I’m not a designer or artist, but I know what a good app does. It should make it easy for a non-expert to do something great. Acorn does that for me. It’s the application I turn to on my Mac when I need to fuss with images. It’s also incredibly powerful. It probably has everything you think you need in Photoshop but it’s easy to use and has terrific support (where you actually get a response from a real person with a real answer).
When I travel I use a VPN. It’s a nice little bit of security when on a strange WiFi network. It’s not bullet proof but it’s a minimal layer between me and a coffee shop or hotel. If you’re unfamiliar with VPN, it’s a private tunnel between your machine and another machine on the Internet. You connect to the VPN host and the VPN host handles all of your requests out to the Internet.
This post by the good doctor is clever. It’s not clever because he does date formatting in JavaScript.1 It’s clever because he does it by calling a second JavaScript library (Moment.js) stored as a snippet from within another snippet.
I usually do my date formatting with Python, but he’s right about the shortcoming with Python or Shell centric snippets. They don’t work everywhere. As of today, there’s a JavaScript engine on every computer I use.
Keyboard Maestro is probably the single most helpful application you can put on a Mac. Today, you can get version 7 for $36 or upgrade from a previous version at a 50% discount.
Version 7 focuses on two major interface changes. First, building macros is easier than ever with integrated help for each action, more logical controls for highlighting, commenting, and generally controlling steps in a macro. There’s also now auto-complete for variable names, which is a huge time saver.
I mentioned in a recent post about Synology that once Arq for Mac supported Amazon Cloud, it would be a great backup alternative. Well, as of this week Arq supports Amazon Cloud.
For $60 a year, Amazon Cloud is a great deal for unlimited storage and bandwidth. Are is great because it encrypts backups before they ever leave my Mac. While there are still advantages to a service like Backblaze (like mobile apps and web access to download files) Cloud Drive with Arq and Synology are very compelling.
Jason Verly writes about how he converts an iThoughts map into a nicely printed outline.
The goal is to get a visual mind map into a orderly text form that can be shared with others. iThoughtsX is what I use to create and capture my thoughts and ideas. We’ll use Marked to render the mind map into a text outline.
You did know that Marked can preview iThoughts files, right?
iThoughtsX for Mac just released a new update that adds a couple of nice features. The first is pretty big: user definable sorting.1
You can set sort order based on several criteria and the child nodes all rearrange from top to bottom. There’s simple alphabetical sorting, but there’s also much more advanced sorting based on meta data like due dates or the order they were modified.
If you are using iThoughts for task management (I’m not) this is pretty interesting.
I think these three consecutive articles describe the current problem pretty well:
The original report from The Register
We completely cracked the keychain service - used to store passwords and other credentials for different Apple apps - and sandbox containers on OS X, and also identified new weaknesses within the inter-app communication mechanisms on OS X and iOS which can be used to steal confidential data from Evernote, Facebook and other high-profile apps.
25% off some of the best Mac software you can find, is not too shabby. If you’ve been considering DEVONthink Pro Office, this is a pretty significant discount. It’s like the writer’s dream bundle with Scrivener, Aeon Timeline and even Take Control books at 25% off. Use the code SUMMERFEST2015 to get the discount. This is not a sponsored post. I just really like these things.
My review of the new Retina MacBook Pro was mostly positive but I was less than thrilled with the Force Touch trackpad. My biggest complaint is that the “Force” part is a bit difficult to master. I often end up applying a Force Touch when I really just want to drag something across the screen.
Right before I disabled the single-finger Force Touch, I found the setting to enable 3-Finger drag on OS 10.
