It turns out I like Sidecar (my new jacket for Simplify) enough to keep playing with it a little. I present version 1.2 for your review.
css, design, music, sideshow, simplify, themes
I took a minute to throw together an Alfred 2 workflow for the new version of Cheaters. Once you configure it to point at your local Cheaters install, you can type “cheat keyword” to jump straight to a specific cheat sheet. For example, “cheat jq” would jump to jQuery, and “cheat git” would jump to the Git cheat sheet, assuming you have it active.
alfred, cheaters
I had a little fun this morning making a very large theme for the Simplify music controller. I wanted something that made use of the background screen real estate on my Thunderbolt display. “Sidecar” is what I came up with… keep in mind it was pretty early in the morning. Naming things before 6am is not my strong point.
css, design, music, sideshow, simplify, themes
A quick note for Cheaters hackers: as of a recent update, Cheaters can now handle linking directly to a specific cheat sheet using url hashes. You can use a zero-index number to link to a page if you know the order (index.html#3 to link to the fourth item), but because the order is configurable and subject to change, it also supports string matching. For example, if you wanted to link directly to the Siri cheat sheet, you could use .
cheaters, cheatsheet
If you’re not already in the loop, Slogger is a “Social Logger” that pulls in feeds from a wide range of social services and creates entries for them in a Day One journal. It can run itself each day and create an automated collection of everything you’re already putting out there on the Internet, including photos (Instagram, Flickr, Twitter, etc.), Tweets, music you listen to, miles you run, blog posts you share and more.
blogging, dayone, slogger
I’ve been saving up for an Aeron Chair for my office for a while. It runs around $890, but I knew that my current chair was killing me and the investment seemed justifiable. I needed something that allowed for (and promoted) better posture than my current heavily-padded “executive” chair. I wasn’t completely sold on the Aeron, though. Then a recommendation from John Gruber for the Chadwick chair showed up on my Twitter stream and piqued my interest. Given that I was already in the…
furniture, office
Thanks to Dan Frakes of Macworld for joining me this week on Systematic. We talk about the life of a reviewer, the universe of an editor and everything about our top three picks. That’s right, it’s episode 42.
podcast, systematic
A new editor was recently added to iTextEditors that I had to check out. It’s called WordEver HD (iPad only), a full-screen text editor with some rather brilliant features which build nicely on some predecessors work.
appreview, ios, ipad, texteditor
As a blogger who writes about a lot of apps, I frequently need to grab artwork for iOS apps. iTunes and its web previews don’t make this an easy task, especially for high-res versions. To assist in this process, I wrote a quick script to allow me to search for an iOS app by name and instantly write its 1024px version (or the highest resolution available) to the current directory in Terminal. There’s also an OS X application version at the end of this post, so you can perform this…
ios, ruby, scripting
I’ve been playing with a cool little application called Dash for a while now. It’s a hotkey-based popup with configurable docsets for most major programming languages, including HTML, CSS (plus Less, Bourbon, Compass, Sass, etc.), JavaScript, Cocoa (Mac and iOS), Python, PHP, Ruby, Unix man pages and much more. It also has an iCloud/Dropbox-syncable snippet manager for storing and quickly accessing reusable code, complete with placeholders and cursor location control.
appreview, macos, programming
I received a request to make the Natural Language Date Service work with formats like “+3 5pm” to create a date in 3 days at 5pm. Previously you couldn’t add a time to a “+x” format.
date, macos, naturallanguage, service
Imagine connecting your app to everything with just 2 lines of code - files from all over the web, across cloud storage source, social networks and devices. Filepicker.io provides a full file system API for your web and mobile applications that allows your app to upload, open, read, write, store, sync and convert files from over 17 sources including Dropbox, Google Docs, Facebook, Skydrive and Box.
I’m currently running a Mac Pro with one monitor as my always-on server. My primary work machine is a 13” Air connected to a 27” Thunderbolt display. The Mac Pro display, the Air and the 27” are next to each other on the desktop, and I use teleport to fluidly pass between the monitors and control both machines with one keyboard and Magic Trackpad.
screensaver, scripting, ssh
