Surely you’ve seen HeckYesMarkdown before. It’s a project from Brett Terpstra that accepts a URL and chokes out a Markdown translation of the page content. I’ve used it on occasion for easily extracting links on a page.
Yesterday I followed a CNN link on Twitter that immediately started playing a video. I was so annoyed that I spent the 5 seconds it took to create a new Alfred workflow. Here’s the page after processing.
You’ll either think this is dumb and boring or surprising and awesome. Good luck.
You can use the Finder just like the nvALT quick search and you can use it from anywhere you have a Finder window.1
Finder searches parse both the file name and the file contents. If you can get a Quick Look preview of it, the Finder can probably search it. I’ve had luck with all Omni, Curio, iThoughts and PDFs as well as any plain text file types.
Skitch is a convenient annotation tool for the Mac. If there’s an easier way to take a screenshot and add a cartoonish arrow and garish pixelation, I don’t want to know. But I don’t want to use Evernote as my screenshot platform.
If you were unaware, Skitch makes it pretty easy to use your own host to share screenshots. Just jump into the preferences and setup a new SFTP or FTP connection.
Stand up if you ever collected piles of floppy disks. Now raise your hand if you used some kind of disk inventory program to help you figure out which disk contained the Spaceward Ho! installer. Now do the hokie-pokie, because that’s what it’s all about.
Spotlight on the Mac has now improved to the point where I almost don’t know I’m using it. Applications like Alfred rely on Spotlight to do their searching but the Spotlight application itself is pretty good for basic file finding.
Storage is cheap. While the SSD in my laptop is still moderately priced, the cost of spinning disks and Internet-based storage seems to be dropping like a stone. Right now all of the major on-line syncing services charge $10 per month or under for 1TB of storage. Dropbox, Microsoft and Google are all competing for customers and driving down the price of syncing files to the Internet.
The disconnect between SSD pricing and storage service pricing can be a deterrent to taking full advantage of both.
The Good Doctor describes why he uses Drafts. It’s one of my favorite iPhone apps, for similar reasons. But Drafts has really become much more useful since the Today Widget was rolled out.
Usually if I put some text on my clipboard, it’s because I want to do something with it. The Drafts Today Widget makes that really easy. I pull down form the top of the screen and hit the +clip button.
Man, that’s a lot of software on sale. Some of my favorite iOS apps at pretty good discount.
Christopher Mayo is an associate professor in communication. He knows how to use DEVONthink, that’s for sure. I particularly liked his example of using DEVONagent in conjunction with DEVONthink:
Every night, my computer scours the web for research items, clips the pages as PDFs (I prefer this format), and puts the results into my DEVONthink database. When I wake up in the morning. I sync it all over to my iPad and I have the day’s reading.
Twitter seems to have an uncommon knack of not understanding how people use their service. In an effort to control more of the material published by users, they occasionally crap all over URLs and especially animated GIFs. They will convert animated GIFs to mp4 files which ruins the entire point of an animated image format.
If you want to save an animated GIF that Twitter has “optimized”, it’s really a pain.
CodeRunner 2 is a new non-AppStore version and it’s a complete rewrite of one of my favorite Mac utilities. In just a brief test, it feels much faster and I like the new support for TextMate themes. From what I can tell, the language support has been boosted and a new HTML/JavaScript mode has been added.
You can get version 2 for free if you have the Mac AppStore version already.
