Pro, and it's been fantastic. Even after seeing how good the M1 was, though, I still didn't feel the need to try an Apple Silicon Mac. The iPad was my chosen platform, and the new chips weren’t enough to convince me.

But as more and more people I know transitioned to Apple Silicon Macs and sang their praises, I started to wonder if maybe I wasn't giving the Mac a fair chance. After all, I was comparing an iPad running the newest Apple chip to Intel Macs that were at least a couple of years old. It wasn't an even fight.

I also started to wonder if my negative feelings towards the Mac might inhibit me from staying up on the latest software and trends, especially with all the cool stuff that Shortcuts users are coming up with on the Mac platform. Being on the iPad all these years made me feel like I was on the cutting edge, but suddenly, it felt like I was being left behind.

Maybe FOMO isn't the best reason to make these kinds of decisions, but it played a part in inspiring me to revisit the idea of using a Mac in my personal life for the first time in years. And once I was open to the idea, it made a lot of sense. It’s clear that Apple is invested in the Mac for the long run (something that wasn’t a given just a few years ago), so it’s probably not a platform I should just write off.

So I decided I needed a Mac in my life again. Then I just had to decide which one was right for me.

The answer came during Apple's Peek Performance event last month. After hearing about the incredible power of the Mac Studio and the revelation from John Ternus that the Apple Silicon transition was nearly over, I came to a realization: As mesmerizing as all of these high-end M1 variants are, I don't need anything more robust than the baseline M1 chip. It's plenty powerful enough to handle the tasks I do day-to-day; going for anything more would just be wasteful.

I ended up going with the simplest solution: the iMac. It's got everything I need included in the box. It's a desktop, so I don't have to worry about it going dead if I don't use it for a stretch of time. It's a computer that can be easily shared between myself, my wife, and anyone else who might be in our home and in need of a computer. And the design of the Apple Silicon version is downright stunning.

The iMac was the perfect solution; it just took me the entire Apple Silicon transition to realize it.

Thankfully, getting ahold of one wasn't too difficult since they’ve been in production for nearly a year now. On the same day so many day-one buyers were eagerly unboxing their Mac Studios, I was setting up my very own iMac in my living room, where it's resided for the past month.

I've been impressed by it so far. The design of the iMac feels cutting-edge the way the iPad Pro did back in 2018. Using macOS on Apple Silicon is a much smoother experience than it was on Intel. I'd say it feels a lot like booting up my iPad, and it doesn't hurt that the iMac can run some of my favorite iPad apps, too.

I'm still working out exactly how the iMac is going to fit into my workflow, but I can already tell that it's going to play a much larger role in my daily life than any Mac has in a long time. It really is a joy to use, and though I still prefer the experience of iPadOS for a lot of things, it's undeniable that the iMac is a great device.

Plus, we now live in a world where Apple encourages us to take advantage of both platforms simultaneously. Universal Control couldn’t have come at a more perfect time for me. I love the ability to control both my iMac and iPad Pro with the same keyboard and trackpad, switching seamlessly between the two. It’s the best of both worlds, and it’s made it easy for me to work the way I like.

A couple of years ago, I’m not sure I could have described any Mac as as “great.” That’s more a reflection of my own attitude than the actual products Apple was offering, though the lineup wasn’t in the best shape. But Apple Silicon and the excitement around the transition have opened me up to the possibility that there might actually be room in my life for a Mac again.

The iPad will likely remain my primary computer for a long time to come. I still love it so much. I’m thankful, though, that I can appreciate and take advantage of the power the Mac platform offers as well. It doesn’t have to be either-or; one doesn’t have to be bad for the other to be good. Both are excellent, beneficial, and worth using. I took me a while to realize that truth, but I think my computing life will be better for it.

Structured

My schedule is normally dictated by two things: my calendar and my to-do list. The Calendar app on my devices is full of meetings, calls, trips, and events that I have to be present for. Meanwhile, the Reminders app keeps track of tasks I need to complete as well as when they must be done. Together, these appointments and tasks make up the essentials of my routine, ensuring that I’m always where I need to be and that my work gets done.

But then there are things that fall between these two categories: family time, hobbies I’d like to make time for, sleep, and the like. Some people put these things on their calendar using a technique called block scheduling, but I don’t want to bog down my calendar with dozens of events every day. That would stress me out and make it difficult to identify the key appointments that I already have in my calendar.

What I need is something that fills that gap between my calendar and to-do list, a way to loosely map out my time without muddying the waters of what I truly can’t miss. Ideally, this tool would be able to integrate the important information I keep in Calendar and Reminders while supplementing it with information on what I’d like to do when I’m not otherwise committed.

This may seem obvious to some of you, but it took me a long time to figure out that what I’ve been looking for is a day planner. I didn’t realize how badly I needed one until I found Structured by Leonard Mehlig when he was interviewed in an issue of Indie Dev Monday last year.

Available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Structured is my ideal day planning app. It starts with a simple, blank timeline that you fill in with your wake up time, bedtime, and the things you want to do as the day goes on. Each task is assigned a name, icon, start time, and duration as you add it to your day. The app encourages you to fill in any gaps, though you can always leave some blank space for downtime as well.

The tool’s genius, though, is its integration with Calendar and Reminders. This integration is part of Structured Pro, a $5 one-time purchase, and the features it unlocks are well worth the price. With Structured Pro, you can select any of your calendars and to-do lists to be automatically included in your day plan. This has been so useful for me.

I’ve got a few Reminders tasks at the top of my timeline that need to be done. Better find a place on my timeline to put them!

Whenever I’m planning out a day, I can instantly see which parts of my schedule are already blocked off in my calendar and what I need to get done on that day so that I can plan out the segments of time between appointments. Reminders assigned to a certain time will appear in place on the timeline, whereas reminders set to a day with no time appear at the top of the timeline for that day. Importing of all of this data means I don’t have to switch back and forth between apps. It’s all right there in front of me.

Here’s how that plays out for me on a practical level: Every night before bed, I open up Structured to plan out the next day. At the top of my timeline, I see any tasks imported from Reminders that need to be completed that day. As I scroll down the timeline, I can see all of my Calendar events as well as any open time slots. I edit each of my Reminders tasks with an assigned time and approximate duration to ensure that I make time for them throughout the day, and then I fill in any open time with things I want to do that aren’t already in Calendar or Reminders.

This is exactly what I wanted! I still keep track of my key appointments and tasks in the same apps I’ve always used, and then I can see them all laid out neatly on a timeline in Structured alongside anything else I’d like to do. This approach allows me to go into each day with a plan for how I’m going to accomplish the things I absolutely need to do as well as some time set aside for things I’d like to do. And I know the difference between the two because items imported from Calendars and Reminders are non-negotiable while my Structured tasks can be moved around as needed.

And this only scratches the surface of what the app can do. Every task is color coded to match your calendars and Reminders lists, and Structured tasks can be assigned any color you like so you can quickly scan your timeline and see what’s coming up. Optionally, you can have the app send you a notification when a task in your plan begins or ends so that you stay on track. There are home screen widgets to show the current task in your day plan, how much longer is left on it, and what’s coming up next. And everything syncs between your devices via iCloud. The app is quite feature-rich, and a watch app is even on the way.

I use Structured every day, and I’ve found it so useful. It gives me a boost of confidence to go into each day with a plan for how it will go, and I’ve found that listing out my tasks actually helps me be more flexible as well. If something comes up, no biggie. I know what I can move around to make things work.

That’s not to say the app is perfect. Structured does sometimes struggle with repeating Reminders tasks, either not marking them as complete or marking them as complete multiple times instead of just once. I’ve also run into an issue where my all-day Reminders tasks don’t always stay in place when I put them at a certain time on the timeline. These are issues that the developer is aware of and working on, so I’m confident they’ll be resolved in time.

It’s understandable that Structured has a few rough edges given that it’s an indie app with such an ambitious purpose. I can only imagine the complexities of integrating so deeply with Apple’s default Calendar and Reminders apps and keeping all the information in sync over iCloud. But the more I used Structured, the more value I find in it and the peace of mind that it gives me. It’s rare to come across an app that does exactly what you’ve been wishing for over a long period of time, but that’s exactly the experience I had when I found Structured, and I’m still so impressed by it.

Being intentional with our time is so important, and I’ve found day planning to be a key tool for me in that endeavor. If you’re interested in giving a try, I recommend you download Structured for free and see if it’s right for you.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next time.

Awesome Habits

Nothing—and I mean nothing in this world—motivates me more than a checklist. The dopamine hit I get when I mark an item off my to-do list is what I live for. That’s just how my brain works.

And so, I find habit tracking tools to be really useful when there’s a change I want to make in my life. Recently, I’ve been using Awesome Habits by Michal Tuma as my go-to habit tracker with great success.

For years, I would turn to Crunchy Bagel’s Streaks for this sort of thing. It’s a long-standing app from a creator with a rock solid history of creating really great tools. But after a lengthy on again/off again relationship with Streaks, I came across Awesome Habits in a recent issue of MacStories Weekly and decided to try changing things up a bit. I’m glad I did.

The concept behind Awesome Habits is simple: You create a list of behaviors you want to get in the habit of doing (or break the habit of doing), and then you use the app to log your performance of each of these behaviors. That’s the gist of it. But what I find special about Awesome Habits is how carefully it’s crafted to set you up for success and make the experience of habit tracking an enjoyable one.

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I‘ve still got a lot to do today!

What struck me most about the app when I first tried it was just how cleanly it’s designed. The home view features a big circle indicating how close you are to completing all of your daily goals with each of your habits listed underneath. To the side of each habit is a smaller circle indicating your progress towards that specific goal.

Fill your little circles to make progress towards the big circle. Once the big circle is full, you’re done for the day. The simplicity of the design makes it so easy to check in on where you’re at and where you need to be working throughout the day.

You can create any kind of habit you want in Awesome Habits. It comes with some pre-built suggestions, like drinking more water and calling a friend. But you can also create custom habits to fit your goals. Each can be assigned its own unique icon and color to make it easily identifiable in your main list.

As I mentioned above, habits can be positive or negative. Are you trying to start something new, like a workout routine? Or rid yourself of a bad behavior, like chewing your nails? Either way, you can track it in the app.

Each habit also has a repeat time. You can create a daily, weekly, or monthly habit. And for the daily ones, you can choose which days of the week to include. For example, several of mine are only active on weekdays because I take the weekends off from activities like exercise. It’s totally customizable to the rhythm you’re trying to create in your life.

After picking a habit and how often it repeats, you get to choose how you’ll measure your success. Is it something you want to do once a day? Three times a week? Thirty minutes a day? The app can help you measure any number of things, from time to the glasses of water you drink in a day to whatever else fits your needs and goals.

But habit tracking is about more than the day-to-day. You need more long-term information to see how your habits are forming over time. That’s where the history tab comes in. It allows you to see how you’re doing over an extended time period and keep track of your all-important streaks. I find this tab to be highly motivating; I love seeing the pretty graphs fill up as I complete my goals.

Awesome Habits includes a ton of other small quality-of-life features as well. You can rearrange your home view however you like and even organize habits into lists for different categories, times of day, or any other way you want to sort them. The app offers plenty of settings to get it looking and working just the way you like it, including an excellent dark mode. The top of the home page includes a fun, optional week view so you can see how you’ve been doing, similar to the weekly summary in Apple’s own Fitness app.

And there are some nice system integrations built into Awesome Habits, too. The app syncs with HealthKit, so it will automatically pull in information like workouts, mindful minutes, and nutrition information from other apps you’re already using. This makes keeping up with those habits even easier. There’s also Shortcuts support, an Apple Watch app, and different sizes of home screen widgets so you can track your habits the way you like best. And of course, all the app’s information syncs over iCloud to keep all of your devices up-to-date. (It’s available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.)

In case you can’t tell, I’ve had a wonderful experience with Awesome Habits over the past couple of months. It’s so much fun to use and look at, which motivates me to keep my tracking updated. I’ve used it to reinforce some habits that I really care about and even form a couple of new ones. Every time I fill that big ring at the top of the app, I get a small burst of joy knowing that I’ve put in the effort to become a little bit more like the person I want to be today.

Awesome Habits is free to download. The app’s subscription option, Awesome Habits Premium, unlocks the ability to create unlimited habits, access all of your statistics in the history tab, customize the looks of your habits and the app itself, and more. At $2/month, $13/year, or $23 for a lifetime subscription, I think it’s well worth the price. I’m subscribed to the annual plan so that I can continue to support Michael’s work into the future.

If you’re into habit tracking, or just want to try forming some new behaviors to help achieve your goals, I highly recommend checking out Awesome Habits. It’s been amazing for me, and I hope will be for you, too.

Everlog

Being a creature of habit, I don’t tend to change up my tech routine very often. Once I find a workflow that clicks for me, I usually stick with it. Why fix what isn’t broken?

But lately, for one reason or another, I’ve found myself venturing out and trying new apps. Some are aides in my personal goals and self-fulfillment. Some are more practical than anything else. And some are just for fun.

I’ve found this process of researching and trying new apps to be really enjoyable and inspiring. So I thought I’d share a handful of the ones that I’ve been integrating into my daily use lately, along with the methods I use to find the tool that’s right for me.

Rather than a long list, I’ll be writing up a short post on each app and publishing them as I go. First up is Everlog, a journaling app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac made by Wessley Roche.

Journaling is a practice that I’ve had many starts and stops with over the years. I find keeping a journal to be really helpful when I make the time for it, and I go on long stretches of being really consistent with the discipline, but then I inevitably let it go after a while. So I’m trying once again to establish a habit of journaling, and that means finding the right app for the job.

I’ve used any number of journaling tools over the years, from a simple Pages document all the way up to Day One, the golden standard for journaling apps. But none of them have ever quite clicked for me long-term.

What I need is an app that’s totally focused on journaling—so not a full-on word processor or text editor—but isn’t bogged down with a bunch of distracting bells and whistles. I don’t want inspiring quotes, journal prompts, or “on this day last year” memories. I just want to open an app and start writing.

That’s exactly what Everlog offers. The app takes a date-based approach to journaling, grouping your entries by day and displaying them on a calendar. Each date has an indicator underneath to let you know that you wrote an entry that day, which I find quite motivating in building up my journaling practice.

The text editor in Everlog is very straightforward and supports Markdown, which is my preferred way of writing. But if you don’t use Markdown (or don’t even know what that is), don’t worry. It includes basic text editing tools like bold, underline, lists, and links. And it gives the option to attach photos to your entries if you like that sort of thing.

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Apologies that I can’t show you all of my journal entries! 😄

Besides the editor and the calendar-based list of entries, there isn’t much more to Everlog. There’s a sidebar where you can organize your entries into multiple journals for different areas of your life and even tag them with special labels. (I haven’t taken advantage of this feature yet, but I intend to.) And there are a few settings for adjusting the appearance of the app and locking your entries behind Face ID or Touch ID if you’d like. That’s really it.

And that’s what makes Everlog work so well for me. It’s a simple, well-designed, focused utility that does one thing really well: journaling. Which is exactly what I set out to find.

I actually came across the app on Twitter when it was in TestFlight beta over a year ago, but I didn’t have a daily journaling habit at the time, so it wasn’t really for me. When I recently started my search for a new journaling tool, I remembered Everlog and sought it out on Indie Apps Catalog to give it a proper try. I’m glad that I did.

The app is free if you keep your journal on a single device, but I want my entries synced via iCloud across all my devices, which requires a subscription to Everlog Premium ($2/month, $18/year, or $41 for lifetime access). The subscription also includes the aforementioned abilities to create multiple journals, tag entries, lock your journal with Face ID/Touch ID, and change the appearance of the app—all worthwhile features. And, of course, subscribing also supports Wesley, an indie app developer, as he continues to work on Everlog into the future.

I’m halfway through my two-week free trial of Everlog Premium, and I plan to pay the subscription fee when the time comes. This one has really impressed me, and I’m becoming more and more confident that it will be a good fit for many years of journaling to come.

You can download Everlog for free on the App Store.