I had a couple of friends recently lose their beloved pets. It’s a tough thing to watch, and an even tougher thing to go through, but it’s guaranteed to happen eventually1. I learned some things from my wife, who’s lost more pets than I’ve owned, and I think there’s good advice here for everyone.
personal
A cool new app was released today called Shoots & Leaves. It lets you snap a picture and immediately turn it into a plain text link in your clipboard for sending to an array of services and other apps. Get it? Shoots and leaves… I find it funny, anyway.
appreview, apps, ios, iphone, photography
This year I Launched the new brettterpstra.com on a Jekyll platform (I’ve written about a few of my Jekyll adventures). Since then I’ve had a couple of projects ship, so I thought I’d take time to do my yearly review.
jekyll, macos, news, nvalt, personal, service, tools
I made a jQuery plugin called “TL;DR”1 live on GitHub last night. It’s designed for bloggers who write long posts: it adds a block with summaries and skip links automatically. It was inspired in part by QuikScan, which was pointed out to me by Christopher Allen.
blogging, javascript, jquery, plugin, reading, text, webdesign
Marked 2.2 (814) is out in the wild. There are a lot of improvements in this one. If you have it installed, just “Check for Updates” from the Marked menu. If not, this would be as good a time as any to try it out.
marked
I’ve been messing around with creating a decent teleprompter for a long time. I’ll probably publish one on the App Store eventually. In the meantime, here’s a trick that I’ve been using to turn Markdown scripts into a very passable teleprompter for screencasting and voice recordings.
markdown, marked
A special thanks to Inetic/Word Magic and their apps WriteRight and Tag Journal for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week. Both of these apps are gorgeous and elegantly powerful, I offer my personal recommendation to check them out!
Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ve fixed a few bugs in the tagfiler.rb script since posting it. If you’ve installed it, grab the source from GitHub again and update your script.
tagfiler
There’s a lot to remember when you’re preparing to record a screencast or a podcast. Quitting some apps, launching others, changing settings… I find it easiest just to script everything. That’s probably not a surprise to anyone.
automator, macos, recording, scripting
The headline kind of says it all. I’m in a giving mood. Use the coupon below at checkout for 20% off a purchase of Marked 2 (regularly US $11.99):
marked, sale
To follow up on my Marker bookmarklet, I’ve created a PopClip extension called WebMarkdown (a.k.a. WebMD) that does pretty much the same thing (take a web page selection and turn it into Markdown). It’s a handy trick when you’re gathering notes or just want to save a portion of an article.
markdown, markdownifier, popclip
It’s been a good year for software. I’ve had the pleasure of using and exploring a ton of new apps. I took inventory of the apps installed on my main Mac, ran it through SearchLink and put together this post1 to share the ones I use the most often.
appreview, apps, macos, productivity, utility
