I recently marked a minor but memorable professional milestone: I wrote my 100th article for TidBITS, the venerable email newsletter and website focused on all things Apple.

I kind of stumbled into becoming a sometime TidBITS contributor in 2009. The role became formalized in 2015, when the editors added me to the masthead.

This is a big deal: A journalist with a passion for tech and especially Apple tech getting paid to write about it on a regular basis. I’m very, very lucky.

I am grateful to Adam Engst, Tonya Engst and Josh Centers for this opportunity — and for the friendship and professional camaraderie they and the other members of TidBITS team have shown me.

On to 200!

Warming up to the Apple Watch took me a while.

When the first version of the smartwatch came out in 2015, I delighted in having an Apple-branded product on my wrist. When the novelty wore off, though, I realized the gizmo wasn’t useful to me in any life-changing way, and ended up leaving it on its desktop charger most of the time.

Apple’s initial, largely ineffectual stabs at a smartwatch operating system were part of the problem, but it kept iterating to make its watchOS better and better. An increased emphasis on fitness was a good move (pardon the pun).

Over time, I discovered more and more uses for the Apple Watch, some fitness-related, others not. I detailed this in a recent Pioneer Press column.

And that was before Apple released the groundbreaking Series 4 version of the watch, along with a vastly improved version 5 of watchOS.

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Laptops with touch screens are pretty much the norm these days, with a prominent exception: Macintosh notebooks.

Apple has stubbornly refrained from adding fingertip interaction to the displays on its MacBook-branded notebooks (while tryihg to accommode touch aficionados in other ways, like gargantuan trackpads and a controversial MacBook Pro Touch Bar.)

So what’s a touch-y Mac user to do?

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