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Draft 5 Actions: The BirchTree Collection

Drafts 5 has totally won me over and made me fall in love with url-schemes. They are basically a local restful API that can be used to accomplish quite a bit. Below are 6 Drafts Actions that I have created to make using Drafts even better. All of these apps have actions already, some
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New Drafts Action: Smart Task in OmniFocus

There is an action built into Drafts 5 that will add a task to OmniFocus, but I found it a bit lacking. In short, the built in action will add the contents of your note as a description. I always set due dates/times and typically add notes and contexts. Since Drafts couldn’t do
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Why I Love Link Blogging

More often than not, I write articles for this site after reading something someone else wrote. I browse the web for articles and tweets that I find interesting, and the ones that make me think are very often the ones that inspire me to write something myself. This leads to a funny situation as a
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A Supporting Character in Everyone Else’s Narrative

It’s hard to be a team player sometimes. I know it is for me, at least. We so easily get sucked into our own thing, assuming that what we have going on is the most important thing ever. We are all the center of our own universes, after all. But the value of breaking
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A Solo, Daily, Non-News Podcast is Probably a Bad Idea, but I Love It

You don’t have to be an eagle-eyed observer to notice that I have begun daily podcasting over the past few weeks. I’ve done 15 episodes over the past 30 days1, and 6 over the past 6 business days. Each episode has nearly zero planning and I record around 7AM before I go
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Today’s Forecast Status Update

8 months ago I released my first app to the iOS App Store: Today’s Forecast. The app was intended to be the weather app I’ve always wanted to use, and I did a really good job of doing that. It’s still the weather app I have on my home screen and I
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Going Back to Android for a Bit

I debated whether to post this on April Fool’s Day or not, but hey, the timelines just so happen to line up 🤷🏻‍♂️ I’m going to pop my SIM card back into my Pixel 2 for a while. I’m doing so this time without the pressure of having to write a review, which
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Reuniting with the First iPod I Ever Bought

https://youtu.be/YwwVNu68tz4 Traditionally, I sell my old tech to help pay for the new stuff. I like to keep up the the latest and greatest, and have never quite had the means to just pay full price for everything right away. Selling the old stuff enabled me to keep up. That said, I
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Some Stupid Personal Twitter Analytics

On a lark, I downloaded my complete Twitter history and ran some searches on my tweets to see what things I have said over the years. Not great insights here, but here’s some #mildlyinteresting data from about 33,000 tweets: When I tweet about tech, it’s usually about Apple This comes as no
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My Perspective on Tech

While BirchTree is not my day job1, it did play a central role in me getting my current job. I work at an ecommerce company2 and my job involves: * Designing user interfaces for new features * Collecting user experience data * Refining existing interfaces based on user feedback * Working with developers directly as features are built * Performing
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2018 Photo a Day Progress Report

I decided I’d try out the 365 project this year, mostly out of sheer curiosity. I’ve tried in the past and never made it past, but I did a few things this year to make sure I did better. 1. I added a reminder for myself at 8pm every night to post my
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BirchTree Support Drive

If you are a regular around these parts, I’d like to say THANK YOU! You are the reason I write here, and I can’t thank you enough for taking some time out of your day to read the site. If you enjoy the site and want to support its continued development, please consider
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Today’s Forecast Update and Price Drop

A small update to Today’s Forecast just hit the App Store! Version 1.2.3 includes the following changes: * New seasonal theme! * Modified the Halloween and standard dark themes to look better on the iPhone X * Fixed a small bug in the Halloween theme displaying weather alerts * Removed alternate icons (sorry, hopefully adding them
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BirchTree State of the Union 2018

As we roll into 20181, I figured this was a good time to share some very basic stats about BirchTree and how things are going. The long story short is that there is nothing crazy happening, and things are heading in the right direction. * Total visits to the site were up 16% over 2016 (crossing
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The Best New Podcasts I Heard in 2017

Below are 7 podcasts that have shot to the top of my podcast priorities in 2017. Not all of them are new shows this year, but in all cases they are shows that I never heard before 2017. Shows like ATP, Cortex, and The Talk Show remained excellent this year, but these are the newcomers
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My Favorite Albums of 2017

I’m not a music expert, but I do pride myself in having relatively good taste in music. As I get further and further away from my college years, I find it harder and harder to keep branching out to new and exciting music, but I’m doing my best to stay young at heart
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My Favorite BirchTree Posts of 2017

Because what is the end of the year for if not looking back on the entirety of the past 12 months and reflect. In that spirit, I wanted to revisit some of my favorite posts from 2017, ranked exclusively by the arbitrary measure of how happy I am to look back on them and think
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Experiment Time! Living on iOS Alone

The acquisition of a 10.5” iPad Pro yesterday has me thinking about the iPad in a more serious way again. This thing is fast, beautiful, and exceedingly portable. It’s the perfect computer for me. With that in mind, I’m going to try to keep my MacBook Pro closed for as long as