THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I spent the last month setting up a new community for the MacSparky audience. I'm not going to walk you through the build today. That's a piece for another week. What I want to tell you about is where the actual decisions came from. I worked through option after option. Names, structures, pricing, rooms, access tiers, onboarding flow. By the end I had a draft set labeled A through H. Yes, eight versions. I went in deep. Claude was useful for a lot of that....
7 days ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I got beta access to the new Siri AI and the first thing I asked was, “Can you check the weather for where I’ll be this weekend?”. I’m going on vacation. I never told Siri that. It read my calendar, figured out I’d be in Hawaii, and gave me the forecast. Old Siri would have read me the weather at home, or handed me a list of web results and wished me luck. That one answer tells you most of what changed. For years, the truth is that Siri made a fine kitchen...
14 days ago • 5 min read
THE ROBOT ASSISTANT FIELD GUIDE Purchase the Robot Assistant Field Guide Get 10% Off with Code: STILL-TIME-ROBOT Hi Friend, Over the past few weeks I've been getting the same question from a lot of people: "Is it too late to get the Robot Assistant Field Guide?" No. Not even close. And actually, the timing is interesting. Apple's new Siri AI features are impressive. I've been using them, and I genuinely mean that. But they don't come close to what you can build with this system. Siri doesn't...
17 days ago • 1 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Back in 2017, the night before the WWDC keynote, I wrote a short post about table stakes. I’d spent a year living on the iPad, and a lot of it still felt like swimming upstream. My argument was that fixing the iPad’s file management and multitasking wasn’t the impressive part of the story. It was the price of admission. As I put it back then, that’s the starting point, not the ending one. In a few days, we’ll get another WWDC keynote, and I keep coming back...
21 days ago • 3 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH My new podcasts with Chris Bailey Hi Friend, I'm proud to announce I just released a new podcast, and I've been wanting to tell you about it for months. It's called Intentional AI, and it's a show about using AI to actually get your work done. Not the doom. Not the hype. The practical, useful stuff that gives you your time back. The origin story for this goes back to my co-host, Chris Bailey, and me looking, in vain, for a show like this. Everywhere we looked, the AI...
24 days ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, At the top of my daily note, there are five little checkboxes. Shop. Bonsai. Exercise. Reading. Meditation. They aren't on the calendar. They have no time blocks assigned. They just sit there. For a while, I thought of them as "non-negotiables". Every box had to get checked every day. That was the deal I made with myself. But it started to feel like a burden, and I kind of lost the thread. I love all five of them. The shift happened gradually. I started...
28 days ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, The first movies were shot from a theater seat. The camera sat where the audience would have sat. The actors moved across the frame like they were on a stage, and the shot didn't change for the whole picture. You were watching a play that someone had happened to have filmed. It took years before folks had the idea to put the camera on the stage. That single move turned a recorded play into cinema. I think we're in the silent film era of AI right now. Most of...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I've been wearing an Apple Watch since 2015. The face problem hasn't changed. That sounds like a complaint, and it is, but I want to be specific about it. The Apple Watch has changed enormously over ten years. The hardware is faster. The health features have saved lives. The battery on my Ultra runs for a couple of days. The watch is great. The faces are still a mess. For years, I used the Explorer face. It shipped with the first cellular Apple Watch in 2017...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, The first time I installed TextExpander, it changed how I used my Mac. Snippets I typed twenty times a day became three keystrokes. It wasn’t the most powerful text utility on the Mac. There were heavier options out there. But TextExpander hit the spot: the feature was powerful enough to be useful and simple enough to use every day. That’s a hard place to land. Wispr Flow has done the same thing for dictation. I’ve been dictating into Macs for years. I’ve...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read