The new Evernote Web Clipper looks amazing. Unfortunately is breaks the FastMail web app and is problematic for the Plex web app. Even after disabling the Evernote plugin on Safari, I still saw conflicts with Plex.
While the Evernote clipper may be amazing, it’s disheartening that this kind of interference was not noticed during testing. I do not plan to allow this plugin in my browser in the future, even though I really like Evernote.
When iTunes in the Cloud first came out, I was very excited to get all of my media off of my local hard drive. But recently I’ve decided that I’d actually prefer to move everything to my Plex server. That means I need to download all of my iCloud purchases to my Mac again. Here’s a quick way to download everything that is missing from my local iTunes library.
First, go into the preferences and under “Store” enable the display of iTunes in the Cloud purchases:
David Sparks, geek author extraordanaire, does it again. His new book, simply titled Email is terrific.
I’ve read/watched/listened from virtual cover to virtual cover twice. I found new and interesting things both times. He hits every significant aspect of dealing with Email on a Mac and iOS. It’s also one of the best iBooks editions I’ve seen of any book.1
Even if you’ve been using email everyday for the past 20 years, like me, you’re going to find something new in David’s book.
MailMate is a relatively new and very nerdy email client for the Mac. The developer is trying something new by attempting to fund future development (version 2.0) with an IndieGoGo campaign. It’s an novel and honest approach that could easily be dismissed except for two things:
MailMate is already a very innovative and competent Mac email client Your donation actually purchases a license for the application, so it’s really just a purchase.
I have three favorite text editors. I use nvALT for quick notes. I use Sublime Text for expansive and complex work. But gradually, I find myself in MultiMarkdown Composer by Fletcher Penney more often than not.1
Today I noticed that the latest update to MMC does something amazing on Mavericks: It recognizes tags in the front matter and offers to add them as a tag in Mavericks.
I opened a file with this front matter:
Flying Meat is one of my favorite Mac development companies. They’ve announced that one of their oldest apps, VoodooPad, is being acquired by Plausible Labs. I love, Gus at Flying Meat, but Mike Ash is also a superman. I think this is good news for VoodooPad fans.
The T2 by CalDigit looks like a great Thunderbolt drive. It supports 2 disks as well as SSDs. It’s called a “native” Mac drive which means no special drivers and it’s bootable.
As is popular now, you can sign up for a spot on their waiting list. No price given.
As for Thunderbolt, the speed is nice but it feels like another Apple boondoggle similar to Firewire. February will mark 3 years since it was released and we still have waiting lists for basic Thunderbolt drives.
A couple of new workflows for Alfred. The first is Layouts for window management:
Layouts is an AppleScript file and an Alfred Workflow to give you a lightweight window manager for your Mac. Out of the box, it allows you to resize your active window to top half, right half, bottom half, left half, top left quarter, top right quarter, bottom right quarter, bottom left quarter, center window and zoom (full screen).
Mail rules are the life raft of the modern working nerd. Without my mail rules I’d be overwhelmed and drowning in messages that I don’t need to see right now, or maybe ever.
For years, I’ve enjoyed some very complex rules in Mail.app. With the combination of MailTags and Mail-Act-On (I’ve written about some of them here), an Mac server can become a competent virtual assistant. Mail.app in Mavericks brings further improvements in rule handling.
The latest episode of Mac Power Users is good. The title is “Running a Mac Small Business with Ben Carter” but it’s really about doing stuff because when it comes down to it, we all work for ourselves on some level.
