It’s the golden age of plain text editors. While Microsoft Word is bloated like a victim in a scene from Se7en, the geekier writers are moving to plain text en masse. One of the advantages of this golden age is that there are terrific apps like Elements[1] and Nebulous Notes[1] for editing plain text on iOS. Not only are these apps powerhouses as text editors, but they were built to integrate with Dropbox.
ReadNow[1] is a native application for growing and reading Instapaper and ReadItLater collections on the Mac. It takes a few aesthetic choices from Reeder, which is a good thing. The Instapaper Web site is fine, but nothing beats a native app like ReadNow. That’s one of my biggest roadblocks for catching up with my Instapaper backlog. There’s no good way to browse and organize Instapaper articles on the Mac. At least until now.
Fake[1] is so much fun. I expect to do a lot more with this. It really does make me giddy for some reason. Maybe because I’ve been doing some of this with Python scripts and it’s very difficult to do well.
Fake is like Automator for the web. But it’s better than that. It’s graphical programming for the web. It can automatically find and populate forms. It can submit logins and extract content.
I just started using CodeRunner and Patterns for script writing.[1] They are both available in the MAS.
CodeRunner supports AppleScript, Python, Ruby, Shell and several more. It provides syntax highlighting and code completion. Importantly it also provides a console window to display the output as well as a mode for accepting input. Sure, it’s not BBEdit, but it’s lightweight and single minded. There are not many frills but it works great.
I purchased the PowerDock Dual from Amazon[1] to help cleanup the family charging stations. 2 iPhones, 2 iPads and 2 laptops all charging in one creates an overwhelming tangle of little white cables. Unfortunately the PowerDock Dual is poorly designed and just creates more problems than it solves
The concept is great. The PowerDock holds one iPad and one iPhone with small coin dish between them. It looked like a smart solution.
While the built-in speaker on my iMac is quite nice it’s not sufficient for listening to music or podcasts, especially if I want to listen from another room. Over the years I’ve heard nice things about the SoundSticks but never had a reason to “upgrade”. Well, I finally needed to reclaim my SoundWorks radio from my office and decided to give the SoundSticks III a go. I’m glad I did.
The iPhone is a beautiful yet fragile piece of technology. I love the feel of it. It has a satisfying heft and the glass allows it to slide easily from my fingers into my pocket. Unfortunately there’s a cost to the sleek design. The iPhone 4(S) appears to have a much greater affinity for the ground than for my hand. The obvious solution is to put it into a protective case.
I tried using the Newsstand app on iOS 5 last week. I purchased one issue of a Mac centric magazine. It was a disgusting mess that quickly reminded me why I prefer Instapaper, Zite and my RSS feeds over reading on glossy paper. The Newsstand “magazine” was slow to render and was 50% ads. By slow to render, I mean that after a page turn, there are several seconds where the facing pages are too blurry to read.
You might be an OmniFocus guru or a Things aficionado. But the Due app for iOS is a valuable addition to any toolbox (TUAW review). It's not for scheduling your life or planning a project. It's for those times when you really don't want to forget something but it's just not going to make it into your task list. Those unplanned imminent tasks.
Due is more of a timer than a scheduler.
Pinboard.in is an anti-social bookmarking service. It started as an alternative to Delicious bookmarks with one major difference. By default, bookmarks were private. It was not intended to be a place to explore, but rather a place to reliably keep bookmarks with a minumum of pomp and circumstance. Their tag-line is “Social bookmarking for introverts.”
I joined Pinboard.in back in April 2010. I can’t remember the price back then, but it was cheap.
