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Hello, my name is Brett Terpstra, and it’s nice to meet you. Elegant solutions to complex problems. Curious?

Apr 10, 2012

Links of interest from April 2, 2012 through April 10, 2012:

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Apr 08, 2012

Marked 1.4 is available on the Mac App Store. I’m announcing this a little prematurely; the press release doesn’t go out until tomorrow morning, but I’m just too excited to hold off.

There are quite a few new features, including Scrivener, Leanpub and mmd_merge support, as well as a syntax for including external files with full MultiMarkdown (or custom) processing. This means that you can create a single index file (multiple formats available) and…

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Apr 08, 2012

Just in case you missed it, a 2x4 interview I did for lifehack​.org went live today. Thanks to Michael Schechter for the opportunity to talk about life, creativity and productivity.

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Apr 07, 2012

I’ve been trying for years to get a decent Bluetooth “proximity” setup going so that my iPhone can trigger lighting setups as I enter and exit a room. I think I’ve finally nailed it, though I’m sure there’s plenty more testing to do.

The biggest problem I kept running into was that I could get lights to go on when I entered a room, but while I sat–even when the phone was motionless on my desk–lights would randomly turn off and turn…

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Apr 03, 2012

My weekend project turns out to be the most popular thing I’ve ever done, at least based on web traffic (besides that one thing that I don’t like to talk about). It’s had more pageviews in two days than my whole blog gets in a typical month, and I haven’t even officially announced the final page outside of Twitter. Insane. Seriously.

If you want to contribute an addition or correction to iTextEditors, please use this form. I’ll be posting a little…

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Apr 02, 2012

I don’t like outliners. It’s not that I see anything wrong with them, they just don’t click with the way my brain works when I’m brainstorming or planning. It’s why I use mind maps. Nonetheless, I had to try Tree (MAS link) when I saw it. It looked different. It was.

An outliner is an outliner, but Tree adds one thing that makes it infinitely more useful to me and my non-linear thought process: a horizontal view of the outline. It’s basically…

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Mar 31, 2012

I’m shocked that this hasn’t been done before. I’m sure it has, really, but my searches didn’t turn anything up…

Many web devs/designers are familiar with Zen Coding, a little tool available for many text editors which turns shorthand strings into full HTML, among a lot of other nifty tricks. A derivation called Sparkup came out a couple of years back. It added the ability to backtrack up the hierarchy from within the shorthand snippet…

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Mar 31, 2012

Links of interest from March 28, 2012 through March 31, 2012:

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Mar 30, 2012

There was an impressive response to the call for crowdsourced iOS text editor comparison. The “final” spreadsheet is available here (link updated to point to the new page). I froze it this morning as there were a lot of deletions happening that were breaking results. It was reverted to restore a few major deletions, and I did my best to replace individual additions and edits that happened since the restore point. If your edit/addition was lost or you have…

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Mar 29, 2012

This is a quick experiment with Google Docs, CSVs, MultiMarkdown tables and CSS3 selectors. It’s really hackish, but it’s a start. I wanted to take Google Docs spreadsheet output and turn it into a clean table with color coding and my own styling. Here’s what I’ve done so far (example output here):

The cleaned up spreadsheet in Numbers

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Mar 29, 2012

Update: The spreadsheet has been frozen for now, results coming soon!

I’m working on a big iOS text editor comparison post, but the number of things to check and test is a bit overwhelming. I’d like to crowdsource it, and I’m looking for your help. I’ve set up a Google spreadsheet with public access and would love contributions.

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Thanks for reading!

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