Rego is one of my favorite location apps for iOS. If you are unfamiliar with Rego, it’s kind of like Foursquare but private and with more utility. I use it to plan vacations, road trips, and hiking. I even used it to plan house hunting by dropping markers on the map for addresses to visit. Then while I’m out and about I can take a photo, add it to my rego map and add some info in case I want to return to the location.
Give me a keyboard and I will give you 10 problems with it. I love a good keyboard but I can also type equally bad on just about any keyboard. I’m not a speed writer. I touch type about 50% of the time but I still look at the keyboard often. I don’t use the correct hand posture but I do use a consistent finger placement. So with all of those caveats out of the way, here’s my review of the new Brydge keyboard for iPad (and an accidental review of the Apple Smart Keyboard Cover).
RSS is still my favorite way to gather and read new ideas on the internet. For me it avoids the echo-chamber of Twitter. The feeds I subscribe to are diverse. Some are noisy and some publish only a few times a month. The topics range from technology and politics to economics and art. A good feed reader can make all the difference though.
A good RSS reader turns all of these feeds into an orderly and easy to read portal.
To search the content of more than one site at time, DuckDuckGo provides the site operator which can contain more than one domain. To search both Macdrifter and Hobosigns I created this Workflow for iOS.
Prepending a search phrase with “site:macdrifter.com OR site:hobosigns.macdrifter.com” does the trick with a DDG search. Sites can even be across different TLDs. So, if you want to search 5 or 6 sites at once, consider a canned DDG cross site search.
It took me a while to realize I could mark a folder in DEVONthink To Go as a favorite in the iOS Files app. This makes it very easy to quickly browse to content in the Files app which might be the best way to edit a file in DEVONthink.
After adding DEVONthink as a source in the Files app, browse to a the level above the folder you want to add.
I still don’t really understand some of the iOS settings but one, in particular, has always baffled me: Spotlight.1
By default, every app installed automatically gets indexed by Spotlight. That’s not always great for search results. I find that many of my spotlight searches are contaminated by results from things I don’t want to see. Through trial and error, I think I figured out the consequences of Spotlight settings. I could be wrong, but this is what I observe.
The iOS browser iCab has a dedicated download feature that makes collecting stuff from around the web very easy. Once an item is added to the download area of iCab, it still contains the source URL. Items are managed right within iCab and they can even be combined into a single zip file right within the app.
iCab now supports iOS 11’s Drag and Drop feature but the easiest way to add items to the Download area is with the press and hold action sheet.
Not to be outdone this week, iThoughts received a few new iOS 11 features:
Siri integration Drag and Drop Both are nicely demonstrated in the app-maker’s video below:
To use the Siri integration configure your quick capture map.
This makes adding new items to an iThoughts inbox very easy. Trigger Siri and “create a new note in iThoughts.” Siri then asks what you want to call the note.
Procreate for iOS was updated to version 4 this week and it’s a biggie.
Besides a nice update to the interface, version 4 adds layer masks and new brush settings across all brush types.
Procreate is such a great app for amateurish noodling and pro-level creation. The app is one of my top picks for use with the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro.
Here’s a nice tutorial by Brad Colbow:
I feel uncomfortable relying on one technology that has no alternative. This discomfort might come from the fact that I don’t have a lot of time to solve the same problems again. But, maybe there’s more to it. I simply don’t enjoy reinventing the wheel just because the wheel didn’t have a stable revenue model. I felt even more passionate about this when TextTool was withdrawn from the App Store recently.
