My Favorite Music and Apps of 2019

Things have been quiet on the blog lately. My wife and I bought a new house in late October and are expecting our first child any day now. Once I can find some time again, I have some very exciting work I am looking forward to here.

In the meantime I wanted to squeeze in a few annual posts I usually do around this time. I have had plenty of time to reflect this year, just not as much time to write. So my descriptions will be more brief, if not absent. I always find it easier to write about technology because of the matter of fact way I can describe what it does.

Favorite Albums of 2019

Johann Sebastian Bach - Víkingur Ólafsson

The Other Side of Air - Myra Melford's Snowy Egret

Origami Harvest - Ambrose Akinmusire

Vibras - J Balvin

re:member - Ólafur Arnalds

Finding Gabriel - Brad Mehldau

BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! - Mark Guilana

The Fearless Flyers II - EP

Motivational Music for the Syncopated Soul - Cory Wong

Favorite Live Shows

Ghost Note at Creative Alliance - When you take the percussionists from Snarky Puppy, Mono Neon on bass, and other members of the backup band for Prince, you get unbelievably funky.

Nickel Creek/Punch Brothers at Carnegie Hall - Beautiful hall to see two of my all time favorite bands performing together for the first time.

Louis Cole at U Street Music Hall - Just Louis Cole, a MIDI keyboard, drum set, and Logic Pro. It was fun in such an intimate venue to see how he uses Logic to handle all of his arrangement tracks. His keyboard playing was FUNKY and his drumming was technically impressive.

Favorite Apps

Home and home apps - I would consider my current favorite hobby to be automating my home. When we moved to the new house this year, I added some of the following stuff to my home automation setup: smart dimmers for the lights, baseboard thermostats, floodlight cameras, garage door openers, diffusers, smoke detectors, and more. The Apple Home app is my master control center for all of these devices, but I also really like Home+ 4 as it offers a superior and more customizable interface in some respects.

I also love HomeRun for customizing my Apple Watch watch face so that it always knows which scenes I want to run at my house based on time of day.

Peleton - I didn't think this service could be worth the hype but I am really buying in. We have a little bit of space in the new house to lay out some yoga gear and do some body weight working out. We are undecided on the bike so far, but the Peloton app is full of classes for strength, meditation, yoga, functional training, running, biking, and more!

There are always new classes, many are live, and they are highly specific. I can filter 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute classes when I only have a little bit of time. There are restorative yoga classes and body weight strength classes that just need a mat. Best of all, the iPhone app can send to my Apple TV and Apple Watch simultaneously so I can watch the instructor on the big screen and track my heart rate on the watch.

FileMaker - I live by this app. I only know the scripting well enough to program my own keyboard shortcuts. But for tracking students, musical repertoire, assignments, and everything else, this is the power app solution for every problem.

AnyTune Pro+ - This iOS and Mac app has finally replaced Transcribe! for me in most cases. It has great Music app integration, native keyboard shortcuts, and a rich user interface. I love using Downie to take YouTube videos from the internet and then slow them down in AnyTune so that my band students and private percussion students can practice to a superior performance at a reasonable speed.

Timery - This is a super impressive and scriptable time tracking app for iOS that has a great widget and Siri Shortcuts support.

Reeder 4 - Reeder is still the app my thumb reaches for first when I have some free time. I love reading my RSS subscriptions in its clean user interface. Now that it has Instapaper support, I don't need to leave the app to catch up on my read later list.

Cardhop for iOS - This is the contacts app replacement you NEED to install on your iOS devices. It takes the frustration out of adding to and updating your contacts. You must see it to believe it.

IDAGIO - This subscription app and service takes the metadata problem out of classical music by properly tagging composer, arranger, soloist, orchestra, and performer information and allowing it to be filtered. You can filter by year, ensemble, composer, conductor, and even soloist.

GoodNotes for Mac - One of my most used iPad apps is now on the Mac. The Mac version uses Apple's Catalyst technology which allows developers to port iPad apps to the Mac. For this reason it exhibits some weird behaviors. But I don't need to spend tons of time working in it as much as I just need to be able to view my synced documents from a Mac. I use the iPad version to annotate my band seating charts. I write down things about posture, behavior, participation, and then compare it against a weekly rehearsal rubric at the end of every week.

It is a lot easier to input grades into our district's LMS, Canvas, on Mac, so it is helpful to now be able to see my annotated charts on macOS, rather than having my iPad and my Mac open side by side.

Which music and apps were most compelling to you in 2019?

Things might be quiet here for a while longer. In early 2020, I look forward to getting cozier in my new home, and learning what it feels like to be a father. I wish you a great year of music making, with all the best technology tools by your side. Happy New Year!

Favorites of 2018 - Apps!

These posts will never happen if I don’t make it fuss free. So here is it! With little introduction or fanfare, the ‘stuff’ that made up my year. My favorite albums, live shows, apps, and ‘things’ of 2018.

Next up, apps!

Apps

Things and OmniFocus

Task management software makes up about 50 percent my time on computing devices so it’s natural that I include what I consider to be the best two apps in this field. After seven years of using OmniFocus, I am experimenting with Things again. I plan to write about this switch in more detail but for now I leave you with this: if you are looking for a powerful way to stay on top of your tasks and don’t mind paying for a premium design, check these apps out.

The Today view in Things displays all of my tasks for the day alongside my calendar.

The Forecast view in OmniFocus is similar to the Today view in Things. Though I have it turned off in this screenshot, it actually displays your tasks inline with your calendar events so you can see where ‘due’ tasks fit into your day.

Health

The Health app by Apple is my hub for collecting all sorts of data about myself from various devices, apps and clinics. It houses data from devices like my Apple Watch, Spire respiratory monitor, Fitbit WiFi scale, and Spark Smart Water Bottle. It tracks data in third party apps like: work outs, active calories burned, steps, heart rate, sleep, water intake, nutrition, meditation minutes, caffeine intake, and blood pressure. It can now even aggregate health data from participating clinics and practices so I don’t have to log into a million web portals. My Quest and LabCorp results are a tap away. The beauty of the app is that it allows me to organize these data points and see them alongside one another so I can draw meaningful conclusions about them. Like for example, I eat better on days when I get more sleep.

Home

Apple’s Home app is the hub for controlling my smart home. I can control all of my smart things in the same user interface rather than by punching into lots of different apps. I can also use it to automate different actions. For example, my Good Morning scene automatically runs at 6:30 am every day which turns on my lights, changes the temperature, and lately, turns on the Christmas tree.

My Today view in Apple Health aggregates all of my health data regardless of which app is responsible for tracking it.

The My Home view in Apple Home shows my most used home automation devices and ‘scenes.’

Tonal Energy Tuner

Absolute must for an instrumental music teacher. Using the new Screen Time feature on iOS reveals that I spend too much time on Reddit. But also that I spend more time than any other app in Tonal Energy. It’s literally running in the foreground all day long while I’m at school, helping students to match pitch, blend, and keep steady time.

Trello

This may be my productivity discovery of the year. Trello is the team project app you have been waiting for. It’s vibrant, Kanbab board style interface will have your team, family, or Dungeons and Dragons group enjoying every minute of collaboration. Bonus points for how well this app integrates with Slack which is my preferred team communication tool.

Planning concerts in Trello allows my team to share todos, check lists, files, and more. We can give items due dates and even assign tasks to other members.

GoodNotes

GoodNotes has become my go-to handwritten note application. It acts like a bookshelf of notebooks so to speak. I take a lot of the work I create in iWork, Ulysses, and OmniGraffle, export them as PDFs, organize them into notebooks in GoodNotes, then annotate them on the go using my iPad. My favorite thing to do with it is keep a notebook of seating charts that have my rehearsal annotations on top of the names of my students. I love how you do not need to trigger an annotation mode to start scribbling on a document with the Apple Pencil. It just feels like paper.

Streaks

There are a lot of great habit building apps out there but Streaks has stuck with me because it encourages you to focus on just six habits at a time. When I am building too many habits at once, they start to feel like a todo list. The Streaks method of choosing six, along with its addictive user interface, keep me launching the app, which keeps me working towards my goals.

AutoSleep and AutoWake

Of the ten or so sleep trackers I have tried for the iPhone and Apple Watch, AutoSleep has stuck with me the most. There are numerous things I like about it, but most of all is how it figures out the most accurate number of hours I have been asleep whether I wear my watch to sleep or not. The companion app, AutoWake, wakes me up silently with haptic feedback on the watch. It does this when I am in my least deep sleep within a half hour before my alarm is set to go off. This eases me awake rather than jolting me awake. I plan to blog later this month about how I am automating some cool stuff in my house when I wake up using this app.

WaterMinder

WaterMinder is my favorite app for tracking water intake, mostly because of its well designed and space efficient widget.

Shortcuts

I did not get as much out of the Siri Shortcuts app this year as I wanted to. In fact, I had a lot of bad luck with it. But it is still an app that is working really well for me in a couple of small areas. In one tap, it generates a clean copy of my band's seating chart in GoodNotes for annotations and opens my lesson plan for the day in OmniOutliner. 

The Waterminder Widget.

Some of my Shortcuts.

CARROT⁵ Weather

This is my favorite weather app due to its clean and appealing design. It gets my pick this year because of how they continue to innovate the Apple Watch app. My favorite feature of the watch is the customizable complications. Carrot makes the best weather complication for the Apple Watch, maybe the best complication, period. Carrot allows infinite customization for how it looks on the watch, depending on which watch face you like to view it, and even in which corner of the watch face you prefer to keep it installed.

The Carrot Weather app complication can be seen in the lower left corner.

Streaks. Guess I can check off that one in the lower right corner now.