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Microsoft Office for iPad: My Beginner's Guide

My overview of Microsoft Word for the iPad over on The Sweet Setup: Microsoft Word on the iPad is currently a solid app. It has the core functionality nailed down. Editing documents is as pleasant as it’s been on any version of Word I’ve used in my lifetime. If you use Word for
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BYOD Podcast: A Rivalry I'm Taking Very Seriously

I had the great pleasure of guesting with Greg and Nati on their always fun BYOD podcast this weekend. I was on to talk all about the Apple Watch, what we expect from WWDC, and why Apple currently has nothing to fear from the Android-based smartwatches out there today. I also unseated Apple rumor
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OmniFocus as a Read Later Service

Ok, hear me out, but I’ve been using OmniFocus as my “read later” service for about a month and it’s kind of working great for me. I tweeted about this earlier in the week and people were…confused, to say the least1. Let me explain myself. Getting in the Right Frame of Mind
Game

Going Old School in 2019

So much of what I do online is about following the newest, latest, best stuff that’s out there. What’s the best phone? What are the best new games? What’s next in…everything? This is just how I am and I generally enjoy being on the cutting edge. It’s fun to have
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A Life in Weather (or Today Was Actually the Coldest Day of My Life)

The weather is insane right now in the Midwest, and I was hearing people say the same things you always hear when it gets really cold or hot: “this is the hottest/coldest day in my life!” Well, today I decided to find out. Methodology I have a Dark Sky developer account for my iOS
Game

BirchTree Gaming, My New YouTube Channel About…Well You Get It

https://youtu.be/ZxfchFEO3yA I've never really had time to spend on video games on BirchTree, but I spend a decent amount of my free time playing video games and I just adore them. Despite this love, I've never spent much time on them here because personal blogs about games just
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Sherman

Things have been slow here since the end of December, and the blame rest entirely on one individual: Sherman. Now, Sherman is a 4 month old puppy, and he doesn't know any better, but he's done a number in my ability to focus on anything around here. So if you are
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2018 By the Numbers

2 Years ago I tracked a ton of information about myself and produced “The Quantified Life” post. I took 2017 off from obsessive tracking, but I got back on the horse in 2018 and tracked a good amount of data every single day of the year. Here’s what 2018 looked like to me through
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Disengaging from the Apple Blogger Life for a Moment

In the past month or so, I’ve had things pick up at my day job significantly. The short of it is that an app I’ve been “directing” (to use John Gruber’s terminology) is making its official launch after almost a year in the works. On top of that, my development team is
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2018: Breaking Out of My Podcaster Shell

I typically treat BirchTree as a solo project, and while that is still very much the case today, I have made an effort to say yes more to doing things with other people. Specifically, I have said yes to doing a few podcasts that I really enjoyed listening to. If you want to catch up
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My (Tech) Desires Are Unconventional

My uncle once told me I should consider fasting for a couple days. He had done it many times and was a big proponent of fasting now and again. "No way, I love food too much," I replied, but he wasn't having it. "That's exactly why you should;
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Support BirchTree on Patreon!

I’ve launched a Patreon! I’ve never really thought of myself as someone who would do something like this, but apparently times change. Outside of the obvious “what if no one subscribes?” question, I was always held up by the question of what value I thought I could offer that people would be willing
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Using Apple News to Its Full Potential

Back in the fall I started to have an issue with Apple News. I went from seeing hundreds of readers per day to almost zero. I couldn’t figure it out for a long time, and I had just assumed that I no longer satisfied the desires of the Apple News algorithm. Despite seeing literally
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Big Changes on the Horizon!

This may not really be that important to anyone reading this, but I thought it was at least worth sharing a few changes I’ll be going through in the near future. First, I’m moving this week! My wife and I are ready to move to something a little more spacious, so starting Tuesday
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Grading Apple on My watchOS 5 Suggestions

Apple doesn’t answer to me, so this is of no concern to them, but I wanted to take a look back at my watchOS requests to see how close Apple came to meeting them. Siri Watch Face I asked for: Let third party devs integrate to it. Apple delivered: ✅ They did exactly this! Watch
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Grading Apple on My iOS 12 Suggestions

Apple doesn’t answer to me, so this is of no concern to them, but I wanted to take a look back at my iOS requests to see how close Apple came to meeting them. Performance I asked for: Performance improvements, especially on older devices. Apple delivered: ✅ Exactly this! iOS 12 is notably faster on
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Criticism and Clinging to the “Now”

I wrote this back in February when I was getting hammered by a small subset of people being at all critical of the impending HomePod release: But I would not be good at my job if every time someone told me something was wrong I replied “well, this has to be like that because X,
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I Made a Silly Amiibo Search Page

This was a fun 2 hour project last night and I’m calling it Amiibo Table. It’s based on the AmiiboAPI that Paul Hallett released yesterday. It’s a simple page and basically just gives you some basic information on whatever Amiibo you’d like. It was an excuse to play with DataTables just