mac

Finally.

I’ve been using You Need a Budget (YNAB) for over a year and I’ve been very happy with it. The YNAB implementation is unique in the finance management software market but it’s based on a simple model called “envelope budgeting.” YNAB preaches “give every dollar a job” and the desktop app does a good job encouraging proper budgeting. I’ve discussed this at length on Nerds on Draft episode 19. This week they released YNAB 5 and it’s clearly not aimed at me.

I’m either a fortune teller or it was completely obvious that Dropbox has been meandering for the past two years. Today they announced an end to both Carousel and Mailbox. I never understood how Mailbox sold more Dropbox subscriptions. Carousel made more sense but I never got behind Dropbox as my photo service because it was just too expensive for what the value it provided to me. What a bummer for users of those products.

In the beginning we had islands of data. What was on our computer stayed on our computer. What was on our Treo stayed on its chubby little atoll. Then we had SD cards and USB drives to float between islands. Eventually we got Dropbox syncing and it felt like the future. Every document I wanted was available to me on any computer with an Internet connection. Fast forward and it’s started to feel like we settled a little too soon.

The hardest part of reviewing Curio for Mac is explaining what it is. It’s like a light-box for information. Or maybe it’s a bulletin board of data. Or maybe it’s a mind mapping application that’s also a rich content organizer. None of these convey exactly what Curio can do. And now version 10 is out and it adds even more, which makes a direct comparison to another tool even more impossible.

Copied is a new clipboard capture and syncing system for iOS and Mac. It’s quite well designed and there’s some extremely thoughtful features. The iOS version has a nice Today widget and 3D Touch actions and can also automatically capture the clipboard while the app is active.1 The iOS version is free to try but costs a buck to enable the iCloud syncing. You read that right. Syncing is through iCloud which is working well for this small amount of data.

One of my favorite Mac apps, iThoughtsX is only a buck right now on the Mac App Store. My understanding is that this a temporary sale to help direct-purchase customers get access to the new Handoff and other iCloud features. Even if you already own the direct-purchase version, like me, this is a must buy. If you don’t already own it, then you’d be crazy to miss a 88% off sale like this.

Import a folder of plaintext files into Apple’s Notes application on El Capitan. Early days, but stuff like this is promising. Here’s shell script by Arthur Lockman that does something similar.

I’m really impressed with iOS 9. Not only is it the most stable major iOS update I’ve used in a while, but it’s added functionality that is useful in surprising ways. The Notes and Reminders apps perfectly encompass the small focused set of features that have become a solid toolkit for getting things done with iOS 9 The trick for me was to realize that now Reminders and Notes are siblings.

I have minimal experience with ImageMagick but the new version 7 seems like a big upgrade. In particular, it now supports reading from many RAW image formats such as NEF, ORF and ARW. Maybe this is old news, but I just discovered it, so it’s new to me. Here’s the complete list of supported formats Now, if only I could figure out how to get it installed on the El Capitan beta.