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
I updated the iOS Markdown group of the TextExpander Tools to trigger “(cursor)” on “” instead of “[[“, which should avoid problems with Drafts 3 templates.
ios, markdown, textexpander
This is a quick mention that Drafts 3 for iPad and iPhone is out, and it has a whole bunch of new features. It’s a great tool for note-taking and much more. If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s more reason than ever to give it a shot.
appreview, drafts
I hosted a chat with Pinbook developer Collin Donnell for Systematic #41. It was a great conversation, despite my “condition.” (I had an engagement directly before the podcast which involved some imbibing).
podcast, systematic
If you happen to be converting a blog from WordPress to Jekyll, this tip might be of use, especially if you want to make sure links to your existing posts continue to work. While this is most likely to be an issue if you’re changing your permalink structure, you can still run into a few hiccups even if you maintain it.
jekyll, wordpress
