My first acquaintance with Ulysses was brief and long ago. I tried it sometime around the end of version 1 and didn’t really like it.
Today, Ulysses 3 is available and I have to say, it’s a great application but still not for me.
I’ll get this out of the way now. Ulysses is very nice. It’s layout will be familiar to nvALT junkies but it’s far more attractive and brings some powerful features to bear on text files.
Two new cases have found a place in the Macdrifter house: The Devicewear iPad Case and the Minisuit iPhone Clipster Case.1
The Devicewear iPad case is $37. That’s not terribly cheap but it has all the bases covered for my needs. The case is faux leather exterior with a soft velvet interior. It fits the iPad 3 nicely with all of the requisite cutouts. What makes it stand out is that it is a great rotating stand as well.
Pinbrowser is a new app by a new developer. It does one simple thing: It allows you to browse the public Pinboard.in feeds. Take this review with a grain of salt, because I’m flattered to be included as one of the default feeds.
Pinbrowser strong suit is knowing what it should be. It’s not trying to be a Pinboard.in bookmarking tool. It is strictly a browser. It comes pre-configured with the Popular feed, one tag feed and (surprisingly) my feed.
I really like my iTunes library. I really like my smart play lists. I really don’t care for the iOS music player so I play the field. I recently stumbled across Groove for iOS and I am thrilled with it.1
Tag Team The core of Groove is it’s tagging engine. When I first launched Groove there was a brief period of about five minutes while it performed a sync with my library, including iTunes Match.
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.
I’ve been using a Drobo connected a Mac Mini server for about 5 years. It’s performed well and I have not had a single complaint about the device. I’ve had at least six disk failures and the Drobo handled them like a champ.
But things die and I like to be prepared. I expect this Drobo is not long for this world and I wanted to go with a standalone NAS device instead of a shared drive on a server.
It’s become a thing for me that when I don’t have a weekly sponsor, I post Pinboard tips instead. Let’s continue the trend.
Pinboard is wonderful, but on iPad I really prefer a native app. The best app I’ve used is Pinbook. Here’s why:
Quick Add From Pasteboard Pinbook immediately detects a new URL on the iPad pasteboard when launched and then offers to add a new bookmark. But it’s smart about it.
I keep most of my photos archived in an Aperture library. But I also have a good size collection in Dropbox. I’m not likely to move completely to Dropbox for my photo collection. It’s much too large and I really like the benefits I get with Aperture. Dropbox simply makes sharing and syncing easy though. I take a lot of photos of whiteboards, documents, and notes that I don’t want in my PhotoStream.
Viticci made me switch from Reeder to Mr. reader on iOS with clever tricks and high praise (see the Macstories review as well). But, believe it or not, I didn’t switch for the URL scheme support. I switched for the better reading experience.1
Here’s a quick tip: slide a finger in from either side to move between articles or close the current one. The controls appear right under the touch point.
