Nonlinear Growth

One of my biggest priorities over the past year has been to slow down. After wearing a bit thinner than I was comfortable with in 2021, I committed myself to not overcommit myself in 2022. To set aside time just for me and for my family rather than taking on as much external responsibility as I could handle. This turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

The effect on my mental health was stark. I’m really good at putting too much pressure on myself, and I didn’t realize what an impact it had on me until I got out from under it. I’ve been much more present this past year, not to mention more pleasant to be around. I appreciate things more deeply than I used to. I like myself more now, which is an odd feeling—but one that I’m proud of.

It’s been surprisingly great for my work, too. Without the haze of anxiety hanging over me all the time, I’ve been able to think more clearly and, ironically, get more done. My output last year was the best it’s been in a long time thanks to my decision to do less.

But the area I’ve seen the most improvement in is my ability to regulate my reactions to the things that happen to me. Before, my immediate response to any stressor was an overwhelming feeling of anxiety. I literally learned to recognize the sensation of cortisol being released in my brain. I would go into situations preemptively stressed out about what was going to happen, and then when it actually happened, I would stress again. It was a brutal cycle.

Once I slowed down and reclaimed some of my mental bandwidth, I found that I had more control over that urge to melt down. Instead of feeling dread when something unexpected happened, I learned to face it, adapt to it, and carry on. Every single thing didn’t seem like a disaster anymore.

This was quite freeing; it literally felt like a weight had been taken off of my shoulders. I didn’t have to be afraid of life anymore.

I could look at unforeseen obstacles as challenges rather than roadblocks. I could exercise flexibility and accept the things outside of my control. Basically, I could approach the world in a healthy way, and I am so thankful for that.

Over the past year, I’ve seen these benefits grow and manifest in so many different ways. My quality of life has improved. I saw myself change to the point that I felt like a totally different person.

That is, until something happened recently that reminded me just how much I’m still very much the same.

The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is an extremely busy time at the church. We do a lotaround Christmastime here. In previous years, I would spend the season feeling anxious about everything I needed to do. This time around, though, I was feeling much more on top of things thanks to my being in a better mental state and some careful planning.

Then the unexpected happened. A wrinkle came up out of the blue, and it threw me off. I wasn’t prepared for my plans to change, and I really wasn’t prepared for my reaction to my plans changing.

I started to stress. I felt the familiar rush of cortisol coursing through my brain. My mind got foggy; I tensed up. I was immediately back in the place I’d been too many times before.

The anxiety I was feeling in that moment was compounded by something new: disappointment in myself. I’d come so far! How could I let it get to this point again? I was frustrated not only with the situation, but with myself for reacting the way I did.

Thankfully, my relapse was short-lived. It was rough for about a half-day before my better instincts kicked in. Even though I experienced that moment of intense stress, the fortitude I’d developed over the past year helped me recover relatively quickly and get a handle on myself. In reality, the thing that had set me off wasn’t that big of a deal, and I took care of it competently.

Still, it was a humbling experience. After keeping my emotions in check so well for so long, I was shocked at my capacity for reversion. I thought I was cured; turns out, not so much.

As much progress as I’ve made (and will continue to make), I’m not immune to my own frailty. I’m still human, after all. There will be days when I don’t react to things the way I would like to, and there’s only so much I can do to control that.

That doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying. I’m still quite proud of the ways I’ve grown over the past year, and I’m appreciative of how my life has improved as a result. One setback doesn’t negate the many steps I’ve taken in the right direction. One bad day can’t take away how far I’ve come.

It’s the same for all of us. Growth isn’t always linear; it doesn’t necessarily move in a straight line. We work to improve ourselves, and often we succeed. Sometimes, we don’t. But we can’t let that stop us from trying. It’s the trying that counts.

Hopefully, in the long run, we’ll be able to look back and see the ways we’ve grown. We may not notice the inches we’re gaining day by day. But eventually, we’ll look up and realize we’re in a completely different place than where we started, even if we took a couple of steps backward along the way.

So don’t give up. If you’ve had a setback, let me be first to tell you: I’ve been there. We all have. But we don’t have to stay there. We can keep going.

My hope for each of us this year is that we’ll all experience growth in the ways that we need it, as messy as that growth may be. Happy new year, friends.

My Creative Output This Year

One of my big goals for 2022 was to invest more time and effort into creative outlets. My writing habit really suffered because of the pandemic, and I wanted to be purposeful about tapping into that side of myself again. Now that the year is coming to a close, it’s time to look back and see how I did.

To start, I challenged myself to publish a blog post at least once every month, which I was able to do. Most of my articles centered on technology. I wrote a series about indie apps that I’ve been enjoying, a couple of posts about the color options on Apple’s devices, and entries about a few other tech-related things happening in my life, like buying a new Mac. Tech’s been front-of-mind in my free time this year, and it’s been fun to express that here on the blog.

Aside from blogging, I’ve also been putting out a lot of podcast episodes with my friend Sigmund. Each week on Magic Rays of Light, we discuss everything happening in the world of Apple TV. I never saw myself becoming a regular podcaster, but I feel like I’ve gotten more comfortable in front of the mic this year. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’m proud of what we’re making.

On the work side of things, a good amount of my creative energy has gone into building and continually working on the church’s new website, which launched early this year. I didn’t realize what an undertaking that would be, but it’s paid off significantly in my day-to-day work of keeping things updated and looking nice. I feel like I’ve gotten into a solid groove of staying on top of what’s happening and keeping church members informed, which also requires me to generate a ton of promotional materials.

We started a church newsletter a couple of months ago, and that’s been a fun challenge to put together. It’s powered by the same tool that I used to build the website, so everything’s nice and cohesive. Coming up with the system to make it all work was a refreshing creative exercise, as is actually creating the newsletter each week.

I’ve also been blessed with the opportunity to preach several times this year, including for the first time on a Sunday morning at my church. Sermon-writing is a whole process unto itself, and it works a totally different part of my brain than any of my other work. I’m always so grateful to get to do so.

So that’s been my creative output this year: blogging about tech, podcasting about Apple TV, building the church website, publishing the newsletter, and writing sermons. At any given moment, I’ve felt like I could be doing more, but looking back, it’s been quite a lot. I’d say I accomplished my goal of exercising my creativity this year, especially when it comes to my personal writing.

Another goal I had for 2022 was putting less pressure on myself. That might seem counterproductive to upping my creative output, but I actually found that the two went hand-in-hand. By setting my goal pretty low at one blog post per month, I gave myself space to build the practice back up without getting stressed out. Instead of a chore, it was something fun and enjoyable, as it should be.

Getting back into writing has been one of the highlights of my year. To everyone who read, shared, or responded to something I wrote, thank you so much. You were a part of me reconnecting with this thing I love, and that means the world to me.

Looking ahead to next year, I hope to keep up my writing habit and publish at least as often as I did this year, if not more. I’d like to keep writing about technology, because that’s what I’m passionate about. But I think I’d also like to write about other topics that interest me. I’m not sure exactly what that looks like yet, but I plan to explore it more in the coming year. And I’m sure I’ll continue my creative efforts through podcasting and work as well.

Who knows what the new year may bring? I’m sure it’ll have its creative challenges, and I look forward to facing them head-on. 2022 has been a productive year of flexing my creative muscles and building some good writing habits. Here’s to more of that in 2023.

Mastodon

For a variety of reasons, many people I respect and enjoy interacting with have shifted away from Twitter in recent weeks. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of the service’s issues here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m now on Mastodon.

I don’t sign up for new social media services very often. To be honest, I was hesitant to create a Mastodon account and give myself another feed to keep up with. But enough people that I want to hear from are there, so I decided to give it a try, and so far, I love it!

The energy on Mastodon is quite fun; it all feels very new and untainted by the ills of for-profit services. I check my Mastodon feed not out of a sense of compulsion but because I actually enjoy it. That’s a great feeling.

There’s still a lot to figure out. For example, I’m not settled on which app I’d like to use, so I’m open to suggestions. If you’re on Mastodon, let’s connect! I think this is going to be a good thing.

Up Ahead

Countdown apps have been around since the dawn of the App Store. Even before smartphones were a thing, people marked off days on their wall calendars to count down to a big event. I’m not sure what people used before wall calendars, but I’m sure they had some way to keep track of how many days stood between them and whatever it was they were looking forward to.

The truth is that humans love countdowns.

I’ve personally never gotten into these sorts of tools, but when Up Ahead by Daniel Gauthier came out recently, I had to give it a try based on its unique design alone. The app is beautiful. And in case you can’t tell from the fact that I’m writing a blog post about it, Up Ahead ended up sticking for me.

As I’ve previously written about, I use a combination of Calendar, Reminders, and my day planner Structured to keep track of events and tasks. But even with this combination, I found that there was a still a hole in my setup. (Am I destined to keep finding apps that fill smaller and smaller gaps in my life for the rest of my days? It’s a possibility.)

There are events that I look forward to but don’t necessarily want taking up space in my calendar. These are things like movie and TV show premieres or events in games that I play. But because I don’t have a system for recording them, they often end up slipping through the cracks. I realize too late that a movie I want to see comes out tomorrow and tickets are sold out, or that I’ve missed something cool in Pokémon Go because I wasn’t paying attention.

That’s where a countdown app like Up Ahead can come in handy for me. I now have a place to put events that aren’t urgent or even all that consequential but still worth keeping track of.

Of course, I also use Up Ahead to count down to big events like my wife’s birthday and trips we’re planning, but that’s mostly just to add to the anticipation. That stuff is too important not to be front-and-center on my calendar. However, a continual countdown is a fun way to keep those important events in mind as they get closer.

So even though I started out skeptical that I would have any use for Up Ahead, its gorgeous design and usefulness combine to make something that I enjoy opening every day. It’s even made its way onto my home screen. That’s why I decided to write up this quick overview of the app’s features and what I love about it, just in case you might find some use for it, too.

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The Up Ahead timeline features all of your upcoming events.

Up Ahead’s main feature is the timeline, a running list of all of your events. As you scroll through your timeline, you’ll see how many days are left until an event occurs and, if applicable, how many gap days there are between events. The timeline is a simple, straightforward way to see what’s happening and what’s coming up.

Of course, the timeline is only useful once you’ve added your events to it. In the bottom right corner of the timeline is a + button that opens the New Event pane. This screen is full options for customizing an event before adding it to your timeline.

Events in Up Next have the following properties:

• Name

• Date

• Category

• Color

• Pattern

Naming an event is pretty straightforward. You can call it whatever you like. Assigning a date can be as simple as picking the day that you’re counting down to, but Up Ahead also gives you some options. You can add a time to your event in the bottom right corner of the date picker, and you can set an end date if the event lasts more than one day. Finally, events can repeat on a regular basis every week, every two weeks, every month, or every year. (Yearly events are a great way to remember loved ones’ birthdays!)

Each event is also assigned a category, which is represented by a symbol. There are lots of symbols to choose from with a search box to help you find just what you’re looking for. Categories might seem at first like a simple way to add a bit of flair to the timeline (which they certainly do), but there’s more to them than that. They allow you to organize your events into groups, and that organization is very useful once your timeline is full of events. At any time, you can filter the timeline to only show events from a certain category.

For example, I have a category in Up Ahead for upcoming TV show debuts, represented of course by the TV icon. If I want to look at a list of just my TV-related events, I can tap the filter button in the top left corner of the timeline, choose the TV icon, and voila. Now I see a list of my upcoming TV shows in a single, clean timeline.

Categories also come in handy when using Up Ahead’s widgets, which we’ll get into later. Suffice it to say that organizing your events into categories from the start will pay dividends for you down the line.

I find it interesting that categories are assigned an icon but not a color. Personally, I prefer for all of the events in a given category to have the same color, but Up Ahead allows you to set any color for an event regardless of its category.

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Up Ahead has a variety of fun patterns.

Beyond color and category icon, you can customize the look of your events with patterns. These background decorations for your events come in all varieties and are unlocked as you perform certain tasks in the app. This gives Up Ahead a bit of gamification and encourages users to keep exploring. I’ve personally unlocked 20 patterns so far but hope to discover more. They’re quite a bit of fun to collect, and you can always check your progress in the pattern gallery.

Creating events and keeping track of them in the timeline are the big features of Up Ahead, and in that sense, it’s pretty similar to other countdown tools you might have seen before. But for me, it’s the small details and design considerations that really set the app apart from the crowd.

I love the look of the timeline and the way it invites you to look forward to the events you’re planning. The timeline can also be customized to only show the details you’re interested in and to format dates in the way that makes the most sense to you. If you like customizing apps to your liking, Up Ahead offers a handful of color themes and app icons to choose from, too.

Widgets are another feature of Up Ahead that I really appreciate. The Countdown widget allows you to select a particular event and add its countdown to your home or lock screen. And the Coming Up widget lists whatever’s next in your timeline. The Coming Up widget can be filtered by category, so you can have one widget listing upcoming TV shows and another for holidays or whatever else you’re looking forward to. Personally, I have a Coming Up widget on my phone so I can see the next three events on my timeline without opening the app.

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The Coming Up widget is my favorite way to quickly check in on my next few events.

Up Ahead also offers three Shortcuts actions: Create Event, Get Next Event, and Get Days Until Event. I haven’t had a chance to try these out in my own shortcuts yet, but I imagine they can be quite useful, and they show the amount of care and effort that went into the app.

And I think that’s what sticks out to me about Up Ahead. Yes, it’s useful, and I appreciate its utility. But more than that, I appreciate it as a tool that’s been meticulously crafted. The developer really put his heart into Up Ahead, and it shows on every screen. There’s a consideredness and a whimsy to the app that I can’t help but be drawn in by.

The fact that the developer cares so much makes me hopeful for its future, too. Up Ahead has already received its first big update, the Low-Hanging Fruit Update, which added some nice customization options. And Daniel Gauthier has put out a list other potential updates in a sort-of loose road map that makes me very excited for what’s to come.

Of course, there are a few things I hope to see added to the app. Right now, it’s iPhone-only, and I’d like to see it come to more devices. I can run the iPhone app on my iPads and Macs, but it’s a bit of a limited experience. And I really think this is the kind of tool that makes sense on the Apple Watch. I’d love to be able to scroll my timeline on my wrist.

iCloud syncing is another feature I think Up Ahead is in need of. Right now, the app automatically backs up events to iCloud Drive for safekeeping, but it doesn’t sync events across devices. As someone who likes having all of my information everywhere, I’ve been able to turn this backup system into a sort of manual sync, but it’s clunky and not ideal. I imagine that if the app ever expands beyond the iPhone, iCloud sync will come along with it.

Finally, I’d like the ability to share events with other people. The app will generate a nice image of an event that you can share with others, but you can’t actually send someone an Up Ahead event that they can add to their device. Shared events and even shared categories would be a welcome addition in a future update.

As it is today, Up Ahead is a wonderful countdown app that I so enjoy using. Its design is impeccable, and the experience of using the app only adds to my excitement for the events I’m counting down to. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to give Up Ahead a try and see how much fun countdowns can be when they’re done this well.

Up Ahead is available on on the App Store as free download. An in-app subscription to Up Ahead Plus includes unlimited events, repeating and multi-day events, widgets, and more for $1.50/month, $10/year, or a one-time payment of $30.

Apple’s New Color Story

This is an update to my article on Apple’s color offerings going into the fall hardware season. Now that things have settled down a bit from the big announcements, I think it’s time to analyze Apple’s new color story.

Apple Watch

My biggest complaint about the Apple Watch Series 7 was that there was no neutral color option for the aluminum models. That problem has been fixed this year, with silver joining starlight, midnight, and red in the Apple Watch lineup. I’m really happy with this set of choices, though I know some might be disappointed that the blue and green finishes have gone away. Personally, I prefer an accessory that can go with any outfit over a bold color. But if you loved one of those finishes, I certainly feel for you.

The Apple Watch SE comes in silver, starlight, and midnight, which is a great range of choices for such an affordable product. I’ve seen these SEs in action, and they are really good. They’re going to sell well this holiday season.

The Apple Watch Ultra offers no color options, which is not a complete surprise for a high-end Apple device. I imagine the space black titanium finish will come back at some point, but for this year, silver titanium will have to do.

iPhone

The iPhone 14 still doesn’t offer a true neutral color option like silver or black, which is disappointing. However, I do think that midnight looks more neutral in glass than aluminum, so maybe a black iPhone isn’t quite as necessary. I still think there are iPhone users who’d like a true white option, though.

As far as the colorful options on the iPhone 14, we’ve got red, blue, and purple. I love the pale look of the purple and blue phones, but I’ve heard some people complain that they’re too washed out. They definitely don’t match the rich red finish, but if I were an iPhone 14 user, I’d be delighted by that purple myself.

The pro iPhones come in space black, silver, gold, and deep purple this year. That deep purple is gorgeous, both in photos and in person. I love it. Silver and gold are mostly unchanged, which is fine because they’ve looked great for a long time. Space black is a huge improvement over graphite. It’s much darker both on the stainless steel sides and the back glass. I thought I would go with deep purple this year, but the surprise of the space black won me over.

The pro iPhone color options are better this year than any previous year. My only complaint is that I can’t buy an Apple Watch to match my space black iPhone without spending $1,300 on an Hermès version. That’s not happening. Hopefully space black fully replaces graphite on the stainless steel Apple Watch Series 9 next year.

iPads

This year’s iPad updates caused a lot of commotion in the Apple community, but one opinion that seemed to be universally shared was an appreciation for the color offerings on the tenth-generation iPad. The blue, pink, and yellow hues look rich and fun, and then there’s a silver option for those who prefer something more subtle. They nailed it.

The iPad Pro comes in space grey and silver, as usual. I know some iPad Pro users wish for more colorful options on the higher end, but I just don’t see it happening. In Apple’s world, pros don’t get to have fun like that.

The rumors are pointing to no new Macs this year, so I guess that part of the story will have to wait for another day. I don’t expect the color options on Macs to change much anytime soon, though I’d love to be wrong.

Takeaways

All in all, I’m much happier with this lineup than last year’s. There’s always room for improvement, including a wider array of colors on the standard iPhone line. I’d also like to see silver or space grey return with the iPhone 15 and space black replace graphite on the Apple Watch Series 9. But this year was certainly a correction for Apple’s color story. Hopefully they continue that trend into 2023.