Boy, I’ve let this blog stagnate! My last entry was when Mojave was released, and this week we get Sonoma! Since my last entry a lot has happened! I purchased a house in Williston, VT, and my first order of business was to install solar panels (Thanks Kevin from SunCommon!) and in January, after a two-year search, I finally found a used all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 2019—that I absolutely ADORE—so now I can claim my business is nearly 100% carbon-free! When I come to help on-site with you, I’m literally driving on sunshine!

AI created image of Ioniq driving through VT scene — AI image of my car driving through VT scene, generated from a text prompt using Midjourney.

The pandemic gave many of you a chance to try working with me remotely, which while efficient both for time and energy, I really miss the human part of meeting you in your homes and businesses, seeing your work products, meeting your families, and enjoying your uniqueness. I came to this business right out of grad school in contemplative psychotherapy, where I came to see that tech is moving into everyone’s lives, whether they want it to or not, and many of you feel you have to fight to hold onto your humanity, to keep connections real and tangible, and to keep yourself grounded in your senses and experience of being, and not get lost in the fun-house mirror of over-filtered, sanitized image generation, where everyone is their “brand” and tries to look like they are living the life everyone else will envy.

Well, fasten your seatbelts, because AI is here.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe when everything digital is assumed to be artificial, we won’t get lost believing it’s real, or that it says anything about who we really are. Always the optimist!

Speaking of AI, I know that most of the media around it is about how dangerous it is. That’s what sells media. The more interesting question for me, is how you are going to use it? It’s here, and we don’t get a vote on that, but it’s also amazingly powerful. Here’s an example of how it helped me: Yesterday I had a client with a deeply nested collection of albums in her Photos app, from a years-long project that she created in the Finder and we imported to Photos. Unfortunately, when Photos imported these folders of images, it created hundreds of folders that contained a single album which made it unnecessarily cumbersome to navigate. I needed a way to move all albums up one level if the folder contained only one album. I searched online to see if someone had solved this already and didn’t find an answer.

Then I broke out ChatGPT app on my phone and asked it, “Write an AppleScript to go through my Photos.app folders and for any folder with only one album, move that album up one level of the hierarchy and delete the now empty folder.”

This is what I got back:

“Sure, I can help you create an AppleScript for that. However, it's important to note that automating actions like moving and deleting files should be done with caution to avoid accidental deletion of important data. Always ensure you have a backup of your data before running any scripts.

Here's a basic AppleScript that should achieve what you described:

This script checks each top-level folder in Photos and moves the album up one level if the folder contains only one album. It then deletes the now empty folder. Always test scripts in a safe environment and ensure you have a backup of your data.

I was floored! I’m familiar with AppleScript, but I’m not good at the details of the syntax, so this was like magic to me. To be fair, this particular script has an error that didn’t work with the version of Photos we were using, but the nice thing about ChatGPT is that it maintains the context of your question, and you can continue to refine the request. I told it about the error, and it offered a slightly different script to try.

Anyway, I’m sure this entry will age about as well as the one on Mojave! Time to install Sonoma and see what new goodies Apple has in store for us!

Five years since my last...