Mona

My favorite Mastodon app, Mona, is now available on the App Store! This is a big day for the app and for its wonderful developer, Jonny Kuang. I’ve had the privilege of testing it out for the past few months, so I thought today I’d share a few of the reasons Mona is my Mastodon app of choice.

• Design: Mona is a good-looking and easy-to-use app. It fits in with the current design of Apple platforms while still maintaining a visual identity of its own. The iconography is straightforward and easy to understand. The app isn’t too opinionated in its design, but it isn’t bland, either. I love the way it feels to use Mona.

• Timeline Media: Many Mastodon apps have struggled to get this right, but Mona nails it from the start. Photos are uncropped and full-size if you want them to be (which I do). Videos autoplay silently. And GIFs loop like they were born to do.

• Threads: If someone you follow shares a response to another post, you often want to see the context of that conversation. This is where timeline threads come in handy, and Mona does a great job of displaying them. Threads look natural in the timeline, encouraging continued conversation.

• Quote Posts: While quote posting isn’t an official Mastodon feature yet, it’s fully functional in Mona. The gives you the ability to quote a post rather than simply reblogbing it so that you can add your own commentary before sharing. And quote posts look awesome in the timeline, too.

• Grouped Notifications: Mastodon is all about interaction, and interaction means lots of notifications. Mona helps you keep your notifications tidy by grouping similar ones together. If you get multiple reposts or favorites on a post, they’ll be grouped together into a single line of notifications, saving screen space and leaving room for other notifications like replies.

• Customization: Mona works great out of the box, and I’m sure lots of people will enjoy it without ever touching a single setting. But for those like me who love tinkering, Mona is endlessly customizable. You can change everything about the app from the navigation tabs to the actions under each post to the color of every element on the screen. There’s even a vibrant community of people sharing themes for Mona to make it look even cooler. You can make the app into exactly the Mastodon app you want, which is just amazing.

• Accessibility: An app can only be considered truly great if it is accessible to everyone. Mona is a shining example of an tool made for all. It’s built from the ground up to be used completely with VoiceOver and includes numerous accessibility options in-app as well. (Accessibility is the topmost category in Mona’s settings.) I’m happy to support an app knowing that it’s inclusive in its design and can be enjoyed by everyone.

These are some of the big reasons why I’m using Mona every day. There are many, many more, but I’ll save those for another day. It truly is an incredible app, and I’m so happy that it’s now available to the world. I highly recommend you give it a try and see if it’s a good fit for you, too.

Mona is available as a free download on the App Store and offers basic functionality at no cost. Additional features can be unlocked on a single device by purchasing Mona Pro ($10) or on all of your devices by purchasing Mona Pro Max ($16), which includes Family Sharing. Those who have previously purchased Jonny’s Twitter client Spring can purchase Mona Pro Max at a discounted price of $9. More details about premium Mona features are available here.

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Complete side note: I somehow made my way into Mona’s App Store/press kit screenshots with my cringey Fast and Furious joke. 😅

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The Fast Saga Movies Make No Sense

I feel like I should start this post with an apology. This isn’t the sort of content you usually come here for. But I’ve had a rant building up in my head for years, and after the recent title reveal of the franchise’s final entry, I can no longer remain silent.

There is no logical coherence—none whatsoever—to the naming of the many, many sequels to 2001’s The Fast and the Furious.

My complaint is completely unrelated to the plot of the films, which I actually quite enjoy. Considering the series is a multi-decade action/racing juggernaut with a good deal of soap opera drama thrown in, we can forgive the odd plot hole, dropped storyline, or retconned fake death. After all, the main purpose of these movies is to have fun; narrative is secondary.

But the titles, they’re just unforgivably bad. And considering the fact that these names are how people will be referring to these films forever, you would expect the creative teams to have done a better job.

Let’s briefly walk through each entry in the series together and consider the franchise’s naming scheme, to the extent that there is one.

• The Fast and the Furious (2001): This is a great name for a movie. It tells you everything you need to know going in: There’s going to be racing, and there’s going to be drama. 10/10.

• 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003): The too/two pun is a little played out, but I’ll give them this one. At the very least, it’s clear that this is a sequel to the first movie.

• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006): At the time, this seemed more like a spin-off than an actual sequel. But Tokyo Drift is a pretty cool name for a movie, and this film gives us our first indication of what the series is called: The Fast and the Furious. Not bad.

• Fast & Furious (2009): This is where things start to go off the rails naming-wise. The fourth film in The Fast and the Furious franchise is called Fast & Furious? Like, the original name but without the “the”? Maybe it was supposed to be edgy or represent a new, more focused direction for the films, but to me, it just seems lazy.

• Fast Five (2011): We’re going back to the basics. No fancy puns, and no sharing names with a previous, separate film. This movie is about fast cars, and it’s the fifth one. Makes total sense.

• Fast & Furious 6 (2013): What in the world were they thinking here? They go back to the original movie’s title, drop the “the,” and add a six to the end of it. Is it the sixth movie following Fast and Furious? No, that one was only two movies ago. You have to add the silent “the”s back into this one to understand it. This movie name is stupid and should feel bad.

• Furious 7 (2015): Again, the movie titles work best when they are simple. You get some “fast” or some “furious” and a number. It’s all you need. Why mess with perfection?

• The Fate of the Furious (2017): The puns have gotten completely out of control. Someone figured out that an F next to an 8 kind of sounds like “fate,” so they ran with it. It’s not a good play on words, people. The title also implies that this is the final movie since it reveals the characters’ fate. But of course, there are three more movies after this. Or maybe two if you ask Vin Diesel, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

• Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019): The saga’s first and so far only spin-off. Hobbs & Shaw tells us who the main characters are, so that tracks. But confusingly, this film introduces a new name for the series. It’s no longer The Fast and the Furious, it’s just Fast & Furious. Okay then.

• F9: The Fast Saga (2021): This time, they didn’t even bother to pick one of their two F-words. It’s just F this time. You get it, right? The series is also now on its third title, switching to The Fast Saga. I have no idea what to call this loosely-related pile of movies anymore.

• Fast X (2023): As the series nears its end, the creators have decided to honor its legacy by switching to a fancy Roman numeral in the title. How many people are going to call this one Fast Ex? I do give them credit for not trying to make a “Fasten your seatbelts” pun, though. That took some self-control.

• Fast X: Part 2 (2025): And finally, we get to the last entry in the Fast Saga, and perhaps its most poorly-named. I guess ending a series on the number 11 would be awkward, so they decided to make Fast X a two-parter. Because what’s better than one number in the title of a movie? Two numbers.

It’s the second part of the tenth film in the most chaotically- and nonsensically-named franchise in movie history. If anyone remembers these films in 2045, it’s going to take ten solid minutes of searching to figure out which one we’re referring to in conversation. “Was that the one with the ‘the’ in the title or not?”

To be fair, it is very on-brand. The movies are stupid, fun, and shallow with no real message other than, “Cars are cool,” and, “Family is all you need.” But also, most of the villains are somehow related to the heroes, so maybe that last message is a bit murky.

I’m still going to watch the last movie though, both when it releases in 2023 and when it releases in 2025. Because if The Fast Saga—or whatever we’re calling it now—has taught me anything, it’s that explosions and car chases are awesome, and I’ll apparently watch them no matter what the movie’s called.

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Update on July 17, 2023:

During a discussion of the series on Mastodon, Marty Day helpfully pointed out that the Fast Saga films have completely different titles in Japan, and they are amazing. I wish they used these names internationally:

• Wild Speed (The Fast and the Furious)

• Wild Speed X2 (2 Fast 2 Furious)

• Wild Speed X3: Tokyo Drift (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift)

• Wild Speed MAX (Fast & Furious)

• Wild Speed MEGA MAX (Fast Five)

• Wild Speed: Euro Mission (Fast & Furious 6)

• Wild Speed: Sky Mission (Furious 7)

• Wild Speed: Ice Break (The Fate of the Furious)

• Wild Speed: Super Combo (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw)

• Wild Speed: Jet Break (F9)

• Wild Speed: Fire Boost (Fast X)

These titles are exciting and, importantly, distinct from one another. As long as they stick the landing with Fast X: Part 2—and I’m confident they will—these will become the canonical titles in my mind.

One Thing at a Time

As Katherine and I prepare for the arrival of our first child in August, I’m reminded of another time we went through a major life change together: planning our wedding. Well, really we were planning the wedding and building a house at the same time. People said that wasn’t a good idea, but it worked out.

That process was long, and it came in fits and starts. Sometimes, we felt like we were making major progress by the day. Invitations: check. Photographer: check. Check, check, check.

Other times, it seemed that we weren’t getting anywhere. Either things were taking longer than we wanted them to, or we just didn’t put in the time to make plans like we thought we should. Our process sometimes felt like it was stuck.

What I came to realize throughout that time was that we could only really focus on a single task at once. When we tried to multitask, we never got very far and usually ended up procrastinating. So getting it all done became a step-by-step process.

When a step went smoothly, this approach worked great. Again, it felt like things were getting checked off the list left and right. But if we hit a roadblock with whatever we were focused on, progress would come to a halt. We’d get that stuck feeling again.

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Standing in what would eventually become our living room.

There was a point during the summer of 2018 when we were trying to get construction started on the house, but the building company wasn’t allowed to begin until they got an approval from the state. The land was prepped; the workers were ready; the blueprints were in hand. A single document from the government would unlock a whole flurry of exciting activity that would move us in the direction of having a finished home.

We waited and waited for the approval to come in. One week passed. Two weeks. Three weeks. Every day, we hoped for the call that the company had started on construction so we could go see some sort of progression in our plans, but it didn’t come. We worried that it never would.

In the meantime, we did zero wedding planning. Our focus was completely directed towards getting the house started. We had a list of wedding stuff that needed to get done, and we had every intention of doing it. But the one thing we were working on wasn’t complete, so we couldn’t move on.

Finally, after a month of waiting, the approval came in. Our construction crew was able to start their work, and the house began to take shape. And as soon as it did, a funny thing happened: We were able to get back to wedding planning! We felt unstuck, and things started getting checked off the list again.

I’ll never forget that stuck feeling, though. It was unsettling. Borderline miserable, even. No matter how hard we tried, we could not move past the thing in front of us. There was no way around it. We had to go through, no matter how long it took.

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All the wedding planning was worth it.

We had to take things one step at a time. And we did eventually get it all done, one thing at a time. Our wedding was a beautiful day, and a couple of weeks later, we were able to move into our little blue house that we love so much. It all worked out great.

But if you had asked me during that month of waiting how things would turn out, my outlook wouldn’t have been so positive. I hated not being able to make progress. It made me feel anxious and powerless to change the situation. Sometimes, that’s just what life does to us.

Looking back, I’m thankful for the experience, not in and of itself, but because it prepared me to face these challenges during life changes in the future. Getting ready to have a baby is more daunting than anything I’ve ever done in my life. It’s a process that has its own bouts of progress interrupted by quiet lulls. I try not to let them bother me anymore, though. I know it’s all a part of it.

We’re taking it one step at a time: Nursery furniture. Family car. A stuck period when all we could focus on was our impending vacation. And then, suddenly, a huge rush of motivation that resulted in our baby registry finally coming together.

Every step is different and new because we’ve never done this before. But we’re loving all of it. And we’re getting there, one thing at a time.

Automation April: Creating Show Notes from GoodLinks

This month is the second annual Automation April, a celebration of automation on Apple platforms hosted by the team at MacStories. It’s a time for the community to share ideas and learn together as we try to make our devices work for us. And it’s a lot of fun.

I like to tinker with Shortcuts year-round. I’ve created several that have made my devices more personal and certain tasks much simpler in my daily workflows. But recently, I’ve been working on something that I thought might be beneficial to other people as well, and so I decided to share it as a part of this special month-long event.

My shortcut is called Show Notes from GoodLinks, and it’s meant to help podcasters, YouTubers, and other creators generate show notes automatically from content they’ve saved in GoodLinks. I’ve been using it for the past couple of months to quickly make episode notes for my podcast Magic Rays of Light, and it’s been really helpful.

How It Works

At a high level, Show Notes from GoodLinks pulls links from tags you select in GoodLinks, combines them with introductory and closing text that you provide, and saves the formatted show notes in the Notes app. It’s pretty simple when you break it down.

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The list of tags is the basis for your show notes.

It all starts with a list of the tags you’d like to pull from. You enter these tags when you first install Show Notes from GoodLinks, and the list can be edited anytime at the top of the shortcut. You can list as many tags as you like. I have eight tags in my list, and they correspond to the segments on my podcast. Some might just have a single podcast tag in GoodLinks that they’d like to pull from, and that works, too.

Once you’ve got your list of tags set, the shortcut checks to see where you’d like your show notes to be saved to. You can point the shortcut to an existing note, enter the name of a new note you’d like to create, or leave the note name blank and let the shortcut automatically generate a note for you. I have a persistent note called Show Notes that is updated every time I run the shortcut, but you can create a new note each time you run the shortcut if you prefer.

Next is the introductory text. Many podcasts and channels have a fixed bit of information that they like to include at the beginning of show notes, and that can be entered here. If you’d prefer to enter custom introductory text each time you run the shortcut, you can change this text variable to Ask Each Time. Either way, the shortcut adds your introductory text to the top of the show note.

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These two repeat loops bring your links in the show notes.

After the introductory text comes the main section: links. Using nested repeat loops, the shortcut will loop through each tag in your list and add every link in that tag to the show notes. It’s a lot of fun to watch your note magically fill with all the links you’ve been saving! At the end, you have a nice, clean list of all of your links.

Then the shortcut will optionally add closing text to the show notes. Like the introductory text, this can be the same every time you run the shortcut, or you can set it to Ask Each Time.

Finally, the shortcut will open your show notes so you can see them in all their glory.

That’s how Show Notes from GoodLinks works. It’s not too complicated, but it saves a lot of copying, pasting, and formatting that usually goes into making show notes. Since I’ve started using it, I’ve been able to store all of my links nicely in GoodLinks and quickly extract them when the time comes.

Side Note: The Problem with Tags

This shortcut does highlight one issue with using tags as a primary organizational structure: Tags disappear when they have no content.

In this use case, that presents a problem because Show Notes from GoodLinks looks for the same tags each time it runs, but users will likely clear out their links from the app once their show notes have been created. Especially for shows that publish on a regular schedule, show notes are constantly being cleared out and started from scratch to keep the content fresh and relevant.

So if empty tags in GoodLinks disappear and the nature of show notes requires that links be deleted regularly, how does one ensure that the correct tags are available in GoodLinks each time the shortcut is run? This was an issue I had to work through when I first tried using GoodLinks for this purpose.

Here’s the solution I came up with: I added a random link to GoodLinks and tagged it with each of my tags, marked it as read, and then adjusted a couple of settings in GoodLinks to make it disappear. By choosing Hide Read Links in each tag view and changing the setting Badges > Links & Tags to unread only, I was able to hide this junk link and make my tags appear empty. But since they technically have a hidden link in them, the tags no longer disappear, even when they appear to have zero links. (I also changed the Mark As Read setting to Manual to make sure the links I want in my show notes don’t accidentally get marked as read and hidden.)

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You’ll want to adjust this toggle if you’re using a hidden link to create permanent tags in GoodLinks.

This solution also requires one adjustment to Show Notes from GoodLinks. The Get Links action has a parameter called Include Read Links that is on by default. If you use my solution to create empty tags in GoodLinks, you’ll want to toggle this parameter to off. Otherwise, the hidden junk link will be exported each time the shortcut is run.

Of course, the other option would be to manually recreate your tags each time they get cleared out, but that leaves a lot of room for error. It’s unfortunate that GoodLinks relies only on tags to organize links rather than allowing users to create custom, permanent folders. But that’s an option the developer is considering, so I hope it changes soon and I no longer have to rely on my workaround.

In the meantime, it works well. Now that it’s set up, I don’t even notice it anymore, but it is something to keep in mind when using this shortcut.

Next Steps

I created Show Notes from GoodLinks with the hope of making it useful to as many people as possible. In its current form, I think it’s something a lot of people could benefit from. One thing I love about it, though, is that it can also be adapted to fit other peoples’ specific use cases as well.

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My customized version of Show Notes from GoodLinks uses a dictionary rather than a list to store tags, allowing the addition of prefixes to links in the show notes.

One extension I’ve added to my own version of the shortcut is link prefixes. For certain segments of my podcast, I want links to have a word or phrase in front of them. If Sigmund and I are discussing a trailer on the podcast, I want to the word “Trailer:” to appear in front of the link in our show notes. I accomplished this by storing my GoodLinks tags in a dictionary rather than a list with the tags as keys and the prefixes as values. Then when I add those links to my show note, I can automatically put the prefix in front of them.

This shortcut can also be used with link-saving apps other than GoodLinks. I originally built it to work with Anh Do’s upcoming app Interlink before switching to GoodLinks. By changing one action (the Get Links action), the shortcut can pull links from Interlink when it’s released. I’ve also tried subbing in an action from Anybox in place of GoodLinks and believe it can work with a bit of finessing, though I ended up deciding not to pursue it myself. I’m hopeful the shortcut will be compatible with other apps in the future as well.

Another way I’ve customized the shortcut to fit my use case is by adding a Delete Links action at the end to remove all unread links from GoodLinks. This wasn’t something I was comfortable including in the public version of the shortcut because I didn’t want anyone to accidentally lose any data, but it’s saved me from having to go in and manually clear out GoodLinks every week. Just another example of getting my devices to do the work for me!

I’m sure there are many other ways Show Notes from GoodLinks can be customized to fit the needs of others. I’m always open to ideas, and if you end up giving the shortcut a try and putting on your own spin on it, I’d love to hear about it.

This is the first shortcut I’ve ever made that I felt like truly had a use case outside of my own personal workflow, and I’m happy to be sharing it. If you’d like, you can download Show Notes from GoodLinks and try it yourself. It’s saved me a ton of time and effort lately, and I hope it can do the same for someone else.

Thanks for reading, and happy Automation April!

Safari Extensions

It’s been a year and a half since Apple added Safari extension support to iOS and iPadOS, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how popular they are. If you’ve never used one, a Safari extension is a tool that adds functionality to the web browser on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. They’re really cool.

I recently revamped my approach to Safari extensions, removing a few that I didn’t find useful anymore and taking on a couple that I thought might make my browsing experience better. Here are the Safari extensions I’m using right now:

• Mapper: I use Apple Maps for navigating, but most address links online send you to Google Maps. Rather than copying and pasting addresses from the web, I use Mapper. It automatically redirects any Google Maps links to Apple Maps. This extension alone has saved me so much time and so many headaches. ($2 one-time purchase.)

• Vinegar: I enjoy watching YouTube videos, but I don’t love YouTube’s video player. Vinegar automatically replaces YouTube’s player with the standard Apple video player, which I find easier to use. I’ve been using this extension ever since it came out, and I can’t imagine watching videos online without it. ($2 one-time purchase.)

• Baking Soda: What Vinegar does for YouTube, Baking Soda does for other videos you come across in Safari. I love the ability to watch any video online in the standard Apple video player. ($2 one-time purchase, or available in a bundle with Vinegar for $3.)

• Noir: Some website offer a special dark mode to match your device’s display settings. For everything else, there’s Noir. It will detect when your device is in dark mode and automatically darken the websites you visit if they don’t have a dark theme of their own. ($3 one-time purchase on iPhone and iPad; separate $3 one-time purchase on Mac.)

• 1Blocker: I don’t have an issue with online ads per se. Everyone has to pay their bills. But some websites have gotten out of control with overwhelming, intrusive ads that keep me from enjoying the content. 1Blocker removes the ads on those sites while enabling me to allow them on the websites I know are respectful and just trying to keep offering good content. (Free ad-blocking; $15/year to unlock other features like blocking web and app trackers.)

• Banish: Banish blocks those annoying “Open in App” banners on websites like Reddit and Google Docs. Sometimes I just want to use the web! ($3 one-time purchase.)

• Hush: This is the latest addition to my collection, and it’s working great so far. Hush blocks cookie notice on websites so you don’t have to click the “Accept” button every time you shop online or read the news. (Free.)

• Web Inspector: There isn’t a built-in webpage inspector in Safari on iPhone and iPad, but that’s okay because Web Inspector fulfills that need nicely. I like this one because it includes the ability to search a page’s code for specific text, which makes it easy for me to find exactly what I need. (Free.)

• Amplosion: Have you ever clicked on a news article in Google results and been taken to a weird, Google-ified version of the page rather than the actual website? I haven’t for a long time, thanks to Amplosion. It redirects you away from AMP pages to the real sites you’re trying to access. ($2 one-time purchase.)

Most of these extensions are available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And last year, Apple added the ability to sync extensions across devices, making it easy for me to have a consistent Safari experience no matter what I’m using.

These tools have made web browsing a lot nicer for me. I’m glad that Apple added this extensibility to Safari, and I’m endlessly grateful to the developers who took the time to make these great tools.

Do any of these Safari extensions interest you? I’d love to know if you decide to try any on my list. And if I’m missing out on a good one, please let me know. Thanks for reading!