Too Many Subscriptions, a Great Text Utility, New Podcast Episode

We're in full-on back-to-school mode, and the summer is winding down. Apple's making progress with the new OS betas leading up to their release this fall, along with new iPhone and Apple Watch models. September will have a lot going on! But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Here's what's coming up in this edition:

• Basic AF: Switchin' It Up with Nintendo and Gaining Focus with the Session App

• Too Many Subscriptions

• Pure Paste: A Great Free Text Utility

• The latest Apple and tech news and rumors

🎙️ Basic AF: Switchin' It Up with Nintendo and Gaining Focus with the Session App

In episode 14 of the show, guest Adam Olson talked a bit about how he uses an app named Session to maintain focus throughout the day and reflect on his day as it winds down to celebrate his accomplishments. Jeff and I have been using Session over the last few weeks, and we like it! I’ve found it an excellent tool that helps me focus on my tasks without being overbearing. We go pretty deep into how we have set it up, use cases throughout the day, and, just as importantly, what we’re NOT using it for. After that, Jeff gives us a review of his last several months playing the Nintendo Switch that his family gifted him for his birthday.

Listen now at basicafshow.com and in all the podcast apps, as well as on YouTube and YouTube Music.

💸 Too Many Subscriptions

I don’t know about you, but I have too many subscriptions. It’s overdue, but I am finally trimming the list.

The biggest one, and the hardest, was canceling my paid Evernote subscription. I started using the app in 2008, and it was the center of my personal and professional life for over a decade. I used it to launch and run a consulting business and collected random notes from my kids, photos, and recipes. I continued with it when I joined the university where I work now, and we even had Evernote for Business there for a few years.

Unfortunately, the company lost sight of what it was (Evernote socks were a clue) and fell behind in the note-taking market. (Its search and web clipper are still top-notch, though.) I moved on to Craft a few years ago, more on that below, and had not added anything new to Evernote in years. The company has seen some struggles and was acquired recently by Bending Spoons, who promptly raised the price, in some cases by a lot. And that was the final straw.

But it’s not the only victim in my sub-slashing. Here are some others:

• Drafts - excellent app, great developer, just not using it these days

• Craft - a good app, but I’ve moved to Bear 2; more on that in the future

• Hevy - workout tracker

• Ivory Mastodon Client - app is nice, Mastodon is meh

• Logic Pro for iPad - don’t need it

• Disney+ - streaming providers keep raising prices, so it goes; Netflix could be next

What about you? What are your must-have subscriptions, and what have you dropped recently?

📋️ Pure Paste: A Great Free Utility

Copy and paste is great. It’s saved us a tremendous amount of time and effort. But, in a world full of rich text, copying and pasting has some overhead and can sometimes be downright frustrating. A beautiful font face on a website may not be what you’re looking for when pasting that snippet into an email. Of course, “Paste and Match Style” is an option, but it’s a mess of a keyboard shortcut (option + shift + command + V 🥴), and some apps don’t offer it.

Pure Paste is a simple, free Mac app that hangs out in the background and clears formatting from the copied text so that you get precisely what you want in the destination app when you paste it. It includes handy settings to help handle unique cases, such as preserving links and removing tracking parameters from URLs (bless!). You can also add apps to the exclusions list, and the app will ignore data copied from them.

You can get the app for free on the Mac App Store. Recommended!

🗞️ Here’s What’s in the News