Jess Weatherbed (Hacker News, Reddit):
Design software developer Serif has launched a new six-month free trial for its Affinity creative suite, which is well regarded as being one of the few viable alternatives to Adobe’s professional design apps. The offer is available for Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher starting today on Mac, Windows PC, and iPad.
Affinity uses a one-time purchase pricing model that has earned it a loyal fanbase among creatives who are sick of paying for recurring subscriptions. Prices start at $69.99 for Affinity’s individual desktop apps or $164.99 for the entire suite, with a separate deal currently offering customers 50 percent off all perpetual licenses.
Previously:
Affinity Designer Affinity Photo Affinity Publisher Bargain iOS App iPadOS iPadOS 17 Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma Marketing
Ricoh (Amazon):
The newest flagship in the ScanSnap family is 33% faster, giving you more time back in your day. Designed for everyday use, the ScanSnap iX1600 gets documents digitized, organized and sent anywhere—anytime—with minimal effort.
The Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M was the only document scanner that ever worked well for me. I’d been using it for almost 18 years (lately via my 2012 MacBook Pro to run the old software), making it probably the longest serving equipment in my office aside from the desk chair.
Unfortunately, it finally died, with the rollers melting, so that they stick to the paper and no longer turn. There’s some possibility of taking it apart and installing aftermarket rollers, but with unscanned papers stacking up I opted to get a new ScanSnap iX1600.
I’m glad to say that it essentially works the same way as before, just a bit better. The new ScanSnap Home software is ugly and awkward, but you can use it without the cloud features and even lock it down with Little Snitch. As before, you can pretty much ignore the software once it’s configure because you can initiate scans by pressing a button on the scanner itself. It now has a touch-screen so you can switch between different profiles (e.g. receipt, black-and-white document, photo) without even touching the Mac.
It works via Wi-Fi, so I can scan to the Mac and update the firmware without ever connecting a USB cable—which would be inconvenient as it’s on the other side of the room from the Mac. I suppose this means that I can’t control which servers it’s talking to, though…
Scanning itself is much faster. It can optionally use OCR to try to help name the files, e.g. figuring out the vendor and date for receipts. This works surprisingly well, although it’s slow even for tiny documents on an M1 Mac. The scanner will pause for a few seconds before it lets me start scanning the next document. Maybe this limited subset of the OCR functionality runs on the scanner itself?
TWAIN support is still missing. I also wish that it could preview the scan on the device’s own display, since, as mentioned, I don’t have the scanner set up next to the Mac. If previews are not a concern, you can avoid installing the Mac software entirely and just have it save the scans to an SMB share on your Mac.
See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.
Previously:
Update (2024-07-15): John Gordon:
In contrast to the desktop app the simple iOS app, ScanSnap.app [ScanSnap Connect Application], worked well for me. It was even multi-user -- anyone could scan from their iPhone.
As of 7/2024 the ix500 still works with a single macOS device by cable or WiFi using the current desktop app. The iOS app is end of life however. A year ago it dropped Google Drive support. A few days ago OneDrive auto-upload started to crash the app following upload (it freezes, needs force quit, the document is lost).
The replacement for [ScanSnap Connect Application] is ScanSnap Home. That app does not support the ix500; it will not connect via WiFi. There is also an end-of-life ScanSnap Cloud app that uses PFU’s crazy (failed?) cloud document routing service.
Fujitsu ScanSnap iOS iOS 17 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Privacy Scanner Server Message Block (SMB)
Howard Oakley:
The commonest error in deciding whether to use a UPS is the argument that, because your Mac isn’t left on 24/7, it’s always attended, so should anything go wrong with the power, you’ll be able to deal with it. Even if you’re sat at your Mac, with instant reactions, there’s no way that it can shut down in time to protect it. Whether you use your Mac for half an hour a day or only power it off once a year for cleaning, it still needs a UPS.
Next in the reasons we persuade ourselves to believe is that UPSes are expensive. Yes, many are, but the more expensive ones are designed to keep things like power-hungry servers running for an hour or more. Most Macs are well-protected if the UPS keeps them going long enough to allow an orderly shutdown, a minute or two at most. It’s far better for a Mac to be given that chance than to have no UPS at all.
[…]
Sadly, few manufacturers bother to provide software that supports Macs. CyberPower is one of those few, and although its bundled software looks oddly blurry, it has valuable features that go well beyond the basics reported by Energy Saver settings.
My Tripp Lite UPS continues to work well, but the Energy Saver integration broke with macOS Catalina, and as far as I know it was never fixed.
Howard Oakley:
If you use a wireless keyboard, mouse or trackpad, or have a UPS connected to your Mac, you might wonder how often macOS checks their charge and functional status. The answer is often, typically every 2-5 seconds. You can follow those checks in the log by listing entries for the subsystem com.apple.BatteryCenter.
Howard Oakley:
Unless your Mac has a Battery widget installed, perhaps on its Desktop, Battery Center entries don’t appear in its log. When you do add a Battery widget to the Desktop, though, checks are made every few seconds, and their results written to the log, and those continue even after removing the widget, at least until the next time that Mac is shut down or restarted.
Third-party software isn’t supposed to access private services like Battery Center, so creating an independent utility to perform similar functions would have to capture its own data. However, given access to the log, it’s possible to read Battery Center’s entries there instead.
[…]
This initial version [of Unhidden] does one job: each time you open a new window in the app, it displays the most recent results obtained by Battery Center, across all the devices that it checks.
Previously:
Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma Power Unhidden Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
Matthew Cassinelli:
Overall, seeing updates to these Reminders actions is a good sign for the Shortcuts ecosystem, as it’s the first signal that Apple is updating their native Shortcuts actions with App Intents-based replacements in iOS 18.
Since the inception of many of these actions in Workflow when Shortcuts was a third-party app, many actions have been built on longstanding external-facing developer APIs (hence actions like “Get Upcoming Reminders”) and then later custom intents from within teams at Apple – they either stayed the same as the Workflow actions, or got piece-by-piece updates for new features each year like Tags in Reminders.
However, as is the nature of intents development, Apple also has tried not to break anything or remove features that are being used in existing shortcuts – but rather than deprecating actions over time, they either have been updated-in-place, added as separate actions (like “Open Smart List”), or simply not implemented in Shortcuts at all.
Now, it appears that we’re seeing the first evidence of an Apple team seeding new actions in betas, hopefully testing and iterating on them, and then likely replacing the Workflow- and custom intents-era actions with modern App Intents actions that can be extended with new features more easily and updated going forward.
App Intents iOS iOS 18 Reminders Shortcuts
