It’s incredible when an app as full featured and long-lived as Keyboard Maestro adds new features. Now we get file-drop triggers for macro actions. I’ve only just started experimenting with it. Here’s a macro that I made awhile ago to grab the path to a file selected in the finder.
Here’s a version that works with a dropped file instead. The “TriggerValue” contains the path to the dropped file.
Now I can drag a file to the action as a trigger and source.
More on this Zettelkasten concept. One of the developers of The Archive passed along a link to an absolutely incredible Sublime Text package, Sublime ZK.
The package is impressive in what it can do, but also in how it’s documented. The Github page for the project is extensive and includes animated examples of it in action. This is a powerhouse for taking notes. It’s probably not for the casual user but if you want to build a encyclopedia of your own ideas and facts then this is a great starting point.
I’ve been reading a bit about the Zettelkasten system and there are some interesting opinions about meta data and how best to think about information. This old blog post by Christian Tietze about categories is thought provoking.
Creating categories is a top-down process. You start with the structure and then file the material away. Notes will have to fit the structure. If they don’t, there’ll have to be a compromise.
The Archive is a new plain-text writing and reference application for the Mac.1 It’s made by people that are super-nerds about plain text and has a lot that looks familiar and a lot that is new and clever. This is not a review. It’s a highlight of what’s neat and innovative.
The Archive is designed around what Notational Velocity and later nvALT brought to the Mac: Fast, reliable search with ease of creation.
Let’s not call these life hacks. They’re just ways to make some parts of my life less annoying or less time consuming. I’m a big believer in creating frameworks that allow me to be lazy or forgetful. When I find myself dealing with the same problem or friction point more than a few times, it’s time to fix it. Often that involves crap from Amazon.
Light the Way The problem: There are lots of little places in my house that are useless unless I turn on some lights.
Over the past few years I’ve enjoyed the benefits of iOS URL schemes. Apple opened a tiny crack and iOS developers built impressive machinery in that space. Entire new applications evolved to do little more than interact with these URL schemes, shuttling data back and forth.
While I love what can be done with URL schemes, I also see their misuse. URL schemes can become excuses for an incomplete or inefficient app UI.
I spend a lot of time with my task manager. My day job is a little bit of technical development and a little bit of project management. The project management piece is a capital “P.M.” I manage a dozen large projects spread over several years. Each project has between one and twenty different people on the team. This review is written from that perspective. I’m not a productivity blogger or a guy that just likes to try out software.
I use my 10.5" iPad Pro every day for taking notes. I greatly prefer to hand-write my notes using the Apple Pencil. This allows me to capture ideas and questions in the margins as well as detailed drawings and diagrams in the main body. It’s fantastic. But, unlike plain text, this is one area where the app makes all the difference.
Many iPad note apps support the Apple Pencil and implement some sort of inking system with line coloring and thickness adjustments.
During December I had a lot of time think. That’s never a good thing. I ended up with a little project to define my personal values. I want something I can write down and measure myself against. You know, kind of a like a corporate mission statement or values list, except for just me. I figured that I can’t ever be better unless I know what better means to me.
Sometimes I want a blank page. Other times I just need a little mental nudge to keep me on track. That’s one of the nice features of GoodNotes for iOS and Mac: It’s easy to create new paper templates.
My use case is pretty simple. I’ve long used the Cornell style of taking notes. As my daily life is mired in meetings rather than learning, I still try to put structure to the information I collect.
