I’m a huge fan of DEVONthink for iOS . It’s one of my favorite apps released in 2016. But there are still some frustrating gaps and non-obvious features. Accessing favorite tags and groups takes far too much exploring and is not supported by the standard URL scheme. But, it is handled through direct item links.
Tap and hold on any document, group, or tag to access a pop-over. The item link is a URL that links directly to that place in DEVONthink and it works across platforms.
My history with OmniFocus goes back to OmniOutliner on the Mac and the miraculous Kinkless GTD (thanks Ethan!). Those early days with Kinkless and GTD felt a bit revolutionary. Then The Omni Group released OmniFocus and set a the gold standard in task management for both Mac and iOS. The power of the perspectives and the incredible quick capture on the Mac was groundbreaking.
The transition to OmniFocus 2 killed my interest in the system.
These tutorials by Jesse are a great introduction to TaskPaper. If you haven’t used TaskPaper in a long while, it’s worth another look. The application was completely redesigned and has several cool new features. Even the TaskPaper date picker is one of the most functional I’ve seen. Plain text doesn’t mean featureless.
Every year there’s one or two iOS apps that really elevate the platform to a new level for me. In the early days it was Tweetbot and iThoughts. Then it was Evernote and Editorial, and Workflow. More recently, scanning applications like Scanner Pro or Scanbot have been tremendous new tools. This year I think there are two or three fundamentally new apps that really change how I use my mobile devices.
Hazel is one of my top 5 Mac apps. It’s taken me years to build up the scripts that Hazel runs on my machine, partly because there’s a steep learning curve and quite a bit of danger. But now, David Sparks has a video field guide to teach you all about Hazel so you can save a lot of anguish and get right to the magic.
Here’s a 30 minute intro video for free:
I love concept maps. I love notes. So, of course I’d love the idea behind Octopus Note. It’s a mapping app that also links to detailed notes. It’s in beta now.
Brought to me by my bearded friend who really gets me.
Episode 65 of Nerds on Draft is freshly canned and includes one of the best IPAs I’ve ever had and a bunch of discuss about task managers (again). Jeff and I check in on how it’s going with 2Do for iOS and Mac and talk about rough edges and favorite features.
The new OmniFocus URL scheme looks to be a major improvement. It’s still in development but it’s starting to sound like OmniFocus is going to catch up to other apps in some significant ways.
This means, for example, that you can now create a text file outlining an entire project, with placeholders for specific names, defer dates, due dates, and so on. You can then run a workflow that processes those placeholders and builds a new project (such as “Run a marathon on June 30”) from that project template, and these project templates and their processing workflows can be shared with others.
Pretty neat stuff on Nik’s Crappy Blog although probably way outside of what I’m willing to do for my macros.
There’s more help with this built into Keyboard Maestro and on the forum.
A few people have asked me about replacing TextExpander fill-in snippets using Keyboard Maestro. While I think Keyboard Maestro is pretty easy to work with, it’s very different than a single purpose snippet expansion tool. Here’s a quick breakdown of a macro for responding to email. It opens a prompt and asks a few questions about the message and then inserts a draft message into an application window.
Variables Keyboard Maestro lives and breathes with variables.
