Joe Cieplinski

“He’s got a date with fate in a black sedan…” 🎵

Another one caught with Spectre. Subway.

Spectre does interesting things with falling snow when light trails are turned on.

Digging the new Dream Theater album. Lots to like there.

New on my blog: I’ve added a quick 3D Touch menu to the frequents panel in RECaf. So you can change the amount or date very quickly before logging a frequent item: joecieplinski.com/blog/2019…

The way I see it, this so called “National Emergency” is nothing more than our President stealing our money and using it for his re-election campaign.

Also, I love to hear how pianists interpret some of Vai’s crazy antics on guitar, given the differences between how you can express yourself on those two very different instruments.

Just realized Steve Vai has released Volume 2 of his Piano Reductions series, with Miho Arai on piano this time. Don’t know how I missed that. Incredible to listen to these songs in their purest, solo instrumental form. Reminds me just how good a composer Vai actually is.

Every time I take my iPad out to the cafe instead of my laptop to encourage myself to get some writing done, I’m reminded that if I were primarily a writer, there’s no doubt in my mind I’d be using iOS full time by now.

Dark Mode is looking nice on the Mac for Micro.blog. The list of remaining unsupported apps gets even shorter.

Now, if I could just have a chat with the folks at Adobe and the folks at Apple working on Logic…

Big announcement day for Release Notes: We’re doing the conference again in 2019. And we’ve got a new location: Save the Date

Been too long since I’ve listened to King’s X, Ear Candy. Fixing that now.

Weekends for me are not so much “I’m not working” as they are “I’m working in a different app than usual.”

I’ve said it before, but I really can’t stress enough how much of a musical masterpiece “Act IV: Rebirth in Reprise” by The Dear Hunter is. Just a perfect album. 🎵

First flight for 2019 booked. I have a feeling it’s going to be a busy travel year for me.

I gifted Jessica a copy of Carrot Weather.

“It just called me a meatbag.”

“Yeah. It does that.”

More excited than I would expect to be about a new blazer that arrived today. New York’s more formal sense of fashion is finally rubbing off on me, I guess.

Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to listening to Between the Buried and Me’s Automata II. I had only listened to part 1 up to this point. Wow. Mind-blowing musicianship going on there. cc: @muncman.

I wonder if they’ve changed something in the anodization process, or the aluminum has changed somehow.

One thing I’ve noticed about my 2018 MacBook Pro: Not only has the keyboard been 100% reliable, but the palm rest and the trackpad seem to be holding up better to the oils in my hands. By now, I usually have a big “spot” on my trackpad, and the palm rests are discolored. But that hasn’t happened to this machine yet. Still looks new.

Two things that were fun about adding Shortcuts to Fin. First, I had to navigate the API in Objective-C. Second, I used NSUserActivity instead of Intents, since I’m just launching the app in a certain state on trigger.