Welcome to the lab.

Life after iThoughts

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So a lot of us are wondering what to do now that Toketaware has announced the sunsetting of the iThoughts mind mapping app for Mac and iOS. It’s very sad to see it go, but I expect the current version to continue working for a few years to come. That said, I tend to favor software that has at least somewhat of a future. So I’ve been testing the waters with some other contenders. The short story is I’m moving over to MindNode.

Why MindNode?

I’ve always appreciated MindNode (and even added support for it to Marked), but there were some things that made me prefer iThoughts over MindNode. After testing the latest version of MindNode, I can no longer remember what those things were. Probably the filtering and advanced searching in iThoughts, but for 90% of my mind map purposes, it looks like MindNode will do just fine. I think the last time I made the comparison, MindNode was lacking some of the features it has these days.

I’m not going into nearly the depth that Allison Sheridan did over on Podfeet with her mind map comparison, but I’ll list some of the pros of MindNode for my purposes:

  • Looks great
  • Actively developed
  • Mac and iOS versions
  • Opens iThoughts (.itmz) files, so I don’t have to fret about losing old mind maps
  • Imports Markdown files
  • Can create tasks from nodes (can’t do much with them other than check them off, but it’s handy for packing lists)
  • Exports Markdown and OPML, among other formats
  • Works with Marked (File->Advanced->Preview in Marked)
  • Good keyboard navigation with some customization options
  • Quick entry from tool bar
  • It’s on Setapp

Other options

If you’re an Obsidian user, there are some mind mapping plugins available. The “Enhancing Mind Maps” plugin is a decent option if you’re in Obsidian all the time anyway:

Pros:

  • Built into obsidian
  • Basic keyboard navigation
  • Transparent layer over plain Markdown files, easily portable and future-proof
  • Works great with Marked using the obsidian-md-filter processor (via Conductor!), and you can easily connect the two with my plugin (which is still waiting for acceptance into the Community Plugins…)

Cons:

  • Lacks a ton of features compared to MindNode

I would also point out that the mind mapping built into Curio is pretty good, and has the benefit of fitting into the crazy cool integrations that Curio provides, linking to other notes and objects, and fitting into an overall project management system.

Introducing the Marked Conductor

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I’ve completed my latest side project, the Marked Conductor. Here’s the backstory:

Marked 2 offers the option to use Custom Processors (and Preprocessors) which allow you use Markdown (and other) flavors with your own commands to convert them to HTML. This is commonly used for processing with Pandoc. Personally, I use it to process my blog posts (and Bunch and other Jekyll help docs) with Kramdown and a bunch of special handlers for previewing the custom Liquid tags and plugins I’ve built, process TaskPaper files with their own functions, and process everything else with Marked’s built-in processors. In those scripts, you can use environment variables like $MARKED_EXT (the file’s extension) or $MARKED_ORIGIN (the file’s path) to fork the script and process differently based on things like file type or location. But my custom processor script was getting unwieldy with all of the conditions I was creating, and for people with limited scripting knowledge, it meant having to turn custom processors on and off based on the needs for the current document.

Enter Conductor. It’s a command line utility that can be set as the custom processor in Marked. It reads from a YAML configuration file where conditions are written in natural language (e.g. tree contains .obsidian) and trigger either a script or a command. Conditions can be booleans (extension is md AND tree contains .obsidian) or they can be nested infinitely to create forked “tracks” for handling any type of document. It offers ways of matching YAML frontmatter keys, matching content with strings or regular expressions, detecting whether a file or directory exists anywhere in the parent folders of the file, and more.

I won’t go into all of the features in this post, but they’re all detailed on the project page. The entire project is available on GitHub, but it’s published as a gem, so installation is as easy as running gem install marked-conductor. Running conductor once from the command line will build out all of the configuration directories and files. Then it’s just a matter of setting up your own tracks and actions.

I think this project will be of great interest to anyone using Custom Processors in Marked. Whether you’re an avid scripter who’s extended it in interesting ways, or just someone who might want Pandoc for documents in your “Work” folder, but Kramdown for documents in your “Blogging” folder, this project makes it very easy to run Custom Processors conditionally.

By the way, I’m waiting on my Obsidian plugin for Marked to be accepted into the Community Plugins. Once that happens, I have a post all about using Marked with Obsidian that I think Obsidian users will love. Stay tuned.

The Bear giveaway winners!

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The Bear giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! I’m really sorry I accidentally mixed up days and ended the giveaway a day early, but hopefully everyone who was going to sign up already has!

The winners!

Congratulations to:

  • Dillon Mok
  • Matthew R Leibowitz
  • Chris Turner

You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything!

But I didn’t win!

If you didn’t win, sorry, but Bear is still worth checking out. If you’re journaling, taking notes, or organizing information and love Markdown, you should check it out.

Next up is Acorn. Check back every Monday through September, 2024 for more giveaways. The next giveaways include:

See the full list of upcoming giveaways!

If you want to suggest an app you’d like to see in this series, let me know on Twitter or Mastodon, and join the email list for notifications!

Web Excursions for April 22, 2024

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Web excursions brought to you in partnership with NordVPN. Secure your internet browsing effectively and affordably.

Google Graveyard - Killed by Google

Killed by Google is the Google Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Google in the Google Cemetery. Up-to-date and shocking in scope. I bet there are a few on here you’d never even realized were a thing.

xero/figlet-fonts
A huge collection of figlet/toilet ascii art fonts from xero.
btt.js
BetterTouchTool MacOS automation in JS. I haven’t played with this yet but it looks really fun. Let me know if you take it for a spin.
ttscoff/Marked2-obsidian
I made a Marked plugin for Obsidian. It’s my first try and I really don’t know what I’m doing, but it seems to work perfectly. Waiting for it to be included in the Community Plugins for easy install (which could have happened by the time this goes live), but you can install from the source if you’re anxious.

NordVPN secures your internet browsing, plus it can make it look to services like you’re coming from any country. Check it out today.

Bear giveaway!

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I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 1-year subscriptions to Bear Pro ($29.99 value each) for Bear. Bear is a great app for note taking, journaling, and organizing information with Markdown support. It’s gorgeous to work with, elegant in its functionality, and works great with Marked for all of your export needs.

From the developer:

Powerful tools to take notes, plan your week, write a book, or even build a wiki, fast, native apps that keep pace with your imagination, online and off, and send notes to others, export to many formats, and share ideas with the world–if you want.

Check out the Bear site for more info.

Sign up below to enter. Winners will be randomly drawn on Friday, April 26, at 12pm Central. The drawing is for 3 1-year subscriptions to Bear Pro ($29.99 value each) for Bear, one per winner. Note that if you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit this post on brettterpstra.com to enter!

New rule: All signups must have a first and last name in order to be eligible. Entries with only a first name will be skipped by the giveaway robot. A lot of the vendors in this series require first and last names for generating license codes, and your cooperation is appreciated!

Sorry, this giveaway has ended.

Stay tuned for more giveaways every week through September, 2024 (and maybe beyond).

If you have an app you’d love to see featured in this series of giveaways, let me know. Also be sure to sign up for the mailing list or follow me on Mastodon so you can be (among) the first to know about these!

A plea to nvALT users

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I’ve said this before, but I need to keep repeating it based on the number of queries I get. nvALT is at end of life, unless someone picks up the reigns and modernizes the (open source) code base. As it stands now, nvALT barely functions on modern OSs.

Fletcher Penney and I have designed nvALT’s successor, nvUltra, to work only with a folder full of Markdown files, which is the only way I recommend using nvALT. If your nvALT files are stored as individual Markdown files, switching to nvUltra is no problem, nor is switching to any other Notational-Velocity-like system. It will even work in Obsidian. But if you store your notes as a database only, you’re screwed when nvALT stops working for you.

So please, if nvALT is still running for you, go into Preferences->Notes->Storage and change “Store and read notes on disk as” to “Plain Text Files.” If your previous storage method was database, all of your notes will be immediately written out as plain text files, safe and secure and easy to port to a new (working) notes system. The files will now be in the same folder nvALT shows in the folder selector at the top of the Notes preference pane.

nvALT is not even working well enough for me to get a full screenshot. But here is my best attempt.

If your notes are stored as Rich Text Files (RTF), you’ll need to convert them to Markdown to make use of other apps like nvUltra, The Archive, or Obsidian. If you don’t know Markdown, don’t sweat it. It’s very easy to learn and it’s really just plain text, so as long as you know how to write, you’re already kind of writing Markdown. It’s only necessary to learn any syntax if you need to do things like create bulleted/numbered lists, add bold or italics, or create links.

So, again, please immediately switch your storage method to plain text files. The nvALT database format has no easy out for people ready to switch. I may try to write an importer for nvUltra (or generally to output Markdown), but I have not done so yet.

If you want on the nvUltra beta, email me through the contact link on nvultra.com.

The Unite 5 giveaway winners!

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The Unite 5 giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce!

The winners!

Congratulations to:

  • Robert Williger
  • Angelo Machils
  • Mike Shaffer
  • Jim Dye
  • Denton C Jacobs

You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything!

But I didn’t win!

If you didn’t win, sorry, but Unite 5 is still worth checking out. If you want to turn your most-used websites into powerful standalone apps, Unite is the best way to do it. You can use the link www.bzgapps.com/pstra for 20% off Unite 5 for a limited time.

By the way, Unite 5 is also available on Setapp, along with hundreds of other amazing apps. You should probably get a subscription.

Next up is Bear. Check back every Monday through September, 2024 for more giveaways. The next giveaways include:

See the full list of upcoming giveaways!

If you want to suggest an app you’d like to see in this series, let me know on Twitter or Mastodon, and join the email list for notifications!

Unite 5 giveaway!

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I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 licenses ($49.99 value each) for Unite 5. Unite creates Single Site Browsers, self-contained apps designed to work with a specific website. You can create an SSB for Facebook, one for Slack, one for any tool you use that has a website. Keep your data separate, customize behaviors, and see the interface the way you want to.

From the developer:

Getting started with Unite is simple. Just input a URL, or choose a site from our extensive app library. In just a few clicks, you’ll have your very own macOS app, designed by you, for you.

Check out the Unite 5 site for more info.

Sign up below to enter. Winners will be randomly drawn on Friday, April 19, at 12pm Central. The drawing is for 5 licenses ($49.99 value each) for Unite 5, one per winner. Note that if you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit this post on brettterpstra.com to enter!

New rule: All signups must have a first and last name in order to be eligible. Entries with only a first name will be skipped by the giveaway robot. A lot of the vendors in this series require first and last names for generating license codes, and your cooperation is appreciated!

Sorry, this giveaway has ended.

Stay tuned for more giveaways every week through September, 2024 (and maybe beyond).

If you have an app you’d love to see featured in this series of giveaways, let me know. Also be sure to sign up for the mailing list or follow me on Mastodon so you can be (among) the first to know about these!

The Photos Workbench giveaway winners!

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The Photos Workbench giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce!

The winners!

Congratulations to:

  • Stuart Marshall
  • Thijs Hagen
  • Christopher Dahrén
  • Yinan Chen
  • Robert Gilmore

You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything!

But I didn’t win!

If you didn’t win, sorry, but Photos Workbench is still worth checking out. Make your photo management and organization life easier. Photos Workbench is a complete set of tools to that you’ll really appreciate if you have a sizeable photo collection (and who doesn’t these days?). You can still save 20% using this link or entering code PWTERPSTRA24 at checkout.

Next up is Unite 5. Check back every Monday through September, 2024 for more giveaways. The next giveaways include:

See the full list of upcoming giveaways!

If you want to suggest an app you’d like to see in this series, let me know on Twitter or Mastodon, and join the email list for notifications!

Photos Workbench giveaway!

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I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 licenses ($29 value each) for Photos Workbench. If you’ve had an iPhone or any digital camera for a while, Apple Photos is probably chock full of pictures. And you probably haven’t named, tagged, geocoded, or rated most of them. Photos Workbench works with Apple Photos to make all of these operations as simple as possible. Take the pain out of organizing your photos!

From the developer:

Photos Workbench works with Apple Photos to help you organize, name, and compare your photos. Batch change titles. Drag and drop photos onto a large map to add locations. One-click apply keywords using keyword palettes. Use ★★★★★ ratings to mark and find your best shots. Compare photos and find the images worth editing, printing, or sharing.

Check out the Photos Workbench site for more info.

Sign up below to enter. Winners will be randomly drawn on Friday, April 12, at 12pm Central. The drawing is for 5 licenses ($29 value each) for Photos Workbench, one per winner. Note that if you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit this post on brettterpstra.com to enter!

New rule: All signups must have a first and last name in order to be eligible. Entries with only a first name will be skipped by the giveaway robot. A lot of the vendors in this series require first and last names for generating license codes, and your cooperation is appreciated!

Sorry, this giveaway has ended.

Stay tuned for more giveaways every week through September, 2024 (and maybe beyond).

If you have an app you’d love to see featured in this series of giveaways, let me know. Also be sure to sign up for the mailing list or follow me on Mastodon so you can be (among) the first to know about these!