I became a steady user of Scratch App (Review) on my iPhone for quickly creating notes. What won me over was the how quick it was to create a new note in Dropbox. By enabling the auto-title option, I can just drop into Scratch and enter a note. Two taps later, it’s saved to my “Notes” folder in Dropbox.
With iOS 6, this workflow has improved greatly. Now I can launch Scratch by voice and dictate the note.
Here’s a good tip about using VoiceOver to read email. After some trial and error, I found that this also works perfectly in WriteRoom1 for reading back notes out of Dropbox.
I setup triple-click to enable VoiceOver. Now I can quickly launch WriteRoom via Siri and navigate and read back notes with my phone in my pocket. This will be a finger saver during the Massachusetts' winters.
This does not work so well in Nebulous Notes, which separates each line into a text field.
The built in dictionary in OS X is great, but sometimes I want a little more. Agile Tortoise, maker of Terminology and Drafts app, also provides a very good dictionary lookup Web site called Term.ly.
I created an Automator service that allows me to select some text and then pop open the Term.ly definition as a small pop-over panel. I can then select a word in Term.ly and it will replace the selected word in my document and add the new term to my clipboard.
Here’s a nice little tool I made in Pythonista for iOS (review). This script is using Brett Terpstra’s awesome heckyesmarkdown web service, which is extremely useful and underrated.
To use this script, I copy a URL to the iOS clipboard and jump into Pythonista. I trigger this script to get the web page in Markdown encoded text.
This URL: http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/09/nfc-is-a-crutch.html
is turned into plain text and put back on the clipboard.
Michael Schechter recently posted a macro to embed nvAlt linked files in OmniFocus. He will probably be the first to admit that it’s less than ideal. OmniFocus doesn’t recognize the links properly. I’ve played with something similar but ended up linking directly to a shared Dropbox document. That also was less than ideal.
About a month ago I updated my process to use TextDrop instead.1
TextDrop can link to a Dropbox folder of notes or to an individual note in Dropbox.
Here’s how I use plain ol' text notes. It was fun to write and I appreciate the opportunity to share it with Macworld.
I mentioned that Twitter links can be piped to Pinboard.in bookmarks by way of IFTTT. It's a simple recipe. Links posted by people I follow are automatically added to Pinboard with the tag "twitterlink". It's a nice way to catch stuff I might have missed while away from Twitter. It's also easy to filter by tag and quickly browse and delete.
Here's the simple IFTTT recipe:
I also like that the IFTTT Twitter component has options for inserting additional information about the link source, like the Tweet text and user name.
Maybe I'm a bit slow but my latest accidental discovery is the gesture to show the Inbox in Mail on iPad.
While in portrait orientation, slide a finger from left to right to show the current mailbox. To hide the mail box, slide from right to left (or just tap outside of the mailbox).
Of course if I just read the damn manual, I would have learned this much sooner.
Macstories.net linked to QuickShot 2.0. It's an iOS app that can send photos directly to Dropbox. But I was thinking, I would prefer an app that could quickly send images to my FTP server at Macdrifter.com. So I came up with a little Hazel rule to connect Dropbox and my FTP server.
Design Considerations I want to put these files on my FTP server so that I can use them for posts to this site.
I've mentioned TextDrop in passing but I like it so much that I wanted to write a full review.
What it is TextDrop is a webapp for notes. It looks a bit like Simplenote or NVAlt but it works exclusively with Dropbox. There is a list of notes on the left sorted by file name, search bar at the top and text window taking up the right 2/3's of the window.
