Here's another quick macro that comes in handy. I often will create a list of items and later I will want the list to be in alphabetical or numerical order. I do it enough that I created a Keyboard Maestro macro for the function.
Given a list like this:
Item 3 Item 1 Something borrowed Something blue Something Blue Alphabetical would be better I can select the items, trigger the macro, and get back this list:
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.
I never expected to see GeekTool make it to the Mac AppStore. As the name implies, it is really for serious nerds. It's an awesome tool and I use it on my MacPro to provide system info on the Desktop. Since menu bar and Dock space are a premium on a 13" screen, GeekTool spreads the info out across my Desktop and also provides some nice aesthetics as well.
One disadvantage of running Little Snitch: You finally know all the background activities going on constantly and consuming bandwidth, memory and cpu cycles without your implicit acknowledgement.
I was not running any FileMaker products at the time. Apparently "helpd" wants to talk to their help server anyway.
If you run Little Snitch, you will have a great appreciation for how active an "idle" machine really is.
If you need access to special Unicode characters, Apple provides a nice support page.
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Brett Terpstra just posted a very nice tool for inserting dates using Natural Language. His post is definitely worth a read.
Given my preference for Python and my previous experience with Natural Language Processing, I decided to implement something similar through a Keyboard Maestro trigger.
I have a macro that pops up a text box and asks for the date language you would like to interpret. Apparently KBM does have a leg up on TextExpander, in that it can accept input to a shell script or applescript.
On the recent episode of the B&B Podcast, Shawn and Ben had a lengthy discussion about the optimal home computing setup. They got pretty close to what I settled on a couple of years ago. I think this post describes my ideal setup until Thunderbolt is ubiquitous. At that point a MacBook Air could instantly connect to an array of devices through one cable and replace my desktop. I would still keep the MacMini server though.
I couldn’t resist. Here are some more generic solutions for text processing via the Services Menu. Create an Automator Services project that accepts text and replaces the selection with the result as shown. Add a “Run AppleScript” step to the workflow. Here’s the AppleScript to convert a selection of text to a bulleted Markdown list: [cc lang=“applescript”] on run {input, parameters} set inputString to input as string set newList to {} set myString to paragraphs of inputString repeat with myItem in myString set NewItem to “- " & myItem set end of newList to NewItem end repeat set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to " " set combinedList to newList as text
If you are a proud user of BBEdit, don't forget that it can help with text anywhere in the OS through the services menu.
Using Automator, you can build new services that receive selected text and replace it with some processed text. Here's an example for use with Markdown enthusiasts. I hate when I am working in TextEdit or NVAlt and I forget to prepend a list with bullets. This service fixes that.
I love me some NVAlt and Simplenote. However, I’m stuck in Windows at work and do not have the pleasure of using Dropbox on Windows. There is a decent enough Simplenote client for windows but development seems to have ceased and it is not feature complete.
So I recently started using the Simplenote webapp for my notes on Windows and it is a great experience. It’s closer to an NVAlt experience on Windows than any other native application I have tried.
