My day two challenge was registering a custom domain for this project.
Going through my standard hosting provider, I bought “applecore.org”. It kind of gets to the heart of this project, and it’s also the name of one of my World of Warcraft characters, taken shamelessly from “The War of the Flowers” by Tad Williams. Alas, about ten minutes later, I got an email saying my domain purchase had been rescinded for the following reason: “suspicious keyword in the domain”.
After exchanging more than a couple emails with their support, I was told essentially that unless I worked for Apple, they weren’t going to let me register the domain. Luckily, just a few hours later, I saw a YouTube photography video whose sponsor was the registrar PorkBun. They had me registered in moments, and the site was configured within ten minutes.
Disclaimer: I am not Tim Apple. I do not work for Apple. This blog will be about using Apple products, but it is not authorized, endorsed, or sponsored* by Apple. I don’t even live in California.
Where were we?! Ah, yes: Now that that is out of the way, let’s briefly go over why this site exists, and what kind of content you should expect.
I recently dumped a number of paid productivity apps, including but not limited to Things 3, Notion, Notability, and Fantastical. There were several reasons, but the most important were cost, speed, integration, and simplicity. I am going to take 2025 at a minimum to see if I can create a compelling productivity loop using essentially an Apple-only productivity stack. The only apps core to my current workflow that are not first-party Apple apps are Sunsama and Zoom; I am experimenting with time-boxing possibilities inside the Apple world, but I haven’t made it work yet, and my “business” phone is hosted by Zoom. I doubt FaceTime will ever offer full telephony as it would eat a large chunk of their iPhone / carrier business.
This blog will document the journey to build a fast, simple-but-comprehensive system using the Apple default app stack- a chronicle of the highs and lows, the do’s and don’ts, and the coolest shit we find along the way.
Every entry will have a few hashtags, which are important in my own personal system, and also seem to turn into category sorts on this site.
blog- Seems pretty self-explanatory.
clean- Used this to sort notes that have been tagged- will expand later.
posted- Seems pretty self-explanatory.
site_info- Posts that have site news or info.
theory- Posts that cover productivity from a high level.
strategy- How the pieces fit together / how the various Apple apps are deployed.
tactics- Specific, actionable bits about app and system usage.
apple_bytes- Apple news that impacts the primary mission here.Every post will have a photo accompanying it, and some might even have something to do with the topic at hand. Today’s won’t.
I can’t wait to get deeper into the weeds with the few folks that stumble across this site; For the time being, if you want to reach out, you can find me on Bluesky.
[Photo of railroad tracks from a low angle, shot on the upper tracks in downtown Kent, Ohio, directly behind the restaurant formerly known as The Pufferbelly.]
*Dear Apple: Should you decide to sponsor this lowly blog, which does not deserve to touch the undersides of the worms that live at the outskirts of the shadow of your spaceship-like campus, I promise to use said funds for the forces of good, so long as you define good as moving to California and putting down a deposit for Lakers season tickets at some point in the future.
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