Press Control-Return in Sequoia to Open Contextual Menus

The airshow returns to Key West this weekend after a few years absence. It should be fun to go see the planes, the Blue Angels and other stunt pilots.

We have gotten stock of the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro so stop into one of our stores if you want to get a hands-on look at the latest from Apple!

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily & Hadley_

I have tried a lot of apps over the years for keeping ideas organized, assigning tasks or just keeping track of my goals. The problem I’ve found with many of the organizational applications is that I don’t find them easy to access. If you’re not on your phone or at your computer, often these applications can’t be utilized easily or have widely varied interfaces depending on which device your using.

“**Trello**”:https://trello.com/ has become my new favorite go-to app for keeping ideas and tasks organized. Trello is a free app with the ability to also pay for upgraded features for minimal fees. Why do I love Trello so much? It’s simple, I can easily use it on my computer, my iPhone or my iPad. There is an app for all three of my devices, and each version works seamlessly with the others. Working with several staff members in different departments here at Small Dog can make keeping track of tasks and to-do lists a bit of a challenge, but this simple application has really helped to streamline things.

I easily and quickly create what they call “boards”, each board then allows you to create individual categories to which you can then add individual tasks. Within my lists I can upload photos, files, web links, assign due dates and add notes. Once I have created a board, I can also easily share that board with co-workers or whomever I choose to share them with. Anyone I have shared a board with can also be granted access to update and add to the boards, add notes or more files.

A feature many of us have come to really rely on are the updates that you get from Trello notifying you that someone has made a change. I have found just one complaint thus far about the application. There appears to be no feature to mark a task as completed while still leaving it on your board. You can easily archive tasks and even entire boards, but I prefer to still be able to see those tasks while clearly seeming them marked as completed. However, all in all, I find this to be an invaluable app and one that I utilize all of the time. I have tried and do use google docs and google drive, and I’ve installed those on my devices as well, but for me nothing beats the ease and convenience of Trello.

So by now, it might be clear that I am a bit of a headphone junkie. I’ve come to the conclusion that I can collect and use headphones like I do bags and purses! In my world I can never have enough, so I jumped on the opportunity this week to test our the new “**Hellas**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002177 and “**Reimers**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002181 from Urbanears.

The Hellas are an over the ear bluetooth headphone. It took a few minutes to get them paired with my computer. My only complaint about these headphones is that I found the touch-less buttons to be a bit clunky to use. The sleek design means you can’t physically see the buttons, so it take some practice and time to learn where the buttons are. However, there are a ton of other features with these headphones that make them extremely appealing. They are incredibly lightweight, comfortable to wear and they have good sound to them. I think my favorite feature about these is that the fabric on the headband and the earpieces are machine washable. You can actually wash the fabric and return your headphones to new condition. As I just started to use these the other day I have not actually tried to wash the fabric, but as more and more people are working out with over the ear headphones this is a huge selling point. Another hidden feature is that there is a built in microphone, so if you are using these with your iPhone, you can take calls without having to remove your headphones.

Also part of the active line are the Reimers. They deliver on fit and comfort while providing some great sound! I am impressed with how far ear buds have come over the years. What’s interesting about these headphones is that while they are in the active category, they are actually a wired set of headphones. However, Urbanears added several great features to ensure these headphones can stand up to the intensity of any workout. They have two clips for securing them to your clothing and they feature reflective cabling to light up during early morning or late evening runs. They use a new earlock technology that ensures they stay in during your workout, so no more fears of them falling out during sit-ups, push-ups and the like. I admit I am just a runner, so some of the more intense workouts I’ve not tried these, but judging by how well they stayed in for runs I am confident in saying they will stay put! Last but not least, they feature standard iOS controls we have all grown to expect out of headphones.

Apple posted record earnings and profit for the holiday quarter disappointing those analysts that predicted less than stellar results. Of course, the realistic guidance for the next quarter sent Apple stock plummeting while those same analysts maintain a price target that is $40-50 higher than the current price of the stock. Okay, so Apple’s profit and revenue were all time records for the company but the remarkable tidbit is that no public corporation ever has posted that much profit in a single quarter. Let’s see how Apple did that.

First of all, Apple sold 74.8 million iPhones in the quarter. Not too shabby and that revenue is nearly 70% of Apple’s total. The average sales price (ASP) for the iPhone was up to $691 which also led to slightly higher gross margin. To put that is some perspective that is an average of 34,000 iPhones sold per hour 24/7 for 13 weeks.

They finished the quarter with about $215 billion in cash which represents about $39/share. Macs sales were down a bit at 5.3 million units and the iPad continues to do moderate in sales with sales dropping year on year from 21.4 million units to 16.1 million units.

Currency “headwinds” have caused some of these results to be muted. With the exceptionally strong dollar it is more difficult to export US goods and sales suffer a bit. The Euro and British Pound were down double digits and the Canadian and Australian dollars were down 20% or more. It gets worse. The Russian Ruble is down by 50% and Brazilian Real is down 40%. Apple estimated that if it were not for these global currency fluctuations that their revenue would have been over $80 billion representing an 8% increase. But despite those headwinds, Apple posted their best quarter ever.

Other high points were service revenue which was the highest ever at over $6 billion. Wow, $6 billion in just iTunes, App store and a few other things. That is more revenue that quite a few well known companies and a 24% growth year over year. Other products which include the Apple TV, Beats and Apple Watch also were strong with $4.5 Billion in sales.

In another milestone that just points to the success of the services side of Apple’s business Tim Cook announced that they now calculate that there are more than 1 billion Apple devices in use worldwide which is up 25% year over year. That is simply incredible considering that there are only 7.4 billion people on the planet!

What sent Apple stock down was Apple’s realistic prediction that iPhones sales in their 2nd fiscal quarter would decline year over year by as much as 15-20%. Last year’s 2nd quarter was strong because of supply issues that moved some revenue from the 1st to 2nd quarter and the impact of the global currency situation has caused some price adjustments. Apple remains very bullish on the iPhone market and pointed to the fact that in China over 50% of the iPhones sold were to people buying their first iPhone. Apple pointed out that the growth of the middle class in China is unprecedented with the middle class comprising about 50 million people in 2010 and now it is projected to be $500,000,000 by 2020.

Even if Apple sells “only” the 40-45 million iPhones in this quarter that would still be more revenue that most companies earn overall in a single quarter. To put this in perspective, Apple books more revenue at strong margins, than Amazon, Facebook, Google or Microsoft generate from all of their operations.

All in all the financial results that Apple announced were an incredible testament to the quality and innovation of Apple products and of a company doing things right. Congratulations to the entire Apple team!

Speed Up Your Fingers with Text Expansion

With all the advances in computing and communications, it’s amazing that–after nearly 150 years!–we still use the keyboard layout from the world’s first practical typewriter for entering text into our Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Sure there are some improving dictation solutions out there but typing is by far how we input text. But we have not gotten that much better as typists, nor do we enjoy typing more–if anything, we increasingly abbreviate to avoid typing, hence “LOL, BRB, etc.” Text messaging aside, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to type less without compromising meaning or making your text look like it was composed by a trained monkey? Thanks to text expansion features built into OS X and iOS, and extended with third-party utilities, you can.

For basic text expansion capabilities in OS X, look in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text, and in iOS 9, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. For both, you can enter a phrase, and a shortcut that expands into that phrase when typed and followed by a space or punctuation character. (Tip: If text expansion doesn’t work in a Mac app like Mail or Safari, make sure Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement is selected.)

If you’re signed into the same iCloud account on both your Mac and your iPhone, for instance, the text expansions sync between them automatically. So, you can type “smh” and tap the Space bar to get “Shaking my head!” typed out for you, regardless of what device you’re using. (Another tip: don’t create abbreviations that you will also want to type normally. It might seem like a good idea to use “np” for “No Problem,” but that will get in the way of talking about Nurse Practitioners.)

With such a useful feature built into OS X and iOS, why would you want to spend money on a third-party utility, like “**TextExpander**”:https://smilesoftware.com/textexpander (Mac and iOS), “**Typinator**”:http://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/ (Mac), or “**TypeIt4Me**”:http://www.ettoresoftware.com/products/typeit4me/. Unfortunately, OS X’s text expansion feature doesn’t work in all apps (it likely won’t work if the app lacks the Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement menu command). The interface for creating new substitutions is cramped and hard to work with, you can’t configure the trigger characters that cause abbreviations to expand, and you can’t include text with styles, variable text like the date, or even graphics.

That’s where text expansion utilities shine. They can include styled text and graphics in expansions, insert the current date and time, respect case when expanding abbreviations, include the contents of the clipboard in expanded text, automatically fix common typos, create fill-in-the-blanks snippets that you customize on each expansion, and much more.

Here are some ideas for the kinds of things you might want to turn over to your computer for typing:
Long or complex words or phrases, such as scientific names. Aedes aegypti, anyone?

*Your address, phone number, and email address. One of my favorites is “@d” which inserts my email address. I get real tired of typing email address, phone numbers, etc. Text expansion speeds that up!

*Boilerplate text for common email replies.

*The current date and/or time.

*Special characters, so blb could expand to the British pound symbol £.

*Unix commands for Terminal, such as using ssh to log in to a remote computer.

I am sure you can come up with dozens that might work for you and speed up your typing. So think about what bit of text you might want expand automatically and give text expansion a try today!