Shawn Hickman:

A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy. Remembering where you left off is the hard part.

Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up on covers throughout the app so you can see where you stand at a glance. Your home screen shows what’s next with one-tap checkboxes to keep things moving.

Five ways to track, depending on what fits: just enjoy with zero setup, tap to log, count pages, check off episodes, or keep a journal as you go. Pick one and switch anytime.

It’s a well-established cliché that no one ever finds the perfect to-do app or “task management system” unless they create it themselves. That’s certainly true for me (and resulted in my co-creating Vesper). Keeping track of things you want or need to do is too close to codifying how you think and remember things in your own mind, and we all think and remember in unique ways. We thus crave unique apps or systems to manage our tasks, ones that fit our minds just right. That’s why there are a zillion to-do apps, including a bunch that are actually good. And, these days, that’s why there are so many people creating their own personal to-do apps using AI coding systems.

Because media-tracking apps are just a subset of to-do apps, all the same things hold true for them. So, just like how I occasionally flit back and forth between general-purpose to-do apps, or become enamored with a new one, I’ve switched between several media-tracking apps over the years. These are apps where you keep lists of movies and shows you want to watch, books you want to read, and then log them, perhaps with notes or ratings, as you watch them.

It’s an endlessly fascinating app genre. Sofa is a really good example, one that I’ve used on and off for years. (Disclaimer: I started using Sofa when it was the weekly sponsor on DF back in 2022, but I’ve kept using it since then because it’s so good.) I’ve been using Sofa v5 for months now, including while it was in beta, and it is a big improvement to an already very good, very thoughtful app. A lot of people use general-purpose to-do apps to track movies and shows to watch, books to read, and games to play. Sofa 5 goes the other way, and expands what started as a dedicated media tracker into something you can use to track, well, anything you want to do.

Sofa is quite useful for free, and super useful with a paid subscription. If you’re even vaguely unsatisfied with your current app or system for tracking media to watch / read / play, you should check it out.

Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs:

When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you told him when you’d have an answer. Again, this was just good advice to anyone “managing up,” as they say.

This is A+ advice for dealing with anyone, period. If you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” So many people have a deep aversion to saying that. And if you can say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out in «some short amount of time here»”, say that.

Here’s the bit that’s relevant this week:

Steve didn’t like the status bar and didn’t see the need for it. “Who looks at URLs when you hover your mouse over a link?” He thought it was just too geeky.

Fortunately, Scott and I convinced Steve to keep the status bar as an option, not visible by default. But that meant we had a new problem. Where should we put the progress bar to indicate how much of the page was left to load?

Before, the progress bar lived inside the status bar. So we needed to find it a new home. We discussed all sorts of silly ideas including making it vertical along the edge of the window.

Remember, this was back in the day before the spinning gear or other smaller affordances were widely used to indicate progress. In the age of barber-pole blue Aqua, it had to be a bar.

The room got quiet. Steve and I sat side-by-side in front of the demo machine staring at Safari. Suddenly we turned to each other and said at the same time, “In the page address field!”

Smiles all around. Which I followed with, “I’ll have a working version of that for you by the end of the week.” Over-committing my engineering team, of course.

But I didn’t care. I had just invented something with the Big Guy. True, it was a trifle, but there’s no feeling like sharing even a tiny byline with Steve.

This of course, is contra John Calhoun’s offhand recollection (in a Hacker News thread last month) that Steve Lemay “also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar”. Melton is a direct source, so there’s no reason to doubt her recollection of having conceived of the idea alongside Steve Jobs. These recollections are not, of course, mutually exclusive — perhaps Lemay was a designer assigned to flesh out the idea, and Calhoun remembers him as a proponent of the idea.

Anyway, this whole essay from Melton just goes down like butter. So good.

Reading about the Pebble Index motivated to keep looking for a better way to dictate reminders using my Apple Watch. Ideally, I would press a button, immediately begin speaking, and the literal text of what I said would appear in OmniFocus. This should work when offline. My watch doesn’t have an action button, so the […]

Matt Birchler (pre-Neo): I think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it’s a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" […]

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad.