📱💻 Finer Things in Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺

Greetings to all you wonderful Finer Things in Tech readers. This issue might look a little different, but don’t adjust your display settings. I’m trying Revue, a new alternative to MailChimp that offers some different features and perks for a non-store newsletter like mine.

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If Apple News is your thing, Finer Things in Tech is now an official publisher there. You can follow the site in a variety of ways, now including my Apple News channel.

Among the many, many perks of Ulysses for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, I recently discovered that its Mac version has a built-in version system for each individual sheet (document/post/article, whatever). In short: you can tell Ulysses to create a sort of bookmark of a piece as you work on it, then browse those bookmarks and revert to any of them.

This works in tandem with Ulysses’ built-in backup mechanism, which keeps periodic versions of everything you work on throughout the app. Think of it as Apple’s Time Machine, built right into Ulysses.

To manually save a version of a sheet in Ulysses for Mac, click File > Save Version. That’s it—no creating a new separate file in Finder, no messing around with your own naming scheme like “file2,” “file3,” etc. Ulysses handles it all for you in the background. If you want to browse the versions of a particular sheet, use File > Browse All Versions. There, you can click back through the versions of your doc, then click Restore at the bottom to turn back your writing clock.

Like its spiritual predecessors iPhoto and Aperture, Photos for Mac supports keywords (or tags). They’re an alternative way to organize photos without cluttering your albums. The iPhone and iPad versions support keywords too, but only in search; you can’t apply them, at least not yet, as far as I can tell.

When viewing any individual photo, click the (i) button in the right of the top toolbar (Command + i works too). A small tool window appears where you can edit various information about the photo—click the Keyword field and start applying them. Bonus tip: you can create multi-word keywords. Type a few words, then press Return to create the keyword.

Alternatively, you can click Window > Keyword Manager. With that tool window, you can select multiple photos and apply keywords to them all with a click. It’s pretty handy.

Later, on both macOS and iOS, you can search for keywords to focus on certain photos. It’s a powerful system, and I hope iOS allows us to create and apply keywords soon.

By default, Safari for Mac remembers your tabs when you quit it, but it starts with a clean slate. You can use History > Reopen All Windows from Last Session to reopen those tabs, or you can plan ahead.

If you hold the Option Key when clicking the Safari menu, the ‘Quit Safari’ option turns into Quit and Keep Windows. The next time you open Safari, your previous tabs will reopen automatically.

On iPad, you can long-tap on Apple’s Files app to display a popover of your recent files (on iPhone 6S and later, use a Force Press instead). There’s a ‘Show More’ button in the upper right, which allows the popover to expand to a second row.

Apple makes this mechanism available to developers, and I really wish more used it. You can do this with Pages and other iWork apps, but so far, I haven’t found any others that use it. Many have some kind of widget or controls for creating a new file/note/whatever, but not this recent files list.

One of my favorite essays from one of my favorite video essayists, Lindsay Ellis. It’s a half hour long, but absolutely worth it. There is so much more going on in these films than you might think, and Lindsay contextualizes it in a wonderful way.

How did you like this issue? Was it useful and bite-size-y enough? Are there certain kinds of tips or apps you’d like to see here? Let me know what you think, and please help me spread the word about supporting Finer Things in Tech!