Apple's "Winback Offer" Wants Me to Start Using Apple Music Again…

Ever since I switched to Rdio and then Spotify, I rarely ever opened the iTunes app on my Mac other than to do the occasional iPhone-syncing (even that I rarely ever do recently). So I was a little bit taken aback when I opened it up and it showed me a screen similar to this:

Reddit user ashindn1l3 via MacRumors.com

Turns out, Apple has been rolling out a free month of subscription offers to convince users who once tried Apple Music but havent subscribed to subscribe to it. I once tried the 3-month subscription—I even paid for an extra month, but I never used Apple Music that much so I stopped and switched back to Spotify.

The offer is called "Winback" but Apple is not winning me back, sorry :(

I haven’t been as comfortable with using Apple Music as I have been with Spotify, mainly because of:

1. The lack of personalized playlists. I haven’t tried out Apple’s My New Music Mix playlist, but I have relied too much on Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Release Radar I can’t bring myself to build another set of playlists. Also, Daily Mix beats Apple Music out of the water.
2. Lack of automatic syncing with Last.fm. Nope, Last.fm is not dead yet, everyone. It’s alive and well, and I haven’t stopped using it since way back in 2009. “Scrobbling” to Last.fm on Spotify can’t be easier thanks to its built-in integration. I don’t think I can say the same with Apple Music. (Apologies for the plug, but, dear Reader, if you’re using Last.fm and would like to add me as a friend, feel free to visit my profile.)
3. Apple Music feels too bloated. Apple Music is integrated with iTunes, in which there is already a plethora of features such as apps, podcasts, my iTunes Library, so navigating to Apple Music is not the most intuitive thing in the world.

In terms of music streaming, I think Spotify wins over Apple Music any day. The Apple Music extra trial will end on July 21, but I don’t think I’ll be resubscribing to it. Sorry, Apple. Really appreciate the offer, though!

App excursions: Vellum for iPhone, an Art Gallery for Stunning, High-resolution Free Wallpapers

Price: Free, with paid upgrade option | Platform: iPhone | Developer: Merek Davis

I’m a stickler for eye-watering wallpapers. While iOS has a beautiful selection of stock wallpapers, the options are quite limited and can get boring over time. Sure, I can do the good, ol’ scouring the interwebz, but picking one from among an almost limitless option out of Google can become quite a daunting task. Sometimes they’re not even in high-resolution.

Enter Vellum, a free app that offers the wallpaper scouring job for you. Developed by the brilliant mind behind the popular photo editing app for iOS, Merek Davis, Vellum offers a curated selection of high-res wallpapers hand-picked by various digital artists and photographers.

Vellum's main collection selection screen.

When you open Vellum, you are greeted with wallpaper collections that you can look through to your heart’s content. There is also one dedicated Daily Wallpaper gallery that refreshes every 24 hours.

The "art gallery" of wallpaper called Stock & Render by Matt Mills.

Once you selected a collection, you’ll be shown a short paragraph describing the person behind the curation. For some reason this makes seeing each collection feel like visiting an art gallery of each respective artists and photographers. Once you find the wallpaper you like, can save it to your Photos app with a push of a button. Before you do, the app also provides you the option to apply blur (perfect for the home screen) as well as to preview how it looks on the home screen or lock screen. Mind you, the app itself cannot automatically set a wallpaper for you; you have to manually do it via Wallpaper option in the iOS Settings app just as you normally would.

See the one you like? Save it to Photos or blur it beforehand.

Vellum is a solid app about which I have almost no complaints. If I’m being picky, though, the couple milliseconds of time that the Daily Archive takes to load can get annoying, but it’s a pretty minor pet peeve considering how solid the app generally is.

Vellum is a free app for iPhone with a Rp29k ($1.99) premium upgrade options that allows ad removal and access to the Daily Wallpaper archive up to 4 weeks back. Try it and you’ll never have to worry about having the same wallpaper on your phone every single day.

Budget mouse and Hot Corners in macOS High Sierra are a match made in heaven—here's why

In my blog post about why I upgraded to Logitech MX Anywhere 2S, I’ve been using the cheaper budget mouse, the M221, for about a year. It’s a nicely designed little mouse capable of withstanding long, full-day use without hurting my wrists.

Sporting only three buttons, at a glance, the M221's features may seem to be so limited it's almost like a minimalist’s paradise. But if you know how to work around this limitation, as you can see in the next paragraph, you can actually do much, much more with it.

Enter Hot Corners

When I first learned about Hot Corners, I stupidly shrugged it off. Why would I ever use it when I have a superior multi-touch trackpad that can do much more? Oh, younger me, you don’t know just how wrong you are!

What Hot Corners basically is, is that it allows you to configure the four corners in your Mac screen as “hot spots” so that whenever your cursor hits them, it triggers a certain action such as start screensaver, launch Mission Control, show desktop, and more.

Here’s how you can configure Hot Corners on macOS High Sierra.

1. Launch System Preferences
2. Navigate to Mission Control
3. Click the Hot Corners button on the bottom left
4. Alternatively you can just press Command+Space to launch Spotlight and type in Hot Corners.

From the menu that appears, you can set up the actions that Hot Corners will trigger. Here’s how I have it set up.

(I leave the top two corners empty because I don’t want to accidentally trigger Hot Corners when I glide towards the Apple logo on the top left or Notification Center on the top right.)

This way, the mouse mimics a little of what the MacBook Air trackpad can do without me having to glide back and forth between my mouse and trackpad.

Say I’m reading a website in Safari. When I find an interesting quote from it, I can copy it, glide my cursor towards the bottom right corner of the screen to launch Mission Control, and then paste it on Bear. Or when I want to launch an app, I can do the same at the bottom left corner of the screen. All of this are done without moving my hand away from the mouse and thus interrupting my workflow.

Bonus tip: Magic trick using the middle click

An immensely useful feature that I think all budget mouse has built-in is a feature that can be very easily overlooked: the middle click. In a web browser, for example, the middle click lets you open a link in a new tab or closing a tab. Best of all, this trick works out of the box, saving you from the complications of a set-up process. Lifehacker has comprehensively written about the many uses of middle click and I recommend you check it out.

The middle click magic in action.

Albert Einstein once said, “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” Who knows that the same principle can also be applied to a budget mouse! A cheap mouse can do much more than you thought it can if you know how take full advantage of it.

I hope you find this post useful!

Should I Upgrade from a Budget Logitech Mouse to a Premium Logitech Mouse? (Spoiler: Yes!)

A computer mouse is an essential complementary tool almost everyone that works with a computer or laptop can have. Because of this, having one that’s reliable is definitely a must. But with a wide range of mice on the market that varies in size, color, and price, how should one go about hunting for that one trustworthy mouse? Should you just go for the cheapest out there or should you invest more for a premium one?

The budget Logitech M221 vs the premium Logitech MX Anywhere 2S.

I’ve just made a decision to update my mouse to one of the best rated mouse out that exists today after about a year or so using a quite reliable budget mouse. In this post, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on why I left my old Logitech M221 for a more premium Logitech MX Anywhere 2S, even though my heart still hasn’t moved on from the former. (Apologies for being overly dramatic!)

Before we get started, a disclaimer: this post is mainly written from a MacBook Air user’s perspective, but I do hope non-MacBook users can also learn a thing or two from this post!

The case for a budget mouse

The mouse that I’ve reliably used for the past year is the Logitech M221 Silent Mouse. It cost Rp160k when I bought it in mid-2017 and it’s been very reliable. It does everything that I require it to do, even at the bare minimum.

The everyday electric car that is the Logitech M221.

The M221 curvy design looks very good and rather cute; it almost looks like an everyday electric car! It also fits quite well in my small hands and I have almost no complaints navigating my cursor with it.

There is one built-in feature on all budget mouse that can be easily overlooked: the middle click. It can open links in a new tab, saving me from having to right-click and then left-clicking on the “Open in a new tab” contextual option. Once I’m done with the tab, I can then middle-click on the tab to quickly close it. All of this can be done without any kind configuration; it works out of the box. For me as someone who scours the social media for content, this feature is a priceless time-saver. (Whoever came up with this idea is a genius!)

Using the middle-click button to quickly open and close tabs in Safari.

The M221 and its Silent Mouse brethren, as the name suggests, sports a unique quiet feature that dampens the sound of the clicks and the scroll wheel. The name is a little misleading, though, because the clicking and scrolling sounds are still audible, albeit in a less annoying, high-pitched “click-clack” sound the way that most budget mouse have.

Why I decide to upgrade: the case against budget mouse

So if the M221 is enough, then why did I decide to switch?

One of my biggest annoyances about using the M221 is the need for a USB dongle. Having a dongle for someone who works with a laptop is troublesome because 1) it adds extra bulk to what should be a portable device, and 2) you can’t help but think that you will at one unfortunate point in time lose it.

Secondly, the M221 inconveniently runs on 2 AAA batteries. I’ve only changed the batteries on my M221 approximately 3 times during the past year but it doesn’t notify me when its running low on battery. My second battery died on me when I was out of town and I had to go for a battery run.

Thirdly, the more I’m using the M221 the more I realize its limitations. On my Mac, I work with multiple web browsers, sometimes even as many as four at the same time. I like to have all of them on full screen and I switch between them very often. To do this, I have to either use four-finger swipe on the trackpad or take advantage of the Hot Corners feature. (Hot Corners can be immensely useful when paired with a budget mouse, but lets save it for another post!) While useful, this method is far from practical and it can get very tedious over time.

I understand that these reasons are by no means conclusive and therefore force me to get another mouse. In fact, if I wanted to I can still use M221 for another year or so. But against my better judgment I decide to go ahead and give the MX Anywhere 2S a shot, which I got for almost six times the price (Rp810k).

Since then, the MX Anywhere 2S has become one of the best investments on a computer mouse Ive ever made.

Logitech MX Anywhere 2S: The best upgrade for a practical wireless mouse

If I say that the M221 is an everyday electric car, the MX Anywhere 2S is a classy, sleek sports car. When you hold it in your hand, you can really feel the difference: it looks, feels, and works like a premium mouse.

Whoever designed the MX Anywhere 2S is probably a part-time sports car designer.

In a nutshell, MX Anywhere 2S is an overpowered M221: it has everything that the budget mouse has to offer but better and more. The MX Anywhere 2S sports a total of seven buttons compared to the minimalistic three that the M221 offers. All seven of these, including the left-right "buttons" on the scroll wheel and the back-forward buttons on the left side, can be fully customized with an app called Logitech Options. I have no complaints about the app other than the fact that it's a third-party app that I have to manually install on my computer.

Logitech Options customization window. Works with budget mice, too!

Working with multiple windows open suddenly becomes a cinch. Whenever I have four full screen windows open, I can configure the two scroll wheel buttons via Logitech Options so when I move it to the right or the left, it switches windows quickly without me having to move my hand back and forth between the mouse and the trackpad or tediously put my cursor into Hot Corners.

The oh-so-very-useful middle-click button can now be assigned to any of the seven buttons, but I like to have it in the small button under the scroll wheel ("middle-ish click"?). It's worth noting that the scroll wheel in the MX Anywhere 2S doesn't register as a button; what it does is it mechanically switches between two scrolling modes: fast scrolling and precision scrolling. Peculiar, indeed!

The MX Anywhere 2S sports a solution for my biggest problem with the M221: the dongle. While it does provide me with a dongle as an option, it’s first and foremost a wireless mouse that connects via Bluetooth, therefore saving my MacBook Air its precious USB slot. The Bluetooth connects in a snap, too, with only a negligible lag when my MacBook Air wakes up from sleep. The only moment the MX Anywhere 2S requires a USB slot is when it’s running out of battery and I have to charge it with a micro-USB cable.

Speaking of batteries, Logitech claims the MX Anywhere 2S can last up to 70 days on a single charge. Ive only charged it once for approximately 4 hours, and the battery level—which, by the way, can be monitored via the aforementioned Logitech Options app—hasn’t gone down even a touch. It’s worth mentioning that this device has a non-removable battery built-in, which I personally think adds to the plus side of this badass excuse for a rodent.

What about the trackpad?

Despite being universally acclaimed as the best. Trackpad. Ever, relying fully on the MacBook Air trackpad is not really the best option for me, especially when I need to be using my laptop for a whole day. My fingers and wrists get uncomfortable after only an hour.

After using the MX Anywhere 2S for about two weeks, I can say that I do not at all regret investing such a premium price for a robust, extremely useful mouse that immensely improves my daily workflow. Will I go back to the M221? My answer is definitely not! The one time I will switch mice again is when I—God forbid—lose it or when I finally decide to upgrade to the ultimate god of a wireless mouse that is the Logitech MX Master 2S. But for now, Im pretty happy with the MX Anywhere 2S and I can see myself using it for a year or two ahead.

To mouse or to trackpad, that is the question.

So after such a long post, what’s the takeaway? If you think that your budget mouse is still reliable and can still do whatever task you require it to do, by all means, stick with it! It’s probably the right mouse for you. However, 1) if you work intensely with your laptop as your main arsenal, or 2) if you think that your existing mouse just doesn’t cut it, or 3) all of the above, budget allowing, do not hesitate to upgrade to a more premium mouse to greatly improve your workflow. It will be worth it in the long run!

And there you have it: my thoughts on how I feel after switching from a budget Logitech M221 Silent Mouse to the premium MX Anywhere 2S. I’m very interested to see how other people achieve productivity with their mice: do you feel the need to upgrade to a premium mouse? Or are you on the opposite side that doesn’t even need a mouse to do your work? Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments!

I Skipped Live-streaming WWDC 2018 and Here Are the Best Announcements that I Missed (But Am Still Excited About)

(Disclaimer: this post may be a little too late since WWDC 2018 is 3 days ago, but what the heck, I'm still excited about it!)

As an Apple fan (sans the '-boy' suffix), I’m feel obliged to watch all Apple keynotes year after year. But for the first time since 2010 I skipped streaming WWDC 2018 live. The reason? I slept! Hey, it's Ramadan and I need to take whatever hours I have at night I can to cover my reduced sleeping hours!

Thanks to the handy, 14-minute roundup by The Verge, I can catch up with everything that I missed from this year's 2-hour-plus-long WWDC. Here are some announcements that I find most interesting and will no doubt make my Mac and iPhone more useful or, in the least, look better.

macOS 10.14 Mojave 

It's official: the successor to High Sierra is called Mojave, named after the driest desert in North America. Apple announced a lineup of updates in macOS Mojave, but the one I’m most excited about is the all-new Dark Mode. While in High Sierra the so-called "dark mode" only affects the menu bar and the dock, Mojave's Dark Mode practically turns your Mac into "Batman" mode: most, if not all, of the UI elements—including the sidebar, windows, and even the Notification Center—will look more black.

Apple's Craig Federighi showcasing Finder in Dark Mode.

Complementing the Dark Mode is a new kind of wallpaper that Apple dubs "dynamic wallpapers". They automatically adjusts themselves according to the time of day, so they're light during the day and dark during the night. From all the beta demos I’ve seen on YouTube, both Dark Mode and dynamic wallpapers look so sleek and I can’t wait to give them a try!

The Mac App Store will get a massive update, too. Gone are the old, bland days of boring showcase of apps. This new update will have Mac App Store mimic the magazine-style in its iOS counterpart, showcasing an Apple-curated list of apps and games.

The mostly invisible Quick Look on Mac also just got a nice buff. You can now make quick edit on files, such as photos, videos, and voice memos, just by hitting the space bar without having to open another app. I can see this being very useful when I have to trim voice memos or crop screenshots.

iOS 12

I'm on of those people who has a mild phone addiction, so the feature that I’m most excited about is Screen Time. This allows you to check the general usage of your iPhone so you'll have more control over it. You can set a time limit to the usage of your iPhone and get notified you once this allocated time is almost over. Neat, right? This feature will not only benefits parents who want to limit their kids’ usage of phones, but also I can see it being useful to the general iPhone users as well.

Craig (again) and the Weekly Activity Summary on an iPhone X. Neat!

In the visual assistant race, Siri seems to be the least impressive. Google's announcement of Duplex a few months ago knocks Siri out of the park. In what looks to be a lazy retaliation, Siri catches up by taking a, um, shortcut with a feature that Apple dubs—wait for it—Shortcuts. With it, you can manually set a custom Siri-based set of commands. An example of how Shortcuts work is you can set Siri so that when you say, "I'm on my way home", Siri will check your ETA, turn on your bedroom light, and text your spouse that you'll be home soon. (Will Siri now finally let me control Spotify?) It by no means as advanced as Duplex, but, hey, at least Siri is getting smarter.

Please Apple, let me control Spotify with Siri!

Other announcements include improvement in AR stuff as well as animoji updates. Apple introduced four new animojis: ghost, tiger, t-rex, and panda. Also, now you can now create an animoji of your own face that Apple calls… wait for it, memoji. A me-animoji. LOL. Very cute, Apple. Also, now animoji can mimic your face when you’re blinking or sticking out your tongue. Looks neat. Congratulations, iPhone X users!

Craig with his alter egos memojis.

Last but not least, Apple announced that iPhones will get massive speed upgrade. Older devices, even stretching as far as the 5 year-old iPhone 5S, will get performance boosts. Basic operations, like opening the Camera app or switching between apps, will be snappier and less laggy. My iPhone 6S still performs very well right now, but, hey, I won't complain about a free speed upgrade!

Who doesn't love free speed boosts on their phones?

Releasing in fall 2018 and I can’t wait!

Apple will release both macOS Mojave and iOS 12 in “Fall 2018”, so we’re looking at September/October release window. Both will be free updates, of course!

Fall 2018 can't come sooner, can it?

Working Late at Night Just Got Easier on the Eyes with f.lux

The above screenshot is my macOS menu bar, highlighting a nifty little app called f.lux. What is f.lux? In simple terms, it’s an app for your computer that automatically adjusts your screen color at night to a friendlier temperature so it puts less strain in your eyes. This passage from their website explains it the best:

f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you're in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again.

Your screen and that thing called the “blue light”

”Why should I bother making my screen look like the room I’m in?” I hear you ask. You can find a plethora of research that answers your question in great detail, but the gist is this: when you’re looking at your computer’s—or smartphone’s—screen, you’re basically staring at the sun thanks to this thing called “blue light”. There’s a whole website dedicated to explaining what blue light is and its effects. But, in short, prolonged exposure to blue light is dangerous for your health, especially at night, when your eyes aren’t supposed to be exposed to blue light! This is where f.lux comes in. By “synchronizing” your screen to the same “night mode” that your eyes are in, it helps minimizing the damage that your screen and blue light do to you. Pretty neat, right?

More late-night mindless browsing!

Using f.lux for the first time was a really strange experience. “Screen look so yellow! Looks ugly! Yuck!” And indeed it’s a comment that I’ve received many times when someone takes a peek at my screen. But the longer I use it, the more I get used to it. And that’s important because that means more mindless browsing late at night for me, but without the annoying eyestrain afterwards. Get f.lux for your PC/Mac/Linux over at their website right now and give it a shot. Your eyes will thank you. Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

How to Beat Procrastination: A Lazy Person's Guide

Everyone procrastinates. More so in this day and age of distractions where you can easily get distracted by a beep of your phone, a TV show, emails, and cat videos. It’s hard to start doing things that actually matters and be productive. How hard it is to make up your bed, to sweep the floor, to take a bath, or even change into clean clothes after work? The answer, as many lazy people would attest, is very hard. Sure, technically, it’s as simple as, in the words of Shia LaBeouf, “just do it”, but ask any lazy person and they’ll have a million reason not to. After all, who can resist the temptation to watch that newly uploaded Fails of the Week video, right?

I know because I am one of those people you call lazy. I wish that the floor would sweep itself and I wish that my term paper would magically write itself. But this isn’t Hogwarts where “there’s a spell for that”. This is real life where, as unfortunate as it is, you can’t expect things to be done by itself without you actually making an effort. If you’re a lazy person, this thought will actually make you shake your head in disappointment.

Procrastination is delaying the inevitable

Here’s the scary bit about procrastination. No matter how you spin it, the consequences will eventually bite you in the rear. After all, procrastination is basically delaying the inevitable. That thing—whatever the thing is—needs to be done, whether now or later, or else a chain reaction of bad things will happen.

An example: let’s say it’s Monday and the work is stressing you out. When you get home in the evening, all you want to do is to hit your head onto the pillow, not even first removing your work clothes your socks, let alone take a bath! So, like a robot, you drop your bag on the floor and drone on straight to bed where you just shut yourself down and sleep like a baby. The next morning you snoozed too much and woke up very late. When all you wanted is a peace of mind in the morning to prep yourself for work, you haven’t even gotten out of yesterday’s clothes yet. So you jump out of bed, all sleepy and light-headed, and begin hurrying to remove your clothes. Finally, you leave work not only feeling groggy, but also because there’s simply too much stress in the morning with nobody else to blame but yourself. And then you remember that you haven’t done that deck for today’s presentation yet. Oh, crap.

First things first!

You can see the horrifying consequences of delaying what needs to be done. So how do you beat it? Well, one method that I do that actually makes me more productive is a method that I call First Things First, or FTF in short. In a nutshell, FTF means doing the easiest thing first. Easiest can mean things that are the closest in proximity or requires the least effort or the least consideration. FTF shouldn’t make you think too much. Here are the steps on how I do it.

1. Think about the easiest things that needs to be done and make an imaginary list in your head, going from the super-easiest things on the very top to the least-easy things on the bottom,
2. say the words, “First things first!” out loud or quietly while still thinking about the aforementioned imaginary list, and, finally,
3. do the things in that imaginary list in the exact order you thought of them.

Step 2 may sound ridiculous but saying the words out loud actually makes the whole thing work like a charm. (There’s a reason why the wizards of Hogwarts say a spell out loud before seeing it work.) 

Going back to the previous example of that horrible Monday evening, instead of heading straight to bed, you think of the following things first: 1) put down the bag, 2) take off your shirt, 3) take off your pants, 4) change into fresh clothes, 5) put the dirty clothes in the laundry bin. Right before you open the door, you say, “First things first!”. When you open the door, you do exactly the things in that order. Another example is when you’re writing an article, think about the subtopics that you want to cover going from the easiest to the least easy, say the words “First things first!”, and you do the research in that order.

The two scenarios above are, of course, merely examples to illustrate how FTF works. Again, the point of First Things First is to do whatever things are the easiest first.

Think. Say. Do.

While recovering from procrastination will take time, simply thinking about and doing the easiest things that you can do first helps a lot. When you feel like you can’t do things simply because you don’t feel like doing them, but they are important, remember the First Things First principle: Think, Say, Do. A little bit of a disclaimer, I am by no means an expert (not even a novice) in psychology nor do I have a sort of scientific explanation behind this so-called “method”.

The reason I’m writing, and sharing, this is purely because I used to be a chronic procrastinator and, in my effort in recovering from that, this method has been working well in my case. It’s also worth mentioning that the FTF principle is by no means the surefire way of getting out of procrastination, especially those who suffer from the chronic kind. It’s merely a way of pushing myself to go that extra mile (or kilometer, I guess) in making a simple effort to getting things done, which, in turn, hopefully helps to shake off that extra strain from an already stressful day.

What do you think of the First Thing’s First principle? Do you agree or disagree? Have you tried a similar principle yourself or, better yet, more productive principles or methods? Please let me know in the comments!