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They just keep tempting me. Memories. So many memories.

Many Tricks is Sponsoring Macdrifter this week and their Name Mangler application is the best way to give meaning to file names again. SponsoredThis tutorial is about a sponsor's product. The concepts, words and opinions are mine. I like Many Tricks. I use Name Mangler and I feel good about recommending it. Now, I know a lot of us have scripts we’ve made to rename files and those certainly do a great job, for some very specific cases.

I’m what you might call an iThoughts fan. It’s on all of my home screens on iOS and almost always open on my Mac. iThoughts is my playground for ideas. Many of my longer articles start in a context map and many of my expansive projects live in that form permanently. That means I can’t silo my data on one device. iThoughts provides a couple of reliable ways to sync data and make sure it’s portable to any other application I need.

Spotlight is one of the fundamental systems on the Mac that enables some of my favorite applications like Hazel. If Spotlight is broken, even if I don’t think I rely on it for search, then my Mac is broken. Here’s a general process for fixing all sorts of Spotlight related strangeness: Check your disk Sometimes Spotlight isn’t the root cause but rather a casualty of a corrupted disk. The best option is to run Disk Utility after booting the Mac in Recovery Mode.

1Password 4 is available today for $50 in the Mac AppStore. That’s a good price for an application I use dozens of times every day. I only have one tip for this new version: I’m waiting for the direct purchase version. It will lack iCloud sync but I’m sure the Dropbox sync will continue to work perfectly.

National Novel Writing Month is almost upon us. If you are traveling down that road, there’s no better tool than Scrivener. Here are some good tips for getting the most out of Scrivener during NaNoWriMo. Writing a novel in Scrivener: lessons learned Scrivener - How I use it, part 1 Scrivener - How I use it, part 2: Labels, keywords, and meta-data Five tips for a successful NaNoWriMo (and how Scrivener can help)

Thanks to DEVONtech for sponsoring Macdrifter this week and for making awesome software. I’ve been using DEVONtech applications since around 2005 and it continues to surprise me with its flexibility and power. While DEVONthink Pro Office is well known for its document aggregation and sorting AI, it can also be used for tasks that simply involve crunching through a lot of information and figuring out what to do with it later, like reading RSS feeds.

Marked 2 is out today and can be had for $12 or as part of the $35 Paddle bundle. This version of Marked is really polished and comes with a lot of little tricks hidden inside. I can easily recommend Marked to anyone, even to someone that has no need to preview their Markdown because Marked comes with tools to evaluate the content of your Markdown. For example, it can show instances of abused words, validate links and provide a complete outline of your document.

OmniGraffle is one of my favorite annotation and mockup tools. It just got better with the release of version 6 Here are the full release notes

MutliMarkdown Composer is the Multi-tool for Markdown nerds and the latest update brings a number of new enhancements. Since it’s introduction, MultiMarkdown Composer (MMDC for short) has steadily added new features and improved MMD handling and it’s a pretty great general purpose editor now. MMDC continues to be one of the most cutting edge text editors for the Mac. For example, this latest release includes Mavericks tag support. Not only will it offer to convert OpenMeta tags to Mavericks tags (As the developer notes in the comments, this feature is not available yet.