From Kotaku:
Though I’ve given away the solution to some of the early puzzles, each one does increase in difficulty. One of them involves solving a QR code. One of them involves slowing down audio and then translating it. One of them involves watching creepy video. Many require cracking codes, knowing different languages, visiting specific websites and finding a hidden message, checking constellations, using chemistry, using music theory, and more.
Nothing against Evernote, but it’s just not on a trajectory I like anymore. It’s been a long time since I’ve used it on a daily basis so I decided it was probably time to finish my transition off of the platform.
For 90% of my stuff I have either plain text files or Pinboard bookmarks. But there’s still images, PDFs and even the occasional generic file. The hardest thing to replace was the Evernote rich text combination of images and text.
Phillip has a nicely annotated walk through of the new Drafts prompt options for actions.
The full power of the Prompt step is unleashed in conjunction to Drafts integration to Javascript, allowing you to change the course of a script completely. You can access previously defined tags in a Script step with draft.getTag(“tagName”), where tagName is the name of the tag, in our case, either llama_text or llama_button.
At a time when Microsoft is releasing major updates to Office for Mac and iOS, I’m increasingly thinking about how far behind they are at making text useful.
iCab continues to be the best web browser on iOS. It’s not as fast as Safari for some tasks but the features are really impressive. Now it adds a clever feature to use a webpage as a Today widget.
The implementation has high and low points. The clever part is that the page is a local cache in iCab so it doesn’t need to immediately load the page and it remains useful when there’s no reception.
I’ve been using Tally since version 1.0 and it’s a handy little application.1 I can’t say I use it every day, but I use it often enough that it’s on my phone. Tally is just a counter. Well, it’s a bit more than a just a counter. It counts up with a tap or down with a swipe. You can set the increments and store multiple counters.
From the Tally counter screen, tap to increment or slide down to decrement.
David Sparks does it again. I honestly had no idea this was coming when I posted a Workflows.app tip yesterday. David’s latest product is a video tutorial of the entire Workflow application and action set with a lot of great tips. It’s an hour long video walkthrough of everything required to build some awesome utilities. The video is shot on an iPad but applies equally to the iPhone version of Workflow.
Workflow for iOS is certainly a handy little application. While not as powerful as Pythonista, it’s far more simple to work with, due primarily to the clever action design.
The latest update brings support for parsing “articles”, which I assume just means the body of a webpage. Whatever it means, I like it. I recently wrote about converting webpages to Markdown for sites that are visitor-hostile. The “Get Article” action in Workflow does something similar.
If you use Mail.app for iOS with several different mail accounts, here are two settings that are very useful.
Mark Addresses This is a less commonly known option. Go into the Mail settings and look at the “Mark Addresses” option. Setting a domain here will cause the iOS Mail app to highlight any address not from that domain in red when you are drafting messages.
This is just an example. I set this to include my work domain so it’s immediately obvious if I’m sending a message to someone outside of our organization.
I’ve only used the iOS app Authy for a few months. If you are unfamiliar, it is a very nice application for managing different two factor authentication secrets and generating tokens. It creates a single place to look for all 2FA tokens.1 There’s also a companion Authy Mac app that can receive the token over Bluetooth and set the clipboard with the token. That’s mildly more convenient than typing. Both require your phone to be next to you.
If you’re into URL schemes, there’s a minor update to the specification that now lists security concerns as well as new parameter for canceling an action.