I’m impressed by Iris, an elegant and clever Mac app that does a bunch of delightful things.

I have an array of photos sources: Two Photos libraries from different eras of Mac and pre-Mac computers; more than a decade of flat file storage that make up my Lightroom libraries; and a big file tree of imported mobile phone photos from prior to when I began syncing everything through iCloud Photos.

Until using Iris, these have been separate catalogs, technically unifiable by dumping absolutely everything into a single Photos library, but I really don’t want to do that. Iris gives me this nimble application layered over all those existing sources, so for the first time I have this entire digital photos history viewable in one place. It’s marvelous and transformative as a way to have access in a unified way to such a span of time and places.

Iris has a lot more to dig into, like entirely on-device machine learning to identify faces and associate them with named people. I can add people details and then Iris will show me things like photos from a person’s birthday over the years. I’m just scratching the surface but I’m really excited by what it can do.

Ah, that’s better.

Apple, I’m practically begging you to implement a multi-select editor in the viewer for activity data. When the Peloton app on my watch goes haywire and decides that I’m exercising from midnight to 3am – reader, I was not exercising – it would be nice to be able to selectively delete all those records instead of nuking the entire day.

Any friends have firsthand experience comparing the Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse? I’d like to get some gestures back now that I’m using a Mac for work at my desk.

Apropos of just sitting here with it tinkering things in with RStudio, this M1 MacBook Pro still feels extraordinarily good, a month+ in.

With my iPhone constantly remind me that it’s just about out of storage space, I realize that I never got around to turning on iCloud Photo Library. I’m not sure why, but I probably had some logic. These days, is there any reason not to turn it on?

On Sunday I pulled the hard drive from my old G5 iMac, boxed up the machine and shipped it back to Apple to recycle. What a great PC that was, my first Mac. Look how lovely that CPU cover and motherboard are.