This week I finally (finally!) finished writing the seventh edition of Take Control of iCloud, which turned out to be a monster revision and far, far more involved than I had expected. Luckily, very little of the book is affected by the forthcoming changes to macOS Big Sur and iOS 14/iPadOS 14 (as far as I know now), so this new edition should, I hope, have a fairly long shelf life. Anyway, it’s now in my editor’s hands, and if we’re very lucky, it could ship by the end of next week.
Next on my plate are a small update to my DEVONthink book and continued work on Take Control of Big Sur, both of which we hope to ship in August.
Also this week, I reviewed an author’s outline for a new book that I think everyone will love, did a bunch of managerial things (which, of course, always take far longer than one imagines), and tried with mixed success to keep my kids relatively happy. Unfortunately, once again I had no time whatsoever to work on my master Take Control to-do list, which remains at 98 items.
Here in California, as in numerous other parts of the United States, a troubling portion of the population still hasn’t figured out that life isn’t back to following normal rules, so they make no effort to stay home, keep their distance from others, wear masks, and so on. And—surprise!—COVID-19 infection (and hospitalization and death) rates have been going up up up. I would love for things to be back to normal as much as anyone, but we won’t get there any time soon at this rate. It’s deeply frustrating, especially (as I’ve mentioned before) as the parent of a child with disabilities.
But at least it’s hot! Yeah, true summer weather has finally hit (and not in a good way), as if I needed something else to sap my strength and enthusiasm.
Looking ahead, I expect August to be an entirely frantic month. Besides the aforementioned iCloud and DEVONthink updates, and the new books on Big Sur and iOS 14/iPadOS 14, we’re planning to ship a new book about podcasting that covers both macOS and i*OS, and four further titles are on the “maybe” list for the month, depending on how quickly their authors can make progress. September and October will be at least as busy, if not more so. In all, we have 33 new or updated books on the roster for the remaining (checks calendar) 22 weeks of 2020, which is beyond ridiculous. Unless I win the time lottery and get a few extra months I can spend however I like, some of those titles will inevitably slip into next year. But we’ll do our best.
That’s all I have for today. Check in again next week for the latest news.