I find Zach Holmquist’s syntax for TextExpander snippets both logically satisfying and frustratingly prone toward collisions. It’s the kind of system that makes me smack my forehead for not coming up with it myself, but then I dig in and realize how terrible it would be in a world of dot notation (like URL’s).
The syntax is logical: email.me expands to your preferred email address. me.home expands to the home address.
Übersicht is a Mac application that can display widgets on the desktop. There’s an entire cult around Geektool, which does the same, but Übersicht is raising the bar a bit for customization. It allows you to pipe shell command output to the desktop but format it using JavaScript and CSS. It looks nice.
There are many “widgets” already available if JS isn’t your thing or if you only have enough spare time to install a widget.
Sure, lot’s of people are linking to this AsianEffeciancy.com guide, but it’s well done.1 App makers really should pay to have these kinds of guides made for their apps. There are complex and technically challenging apps that many people just don’t know how to get started with. A nice guide can make all of the difference.
Boy, I sure don’t endorse the use of pop-overs on the website though.
Design+Code is an excellent resource for learning about building iOS apps. It’s half design tutorials and half coding tutorials. It first caught my attention for the terrific tutorials for the Mac app Sketch.1 I purchased the entire “book” immediately and it is all top quality. If you think the Design+Code Web site is gorgeous just wait until you see the tutorial content.
The next chapter Design with Swift is now available and starts with a good discussion of Web vs.
I’ve always considered myself partially outside of the mainstream when it comes to computers. In the early 90’s, you just had to use a Mac to be weird.1 But even in the fringe group of Mac users, I tweaked and contorted my machine beyond all reason.
As OS X has changed, I’ve resisted various aspects of Apple’s grand plan. Sandboxing was a hurdle I attempted to surmount with symbolic links. Default writes brought back the old style “save as” dialogs or made the dock transparent.
Typinator 6.1 is out with a compelling new feature: Expansion based on a regular expression. It ships with an example expansion to correct accidental DOuble capitalization.
There’s also some cool tricks like automatic line sorting with a single snippet.
I like to see competition in this area. It keeps everyone scrappy. This is nice competition and major update worth looking at.
In case you’re just emerging from an Amish community for the first time, Marked is a Mac app for live preview of markup documents. Marked 2 was released as a direct purchase download almost a year ago but it’s now available on the Mac App Store with a sale price of $10.
Marked isn’t just a preview tool for Markdown. It’s a writing tool. It provides helpful notifications for word repetition or tedious sentence structures.
This is a pretty neat weather forecast action for Launchbar. It uses Forecast.io and has a a few dependencies to get right, but I like how much information it provides. I don’t think I’d really use it because I’ve already checked the weather by the time I get to my Mac. Still, nice work.
Also check out his Mailmate action.
By way of @prenagha
If you own Launchbar (or are considering it) the latest nightly build is looking great. This pre-release build provides a new context for selections: staging. It’s a bit like a holding area for anything that is actionable in Launchbar and is similar to the Quicksilver comma trick. Add multiple items while searching and browsing and then commit one action to all of them at once. It’s one of the most promising new features to emerge in Launchbar in version 6.
Katie and David were generous enough to invite me on Mac Power Users to talk about being saddled with a PC at work but using iOS and a Mac the rest of the time. Multi=platform work is a pain but there are great services that reduce the burden. I think it’s a common problem and I don’t have all of the answers, but I’ve lived that life for a decade and I’ve developed workarounds that I think are generally applicable.
