I reviewed ZoomNotes 2 back in May and I was impressed with the sketching app for iOS. Since May, ZoomNotes has been updated several times and is now my preferred app for quick sketches on iOS.
I’ll just get this out there right away. The ZoomNotes interface is not pretty. The UI elements have a terrible color and gradient. I admit that. However, the feature set is hard to beat.
CopyLess is a clipboard utility for the Mac. My biggest annoyance with Alfred (1 and 2) is that it strips my text formatting on the Clipboard. I regularly use the Keyboard Maestro clipboard manager but CopyLess is a nice replacement.
CopyLess is activated with a hot key and shows a list of all recent clipboard activity. I like the way CopyLess displays the source app icon of each clip.
There is an Application Filter option to exclude CopyLess from capturing from user defined applications.
I really like the Pelle journals. The biggest selling point for me is the thick paper stock. The ruled and plain notebooks are 28lb. linen paper and the drawing pads are 80lb. textured linen paper. These are perhaps the nicest little notebooks I’ve ever tried.
I use the Pelle journals without a special cover but I bought this gorgeous leather binder as a gift for someone that really doesn’t care about notebooks.
Voila is a Mac toolbox for screen capture and annotation. It’s what Skitch might have been if it was continually developed and enhanced.
Screenshot Collector At its core, Voila provides solid image capture, annotation, sharing and storage. It’s an all-in-one system. Snapshots are stored within the app’s database and can be renamed, tagged and shared directly.
But Voila does more than just hold the images. It tracks how they are used and gives immediate access to that meta-data through “Smart Collections.
Delish is a Mac app1 for managing bookmarks on the Mac. It integrates with Pinboard2 and brings some bonus features that the website lacks.
Smart Bundles Smart Bundles are the real knock-out feature of Delish. They go beyond the standard Pinboard tag bundles. Delish Smart Bundles are similar to iTunes smart playlists and allow a user to combine many different search types into a constantly refreshing smart folder.
The smart folders have access to all of the important bookmark data for a Pinboard bookmark, which makes it easy to build some very useful collections.
The Mail app on OS X is adequate for most users right out of the box. Maybe I get a lot of email. Maybe I have a lot of projects. Maybe I’m a future star of an episode of Hoarders.
I file all of my mail into a folder structure that aids in locating and documenting. Mail’s search is a wonderful thing, but with many thousands of messages, it’s often faster if I begin by narrowing the search domain fist.
I’ve used OmniFocus since the first week it was released. I’ve reached a professional tipping point. I manage some large projects with dozens of contributors that span several years. My OmniFocus database has many, many hundreds of tasks. Six months ago I realized that contexts were becoming irrelevant in an always-available and online world. I can do email at any time. I can write or search the web from my phone.
This article is boring. That is, it’s boring for anyone who is not considering moving from a 27" iMac to a 15" MacBook Pro. For someone who is, this post may be just what they are looking for.1
The pain in moving is not just packing everything up and shlepping it to a new location. The real pain is trying to make the new place feel like home.2 As with houses, so goes computers.
Disclosure: I helped with beta testing Tally. I also like Agile Tortoise. We all have our biases. Now you know mine.
Tally is a simple app for counting. It’s as simple as counting should be. Start the app and it shows a zero count. Tap anywhere on the screen and it increments by one. But maybe you’re a power-counter. Incrementing by one is for grade school. Slide right to left and a configuration panel opens.
I use a mix of iTunes and Pandora for most of my musical enjoyment. I’m a PandoraOne subscriber and used the PandoraOne Mac app, which was a terrible Adobe Air kludge. Even their web site requires Flash, like an animal. Now I use Pandabar.1
Pandabar runs as a menu bar application that exposes all of the Pandora functionality. There are the standard controls as well as option to rate the current song.
