Glassboard, Google+, Viber, Patter, Wordpress, Basecamp, I’ve tried a lot of collaborative messaging services. Every one of them has been a terrible experience for what I needed. They either lacked native clients or notifications or basic document sharing.
Slack just sucked the oxygen out of the collaborative work-room.1
I collaborate on several personal projects. Back when Erik and I were working on Critic Markup, we looked high and low for a collaborative messaging system that supported code syntax highlighting, file sharing and threaded messages with notifications.
Do you ever have that feeling that you know exactly what app you want to use but can’t remember it’s name? Or how about those moments when you just don’t remember that you even have an application for the job you’re trying to accomplish?1 I do. All of the time.
This Alfred workflow (download) creates functional app buckets from keywords and leverages a subtle setting in the File Filter trigger.2
Katie and David invited me on Mac Power Users to talk about Devonthink and my workflows. It was a lot fun talking to fellow nerds for almost 2hrs. Just check out those show notes.
I’ll also point out that this makes episode 177 of MPU and I’ve listened to every single one every single week. It’s still one of my favorite weekly rituals. It’s awe-inspiring that they continue to have compelling discussions after this many episodes.
On my recent expedition to switch away from OmniFocus, I investigated several alternatives. On of those that I found very compelling and surprising was iThoughts. It may be shocking to learn this, but iThoughts makes for a very competent task management manager if it fits your basic requirements.
What sets iThoughts apart from any other task manager is the completely new perspective it provides for task and project relationships.1 Dependencies and complexity are immediately obvious in a context map.
Tax time approaches once again and when I stop and consider how much easier the entire process is in 2014 than in 2004 I get a warm feeling down below for my Mac. I’m not talking about tax preparation or accounting software, those still make me nauseous. I’m talking about all of the other pieces of hardware and software that take some of the suck out of the tax preparation process.
The latest update to Evernote for Mac adds some new query syntax to make searching faster.
“Recipes with photos tagged vegetarian”
That’s pretty nice. Natural language search is great when it works but you must know the rules. It looks like Evernote provides a lot of modifier syntax so it should be pretty flexible. For example, by exposing the source attribute you can create a query like Notes from email to only show results that were emailed into Evernote.
Rob Trew is a wizard. This latest piece of work re-creates the OmniFocus perspective functionality for use with TaskPaper. It supports some basic natural language queries as well as adding an editing option. It all hinges on TaskPaper’s excellent query language.
His work of bolting on huge feature enhancements to OmniFocus is now directed squarely at TaskPaper. This is going to get good.
Let’s journey down the Nerd Hole™.
I’ve longed for SFTP access to my Dropbox files. It always seemed like the easiest way to work on text files when at a locked down Windows computer or inside a remote script. But it was never important enough to dedicate much time. Fast forward to my recent migration to plain text task management. Now I really just want access to a handfull of text files from Sublime Text, Pythonista and variety of scripts.
This is part two in the series. In part one, I discussed the rules and detail designs of a plain text based task management experiment. The tag and project structure in the TaskPaper format is flexible and easy to comprehend. But the system is only as good as the tools available for working with the documents.
In this article, I’ll document a broad set of tools available on various platforms for working with TaskPaper documents.
Jordan Merrick wrote some excellent pieces for AppStorm before it was killed off a month ago. His latest project, The Instructional looks like something to pay attention to.
My aim for The Instructional is to provide in-depth guides and workflows for Mac and iOS, picking up where most app reviews finish by exploring the various features and functions of apps for, and features of, both iOS and OS X.
