I bought my first dashboard GPS unit in 2006. My wife had been against the idea for the prior year. Every time I suggested buying one she suggested that we were smart enough to use a map. But then one Saturday we went on a road trip to Ikea that nearly ended at divorce court.
We managed to take the right exit, but on the wrong highway. Because it was an industrial park on a Saturday morning, there were few options for getting local directions.
Curio I’ve been using Curio from Zengobi for several years. I’ve found it to be one of the best ways to take notes on the Mac. It’s incredibly flexible and easy to use. The application has some nice features like built-in Evernote search and import, PDF import, and pasting of audio and video. Curio also is one of the easiest ways to make gorgeous mind maps. Whenever I sit down at my Mac to take some serious notes I use Curio as a sort of TrapperKeeper notebook.
There’s been a couple of new note apps 1 since my real-world review. Most of them still can not compete with Simplenote and Omnioutlner. However, I have found three very good alternatives. Notely, WriteRoom and Notability.
All three of these apps started out simple enough but they have evolved and matured into top of class text editors.
Notely; $1.99 Notely started out as a relatively barebones text editors. It had some rudimentary Dropbox syncing that required a manual sync.
Spirited Away This donation-ware application has been keeping me focused for the past year (or more). I’m not sure it will survive Lion's shift to full screen applications, but for now it runs on all of my non-server macs. Spirited Away simply hides all inactive application windows after a user specifiable amount of time.
I don’t tend to use it as much on my primary Mac since I have a huge amount of screen real estate.
I’m always interested in Macworld’s iPad accessory reviews. I don’t always agree with their take, but they do a wonderful job rounding up what’s available. Their recent update on iPad 2 cases was no exception.
I was intrigued by the Speck SmartShell and decided to drop the $35 to try it myself. I was not disappointed.
The Good It works with the Smart Cover. There is a cutout that fits the Smart Cover hinge.
KeyCue (20 euros; ~$28) is one of those Mac applications that seems unnecessary until you really need it. I don’t recall how I heard about it but I sure am glad I did.
KeyCue is a system-wide application that displays all of the keyboard shortcuts and commands that are relevant for your context. That means it shows shortcuts for the finder when you’re in finder but shortcuts for Aperture when that application is active.
Listen: I have become stuck in time. Unseen forces have conspired against me to spend an inordinate amount of time watching clocks and calendars. My work is now measured by hours. Yes, billable time is now part of my workflow.
Now that I am required to capture my work load by measures of time I need some new methodology. At my job, we are required to input our “timesheet” into Microsoft Project (Enterprise Ultra Premium Edition with nuts).
Back in 2006 I briefly discussed the use cases for Devonthink Pro. ($149) I'm still a fan of Devonthink Pro Office (the newly renamed top tier version) but I use it less and less for filing documents. I've been leaning more towards application agnostic file storing.
However, there is one workflow that Devonthink Pro Office accels at: PDF OCR. ABBYY Finereader ($99) is included with the application as a plugin. I've worked with many PDF OCR products, including the grotesquely expensive Adobe Acrobat Pro ($499).
I recently attended a four day conference. The subject isn’t all that important (generally, the interface of science and IT). What is important is that I decided to take the opportunity to test a number of iPad apps that I had only noodled around with previously. The experiment was really about testing the idea that the iPad can replace both a laptop and a pad of paper for taking notes. I’ll always be a pen-geek and a notebook snob.
I’ve been enjoying Dr. Drang’s tales of file format lock-in and his crusade against closed formats for his data. His stories always feel eerily familiar.
I bounce back and forth between Macs and Windows machines in my daily life. My OS polytheism goes way back. I started with an old custom built 386 PC in high school. In undergraduate, I took advantage of the steep Apple student discount and acquired a Mac IIci.
