Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Tap Forms. I guess I have several reasons to thank them.
They make a terrific personal database application for Mac and iOS that I use They made it easy to migrate from, the now defunct, Bento They’re sponsoring Macdrifter this week As a former Bento user, I was disappointed regularly. The updates were mostly paid bug fixes and while the form designer was intuitive, the syncing was miserable.
As a fan and friend of Day One, this upcoming feature looks interesting.
Day One is rapidly becoming the greatest and most personal publishing system on any platform.
Do you use nvALT or Marked.app for writing? How about Markdown tools or automatic logging for Day One? I’m betting that if you read this site that there is something that you use daily that Brett Terpstra made or contributed to.1
Brett is now an indie developer and writer. He’s accepting donations to support his work. I don’t look at it so much as a donation but rather as a self serving act that will help make more awesome available sooner rather than later.
Pastebot was a terrific app for getting something from an iPhone to a Mac. Put some text or an image in Pastebot and it would be available on my Mac. But Pastebot appears to be abandoned and extremely dated. Even brand new replacements, like Command-C still require Bonjour for sharing data rather than syncing through a central server.
I toyed with other online clipboard managers like CloudApp and Droplr. They are great.
How’s that for an anti-SEO title?
Are you using Brett Terpstra’s Cheaters? You probably should be. It’s pretty and very functional. However I’ve always been annoyed by the Automator web view. It’s cool that it has support for fixed dimensions and user agents but in order to dismiss it you need to click on the window to activate it first. I assume that’s because it is a HUD and not a normal window.
Patrick Welker gives a tour of his elaborate methods for processing RSS feeds. It’s an impressive system and there’s a lot to learn. I think the most important take home point is that it’s worth taking the time to understand both the how and the why.
Patrick has too many buckets for my taste but everyone is different. Whatever you think, there’s value in see his organizational structure, which is laid out nicely in a context map.
My favorite iOS to Mac screen sharing application, AirServer just received an excellent update. This update adds built in screen recording.
With just a one click and no other application, I can do a screen recording from my iPad or iPhone on my Mac and save the entire session to an H.264 video file. There are also some modest effects to apply to the video session.
AirServer has always had solid performance for me.
I’m a workflow voyeur like so many other nerds. That makes the end of the year particularly fascinating with the deluge of “Best Of” lists. But what gets lost in the top 1% of apps is the the other 99% of things that are still awesome but somewhat obscure.
So here’s my list1 of apps that are great but probably not on anyone’s top ten list because they are either obscure or too niche.
In case you thought that it only takes a black mock turtleneck and an over-produced demo video to succeed, it apparently also takes not-so-subtle attacks on developers of pre-existing apps.
And in case you think their argument is valid, SyntaxCheck might change your mind1:
Small and dirty iOS demo showing NSLinguisticTagger live-detecting sentence structure in an UITextView.
But maybe it’s best to just let the market decide.
DisclaimerI don't like asshats.
I’m excited to have PCalc for iOS as a sponsor this week. It’s been on my home screen for years and is still the most efficient way to do calculations.
SponsorThis post is about a sponsor's product, PCalc. I've recommended PCalc to many of my friends. It is hands-down the best calculator out there. When I need to do a lot of math, I do it with PCalc. As usual, all of the words and ideas in this post are my own about something I like.
