🎬 This article is the best thing I’ve ever read about Star Wars.

📚 “Ready Player One” looks promising. I’m one chapter in, and it’s fun.

The 2017 news cycle has worn me out. I am looking for something purely escapist to read. I’m considering “Ready Player One” and “The Last Unicorn”.

I am vacillating between being lazy and productive today. It is a vacation day, so I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.

🎬 I am finally seeing “The Last Jedi” tonight. Hope it is good!

After an eventful trip to see family, we are back at home. Today is a rebuilding day: unpacking, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, dishes, etc.

And when they say that all is lost All is not lost, all is not lost And when they say that all is lost All is not lost, no all is not lost at all

—OK Go “All Is Not Lost” Video

Merry Christmas everyone!

We are heading off to see family for Christmas today.

I made banana bread, too.

I baked Snickerdoodles for the family today. They are really, really good!

I bought Castro 2 this week because I like the design and it was on sale for a pittance. I am not sure I will switch to it from Overcast, though. Castro 2 has a better UI and better product focus, but Overcast has the better audio engine, which really is the most important thing.

I made a batch of Christmas cookies tonight with my daughter. Such fun! She pressed chocolate chips on top of sugar cookies that we rolled out together and cut—about 100 chips per cookie, I think.

A long lunch with the family was a great way to complete my work week.

So much of all programming, and really all work in general, is developing a common vocabulary, and after that, common goals. That is most of the work in a lot of the projects I work on.

I am up too late. What exactly is happening right now? 🙃

According to Dark Sky, a Christmas morning snowstorm may interfere with my holday travel plans. I am crossing my fingers that it doesn’t happen.

I’m relieved to have finished all my billable work for the week already. It was a tough week, and thankfully it is starting to wind down now. I am looking forward to a holiday break next week.

I wonder how many people still have to use VBA for Excel and Access automation at work, like I do. Googling for Office VBA how-tos feels like jumping in a time machine and going back 10 or 20 years. It is disappointing that Microsoft never added C#/.NET support to Office, but it is understandable.

I started a micro blog at mjdescy.micro.blog this week. It is not to replace this blog, but to supplement it with a more frequently updated stream of short comments and asides about my life, or about news items that directly affect my life in some way. I want it to be like Twitter was for me back when I first joined it: a stream of consciousness, and a window into my life. My plan is to keep this blog (my macro-blog?) free of micro blog posts and life blogging, and more focused on longer articles, bigger ideas, and more complete thoughts—as it has been from the very start.

I spent some time this evening starting to code something new for work in C#: a tool for comparing actual drug formularies to required ones. It should be a fun little project.

Twitter is abuzz about UIKit, perhaps, going to the Mac late next year. We’ll see. I would love to code a new version of my todo.txt app, SwiftoDo Desktop, in UIKit rather than AppKit. The different table view model is a big factor in that, though UIKit’s window and split view controls are, of course, different, too. WWDC will be especially interesting next year.

It’s the last work week of the year, and the busiest I’ve had in about six months. I had to work late tonight. (I’m still working, in fact.) It’s making me think of this bleak article I read earlier this evening: eand.co/what-do-y…

I’m happy to join the micro.blog community today!

Drafts is a tinkerer’s DIY dream of a text editor. It nails the basics, and allows you to customize its editor and its tag and folder system to fit your specific needs—it just takes a little time (and, maybe, some JavaScript skills, for some things) to do so.

Drafts is where text begins

Drafts, by Agile Tortoise, isn’t exactly an unknown app. On the contrary, it is one of the crown jewels of the iOS platform. It is one of the few apps with an in-app purchase tip jar that I actually threw money in—a few times, actually. Drafts makes my life simpler, in little ways, every day. Like one of my other favorite writing apps, Ulysses, it is a pleasure to use.

Drafts is primarily meant for quick text entry, and then pushing that text to another app for processing or storage. For example, I type most calendar entries and Google searches in Drafts (which is in my home screen toolbar) and, in two taps, open them for processing in Fantastical or Safari (which are not in my toolbar). Drafts 4, which has been out quite a while now, expands on that basic idea, and delivers a very useful utility and a top-notch text editor.

Not just for automation—for writing!

Drafts is already well known for its automation capabilities. It is great for drafting a tweet and posting it to Twitter (either natively or via another app), or for writing out a calendar entry and pushing it to Fantastical or Calendars 5 for parsing. What it is not well known for—but should be—is that it is the most customizable text editor on iOS. Editorial has long held that crown, thanks to its its support of snippets and extensibility with Python scripts. Drafts, however, outdoes Editorial when it comes to customizing the editor itself, which has a profound effect on writing experience.

In Drafts, actions can change the text your are writing, send some or all of it to another app, turn on/off night mode within the app, and so on. You can download actions from the developer’s extensive library, of, if you are a bit of a programmer, you can them yourself in JavaScript, from within the app. You can assign these actions to the main menu, which is accessible from the top-right icon, or from a swipe to the left. That’s the basic stuff. You can also assign these actions to a custom toolbar that is displayed over the keyboard. Even better, for hardware keyboard users, you can assign your own hardware keyboard shortcuts to these actions, too. No other iOS app that I use does this!

I use Drafts on my iPad primarily for writing notes, such as when I get a phone call or am in a meeting. I use my custom toolbar buttons to input today’s date, paste text, format headings and lists in Markdown, send various lines (text selections) to my todo.txt file (via Dropbox), and so on. At the end of my writing session, I send the entire note to Dropbox for storage.

Notes don’t have to be exported, however. They can stay in Drafts and sync to all your other iOS devices via iCloud. You can also organize them there. There are three basic folders—Inbox, Archive, and Trash—to put notes into. You can flag notes for future retrieval, and filter them them by folder, flag status, and keywords (search terms within the note text) into custom “folders” or saved searches as well. I have not switched over to using Drafts as a full-fledged notes app (most of my drafts get automatically deleted after 30 days in the Trash folder), but I am thinking about it.

Drafts in the future

Drafts 4 has been around for a while now. Drafts 5 is coming, someday, with even more features: TaskPaper editing is a feature that I am looking forward to. I expect the pricing model to change from paid upfront to a subscription; I will be happy to pay for it, as a valuable companion to Ulysses for writing, and a valuable sidekick to practically every other app in the iOS ecosystem.