Happy Sunday morning everyone! There are some serious forest fires taking place in the eastern and northern parts of our province and the hazy smoke has stifled the air outside. Our thoughts go out to all those families affected by the raging fires.

Our little family is full steam ahead into summer activities at this point. We have baseball four nights a week and a few church opportunities along the way each week. I've decided I will try my hardest to never tell someone "Life is busy" as an answer ever again — yes, things are busy, but though we are tired, we are enjoying seeing our little ones grow and learn all sorts of new skills. To each part of life, there is a season. And we're enjoying the hectic pace, late nights, and increasing amount of ice cream we're eating with the kids.

This week, I've got a discussion on using dual Apple Studio Displays for work, MacStories's look at the upcoming Sky app, a few reviews of the Sony XM6 headphones, and a few quick blurbs on writing, fun apps, and Traveler's Notebooks.

On Using Dual Apple Studio Displays

I attempted to work with dual Apple Studio Displays for a couple weeks at the office after the hectic pace of tax season subsided. I have long admired beautiful dual display setups in r/macsetups. And the seemingly obvious conclusion that more screen real estate means more productivity has beckoned from the distance for quite some time.

This is the second time I've tried it — the first was a lackluster attempt and lasted only a few hours. I had a bad day, felt sick, and the bright displays and constant back-and-forth with my neck didn't help my first impression of a dual display work setup. That day, I specifically remember how bright both displays felt when side-by-side — it felt like so much light beaming down in my little command center. I also remember a modest neck twinge because I didn't have room on my desk to have one Studio Display front and center and the second display off to the side.

I tried to rectify those first issues this time, but ultimately decided to retire the dual display setup once again.

First, and specific to my office setup, the two displays side-by-side were very overwhelming and served to disconnect me from the rest of the office. With a single display, I can just drop my left shoulder slightly and peer out the door to see what's going on in the main area. With two displays, I couldn't see anything going on. I don't like the feeling of not being accessible to the rest of the office.

Second, desk space — you need lots of desk space to make two 27-inch displays work without feeling like space is constrained. Apple does a good job not taking up too much desk space with the Studio Display stand (though height-adjustable display has a slightly larger stand footprint), but there's only so much space on a 70-inch wide desk. I quickly felt the need to have these set up in the corner of an L-shaped desk rather than a rectangular desk.

Third — though I can’t articulate it exactly, I am starting to believe there’s a fine line between the amount I find focused on the screen and the amount I find distracting. Two 27-inch displays have a lot of room for distraction. You could have just one window on-screen, but that feels like a waste. And if you have 30 windows open on-screen, it’s really hard to not get a headache looking around for your desired window.

Worse yet, I don’t feel a single 27-inch display is enough screen real estate for what I do. I consistently require a spreadsheet, a browser, and a PDF open at the same time. This could potentially work on a larger 32-inch display, where the screen is split into thirds. In my current setup, it effectively ensures I have the MacBook (or the iPad Pro, in Sidecar mode) open with something small on it.

Once again, the dual Apple Studio Display setup didn’t pan out for me. After the first trial run a year or so ago, I came away thinking I needed to give it a proper chance. This time, after two weeks of working with both on my desk, I know two big displays like this isn’t for me. Whether having one display setup vertically, two smaller displays (like the 24-inch UltraFines), or one big 32-inch display is better than a single 27-inch display — again, for me — is still up for debate.

I’ll check this one off the list as I continue to search for the grail desk setup.

From the Creators of Shortcuts, Sky Extends AI Integration and Automation to Your Entire Mac

This is a very cool first look at an upcoming AI app that could have lasting implications. As described in the linked MacStories article:

Sky is an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions and answer questions for any window and any app open on your Mac. On the surface, it may look like any other launcher or LLM with a desktop app: you press a hotkey, and a tiny floating UI comes up.

Sky uses AI to view what’s on your screen and the contents of those windows to help perform actions for you, all directed by natural language. A quick view of their teaser video is sure to leave you going “Woah”.

Now, as time goes on, it’ll be interesting to see how each AI product attempts to build out these types of tools. My understanding is that ChatGPT is working on its own method for handling information and data in other apps and building out automated workflows, and ChatGPT is ubiquitous at this point. Whether Sky becomes the de facto option for this down the road remains to be seen.

As the folks at MacStories allude to, this feels paradigm-shifting. Sky has the potential to change how you use a computer — seemingly, Sky creates a computer within a computer to perform tasks for you while you work on other things.

Even at my age and my stage of the game, I wonder how easily I’ll be able to adapt my thinking to fit a computer with Sky installed. I certainly want to try. I’m extra excited to see how it could work with our accounting and tax tools to perform the less exciting tasks while I focus on the more complex parts.

The Second Cup

A Letter to Arc members 2025

Perhaps coincidentally, the day before this penned article hit the web, I deleted Arc from my computer.

The 1:1 method

I like this writing methodology — it closely relates to some writing advice a friend once gave me. Perhaps some difficulty, though, is determining which person to write to for each article on the site. In theory, you should be able to hear a tone change when the author changes their audience.

A few things I've learned about writing

Speaking of my friend.

Anchor

There seems to be a bit of a design aesthetic floating around. Anchor and Joi seem to have a lot in common.

A Colorful Life Rewritten // Job

I have been eyeing new ways to utilize the Traveler’s Notebook in my life (I thought I had settled on using it for in-church Bible study notes), but I just can’t shake the idea of not being able to search the contents of my notes in a quick or efficient manner. Handwritten notes like this can’t be linked to other notes to build out a knowledge web. At best, they can be copied into a digital knowledge web, which ensures duplicated work. To each their own — some hotshot will tell me that duplicated work is the key to memory or great productivity — but I’ll be the judge of that myself.

Happy Sunday! Hope you have a great week ahead.