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Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanMyMac X, all the tools to speed up your Mac, in one app.
- HitCal
- A tool similar to calend.ly or WhenWorks, but built for Messages. Nail down a meeting time by offering available slots and letting the correspondent just pick one.
- Learn vim For the Last Time: A Tutorial and Primer
- I always feel like I’m going back to the beginning to get a better grasp on Vim. This was a great tutorial.
- Simple Opt Out
- Deep links to opt-out of data sharing by 60+ companies.
- Markdown Tables for iOS
- In the vein of TableFlip, Markdown Tables is an iOS app for the creation and editing of Markdown-formatted tables for use in combination with your favorite Markdown editor. From the creator of Trunk Notes, the now-defunct iOS wiki app that I still have a soft spot for.
- Untitled Goose Game
- Yeah, I know, everybody’s already talking about this game (to the extent that I had to try it), but it’s worth the buzz. Cathartic.
Ok, another month, another nvUltra update. As I’d warily predicted, my initial hopes for an August release slipped, and I’m currently making more conservative predictions. I’m not going to put an ETA on it this time, but before you grow concerned, let me tell you where things are at and why I’m being cautious.
We’ve added another 500 testers from the initial signup list at this point, plus a slew of additional edge-case testers, and we have our hands full keeping up with feedback and forum posts from the current pool of users. Fletcher works in a hospital ER, and I have my own side-pursuits (not a Doctor) to pay the bills while we develop this, so it’s 2 part-time guys working with 1000+ users and a very active beta feedback forum. There’s a lot of excitement, though, and it makes it a lot of fun to continue interacting with everyone.
First off, I promise an nvUltra update this week. You deserve it. In the meantime…
I woke up at three this morning. As you may have come to expect, I’ve added stuff to Bunch, my batch app launcher and current too-awake-to-sleep-too-tired-to-do-real-work project. I think this new feature will save a few users (and myself) some time: I’m calling it “snippets,” which is an uncreative way of saying you can now use templated actions with variables in a Bunch.
Tower, the makers of the eponymous Git client, have a history of providing design-oriented products in addition to their elegant app. You may recall the Developer Manifesto poster I ran a giveaway for last year. Their latest product line is a fantastic followup.
Tech Animals is a reimagining of all of the animals that become logos for our favorite tech projects, from the Linux Penguin and the Firefox to the Swift bird and the Perl camel, you’re sure to find beautifully illustrated versions of your favorite project’s mascot. All available as posters, coffee mugs, and t-shirts.
Here’s the cool part, though: 100% of profits are going to Hacker School, a project that inspires children to get started with programming while also offering refugees an IT education. Visit the shop and get some great design for a worthy cause.
If you get into the kind of automation I offer on this blog, or maybe wish you did if it weren’t for all the coding, then Shortcuts on iOS is either on your radar or should be. And David Sparks has just the thing.
Released today, the latest MacSparky Field Guide is Shortcuts, the iOS 13 edition. Apple has dedicated more resources to automation on iOS than they have for a long time on macOS, and Shortcuts offers a way to harness the power without having to write a single line of code.
The course includes 6 hours+ of video training and 107 separate videos. Learn to build simple apps, automate your meetings, do things like have your iPad enter “focus mode” when you connect to coffeehouse wifi or send an automated message when you’re running late with an accurate ETA.
The MacSparky Shortcuts Field Guide costs $29 US, but for a limited time you can use the code LAUNCHSHORTCUTS to bring the price down to $24. Check it out!
Back in 2015 I wrote a little utility called mdless for previewing Markdown files on the command line. It performs some basic formatting fix-up, and then highlights the various elements of a Markdown document, paging it out in your terminal. While it’s been popular via Hacker News and StackOverflow posts, I hadn’t really updated it much since the release.
When I finally got around to responding to some GitHub issues on it, I decided to go a little beyond the bugfixes to polish and extend it a bit. The bugfixes include errors on syntax highlighting, overruns on long blocks, you know, stuff like that.
I’d been doing point releases from 0.0.1 to 0.0.15, but I’ve decided it’s at a 1.0 place. So join me in welcoming mdless 1.0.0. Cheers. (It’s actually 1.0.2 already, because bugs. You know how it is.) It’s honestly not that huge a release, but it does breathe new life into the aging utility.
I had the pleasure of being the guest on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast this week. Episode 400, which seems like a big one, numerically. I’m duly honored.
I mention it especially because the conversation ended up being enlightening to me. I didn’t know what I was going to talk about when I got on Zoom that day, but I found it very natural to be open and vulnerable about my experiences with ADHD and BPD. Which, ironically, is where the conversation started out.
We talked about how I’ve never found it scary to talk about my mental health, as screwed up as it may be. It’s easier to talk about it than hide it, so it’s really the path of least resistance for me. But I’ve learned over the years that not everyone has that proclivity, and being able to see others share makes a lot of people feel less alone, frustrated, and ashamed. I’m so glad that my inability to keep my feelings under wraps is beneficial to others, especially given the potential alternative reactions.
I learned a lot about myself just talking through it on the episode. Hopefully any ADHD folks with time to listen to it can enjoy the epiphanies with me. And while I hadn’t been a listener until after the invite came, I’ve been checking out the back catalog and will be a listener going forward. It’s a really great podcast for people with ADHD in their lives (in themselves or a love one).
Thanks to Pete and Nikki for letting me be a part of it! Check out episode 400 at rashpixel.fm.
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with MindMeister, the best collaborative mind mapping software out there.
- Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online
- I wish my own macOS tagging system could be this intelligent. Via @sjh_canada.
- Postbox 7.0
- As you may be aware, I’m a very happy MailMate user, but I’ve always been impressed with the power of the Postbox email client for Mac. Among a host of new features, the latest version adds new swipe gestures, new rich-text composition tools, and “Labs”, which allows running experimental 3rd-party code within Postbox.
- AnyDrop for Mac
- I like the idea of this: drag files to the menu bar and get a list of possible actions based on the type of file. But… it doesn’t appear to be user-extensible, so I’m happy sticking with Dropzone, personally.
- Color System Plugin for Sketch
- In the past, Dark Mode color schemes have usually been an afterthought for me. These days making a design pop in both light and dark versions requires attention from the beginning. This is a great Sketch plugin for setting up a color system that works.
- Amazon Prime Video - Rotten Tomatoes Overlay
- As someone who wishes Rotten Tomatoes were integrated everywhere I watch movies, this Chrome Extension which overlays Amazon Prime Video TV and movies with ratings is a welcome tool.
Check out MindMeister and start brainstorming, collaborating, and boosting productivity.
I’ve been a bit too busy to get much content out the last couple of weeks, but I did want to take a second to point out some changes (improvements, hopefully) I’ve made to this site over the last couple of months. Mostly because I think they’re kind of cool and I know few people will ever notice them.
The time had come around for me to consider a redesign, but when I sat down to evaluate it, it turned out I still liked the overall layout of the site. So I focused on details, both design and speed related. You may love them, you might hate them, and I’m open to feedback on any of them.