Welcome to the lab.
- Sync + WD + Raspberry Pi
- Truly build your own cloud with a 1TB drive, Raspberry Pi, and Bittorrent Sync.
- chilicuil/tundle
- A slick package manager for tmux.
- Today color scheme for Sublime
- I’m really into Spacegray right now, but this Sublime Text color scheme is beautiful.
- Zen Timer
- I’ll be talking more about this little app soon, but if you’re using the Pomodoro technique1, this timer is beautiful. It grows a tree as the timer runs, and can do it with a transparent background at desktop level with customizable colors. Very fun.
- NetNewsWire
- Nice to see NetNewsWire back! iOS version, too!
SearchLink 2.2.2 is up. Steve Lambert pointed out a bug in the Wikipedia search where a new redirect to SSL was causing SearchLink to fail on all !wiki searches. 2.2.2 fixes this.
There’s also extended help output now, so if you select just the word “help” and run it, it will list all available searches, including any custom searches you’ve set up in ~/.searchlink.
In my own workflows, SearchLink is still one of the most useful OS X utilities I’ve built. If you write in Markdown and ever switch away from your editor to get a link and haven’t tried SearchLink out, you should. I can say with a good amount of certainty that it will change the way you blog, email, and write.
Be sure to check out the custom site search extensions that showed up in the last release.
Also, don’t miss the URL Preview extension I created to validate inscrutable links, still without switching away from your editor.
On behalf of myself and the Giveway Robot1, I’d like to congratulate the five lucky winners of Dropzone 3.5 licenses from last week’s contest:
- Ronan
- ron_chisenhall
- Karl Hagelin
- Mark Hulme
- Josh Asch
If you haven’t received the telegraph from Giveaway Robot, feel free to ping me.
If you entered and didn’t win, you can pick up a copy on the Mac App Store for just $4.99 US right now. It was a must-have app for me before, but the new features for keyboard triggering and navigation make it well worth the purchase.
As always, thanks for reading!
Update: Version 1.0.1 is now the current download. Fixes Safari functionality and allows the optional use of a dotfile (~/.dropboxid with the 5-digit Dropbox user id in it) instead of modifying the script directly.
Since it doesn’t absolutely require user editing now, it’s also codesigned to avoid any issues.
Rick Martin left a comment on my “Write Better Markdown” post that reminded me of a relatively simple amalgamation of projects I’d had in the back of my mind for a couple of years now. I knocked it out as an Automator workflow today.
Borrowing from the Markdown Service Tools browser commands and the original Dropbox Collection Service I made a few years ago, “Share Tab Collection” is a useful tool for anyone who collects in browser tabs during meetings, brainstorming sessions, podcasts, or any time you have a browser full of tabs and want to distribute them.
Run it, and whatever tabs are open in the front window of your browser (Chrome or Safari) will be collected into a web page and a Dropbox public URL will be placed on your clipboard for sharing. Like the original “Collections” Service, it includes an “open all” link that will restore the entire session with a single click.
The output page has updated styling (compared to the original Collections Service) and works on small (mobile) screens. Other than that, it’s very simple.
HTML files are stored in ~/Dropbox/Public/LinkCollections (it will make the folder if needed) and named with a timestamp. You can remove them from public view by deleting or moving those files at any time. You can also go in and edit them manually if you’re industrious and need a quick fix.
Download at the bottom.
Configuration
Update (1.0.1) The instructions below will still work, but you can also use a dotfile to define the Dropbox user ID. Follow the same steps to retrieve it, but then paste it into a file called .dropboxid in your Home folder.
For simplicity’s sake, just copy the 5-digit number from a public URL, then run this in Terminal: pbpaste > ~/.dropboxid. Done.
The only setup you need to do is to open the workflow in Automator and edit the USERID variable at the very top of the Run Shell Script action. This should be set to the portion of a Dropbox url for a file in your “Public” folder. Here, I made you a picture.
Save the workflow and it’s ready to run. You can also hold down Option in Automator’s File menu and choose “Save as” to convert it to an Application bundle. Workflows are easy to trigger with tools such as EventScripts, BetterTouchTool, LaunchBar, Alfred and others, but an Application can be more convenient if you just want to double click or Spotlight-launch it.
Usage
- Bring the browser window with the tabs you want to collect to the front
- Run the workflow
- Optionally enter a title for the collection (provides a default title if left blank) and hit Continue
- The tabs will be collected, a page generated, and a Dropbox public URL placed in your clipboard
- Lastly, it will ask you if you want to open the URL immediately, clicking OK will load it in a new browser tab
If Chrome is running, it’s prioritized as default browser. If it’s not and Safari is, then it will use Safari’s front window instead. If no browsers are running, it will curl up and die.
Hacking Around
There are a few optional parts of the workflow you can remove or modify as desired.
The “Ask for Text” action that prompts for a collection title can be deleted if you want to always use the default date-based title format.
The last three actions (Ask for Confirmation, Get Value of Variable, and Run Shell Script) can be deleted if you never want to open the url, or…
You can remove the Copy to Clipboard action and the Ask for Confirmation command to only open the URL, without asking and without copying to the clipboard.
You can also add a “Display Notification” action if you want additional feedback.
Download
You may have noticed a record zero posts here this last week. I have an explanation.
I went on my third real vacation in the last 10 years. My wife and I headed out to New Hampshire and Maine for a bit of East Coast flavor. We had a great time, thank you for asking.
As a productivity aside, I made use of a SaneBox feature I didn’t know about until now: the @SaneVacation mailbox. By moving emails to that folder, they disappear until the day I told it I would be back home, at which point they return to my inbox as unread messages. I replied to maybe 2 emails all week. It was very nice.
I also decided to do this trip without a laptop, relying instead on my iPhone 6+ and my WiFi-only iPad1 with an external keyboard (the Logitech K480 is awesome, by the way). I’ll write more about that adventure as I get time, though I’m so late to the “working on an iPad” game that I don’t have that much new to say2.
Anyway, to the point. Dropzone developer John Winter has been awesome enough to sponsor my blog the week I’ve been on vacation, and he’s taken it further by offering five promo codes for Dropzone 3 ($4.99US) to BrettTerpstra.com readers. Sign up below! Entries will be accepted right up until Saturday, September 5th at 12pm CST, at which time the Giveaway Robot will decide your fates by randomly selecting five (5) winners.
Thanks again to John and Dropzone 3!
Sorry, this giveaway has ended.
- How to survive working at home
- Daniel Jalkut (one of my favorite indie devs) shares his mistakes and triumphs from over 10 years of being his own boss and working at home. I still need to figure out the keeping-up-hygiene-and-appearances part.
- Marcato
- An iOS app that lets you create single site browsers (a la Fluid) to maintain separate cookies and local storage for various sites. Hat tip to [@Anodigital](https://twitter.com/Anodigital].
- How the Apple Watch Has Changed My Behavior for the Better
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I now snapshot my work, look away, drink some water, walk to the kitchen to refill my cup, glance around to see if anybody needs me, and then get back to work.
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This post encapsulates my own experience well.
- Use Markdown in Evernote
- An update (with fix) to an older Evernote-watching script from Dan Rosenstark for integration with Marked.
- Pinboard Pro - Google Chrome extension for Pinboard.in
- An alternative to the official Pinboard Chrome extension. It has essentially the same features, but the one thing I wanted very badly for Chrome was a shortcut for Tab Sets, and this offers it.
As John Gruber stated in his original introduction of the Markdown project:
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible.
The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
I work with many different “flavors” of Markdown that have branched off since Markdown 1.0. Some add syntax to accomplish more advanced output control, but the design goal typically remains the same.
The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
Well-formatted text is not only more readable, it’s more future-proof, and following a set of rules derived from the original spec means better portability.
The CommonMark project aims to clarify a lot of the things I’m about to mention. Its goal is stricter handling of ambiguities in the syntax, and it’s a justifiable one. The negative reactions to the idea seem primarily summed up as “you’re not my real dad.” People seemed more offended by the approach than the spec.
I’m on both sides. As a developer whose primary application is Markdown-based, at least 50% of my customer support involves explaining Markdown syntax and differences between flavors. A common knowledge of what’s standard is useful. Many users learn a syntax particular to a specific processor, and then face disappointment when their documents don’t render properly elsewhere.
However, I love that Markdown has been extended and tweaked for specific purposes, and I take a “personal responsibility” stance on the syntax. As long as users are aware of potential compatibility issues, they can decide for themselves how much of a mess to make when working with any given processor.
This post isn’t about proposing any standard or new flavors, it’s just about common sense guidelines that allow you to work with any processor.
Messes happen because some processors are more lax than others about formatting (preserving line breaks, allowing 2-space indentation, different interpretations of unescaped emphasis markers, etc.), or provide a syntax for elements which aren’t universal (e.g. centering with ~, fenced code with backticks or tildes, strikethrough characters). It’s fine to make use of the latter, as long as you’re aware of what won’t work elsewhere. Ambiguous formatting without recognizing the general rules, though, is just shooting yourself in the foot.
The following guidelines will serve writers well across any flavor of Markdown, and provide portability between them.
