I'm sure all of you have been hearing the same thing: "We have to get used to a new normal." I myself have been hearing this a lot lately as well. Whether it's a global pandemic, social injustices, the attacks on media or science, or changes in our weather due to climate change, there's a lot of "new" out there to get used to.

I've thought about this a lot as I'm getting older: norms change all the time. Our "new normal" – current crises aside – is much different than our parents grew up with. Much different than I grew up with. In the last 20 years, there's been a rapid change in our daily lives for what we consider normal.

Twenty years ago, I was in college. That's back in the days of AOL and dial-up.^[1] Communication was starting to really take off as "instant", with instant messaging and cell phones. It was just at the precipice of it, and back then it was exciting to go through. Now, most of those same services we started with are gone and have been replaced by new things. And those new things are now old and established institutions within our social lives.

Think of where we are today: we have instant access to everything. We are a society that wants everything right now. We always want the new stuff. We want change immediately. We want justice immediately. And we are at quite a crossroads. The people who are making decisions – right, wrong, or indifferent – are by and large from a generation who didn't grow up with instant. They have been adapting to a new normal for a long time, yet still want to hold on to the older ideals they grew up with. I'm sure that you and I will be doing the same as we get older.

We as individuals can adapt to a new normal at our own pace. Society not so much. Society involves more people and moves slowly, which is not the world we as individuals expect to live in today. As we are all striving to return to what "normal" looks like, we need to realize that things are changing rapidly and that a normal or a new normal might not even be what we expect. I guess for now we move forward as the pandemic rages, and wait patiently for what life will be like on the other side.

Maybe take a break from things online. Take some time to figure out connecting to others in the safest way possible. Reflect on what we are all going through.^[2] Do your part to help others through this, whether it be checking in on people or doing the simplest thing that anyone could: wear a damn mask.

Every year, I hesitate on jumping on the betas. I worry about the bugs, the data loss, and all the ways it can screw with my devices. Then, inevitably, I end up jumping on them around beta 2 or 3. When the releases come out in the fall, I usually delete the beta profile and do an install with the release version. I follow the recommended steps for backing up, then just install the OS and carry on.

It's been a long time since I've done a clean install: no restoration from a backup, installing everything as new, letting the cloud services work to bring the data back to my devices on a per-app basis. This is a time-consuming process, and the main reason I haven't done it in so long. It might be all the way back to iOS 8 since I've done this. Those many, many years of little inconsistencies have lead to a lot of cruft, and I think this is the year to do wipe the slate clean.

Playing around with the iOS 14 beta so far, the App Library is a feature that hasn't been my favorite. It doesn't organize the apps in the categories which I would: I think that a banking app should be in finance, not in productivity. I think games should be a category, which include the Apple Arcade titles as well. I get they are pushing a brand, but unless you stay subscribed, that advertising will go away. The search aspect of it is great, but I can also use Spotlight search to find the apps I need.

But where it doesn't live up to my desires, it does deliver on supporting a clean install. I don't have to organize my Home Screen as I add apps one by one. I can hide pages and pages of apps, and organize my true Home Screen. This takes away a ton of pressure and mental overhead that I don't need to carry with me. It will make the process far easier for me than ever before. And in that way, the App Library is actually a welcome feature for me now. I wish that same feature would be there on the iPad, but perhaps there are more plans for that in the future.

This year is the perfect time to do a clean install. I can finally shed the years of issues without having to worry about the time and effort required to get back up and running. I'm all for clearing clutter and minimizing what things I have in my life. And this fall will be no different.

I'm going to be blunt: I'm not even sure why I'm sitting down to write this. I don't know where this post is even going, and if I'm honest with myself, I'm a little scared by where it might go or what I might say.^[1] But I think I just need to get these thoughts out of my head and out into the ether.

The last few months, in the midst of the pandemic, have been mostly ok for me and my family. I'm privileged as hell: I have a job where I can work at home, care for my kids and my partner, and we're all doing well health wise. I've even gone out to a few places, albeit limited, and it's been OK.

There's this looming feeling over everything though: we're in a pandemic. I'm not sure we as a society really grasp what this means. There's so much information – and misinformation – out there, and not everything is known or explained well. People are taking ridiculous stances on their feelings when we should be focused on science and reason. I've said it on more than one occasion that if we can't pull this together, we have failed as a species and deserve every bit of what we get. And to be clear: you should wear a mask and wash your hands. Please don't bother to convince me otherwise. Go ahead and lose my number if you feel differently.

In the past few weeks, I've been agonizing over the decision for sending my child back to face-to-face learning. I've communicated with our district superintendent for the first time^[2] and voiced my concerns with the plans laid out before the parents. I've lost so much sleep over this I don't really even want to think about it. It's constantly weighed on my mind, and I feel physically tired from it.

In speaking with my best friend today, we lamented how our discussions keep devolving into discussion of the current pandemic, how others are handling it, and how we are handling it. How we feel like bad parents and crazy people for continuing courses of action for months on end. My fight-or-flight response has been in almost constant engagement since this all went down. And I feel exhausted. But what the hell else are we going to discuss? Apps? Technology? More unimportant shit? Of course not. Because we have a fucking lion in the form of a pandemic chasing us.

I've been wanting to be creative for a while. I really admire the people who can be creative in this time. I had some push at the start of this, put out a few posts, and then… nothing. I hit a wall. I had been thinking of various posts over the past few months, but thought to myself none of this shit is important. And then I find myself doing other things. It should be no surprise that the single most traveled place in the past few months has been to the hardware store, masked and gloved, to get things to improve the house. I've learned some new things on how to hang a door properly, and how big a pain in the ass it can be. I'm working with my girlfriend to understand what we want to do the house how we want to make it our place. I've created an office space, and I'm starting on a new, more permanent one.

So when I think about it, I'm being creative, but in a more practical sense. I'm getting my house in order – my literal house – for the first time in a long time. I've made list upon list of what I want to do, and sadly, how much it's going to cost me over time. But I know that in a few short years, I might be in a great spot with a house I'm finally proud of after 10 years of ownership.

I am, however, stifled when it comes to writing. My brain feels like it hurts when I sit down to type things out. My journaling has been hit or miss in the past few weeks, as has my general health routine. I'm feeling burned out. I'm feeling like I need a break. And so, I think I'll continue to take one. This isn't to say that I don't have thoughts and ideas: I've created several mind maps to help me organize what I want to write about in the future, and ideas that I feel are worth sharing. But right now, given the current climate, I just can't bring myself to sit down and really focus on them when so much else out there is important.

There's a level of guilt that I feel when it comes to this. There are times where I think "I owe it to people to write and put things out there". But I keep coming back to the fact that it doesn't put food on the table. That it isn't my day job and takes away from time with my family or my home. Maybe if there was incentive on my end to write, I'd do it more often and carve out the time. But until I focus on how to incentivize all this, I'm going to continue to write at my pace and figure out how to make it all happen.

I'll get back to doing it eventually. And I'm hopeful that some of the ideas that I have in my mind are actually decent enough to share. Of course, I'll be writing about things coming for the fall; maybe saving some of my creative energy for that is the best course for me. We're all navigating this global pandemic differently. We're all trying to do what we need to keep sane and healthy. And for me, that takes the shape of protecting my family and house by working and providing leadership, all to keep the lion away. The writing will have to wait for now. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get a bunch more work done around the house. Enough procrastination. Time to do the work.

I'm often asked what different uses I have for Drafts, my everything-text app of choice. I have a variety of core use cases which I use Drafts for every day: even with my posts and large reviews, journaling is by far the highest volume of content I create.

I've journaled for a while. And while I'm not perfect at doing it and frequently miss days because life sometimes gets in the way, there are some considerations I've made for my particular journaling solution. A few years ago, I created my own journal solution: this utilized Drafts + Dropbox + Workflow. That solution morphed into using DEVONthink To Go to save the journal entries, primarily because of security. I was also storing more information there at the time, so it made sense.

Then, in the midst of a pandemic, I started looking at a lot of the things in my life that were just adding to my least favorite thing: clutter. I started wondering where DEVONthink fit into my life. And aside from keeping the rare thing or two in it, I only used it for journaling. So while this solution worked – and worked well – it started to become apparent to me that I no longer wanted this as the solution.

Inevitably, as often these ear worms do, it sent me down a new path. How could I take my journaling solution and simplify it to use the apps and services I want to use so that I can streamline my process, or at the very least, make it easier to use and review later? Just use a dedicated app.

I've been down this road. In the past, I used a dedicated journaling app. And while it was good at what it did, there were aspects that didn't appeal to me: security breaches and a subscription price isn't worth it for me.^[1] I can roll my own solution here utilizing apps I already have, and save myself the cost. And, for the most part, I'm not missing a lot from some of the full-featured apps.

Another reason for not doing this is that most use their own syncing solution, which has me uncomfortable. I like to control where my data is going. I trust Apple more than most, even if it's not a fully secure thing.^[2] Having that control feels right to me, and having my data stored in iCloud Drive will be better for me in the long run anyway.

Moving from Dropbox to iCloud Drive has allowed me to purge my subscription to Dropbox entirely, and I increased my 200GB iCloud Drive plan to 1TB. Now I pay far less for the same storage I was using. I still have my Dropbox account and still use the 7GB free that I have, but I don't use it in the same way; it is for shared or temporary files. I don't need to have DEVONthink installed, thus clearing up some clutter from my life.

So, now on to how I threw this together…

I start my journal by tapping a shortcut in the widget or tapping the shortcut notification, which in turn kicks of an automation; the automation actually calls the shortcut, so the process of them is the same, but how I get there can be different.^[3] This shortcut asks me a few questions, all of which can be run in the widget and is my preferred method, to start off my journal. From there, it adds my sleep duration and resting heart rate, along with aspects of the weather forecast for the day, all formatted how I like them.

All of that text goes into Drafts, along with the proper tags to make sure it gets into my Journal workspace. This is where all of my thoughts go. I have it broken into a couple of categories: quick hits and entries.^[4] Quick hits are just that: quick little thoughts. I found that adding quick hits has allowed me to just write instead of feeling like I need to say anything profound. Just gets it out of my head and on to the pa… screen. Entries are for more long-form writing. I don't do them every day, but when I do, I like to make sure I know what time of the day I was writing it. Over time, I've even seen patterns just knowing the time of day I was writing, which has been interesting.

For entries or even quick hits, I have several shortcuts which can add data to my journal: weather, location, health, and music. Each of those adds pertinent data to my entries at any given time; they start in Drafts, kick over to Shortcuts, gets the data back, and sends a block of text back into my journal entry. For the health shortcut, it needs to be run from the phone. It is also limited to move ring numbers, as exercise minutes and stand hours aren't available via Shortcuts right now. My hope was to recreate activity rings, but I'll wait on that until more support come to both the Shortcuts and Health apps.

Along with the data, I can add a few other file types that might be relevant for me: audio recordings, photos, and files. These don't save the files into Drafts, which does not support them, but rather provides Markdown-formatted links to the files for use later. I occasionally will do an audio file to capture something that's more nuanced than text. Similarly, I might need to reference a file later and having the option here helps as well. It may seem weird that I have files linked to a journal, but, well… it's my journal.

Now that I have everything in place, rather than save the text, I realized I just want to be able to view the final product after it's completed for the day. For a while, I was saving plain text and viewing it later via a quick look action, but I ultimately just want the rendered journal entry. This sent me down the path to creating a way to save a PDF of the document, along with rendered images and links to the audio recordings and files for later consumption.

This might sound complex, but what it forced me to do was focus on what I really wanted to ever put in a journal, and develop those solutions. Now that they are there, assuming Drafts, Shortcuts, and Scriptable don't go away, I'll be able to have this solution for a long time. In fact, if improvements come to Shortcuts which provide certain features, I might not even need all three to make this happen.^[5]

The trickiest part of all of this was saving the photos, files, recordings, and the final PDF where I wanted them to go. This is where Scriptable comes in. Scriptable provides the ability to create File Bookmarks, something highlighted by Federico in his FS Bookmarks post. In simple terms, the File Bookmark enables me to have saved locations to send data into. Scriptable is able to manipulate files in a way that Shortcuts simply can't: if I want to move a file from one location in iCloud Drive to another, I can't do that natively in Shortcuts. But with a little JavaScript and some help,^[6] I'm able to do just that.

For each one of the different document types – photos, recordings, files, and entries – I have a file bookmark to a folder. They all run generally in the same way, with some exceptions in each. The main point of all of these was I could save them into the /iCloud Drive/Shortcuts/ folder in an automated way, but would have to manually select where to put it if I wanted the file anywhere else. This is less than ideal from an automation perspective. It can be done, but if there's a way to automate it, I'd much rather.

So for each of the shortcuts outlined below, I have a script in Scriptable which is basically the following:

let filePath = args.fileURLs[0];
let fm = FileManager.iCloud()
let destinationPath = fm.bookmarkedPath('Path'); //change this to your bookmarked folder in Scriptable
let fileName = fm.fileName(filePath) + '.' + fm.fileExtension(filePath);
fm.move(filePath, destinationPath + '/' + fileName)

As you see in the comment within the script, you need to change the 'Path' to whatever your file bookmark is called. For my journal entries, I simply have it named 'Journal'. For each one of the file types I have a journal bookmark for where they need to end up. I also have a separate scriptable action which is incorporated into the shortcuts I use. With all of these in place, I can start to send the different files where I need them to go automatically.

Each shortcut is essentially the same: it asks me to select a file, rename the file, and then saves it into a Shortcuts folder. Then, I'm kicked over to Scriptable to move the file from one place to another. Upon return, they each produce a link to the file type. While moving out of Shortcuts into Scriptable and back again isn't ideal, it does work; my hope is that in the future, I won't have to do this song-and-dance maneuver.

For audio recordings and files, I've taken the prefix of the launcher shortcut and just appended the file name and folder location manually:

shareddocuments:///private/var/mobile/Library/Mobile%20Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Personal/Journal/

This works extremely well and means I don't have to create a file bookmark for every file. Photos, however, uses something else. At the time of me writing this, I cannot figure out a way to have renderable links for photos within Files. I've tried everything I can think of, but nothing has worked. I could use my website and upload images, but I only need them on a temporary basis. This is where Dropbox comes in. I save the image file to Dropbox in a temp folder, get the link to the file, and insert a Markdown image link ![name](url); I had to make sure to replace the www with dl to make it render, but it works very well. Every so often, I have a shortcut that I can tap and remove all of the temporary images from the folder. I don't actually need to keep the images here: because they are rendered and a part of the PDF, they are ephemeral files for me. If I ever want to review the image, I can just pop into my photo library, search on the date, and then get the file.

To save my entires, I have a shortcut that is kicked off from Drafts. It accepts the Markdown-formatted text from Drafts, converts it to HTML, and then uses a customized HTML formatting I created to generate a PDF. Once I view the PDF and hit 'OK' to proceed, the PDF is then saved to iCloud Drive in the Shortcuts folder; from there, I'm sent over to Scriptable where the script moves it from the folder to the Journal bookmarked folder, similar to how I do with the other files.

So, I'm sure you're wanting to see these actions. But, I'm not sharing them right now. Not because I'm trying to be mean and withhold them, but they change very frequently; I'm tweaking them so often that during the time I started writing to the time I'm going to hit publish on this post, it will have changed no less than 4 times.^[7] These actions are pretty simple to create, aside from the JavaScript I already shared. The image below will help guide you through some of the Shortcuts. I'm thinking about sharing them at some point,^[8] but for now you'll just have to steal inspiration and create them yourself.

Compared to what I originally started with and even my "upgraded" solution along the way, this new solution is so much better for me and the way I want to keep my journal. I'm even going back through my journal entries, fixing some image and file links, and will be saving those out as a PDF as well.

In the future, I hope that I can do a couple of things to improve all of it: move the files within Shortcuts actions itself, and render images using iCloud Drive rather than using Dropbox. If I can streamline this workflow to be Drafts + Shortcuts – two apps that will be around for a long time – I'd much prefer it. And while I don't mind supporting another indie developer right now, I would love to reduce the digital clutter in my life even more.

The end result of this has paid off for me: I've built a complete journaling system over time, built on the foundation of common formats and apps I use on a daily basis, to create the best system for me. As with a lot of things surrounding Drafts and the way I work, I can see this workflow sticking for a long time. It's evolved from a text based solution to a PDF solution. The PDF format has been around for ages, and I don't see that going away for a while. It will allow me to keep a lot of the historical record intact for at least my lifetime. Will I ever share it with anyone? Probably not. But I can rest easy that if I really wanted to do it, I now have the ability to do so.

Some of you have asked about my new site design, and the reasons behind some of my choices. Rather than explain them individually, I thought I'd drop them all here.

The original site design dates back to 2016. I did most of it myself, with the exception of some help from my sage web advisor – Jeff Mueller. I was happy with it for a long time – nearly four years. There were things that I wanted to add in an effort to make it more modern that I had zero idea how to implement. The development time for me to sit down and figure it out piled up to not be worth it.

And it finally hit me: why not have someone else do this work? There are many times where giving this work to someone else can free you to do what you hadn't before. I do this in other aspects of my personal life, so why not this? So that's when I set down this path, and really embraced this new direction. This time, rather than ask for advice, I contracted out the work to Jeff.

I found a WordPress theme that I liked, but I knew I wanted to make it much more my own. I wanted to implement some things that I had seen elsewhere: a light/dark theme which automatically switches based on your device preferences, code blocks with line numbers, and better support for images with captions. Things that make it feel more in-tune with the improvements in technology and not stuck in the past. It was a relief to not have to dive into the code and tweak it, but rather to give direction as to what to fix and let someone do the work.

The only thing left for me to decide were the theme colors. I had been using a yellow and gray for my last theme. And while I still enjoy that color combination a lot, it doesn't work at all for a light theme, which pushed me to choose something different. So naturally, I started out with a completely different color than most – blue.

Blue is fine. Blue is ok. But blue is used by so many others. Just take a look at your home screen on your phone, tablet, or computer and you'll see a sea of blue in a lot of cases. So, I decided to not to go down the road of so many others. I looked a few other options – some greens and teals – but nothing really jumped out at me. Then, while changing my watch band one evening, it hit me:

Dragon Fruit.

I have had a dragon fruit sport loop band since Christmas. It is my favorite Apple Watch band that I own because it was a gift from my partner (she's amazing) and it's just a solid color choice.^[1] I cannot tell you how often I wear this because it pairs so well with the grayscale pallet, from white to gray to charcoal to black. So I put that color against a light and dark background that came from some Drafts theme colors, and was instantly in love. Pair that with a nice mid-gray which works for both, and I had my palette.

This is where the logo journey started. I wanted something different, something new. The same day that I thought about a site redesign and a new logo, I saw a post from another Jeff – Jeff Perry. He was offering to do some work to help others, and boy did I need it. There were a lot of back and forth discussions and directions with him about the logo. Too many. And all of that my fault, as I didn't exactly know where I wanted to go with all of it.

There were multiple iterations of a design. I enjoyed the first logo a lot. I liked the whole idea of having a vague looking N surrounding an homage to Drafts. The idea was clean, but ultimately decided not to go this path because I thought it looked a bit too much like a business card and not something I would want for a website.

Then I went to another extreme: what if I created a design of glyphs to show what my site is about (most of the time). I liked this idea a lot too. But it looked more like an infographic than a logo. It would be a chunky item to put at the top of the page. I do still like this a lot, and might incorporate some of the design aesthetic into posts in the future, but I ultimately didn't pursue this direction further.

Then I went back to basics, and hated myself a bit. This… is awful. I'm ashamed of it. So why not discuss it and show it off? It really comes down to this: in searching some logo designs, I saw a lot of line/dot art that looked like an object. And while this worked in practice for other designs, it is a horrible design for what I wanted. And I won't mention it again. Ever.

I went further back. When a job goes wrong, you go back to the beginning. All the way back to my first logo. It was simply the n in the font choice of my website. I really only ever used it for my favicon, and no where else. I always had nahumck.me up on top. So I went into Pixelmator, and put that on the canvas in text. I started thinking about what I could do to break it up. This lead me to a line, which lead me to a rectangle. and that's when it all started coming together. I'll break up the nahumck and the me with a box, where the period would be a do which breaks up the box.

Now, that's not much of a logo. But if I took it down to where I started originally – with a simple n – it might work best. So I handed this off to Jeff, and he created the final version. The corners became more rounded and the line stopped closer to the dot and also followed the outline of it. I loved this little touch in the design. This is what I will use going forward for the website, and I absolutely love it!

It was a process to get this done. Working with the Jeffs was easy, even if I was stressed in my head. Going through some tough discussions and decisions to make way for something bold is fantastic. I was stuck in a rut with the colors at first, much like my writing. But I realized this needed to change. I would have never chosen dragonfruit as my initial color, but I'm happy that it turned into what I ultimately wanted. I was looking to go with a different idea for a logo, but ultimately went with something familiar yet modern. Even better, I'll have a new visual in Drafts for my previews in the future, so the new themes will be everywhere.

I'm happy that this has all worked out for the better. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do. And who knows: maybe there are some stickers and shirts in the future…