I'm not sure how long this has been available, but Pragmatic Books now offers automatic syncing to Dropbox. That means my Dropbox account will always have the latest version of my Pragmatic books.
I really like the Pragmatic model. They offer print on demand copies of their works as well as early access electronic versions. The books are very high quality and always well written. I only wish that the videos I've purchased could also be synchronized with Dropbox for offline viewing and streaming to my AppleTV.
I'm giving Fletcher Penny's new application MultiMarkdown Composer a spin. It's great but I like the dark black styling provided by Byword. Luckily, it's dead simple to create a new style sheet for MMD Composer.
Just create the following folder if it does not already exits
~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown Composer/Styles/
Now create a new style sheet and set the colors and formatting to something you like better. If you want to start with my template, you can find it here.
I've been doing this trick (from TUAW) with my wife for the past week. She doesn't have an iPhone 4S (yet) but she prefers the reminders app to any other option, including a list on the refrigerator. Siri makes it all that much easier for me to add things to the shopping list while I prepare meals (I do the household cooking and my wife does the grocery shopping).
Keyboard Maestro macros can be executed several different ways. There’s the common hot-key trigger and text snippet trigger. These are great but sometimes I need to run a macro when I’m not sitting in front of my computer. That’s where the KM Webserver trigger and Keyboard Maestro iOS apps come in handy. Webserver This a somewhat understated feature of Keyboard Maestro. I can configure the application to expose a webserver running on a specific port.
One of my favorite new features in iOS on my iPad2 is mirroring to an Apple TV 2. This is a pretty big deal. It transforms the iPad from an introverted device to a home activity center.
If you own an Apple TV2 you probably know how satisfying it is to watch the photo screensaver serve up all of your favorite family moments. It’s equally satisfying to sit together on the couch and look for local restaurants on Yelp or look at recipes in Paprika.
You know an OS is great when it it makes MS Outlook even slightly tolerable. In this case iOS 5 adds syncing Exchange tasks with the new Reminders app in iOS 5. I have avoided uses Outlook task since my first iPhone arrived. I preferred to hop from my work windows machine to my iPhone or iPad rather than use Outlook any more than I was forced to.
I missed it in many of the great iOS reviews but discovered it last night when my old completed tasks from work showed up in Reminders (4 year old tasks that were surprisingly completed).
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.
If everything works according to plan, iCloud should arrive next week. The only immediate actions are to get ready to download several application updates. iWork for Mac and iOS is likely to be released at the same time that iCloud goes live. In addition to the applications from Apple, I’m sure there are a number of top-tier developers ready to start using the iCloud syncing (for example the Omni Group).
Brett Terpstra had a post a few days ago about how he uses Evernote even though he is predominately a plain text guy. Brett makes perfect sense. Damn him!
I used Evernote like crazy for a long time. I paid for premium service for a long time. But it worried me that it was a hole I was digging that I might not be able to get my carefully curated notes out of.
Beer Tracking Trilogy Episode 4
See this post for the introduction and ground rules
Bento I started this project in Bento. A couple of years ago, I created a Bento database for cataloging beers I drank. The purpose was to know what to buy again, and what to avoid at all costs. Bento worked moderately well but had some frustrating rough edges.
Bento on the Mac has two different views into the data.
