MacTuts has a very well done Hazel tutorial. It’s a basic introduction that ramps up quickly to some advanced Hazel features. Although, people seem to love organizing files into subfolders with Hazel. I’ve never understood that for anything other than photos.
PDFpenPro 6 is out today and on sale for 2 days. The Mac App Store version is $40 during the sale. There’s also a direct download version but you don’t get the iCloud sync unless you buy through the MAS. I only need the superpowers of PDFpenPro a few times a year, but each of those times was easily worth $40.
Here’s a little trick in OS X that I underuse: Hit F5 while typing a word in many Cocoa apps to get a list of suggested words.
This works in TextEdit, Mail, OmniFocus and Tweetbot.1 Unfortunately it does not work in Sublime Text or nvALT at all.
Actually, this command has several keyboard shortcuts that work in different apps:
⌘.(period)
ESC
F5
Only F5 works consistently for me in multiple applications.
Name Mangler was updated today and it’s very impressive. I bought it before the demo video was even half over. It’s on sale for $10. Sure, you could write a bunch of AppleScript, Shell or Python to do the same things. Sure, you’re really awesome, but my time costs money. I don’t want to spend any more of it writing scripts to rename files.
The Apple Mail application on the Mac is a fine specimen of a tool made for the 95% and loathsomely inadequate for the remaining 5%. It serves 95% of users 95% of the time. Mail.app works: mail comes in and mail goes out. Occasionally I can even find old mail when I need it. But the pure Mail.app experience lacks automated filing, tagging and grouping of related messages. It lacks gusto.
Texts really does look like a good Mac app for working with plain text and this review by AppStorm has convinced me to try it. It’s Mac and Windows to boot. But really, their attention to footnotes has me sold.
“Discounted” to $29 for now.
Here’s a quick tip for using Pixa for Mac to extract icons from application bundles. Just drag the application into Pixa. A new folder with the same name as the app is created. All image resources can be browsed and filtered easily using the Pixa automatic tagging.
Note, this creates a copy of the application bundle in Pixa not just a view into the original application bundle.
Mauricio has a nice little overview of the Mac window manager Slate. His post led me down the rabbit hole to discover Xnomad and Afloat.
For a really great introduction to Slate, check out Tristan Hume’s blog post too.
I’m a little afraid of moving over to Slate from Moom. I have a job and a family and I would miss them too much. Slate is an incredibly deep tool for window management but it comes at a high price.
It’s tax season here in the US and that means one thing: Trying to send every sensitive document I have through the Internet to an accountant running some variant of Windows.
The biggest hurdle is always sending a secured archive file containing scanned copies of tax documents and receipts. This year I decided to prepare for the comedy of errors and downloaded Keka from the Mac AppStore.1
Keka is a little utility for creating and expanding a variety of compressed archives.
The Ground Rules The bar is pretty high after the first round of evaluations.
There are a few areas that I have found most OmniFocus competitors fail hard and a few that make OmniFocus look like a LeapFrog application.
Sequential vs. Unordered Tasks
This is an odd omission. No system I have found has an option to indicate a sequential or unordered list of tasks for a project. Worse, some systems have almost no option for setting the order of tasks.
