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.

The MacOS Journal app feels so half-baked. I thought I’d try it for a travelogue of my past week, dragged some photos to it, and it just dumps them in a pile. There’s no arranging, scaling for layout of landscape and portrait, nothing. C’mon, Apple, I’m trying to not shell out for Day One again, here.

Too much to expect that Lightroom 5 continues to work on MacOS Sonoma? Gonna have to figure out how to get into my legacy album, I guess.

I wanted to make a QR code to go along with a gift card I’m giving to someone. The search space for how to do that is a wasteland of SEO and sketchy generators, but – turns out – there’s a MacOS/iOS shortcut already available in the Shortcuts gallery. HOWEVER: Searching for just “QR” doesn’t find it; search for “QR code” instead, and you’re good to go.

Whoa, roon-tui lets you control Roon from a terminal! This is very cool and makes me want to learn just a little Rust to be able to tinker with it.

I spent some time today rewriting a shortcut that uploads images to the media endpoint I use for my blog. It now covers all my core use cases of converting HEICs where needed and resizing images that are too big. I’m super pleased at these improvements, and am still impressed that it works on both my desktop and iPhone, but also – oof, working in shortcuts still feels unintuitive and clunky so often.

Figure I’ll get Ventura installed today. I think I’ve been holding off – for nearly a year – because I’ve been concerned it would break something in brew.

SourceCodeSyntaxHighlight is a great drop-in plugin to enable syntax highlighting in the MaxOS finder’s quick view. Just what I needed to improve the experience of scanning json files in the finder!

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

MacOS/Shortcuts folks: Can I send a photo to a shortcut via quick actions? I can run the action in a shortcut to pop up the little picker, but can’t figure out if there’s a way to do it from within Photos itself. I want to be looking at an image, run an action, and send that image to a workflow. I think I’m mistaken in believing that this should work.