Here are some things I’ve been enjoying recently, in no specific order. I am not compensated in any way, even referral payments, for these links. Hope I turn someone else onto something they enjoy.

Mela

After years of being a devoted user of Paprika, I have completed converted over to Mela as my digital recipe keeper. Mela is from the same developer as Reeder, which is the RSS reader I have used, in conjunction with Feedbin, as my newsreader or choice for a long while now. Why did I switch? First, Mela just has a much cleaner user interface, feels more current and modern than Paprika, and is more in keeping with my personal taste.

Second, because this app comes from the developer of a feed reader, it has the same concept built into it. This allows me to add my favorite recipe sites to the app, and quickly be able to see the recipes that they have posted recently, then easily add them to my recipe collection in Mela. I like this workflow better.

Migration from Paprika was very fast and I haven't found any issues with my collection of recipes. Once I purchased both the Mac and iOS versions, my recipes appeared everywhere via iCloud sync without issue.

Mela is $4.99 for iOS and $9.99 for the Mac.

Sportsletter

I'm a big fan of sports. I've also worked in sports for the vast majority of my professional career now. I'm not sure where I found it, but The Sportsletter is just an absolutely great and completely free daily sports email newsletter. It hits my inbox every morning about the time I get out of bed, and they do a phenomenal job of giving a sports fan the news, notes, stories and schedules for the day. Here's an example newsletter for your perusal. I think maybe the best thing about it is that it's not junked up with ads.

The Week: 10 Things You Need to Know Today

While I am suggesting email newsletters that hit your inbox in the morning. I have to suggest this daily news email from The Week. They are a credible source of daily news headlines without a lot of bias. You can subscribe to this one here. It's exactly what the title says, ten things in your inbox, linking to credible news organizations about the stories if you want further information. If you're interested in getting a bit more information every morning, this is a good way to do it.

Notorious EDC Beer Bomb

I wouldn't consider myself a big EDC guy, but pens have been sort of a gateway drug for me into this world. The moment I saw the Notorious EDC Beer Bomb, I knew that I had to have one. (I borrowed this image from their site, sorry Tom.) It's a bottle opener, a pry tool, and just a delightful little guy to carry around. I'm finding all sorts of uses for mine, and I kind of can't wait for it to get beat up with use. Here's a great little history of the object.

Now the bad news, getting your hands on one of these isn't super easy, and it seems like it's getting harder all the time because they have gotten so popular, come in different color ways, and have attracted a bunch of avid collectors who congregate over on a private Facebook Group. Your best bet, if you want to take on the challenge of purchasing one of these, is to follow them on social media, and get into the Facebook group.

LePen

Do you remember LePen? When reading my weekly Pen Addict member newsletter a couple of weeks ago, there was a link to a blog post from The Stationer about the tools Tessa currently uses. Lurking in that list was a pen that I had totally forgotten about, LePen. I remembered how fun these skinny little pens are, and decided to order some from her shop. These pens are just as fun to have around I as remembered, and I am now using them to add color to my Bullet Journal spreads. I especially like their Olive Green color.

Well, that's enough for this post, more to come soon.

Making meetings effective is something that I think about every week. I spend a lot of my time in meetings, and it always seems like I could use more time outside of them for the rest of my job. Everyone seems to agree about this. Meetings are a necessary evil, but they don't have to be wasteful.

A key to making meetings more productive for me has been providing my meeting agenda items to the other person in advance. It does two great things for me. First, it makes me think carefully about what I want to use the time to talk about. Second it makes me organize topics either in order of priority if I think that time is a consideration, or in a flow that makes sense for the conversation. Finally, it makes me prep for the meeting and identifies any prep work that I need to do to get ready for the meeting.

I have a fairly simple system for collecting potential agenda items. I keep an agenda folder in whichever notes app I am currently using, for instance Apple Notes or Bear. I'm currently using NotePlan all day, and should probably blog about that at some point.

For each person or group who I meet with on a regular basis, I have a separate note in an "Agendas" folder, even if those meetings are sporadic. As I go through my day, as it occurs to me or comes up in a meeting that I need to discuss something with one of those people, I will command tab over to their agenda note and add the item.

Then, the day before or a few hours before I meet with the person or group, I comb through the items I have collected, and turn them into an agenda that I either email or Slack to that person. I generally try and do it well before the meeting, this allows the other person or people to think about the topics and prepare if need be. There are times, however, when I am just using that list in the moment to make sure I don't miss something.

A week later, or whenever I need to meet with that person or group again, I’m also able to see what we discussed last time, and can leverage that to follow up on any items that require more conversation.

This system is pretty simple, but it has worked really well for me.

I feel like I should take the opportunity that the holiday break from work affords me to think back over the last year, and share some of the things that brought joy to my life in 2017.

There are so many apps that I could write about here. I spend a lot of time on my iPad, iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. This isn’t a comprehensive look at what I use, just some high notes. For instance, I probably use my iPad about 35% of the time for reading across Reeder, Instapaper and the Kindle app, but that’s all the mention they get.

I’m writing this using Bear on my iPad. Bear has become the latest in a line of notepad apps that I have used as a junk drawer for my information. I occasionally take a quick look to see where Apple’s Notes and Simplenote are, both served this role for some time after I abandoned Evernote. Both offer the one thing that has made me reconsider Bear, a web interface to my text. (Bear has one currently under development, but with no announced release date.) What Bear does offer is a really nice clean interface, good tagging support, and first class apps on iPad, Mac and iPhone. It also offers a good community and developers who are actively working to improve the apps. It’s a joy to use, and I happily will let my subscription renew.

I’ve used a lot of weather apps over the years, but I have currently settled on Hello Weather. It offers a clean, uncluttered UI, but without redacting any of the information that I want my weather app to include.

I spent a lot of time this year trying out different podcast apps, but ultimately ended up back where I started, using Overcast. What drove me to look at the other options was the lack of a good working web player or desktop app for Mac. Overcast offers the best iOS app, bar none, in my opinion, and in the end, that won out over the presence of better web players from other developers for me. It would be nice if he made some quality of life enhancements to the web player, but I have taken to just always listening from my phone for now.

I have (I just counted.) 45 photography apps installed on my phone. Darkroom has become the default app for editing and touch ups once I have taken the shot and gotten the image onto my phone, if shot with a camera. It offers really clean workflow that matches how I think about editing images. I still also use VSCO, Priime, and am also trying out TouchRetouch.

I currently have a 429 day streak of checking Timehop. This lovely little app lets me look into what I was doing in previous years across social media and the photos on my device. Most of my social time is spent using Tweetbot and Instagram. Tweetbot offers fantastic list support and I use Twitter in a very list-centric manner, so it maps well for me on all my devices. I continue to miss the days of 3rd party Instagram apps for the iPad. I’ve taken to using their web site on my iPad instead of blowing their iPhone app up 2x.

As a lot of this year was dedicated to fitness, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Activity app from Apple is something I use religiously. My wife and I share our activity goal data, allowing us to encourage each other to do well. I can’t understate the big help that this app and the Apple Watch have been for me as I try to push myself to become more fit and healthy. Late in the year, after I got my Series 3 Apple Watch, I also started using HeartWatch and AutoSleep. Both offer more data than the base Activity app, specifically around sleep efficiency and heart rate data.

In a related vein, since I listen to music while working out, Spotify has become a key app on my phone and my main music app. I maintain a subscription to Apple Music as well, and use SoundCloud and Mixcloud for DJ mixes predominantly, but Spotify rules the day because of it’s device support, social features and better recommendation engine. I could play Spotify through my new living room home entertainment gear on the day it arrived without any additional hardware or effort. If I had to drop a subscription, it would be Apple Music. They just haven’t improved it enough since launch.

Which brings me to games. Two games have remained on my home screen throughout the year, and probably will stay there for some time to come. I’ve been playing Hearthstone since launch, and still enjoy the most recent expansions. Blizzard have done a great job of fostering new content. When I want to get a little more tappy and engaged, I fire up VainGlory. I mostly play their Battle Royale mode. They have built a very responsive MOBA, and I look forward to the release of 5v5 play in January.

What went wrong was very simple. We never made enough money.

I really like(d) Vesper, but it never stuck for me. I was a day one user, mainly because I am huge fan of all three of these guys, and also consider their QA lead an internet friend.

I don’t know what they could have done differently, especially with only three of them, I do think that, for their core audience, there are three platforms that matter:

1. mobile/iOS
2. Desktop Mac
3. Web

Only Brent, Dave and John know for sure, but from my outsider’s view, this was a part time job for all three of them. I suspect that if even one of them had made this more of a full time job, it might have generated perspective and possibly drive to succeed. Just guessing on that bit, and I could be completely wrong.

I’m currently using Apple Notes as my primary phone/tablet/desktop text tool. iCloud sync has worked great for me.

Studio Neat recently introduced a new free app named Highball. I was just thinking last week that there didn’t seem to be a lot of good apps for storing cocktail recipes, surprising given how in vogue fancy cocktails seem to be at the moment. The price is right, and the app is responsive and well designed. It’s a natural extension of their Neat Ice Kit and Simple Syrup Kit products, both of which are on my future purchase list.

More interesting to me is the way they have implemented cocktail recipe sharing. You can either take a picture of the card some else has shared, which has an embedded QR code, (It’s small, but it’s still a QR code.) or you can enter a unique number that is assigned to that recipe in their database of recipes. Definitely a pretty elegant solution to a pretty thorny problem. Send me your recipes!