I think Seth Godin writes some thought provoking pieces. I worry that he is following the recent trend of embracing hyperbole to fill a blog with fluff. Typically, hyperbole is just a waste of the reader's time. Sometimes it is actually bad advice.
It's great to try to encourage people to push themselves to do new and difficult things. The reality is that some success is from hard work and some is from good luck.
You can bet I will be hacking around with this awesome work. Some clever little tricks. I love when people make awesome tools to solve their own problems.
By way of Simplicity Is Bliss
Back in 2006 I briefly discussed the use cases for Devonthink Pro. ($149) I'm still a fan of Devonthink Pro Office (the newly renamed top tier version) but I use it less and less for filing documents. I've been leaning more towards application agnostic file storing.
However, there is one workflow that Devonthink Pro Office accels at: PDF OCR. ABBYY Finereader ($99) is included with the application as a plugin. I've worked with many PDF OCR products, including the grotesquely expensive Adobe Acrobat Pro ($499).
Just a quick addendum to my recent post about intercepting the CMD-Q keys in apps. I wanted to let the developer, Peter Lewis, know that I changed his suggested macro to make it more universal. He responded to my email right away and blew my mind with another option.
Keyboard Maestro supports the Boolean conjunction “or” via pipes (that key just above the backslash on your keyboard) for arguments. Here’s a snippet from his email:
I’ve been enjoying Dr. Drang’s tales of file format lock-in and his crusade against closed formats for his data. His stories always feel eerily familiar.
I bounce back and forth between Macs and Windows machines in my daily life. My OS polytheism goes way back. I started with an old custom built 386 PC in high school. In undergraduate, I took advantage of the steep Apple student discount and acquired a Mac IIci.
I recently received a "state of the union" type email from Stairways Software. There are just a few application specific email lists I subscribe to. They can be quite informative and full of tips. This latest news letter mostly covered the current status of Keyboard Maestro 5 development. At the end there was a nice little tip for intercepting accidental command-Q presses.
This happens to me all the time and it's very frustrating.
This feature alone is enough to warrant the PathFinder price tag:
If you spend any time on Windows, you know that the Mac Finder is missing cut and paste in the OS. Don't even get me started on the other awesome features of PathFinder or this post will take all day to write. Let's just say the Drop Stack functionality is insanely useful.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out the Macsparky.com review of OmniOutliner for iPad. He's a bit more upbeat about the release but notes some of the same gaps. We both still like using the app but look forward to the infamous Omni Group iterations on design.
Here's a quick followup to my recent post about TextExpander on iOS. You can download the snippet file from the link below by right click and saving to your own Mac. You'll need TextExpander for the Mac to import the file and share with your iOS devices. It should save the effort of having to manually create all the snippets. Notice that some snippets have changed from my last post. Trial and error testing has allowed me to refine the workflow a bit.
