Tuesday, 23 September, 2025

The core problem in local government digital is capacity

This is the content of the ‘article’ element of the email newsletter I sent last week. Publishing here for posterity.

2025 has been a pretty tumultuous year in local government digital, largely due to the impact of the Localism bill in late 2024 and the imminent (and indeed immanent) prospect of local government reorganisation. Following the latest cabinet reshuffle, it feels like the ambitions might be being dialled back a little (note: I have no special insight other than what I read online), which probably isn’t a bad thing.
I can’t help but feel that some kind of coming together is required if the sector is to get the most out of the digital opportunity. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in several research projects in the last year looking at some of the the big picture stuff, and to me the issue of capacity seems to be screaming out as the fundamental issue facing council digital teams across the country.
  • Local government software is largely terrible because nobody has the time to put the effort into demanding and buying something better.
  • Local government data is in a poorly maintained mess because nobody has the time to sort it out.
  • Local government websites are still full of unintelligible content and PDF forms because nobody has the time to get round to fixing it.
I could go on (but don’t have the time, LOL!) but you get my point – many of the oft-cited root causes of digital incompetence actually have a root cause themselves – capacity.
Have hundreds of councils trying to do the same thing, over and over again, is nuts, and there could have been some potential in using the LGR process to create some scalable teams to deal with the issue. Trouble is, LGR itself creates so much work that I dare say the opportunity wouldn’t be realised for some time.
I wrote a thing last autumn about how councils could start sharing digital, data, and technology capabilities in a way that doesn’t impact local policy setting or require huge sector-wide reform projects. Shared services have a bad rep in the sector, but it doesn’t have to be that way if we do things properly and take our time.
If LGR doesn’t end up happening as widely as once was expected, it would be nice to think that some of the conversations that have started up between digital people could still result in sharing capabilities, reducing burdens, and increasing capacity across the sector.
#The core problem in local government digital is capacity

Thursday, 18 September, 2025

📅 Daily Note: September 18, 2025

Giles Turnbull: The strategy is enquiry

What I’m suggesting is a new approach for the times when there’s a perceived need for a document called a “strategy”. It shouldn’t be a document full of “we will”; it should be a website full of “what we’re learning”.

Use it to demonstrate your institutional capability to test and learn, to enquire and be curious.

# – micropost 23041

Key learnings from GOV.UK One Login discovery research for local government:

Key themes emerging from the research include:

  • cost savings are essential – councils told us this would be critical to secure leadership buy-in
  • identity verification is a USP – councils value secure verification and the potential to share credentials across local and central government
  • suppliers are open to integration – many are already using, or moving towards, OpenID Connect (OIDC) compatibility
  • forward thinking but stretched – councils want to future-proof systems, but limited resources, capability, and competing priorities are barriers
  • user adoption risks – concerns about digital exclusion, resident trust, and the transitioning of users to a new system

# – micropost 23043

Dave Winer, It’s really simple:

FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, it’s a real editor that supports all the features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. How could they miss that? Markdown is like MP3. If you’re mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It’s there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you’re mixing text you’re mixing Markdown.

# – micropost 23045

Really Simple Licensing – “The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet”.

RSL is an open standard that lets publishers define machine-readable licensing terms for their content, including attribution, pay per crawl, and pay per inference compensation.

# – micropost 23046

Avoiding the hidden costs of leadership debt – Oli Lovell, Public Digital:

Technical debt is well recognised. But the same logic of ever-shifting organisational needs – and therefore the debt accrued by standing still – applies to leadership too. As a leader, your skills, models and culture operate as a system of their own, determining how well your organisation is able to adapt and respond to change.

# – micropost 23048

Decision making at the right level with Hats, Haircuts and Tattoos by Emily Webber:

What I like about these definitions is that they provide a framework for considering a decision, while also allowing for the differences and nuances of the situation and the experience of the people making them.

# – micropost 23049

This is a fair challenge:

i know its a lot easier to book the same recurring slot every fortnight / month

but its quite depressing seeing group after group you never get to attend, because they always meet on your non working day 😔

I did the lazy thing with Localise Live! but probably should have mixed it up a bit more. I will be making recordings available to people who sign up, so maybe I need to make it clearer that people should sign up even if they can’t make the meetings, so they get that access…

# – micropost 23050

David Gerrard – UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI

The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”.

The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated. Users could churn out PowerPoint slides faster, but worse. Excel data analysis was slower, and worse.

# – micropost 23051

How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs by Anil Dash:

There’s a tech industry habit of second-guessing “what would Steve Jobs have done” ever since he passed away, and most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent. But recently, we have one of those very rare cases where we know exactly what Steve Jobs would not have done. Tim Cook and Apple’s leadership team have sold out the very American opportunity that made Steve Jobs’ life and accomplishments possible, while betraying his famously contemptuous attitude towards bullshit institutions.

# – micropost 23052

James Plunkett writes What does digital-era healthcare really mean?

When the UK government published its 10 Year Plan for Health two months ago, there was general support for its direction of travel: shifting from analogue to digital, from hospitals to communities, and from treatment to prevention.

The question people asked is whether the healthcare system has the capability to deliver these shifts. Or, put more bluntly, ‘we’ve heard this all before, so why is this time different?’

# – micropost 23054

#📅 Daily Note: September 18, 2025

Wednesday, 10 September, 2025

Tuesday, 9 September, 2025

📅 Daily Note: September 9, 2025

# – micropost 23027

The hidden fundamentals of digital transformation in healthcare: how to roll out nationally in a local system – by Jane Maber on the dxw blog:

There’s no question that the technical challenge is real. Designing digital services that work for a national screening programme in a local environment isn’t easy.  You have to integrate with diverse existing systems, handle local variation and consider patient safety.  Not to mention managing, and often decommissioning, legacy systems alongside.

But what’s become increasingly clear is that technology alone doesn’t drive transformation. As more decision-making power is devolved to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), national teams can’t assume one-size-fits-all delivery. Success is really all about the people impacted by the new product – the admin and clinical staff who use it, and the screening participants who experience it.

Change doesn’t land just because it’s technically sound. Or even operationally sound for that matter.  It lands because people trust it, understand it, and feel part of it.  So development needs to be done in partnership, and the quality of the relationship with those partners is critical.

# – micropost 23028

I stopped sending out my email newsletter this year – it lost its place on my todo list in the madness of moving house and so on.

However, am minded to kick it off again, but wanted to move away from Substack for a variety of reasons including nazi-friendliness and increasingly user hostile behaviour.

So, taking some advice Steph gave me a while ago, I’ve moved to Email Octopus, who seem very friendly and the system is easy enough to use. I’ve also changed it to be Localise branded – I’m terrible about marketing my company so thought this might be an easy way of reminding people how I earn a living.

If you’re curious, you can sign up on the landing page.

# – micropost 23031

Have updated my about page which was very long in the tooth!

# – micropost 23032

# – micropost 23035

#📅 Daily Note: September 9, 2025

Friday, 5 September, 2025

Localise Live! – monthly chats for local government folk

Join me for a light-hearted hour of sharing challenges, ideas, and experience about innovating in local public services.

Localise Live! takes place on the last Thursday of every month at 12pm until 1pm and is open to public sector people only. The sessions take place on Zoom, so make sure you have it downloaded and up to date!

Don’t worry if you can’t make them all, just sign up and pop along when you can.

Some sessions will have a predetermined topic to discuss, which you will be emailed about, and others will feature guests to share their ideas and knowledge with us. Sometimes we will just busk it on the day!

Sign up now to bag your place and get all the sessions added to your calendar: https://bit.ly/localiselive

See you there! 😀

#Localise Live! – monthly chats for local government folk

Wednesday, 3 September, 2025

📅 Daily Note: September 3, 2025

Brent’s Innovation Journey: Building a ‘Base’ for Local Government Innovation by Ryan Hamilton on the LOTI blog:

At Brent, we’ve been trying to rethink how we tackle problems in a way that makes ‘innovation’ not just a buzzword, but a practical, everyday reality in local government.

That journey led us to something exciting: We will soon be launching ‘The Base’ , a dedicated space at the Civic Centre (both physical and cultural) where bold ideas, agile working and collaborative experimentation come to life.

# – micropost 23005

What makes a good outcome? by Jamie Arnold:

In the world of digital and organisational change, being able to define and communicate a strong outcome is a leadership superpower. Whether you’re working on a product, service, or internal shift, a well-crafted outcome sets direction, aligns teams, and builds momentum. Here’s how to make your outcomes truly effective.

# – micropost 23006

New book to improve accessibility of Welsh digital public services – from the Centre for Digital Public Services.

# – micropost 23007

# – micropost 23008

I like the idea of “digital everywhere” – amongst a whole range of brilliant ideas and reflections from Catherine Howe:

Digital everywhere: The embedding of digital practitioners within services alongside a digital skills development program is something I feel we’ve tested in a limited way but clearly it works when done right and I’m really looking forward to having the capacity to develop this approach. This requires a really strong approach to making sure those digital roles are properly designed and also wired into the core digital team as well as clear guide rails that need to be context sensitive.

# – micropost 23009

# – micropost 23011

Product strategy, prioritisation frameworks and responding to change by Alan Wright:

Product teams often face more opportunities than they can act on, with new ones arising all the time. This post explores the link between strategy and priorities, when prioritisation frameworks help or hinder, and how to empower teams to make smart, timely decisions as new opportunities emerge.

# – micropost 23012

From Strategy to Strolls: A Few Weeks of Progress and Pauses, by Atika:

One of the standout achievements in the last few weeks was securing approval for our new strategic framework and governance model. This marks a significant step forward in aligning our digital ambitions with the Council’s broader priorities. The framework, shaped through collaboration and challenge, is now the backbone of how we’ll deliver impact—anchored in transparency, agility, and accountability. We’re also making good progress on the TOM work to make sure we have the culture and capability to deliver this.

# – micropost 23013

The courage to digitally transform with the Digital Layer and AI – interesting talk from Mark Thompson.

 

# – micropost 23019

#📅 Daily Note: September 3, 2025

Tuesday, 2 September, 2025

Holibobs

Am back from a wonderful week with the family in Suffolk. Some lovely days by the sea in Southwold and Aldeburgh, and a trip to the castle in Framlingham too.

#Holibobs

Thursday, 7 August, 2025

📅 Daily Note: August 7, 2025

AI in Adult Social Care – guidance for adult care providers on the use of AI.

# – micropost 22995

Giles shares “examples and links about working in the open and agile communication”.

# – micropost 22996

# – micropost 22997

Service mapping: building transparency, trust and transformation together on the Public Digital blog.

Service maps aren’t just tools – they’re catalysts for transformation. They clarify complexity, foster collaboration and enable informed decision-making. They help organisations navigate the challenges of transforming and continuously improving their services. We worked with Defra’s Farming and Countryside Programme (FCP) to develop a service map and a set of service outcomes.

# – micropost 22998

Blood, Sweat and Roadmaps by Maarten Dalmijn:

Your roadmap is like an indicator species that reveals all the organizational dysfunctions in your organization. The roadmap is where business and tech meet, where your vision and strategy collide with your execution and teams. The roadmap is where departments and business units compete with your teams and other organizational priorities.

via Steve.

# – micropost 22999

Steve Messer: Don’t just keep the lights on, shine bright:

Platform products, built by government for public sector organisations, are intended to be better, cheaper and preferable to competitors. If an arms-length body or small government organisation has to choose between a private-sector platform or a platform built by government, both of those platforms are in a market. The arms-length body will choose which platform to use based on the features offered, the price, the complexity of integration, design, accessibility, and loads of other factors.

# – micropost 23001

Alan Wright – Jobs to be Done surveys:

As a product manager, one of my favourite ways to prioritise problems to solve for users is to understand their Jobs to be Done (JTBD). The best way to get this data is by having conversations with many users, but this is not always something users have time for. Surveys are a great complimentary method to gather this data quantitatively and quickly. In this post, I share the thinking behind the Jobs to be Done survey I have been running with users in my current role.

# – micropost 23002

#📅 Daily Note: August 7, 2025

Friday, 25 July, 2025

📅 Daily Note: July 25, 2025

I *thought* I had settled on Devonthink as my everything bucket, but now I am falling down an Obsidian shaped rabbit hole thanks to Steve Messer linking to this monster:

Every few months I set aside time for a “random revisit”. I use the random note hotkey to quickly travel randomly through my vault. I often use the local graph at shallow depth to see related notes. This helps me revisit old ideas, create missing links, and find inspiration in past thoughts. It’s also an opportunity to do maintenance, like fix formatting based on new rules in my personal style guide.

# – micropost 22976

Local Government Association Cyber Incident Grab Bag for Local Authorities – Public Digital.

Along with other public services and businesses, cyber threats pose a significant risk for local authorities. The LGA wanted to provide practical support that could assist councils needing to respond to a serious cyber incident. They also wanted to make sure that the product clearly articulates how cyber security is a team sport, emphasising how a strong response hinges on collective strength.

 

# – micropost 22980

Is it just me or are other people still putting ‘please’ in their AI prompts?

# – micropost 22983

#📅 Daily Note: July 25, 2025

Thursday, 24 July, 2025

On user groups for local government software

Have had a few conversations lately with local gov folk which bemoaned the lack of active user groups for most software systems. This is a problem! What could we do about it?

It seems like vendors are keen to say they have user groups, but then once the sale is made, less keen on convening them.

There’s real advantages in the people actually using software to get together to share insight, issues, collectivise around requests, and so on.

Is there a space, I wonder, for an independent user group as a service offering? Someone to provide a safe place for online discussions, organise regular meet-ups, do a bit of the admin, and maybe engage with the vendors to get them to turn up and so on. Question is probably ‘who pays?’.

Another little LinkedIn post / rant, which I am saving for posterity here.

#On user groups for local government software

Tuesday, 15 July, 2025

Monday, 14 July, 2025

📅 Daily Note: July 14, 2025

Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service.

# – micropost 22965

Ben Holliday: New ways of organising:

What’s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. It’s hard to point to places that we can truly call service organisations, at least outside of individual policy areas or transformation programmes.

# – micropost 22966

Jukesie – The Open Continuum:

Working in the open can seem scary and a bit all or nothing. I suspect I do not help with this with my stories of the extreme ups and downs of the practice and certainly there is some risk…not as much as is often feared but it is there.

Being open is not one size fits all though. There are levels to it and significant benefits at each of them – plus you build your muscles, instincts and a thicker skin if you work your way up to going all-out.

# – micropost 22967

#📅 Daily Note: July 14, 2025

Friday, 11 July, 2025

On ‘the single view of the customer’

“We need a single view of the customer!” Well, no you don’t, and you can’t have one anyway.

‘Single view of the customer’ is one of those easy to trot out phrases that sounds brilliantly simple and impossible to argue with when uttered with confidence. But just the slightest digging under the surface reveals a plethora of issues, whether technology, governance, ethics, data quality, affordability… the list goes on.

If anyone offers to sell you a single view of the customer for anything less than many millions of pounds, and needing at least 5 years to get working, then they are fibbing.

Instead, try bringing together the data you need about a certain type of customer, for a particular use case. All the debtors, for example. Then see if you or your software can spot trends or commonalities in that. You don’t need ALL the customer data to be able to make a difference, and trying to do so will slow you down so much that you’ll end up making no impact at all.

Another little LinkedIn post / rant, which I am saving for posterity here.

#On ‘the single view of the customer’

📅 Daily Note: July 11, 2025

Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the government’s missions”.

In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ‘administrative burdens’, one by one.

# – micropost 22941

How is it that I keep seeing these posts where people have made all these cool things with image generation AI, and I only ever get absolutely terrible results?!

# – micropost 22953

Is it worth bothering with LinkedIn articles any more? Seems easier and more engaging to just whack even longer form content into posts, as long as it fits into the character limit (3,000 or 500 words or so).

# – micropost 22954

James Plunkett: How to save bureaucracy from itself

I’m struck by how common it is these days to hear people working in government say some version of ‘bureaucracy is broken’, ranging from senior civil servants to political appointees.

These are thoughtful people, so their point isn’t that everything in government is broken. They’re just saying that the problem runs deep — that it’s not enough to try harder, or to run things better, because at least part of the problem relates to the logic by which bureaucracy functions.

If that’s right, what do we do about it? A principle I find helpful is the idea from systems theory that when a system fails we need to work at the level of the problem.

# – micropost 22957

Tom Loosemore: behind the scenes of the Universal Credit Reset – really interesting podcast episode.

# – micropost 22960

#📅 Daily Note: July 11, 2025

Thursday, 19 June, 2025

Content Restrictor WordPress plugin

For a project, I needed a way to easily restrict access to content on a WordPress website on a per user basis.

There’s loads of existing plugins that over complicate this significantly, so I thought I would test Gemini‘s capability at writing WordPress code.

The result is Content Restrictor – and it works very nicely for my needs:

  • Pages and posts have a check box – should this be restricted or not?
  • Each user page now has a section with a list of all the restricted pages, and if checked, that user can view the content, else they get a message
  • The message can be customised in the settings
  • There’s also a short code to display all the restricted pages that the current user has access to
  • Admins accounts bypass the restrictions entirely

If it works for you tool, feel free to grab it from GitHub!

#Content Restrictor WordPress plugin

Friday, 13 June, 2025

📄 Balancing ambition and caution in LGR

Chatting with Clare this morning about all things digital and local government reorganisation, I came to the conclusion that it really is all a balancing act. The risks of things going wrong are huge, and the importance of being ‘safe and legal’ is vital… but at the same time this is a generational opportunity for positive change and genuine transformation that must not be wasted.

So I think the answer for leaders going into this is: be ambitious, but be aware of the minefield you are working in. Be realistic about what can be achieved in what timescale, but absolutely make sure that at the right points in your roadmap (which ought to span a decade, if we are being honest) radical reform is on the agenda.

A couple of ideas on what that looks like. One of those inflection points is right at the beginning, when the business case is being put together and the design of the new organisation is being thought about. This is a moment for radicalism, for the new council to be infused with digital-age principles: responsive, user-centred, flexible, a positive actor within a wider system, preventative, relational, etc.

Do not, whatever you do, factor in any short term savings around digital and IT – it ain’t happening.

But when planning for day 1, I’d be cautious. Get everyone on the same Microsoft tenancy so you can at least all talk to each other. Having a single finance system will make managing budgets a hell of a lot easier. Make sure the basics of security are in the right place. A single website front end would be nice. I think that’s enough to be getting on with. Extend all the contracts that all the original councils had with existing suppliers – they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Beyond day 1, we can start being radical again. Set out a realistic roadmap for the next 5 years or so, identifying the major service areas for redesign. This cannot, must not, just involve aggregating everyone onto a single system, but is the opportunity for ground up, blank sheet of paper style transformation, with the right technology a key part of making it happen. Don’t take on too much – even with a big team, these could take multiple years to complete.

From that point, iteratively keep circling around, don’t take on too much, manage expectations that real transformation is hard work, takes time, but is worth it. Each service area will be reached, at the right point in time, and until then, services must do the best they can with what they have – it’s worked oki-ish for the last 20 years, it can keep going another 5. Best not to rush, take the time and do it properly.

As I said at the beginning, keep in mind: we have to be ambitious, but those landmines are everywhere. Think about where you are treading, don’t be hasty. This is an amazing opportunity, so let’s not cock it up.

This was originally posted on LinkedIn, saved here for posterity.

#📄 Balancing ambition and caution in LGR

Thursday, 5 June, 2025

📅 Daily Note: June 5, 2025

Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working.

# – micropost 22920

# – micropost 22934

My general take these days is that the local gov software market isn’t necessarily broken – it’s probably doing what it is supposed to do, i.e. behaving like a market. The issues are symptoms of wider problems, largely lack of capability and capacity on the buy side.

# – micropost 22935

Ben Unsworth points out that I haven’t installed the free and open source Caffeine on my Mac. How foolish of me.

Have rectified that and will amend the post at some point to include it.

# – micropost 22936

Ben Holliday on ‘networked responsibility’:

Digital transformation has to be a people movement. And it has to be ‘of the internet’ in the way that it’s networked, open, and has the potential to self-sustain how ideas and solutions work in joined-up ways across systems and layers of government – networked responsibility is the role we all have as individual leaders in making this happen.

# – micropost 22937

#📅 Daily Note: June 5, 2025

Tuesday, 3 June, 2025

💻 New Mac, new setup (June 2025)

I’ve recently moved into an office in the garden – a fancy shed, in other words. Doing so exposed a weakness in my tech setup, based as it was on a Mac Mini. When I returned to the house, I couldn’t access my computer!

Now, wellness gurus would probably be yelling “GOOD!” at me at this stage, but, y’know, sometimes I don’t want to have to go outside to do some work, and I fancy doing my email over a lazy breakfast, or I just want to check something in the evening. It was really annoying not being able to. So, I switched the Mini for a new Macbook Air.

I went for the 15″ one, as I don’t travel much these days, and the extra screen real estate is good for my eyes. I also maxed out the specs, so got the new M4 model with the 512GB SSD and 32GB RAM in the Midnight colour (a sort of light black, if that makes any sense at all). I don’t want to be having to replace this thing any time soon.

In terms of hardware to make it work in the office/shed, I went for:

  • Logitech MX Master 35 mouse – this mouse is brilliant. I find the Apple Magic Mouse cumbersome and heavy, the lack of buttons annoying, and the ability to use it as a trackpad replacement useless. This mouse is regularly recommended on various trustworthy websites, and I have to say I love it. It’s pretty light for a wireless mouse, very ergonomic, and has loads of programmable buttons which both don’t get in the way and are really useful.
  • Spigen Urban Fit Laptop Case – fairly standard hard case to protect the outside of the laptop. Has a pleasing texture, but isn’t sticker friendly, I don’t think. It has however proved to be very adhesive when it comes to animal hair.
  • Rain Design mTower Vertical Laptop Stand – went for a vertical stand, because I’m happy to keep the laptop shut when I am at my desk and plugged into the monitor. Fits the laptop nicely.
  • WAVLINK Thunderbolt 4 Docking Station – this was the thing I probably did the most research and agonising over. Some of these things are ridiculously expensive, but at the same time i didn’t want to go too cheap, and find myself overloading the thing. This has worked with no problems since I got it.
  • Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad – i umm’d and ahh’d over the keyboard – was very tempted to go for something mechanical, but in the end stuck with the official Apple one, but went for the bigger size.

This is in addition to the Dell 27″ monitor and Logitech webcam I already owned. Some of this may seem a little pricey (although by no means the most expensive kit out there) but I have to say, using higher quality gear genuinely makes a difference to my productivity (honest).

Software wise, I’ll break this down into categories to make life easier! There’s a lot and quite of a few of these are utilities that start up on login – hence why I maxed out the RAM, I guess.

Setapp

Setapp is a neat subscription that gives you access to a mighty range of Mac apps for a single monthly price. You do have to make it work for you, but luckily some of these apps are properly best in class, and the others are good enough to replace first choices which otherwise would cost extra dosh.

  • Canary Mail – I have an email address that runs on Fastmail rather than Gmail, and I like to have a desktop client for it (I use Apple Mail for my iCloud account. I have too many email addresses!). Canary was available in Setapp, so I use it. It’s fine.
  • Ulysses – one of the better writing apps for longer documents out there. I tried using it for an ‘everything bucket’ for a while but that didn’t work out.
  • Commander One – a Finder replacement, with a lot more options but most importantly a twin pane display, which makes organising stuff much easier. I could live without it, but it’s included, so what the hell?
  • Bartender – when you run as many apps as I do, the menu bar at the top of the Mac desktop gets very cluttered. Bartender helps me keep it neat and tidy.
  • Rocket Typist – this allows me to create various little abbreviations that automatically expand into words or phrases. For example, I can type my telephone number with just 2 characters – and I don’t have to remember what it is! Text Expander is probably the number 1 app in this space, but Rocket Typist works fine for me.
  • Dato – the Mac shows the date in the menu bar, but it doesn’t do anything. Dato makes it clickable, so it shows what meetings I have coming up. Inessential but neat.
  • Paste – a clipboard manager. It remembers everything cut, copy, and paste, so I can go back and use them again. This is one of those tools that once you’ve used it, you wonder how you ever managed before.
  • Yoink – rarely used but helpful when needed. When dragging and dropping stuff (files, folders, text, photos etc) around the screen, Yoink lets you temporarily leave it in a dropzone on the desktop, then come back for it later
  • CleanShot X – makes taking screenshots a breeze, a significant improvement on the built in Mac method
  • Soulver – I used this purely as a sort of conversational calculator. I’m not great with figures, and so I can type calculations in words to get the response I am after – usually working out percentages!
  • Nitro PDF Pro – a PDF editing tool that saves me having to shell out for Acrobat Pro. It’s fine.
  • CleanMyMac – a handy set of tools to keep the Mac working as it should
  • Coherence X – can turn websites into desktop apps. I don’t use it much, other than for Google Tasks, which I use to log daily to dos, and having it lingering in a browser tab is not something I enjoy (this is very niche, I get it)
  • Mindnode Classic – a really easy to use mind mapping tool. Been using this for planning and organising thoughts for years
  • MarsEdit – my desktop blog editor of choice. Venerable but brilliant. I don’t use it quite as often as I used to, because of the micropost system now in place on this blog, but I still prefer using MarsEdit to blog when I can.
  • Gemini – not something I use all that often, but Gemini hunts out duplicate copies of files, and lets me tidy them up.
  • Permute – really good little app for converting all sorts of media files to different formats. Not a problem many people have, but when you do, it can be really annoying.
  • Sip – a really simple tool for picking colours from anywhere on the screen
  • TextSniper – pulls text out of images
  • Diagrams – makes a certain type of diagram very prettily. Doesn’t work for everything though.

Fair to say I get my money’s worth from Setapp.

Free as in speech and/or beer

There’s a bunch of things I use that don’t cost money – not all of them proper open source though.

  • NewNewsWire – an old school feed reader for people like me who need such things. It’s free and open source, and brilliant.
  • AltTab – I find the Mac version of the Alt-Tab shortcut annoying – it scrolls through open applications, not windows. This fixes that – and does a load of other stuff I haven’t really looked into.
  • Rectangle – makes resizing windows, tiling them just how you want them etc easy peasey.
  • iTerm – a general improvement on the basic Terminal app. To be honest, I install this out of habit more than anything. Likewise the first thing I do with it is install Homebrew – also for no good reason.
  • Alfred – again, an improvement on the built in Spotlight tool. Means I can do more from the keyboard.
  • BBEdit – when I need to edit some bog basic text, BBEdit is my go to, especially as it now had a free version.
  • Google Drive – Localise runs on Google WorkSpace, and I usually happily use the browser. Sometimes though moving files around on the desktop is easier.

Stuff I have bought

I do shell out for individual bits of software occasionally, although it is relatively rare. One of the things I love about the Mac though is the time and care taken by those developing apps for it – and that makes spending the money a little bit less painful than it would be otherwise.

  • Mimestream – I like having email in a native app rather than a browser tab, and Mimestream – despite the terrible name – seems to be the best at working with Google accounts.
  • DEVONthink 3 – my new everything bucket, and it’s working great for me. Having tried loads, I just decided to splash the cash and buy the behemoth. I use about 2.5% of its features, admittedly, but I like them. Main uses are storing PDFs and archives of webpages in a library, keeping notes from all my meetings in one place, and maintaining a work journal of what I am doing and who I am talking to.
  • Transmit – bit of an indulgence, but I find every other FTP client annoying, so am happy to shell out for Transmit’s ease of use.
  • Sketch – a recent addition. I had been using Figma’s free version on the web for my very basic needs, but was reaching the point where I would have to start paying, and so I went for the native desktop option instead. It feels solid, although as with much of the software I use, I barely scratch the surface of its capabilities.
  • Screen Studio – a new one for me, but this seems to be the top choice for screen recording – something I intend to do a lot more of in the near future.
  • OmniOutliner – I bought this on the App Store years ago, and so always download it, although it rarely gets used these days, unless I am really struggling to get my thoughts in order about something
  • Pixelmator Pro – been using this, and the non-pro version before it, for years. My image editing needs are very basic and Pixelmator just works
  • BetterMouse – way better than the standard Logitech software for customising my mouse. Well worth the £7 or however much it was!
  • Microsoft Office – grumble, grumble. A necessary evil.

Native apps for web services

Most of these are just Electron or similar wrappers around websites, that give an ersatz sense of the solidity one gets from a proper native app. Still, at least they don’t take up valuable tab space.

  • Trello – still one of the best ways to throw together a collaborative to do list / lightweight project plan
  • Slack – a customer uses it heavily, and i am a member of a couple of community focused groups
  • Miro – no idea whether Miro is the best app for the online workshopping thing, but it continues to serve my needs just fine
  • Whatsapp – seems to be the default comms method for an awful lot of people these days. Being able to type on a full size keyboard speeds things up, even if it doesn’t reduce the typos!
  • Zoom – still my preferred way of doing online meetings. Google Meet is quick and easy, but feels flakey still. Teams is a royal pain in the backside, although sadly it seems to now be the default for most of the people I talk to regularly.

So, quite a lot of stuff. It’s taken me an age to put this together, so hopefully there’s something useful in there for everyone. My question: have I missed anything?!

#💻 New Mac, new setup (June 2025)

📅 Daily Note: June 3, 2025

Nice, insightful set of principles around how Martin Wright writes his weeknotes:

I write about what’s stuck with me when I sit down to write my weeknote. I don’t want to assume what’s important, or interesting enough to weeknote while it’s happening, so I don’t take notes during the week to feature in my weeknote. If I’ve forgotten it by the time of writing then it wasn’t worthy of inclusion in a weeknote.

# – micropost 22912

I haven’t done brilliantly at coming back to blogging, but at least I am thinking about it a bit more often.

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Emily Webber’s new course on building communities of practice looks good.

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Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of the right things to do. This from dxw is a good example of that.

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As part of my accidental blogging break this year, I also didn’t open my news reader (yes I am old school). This means I currently have over 8,000 unread articles in NetNewsWire (I told you I was old school). I probably ought to mark all as read and start over, but there’s bound to be some good stuff in there that I don’t want to miss.

So I will scan it all a bit every day and pick out some gems, and post them here for posterity.

# – micropost 22916

#📅 Daily Note: June 3, 2025

Wednesday, 21 May, 2025

📅 Daily Note: May 21, 2025

Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good.

In all the research work I have done in the last year or so, leadership comes up time and time again as being one of the biggest things holding local government back from making the most of the digital opportunity.

 

# – micropost 22893

The Somerset Council target operating model is quite nice, I think.

# – micropost 22907

Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens on service patterns:

A lack of common service patterns can prove costly within a single organisation too. We’ve all read reports of spiralling costs and lengthy delays in pubic sector IT projects, and in part this can be attributed to the desire for bespoke functionality resulting in tweaks or even wholesale redesign of how a platform functions to meet the unique service designs of that organisation.

He isn’t wrong to flag this. I’ve been noodling around with this idea a bit in the last few months, which I need to blog about at some point.

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#📅 Daily Note: May 21, 2025