Launchbar 6 is coming soon and they are gearing up for a public beta. Version 6 is a long time coming but I’m pretty excited to see what they do with it. There’s stiff competition for keyboard navigators these days but there’s also some really creative solutions. It’s a good year for Mac software, that’s for sure.
A great update to Keyboard Maestro. Version 6.4 adds support for reading and writing tags on files.
The new asynchronous macro execution has some nice potential for chaining macros without holding up the current macro. It fires off sub macros without waiting for them to complete.
It’s great to see one of my favorite apps constantly getting new and clever additions.
Dr. Drang and David Sparks have both written recently about creating temporary throw away tools. This conversation tickles me because it’s about a key aspect of tinkering that I think squashes a lot of creativity: these little tools are not precious. If a tool performs well, even once, then I’m pretty happy with the outcome.
I create a huge variety of what may be considered short-term solutions. I think this is pretty normal and it’s precisely what computers are good for.
Synology just released their latest update for their network attached storage drives.1 DSM 5 provides a significant improvement to the UI of the management console but it also brings some new tricks the my all-around favorite piece of hardware, such as Cloud Sync for automatic syncing with Goolge Drive and Dropbox.
After installing the Clound Sync application from the Synology drive’s Package Center, create a new sync end-point. The options are Google Drive, Dropbox and Baidu Cloud.
In honor of the recent Alfred update, here’s a really great way to action contact info from the Address Book.
Out of the box, you can ⌘-C any item in your Address Book just by searching for the person in Alfred and navigating to the detail in the contact display.
But if you want to do more than just copy the info to the pasteboard, jump into the Alfred preferences for the Contacts and add some custom actions.
Shawn Blanc’s lovely write-up for the new Day One service mentioned his coffee journal. On Twitter he linked to Josiah Wiebe’s post about Launch Center Pro actions for journaling with Day One. I like the use of the table layout in Day One.
It reminds me of Ken’s post about logging his beers, which is more about automated logging.
That little green airplane in my menu bar means something important. It means my Macbook thinks it’s sitting at my desk plugged into my Thunderbolt display and on Ethernet. It also means that my NAS remote disks are mounted and ready for action.
Whenever I plug in my Thunderbolt display ControlPlane jumps into action and mounts my most commonly used volumes so that they are ready to go.
ControlPlane is configured to watch a wide variety of hardware and software changes on your Mac.
Nuance just released the latest version of Dragon Dictate for Mac and it’s simultaneously great and terrible.
Disclaimer I own Nuance stock. I'm not much of an investor, but I like to put money into technologies I really believe in. I really believe speech recognition and comprehension is the next revolution in computing. Nuance seems to own all of the patents.
The Great The speech recognition engine is noticeably better.
These tips work with both the Mac and iOS version of Fantastical.
To create a Reminder instead of a calendar entry, start a sentence with “reminder”, “todo” or “task”:
:::text todo Post Fantastical tips Saturday at 7pm Use the keyboard shortcut ⌥-V on the Mac to prefix with a check mark (✔) and automatically toggle an entry to a Reminder.
Include basic date logic in an entry. Fantastical will take care of figuring out the date:
Here’s how you adjust the date format used system-wide on Mavericks.
Go into the “Language and Region” system preference on the Mac.
Switch to the “Date” pane and activate the “Advanced” settings. Now you can configure your preferred system wide date format. For example, I prefer the short format yyyy-mm-dd.
Now applications that use the system date format comply with my odd standard.
