The Trilogy This is the opening crawl to a trilogy. Like any good trilogy, it will begin with episode 4 and never, ever speak of episodes 1–3.
The trilogy will describe a quest to find the ideal solution for curating my collection of micro-brewery beers. The quest spans several suites of applications: Bento, OmniOutliner and iWork Numbers. I’ve learned a lot about how I can use these tools and I hope someone else gets something out of this series.
As I have mentioned, my dear wife is now a full time OmniOutliner user. She started on the iPad and eventually migrated to the Mac. One major advantage of using OmniOutliner on the Mac is that you can design templates that automatically handle formatting based on context. The Omni Group provides some tutorials and some specific demos of styles but I decided to whip up a little tutorial for my wife and I am presenting it below.
This is a really good deal for an upgrade. There are some pretty serious issues with using older version of Bento on Lion and this is a great way to get past that. I'm not a fan of their typical upgrade pricing since I don't think the iterations have provided much new value.
Unfortunately for me, I already purchased Bento 4 on the MAS because of the bugs with Lion. I have a couple of Bento databases that I use a lot and needed to make sure I would continue to be supported on Lion.
Today I found myself in need of a lightweight ERD tool. I was planning a small relational database and I was on a windows machine. I didn't want a heavy-handed tool like Visio or DBArtisan so I did some Google-foo and found WWW SQL Designer. It's a javascript based web app for making small ERD's. Check out this awesome live demo. It's easy and the results look nice enough. You can also save the entire design as XML and take it with you.
As my last post revealed, I’m now thinking a bit more about a variety of use cases for outlining as a form of note-taking. One thing that I’ve discovered is that lawyer-ly folks love 'em some OmniOutliner. There’s almost a cult following around the application. Maybe that’s where everybody’s favorite Power Users got their start with Omni products.
Here are just a few links I have discovered while figuring out how a new Law student might take advantage of OmniOutliner:
Macworld reviewed Moom from Many Tricks software back in April. They gave it a good rating and I figured for $5 it was worth a try. I was already using BetterTouchTool and Keyboard Maestro to move windows from the keyboard but I thought the design was interesting. I've been using Moom for several months and I am very happy with the features, stability and ease of use.
Moom has a unique interface as window management applications go.
I have been recently shifting a large chunk of my TextExpander snippets to Keyboard Maestro. I still plan to use TextExpander for basic snippet expansion but I find the depth of Keyboard Maestro allows me to build custom tailored tools that fit their intended uses much better.
For example, here a juiced up version of a snippet for inserting Markdown references from Safari. First, here's what my TextExpander snippet did:
Looks like there is a small uprising over at the AgileBits forum. The issue centers on their decision to go all-in on the Mac AppStore (MAS). There are two camps:[1]
People angry that they have to repurchase the application and will not get upgrade pricing People that are concerned the MAS will reduce the functionality and update cycles For the people hanging out in camp 1: If you derive $20 additional value out of MAS and the upcoming version 4 of 1Password, then pay for it.
I was excited to finally migrate my 1Password install to the Mac AppStore. I've been slowly repurchasing through the MAS so that I can quit maintaining an inventory of all of my application licenses.
Unfortunatley, there is a significant bug with the MAS version. I keep my Dropbox folder on a secondary internal drive so as to save space on my SSD. The new 1Password assumes that Dropbox is always installed in the user folder.
This is some really high quality work and attention to detail. If you add the tag "@done" at the end of a line in NVAlt, the text is automatically displayed with a strikethrough line, a la TaskPaper. It's not reformatted. It's still just plain text. But NVAlt displays it as if it was formatted with a strikethrough.
Also, don't forget the double brackets automatically create links to other notes.
