I tweeted the other day that @eternalstorms is way too good at solving my problems for me. What I was referring to was Yoink, which just became available today. It’s an uber-simple app which provides a drawer for dragging files between spaces and full-screen apps. I wrote it up on TUAW this morning, so I won’t go into detail here.
appreview, lion, macos, utility
Anyone who’s read this blog, used my projects or has talked to me about anything nerdy for more than five minutes knows I’m a fan of Markdown. The question doesn’t come up often, but occasionally someone dares to ask–despite the apparent probability that it will lead to a lengthy explanation–why I use Markdown in so many of my workflows. I give just about the same response to seasoned nerds as I do to my not-so-computer-savvy friends. This isn’t the Markdown…
blogging, markdown, text, writing
Joe Workman put out a utility today for sharing Application Support folders between machines using Dropbox. It uses symlinks to allow moving the folder out of and into your Dropbox but keeping it accessible to the application. This is a great trick, and the Joe’s utility makes it dead simple to pull off. The biggest concern, however, is the possibility of corruption and other issues if you run the application on multiple machines simultaneously.
dropbox, scripting
I’ve heard complaints over the last year that apps such as nvALT and Marked slow down when handling large documents. I’m constantly working to optimize the code and the preview processes, but here’s a tip that I hope will be taken to heart: split your longer text documents into manageable portions.
nvalt, text, writing
Here’s a little gem of an app: Launchpad-Control. It’s actually a Preference Pane, and it allows you to use simple checkboxes to show and hide items, folders and even entire pages of applications in Lion’s Launchpad.
appreview, launchpad, lion, macos
Thanks to a pointer from Jeremy Lu, I’ve got the Antique Safari Reader hack running in Safari 5.1. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’d missed it since updating to Lion. I’ve updated the instructions page to include the Lion location of Reader.html.
antique, reader, safari
I’ve updated the service mentioned in the post “Automated search and link text.” The Yahoo API broke (was sunset) and I needed to rewrite it to work with Bing instead. The result is below, and can also replace the md-Luck Link service from the Markdown Service Tools.
markdownservices
In the interest of actually getting going on app reviews on this blog, I’m mentioning a somewhat obvious one: Byword. While I still write my drafts in nvALT and do the heavy lifting and linking in TextMate with my Blogsmith Bundle, Byword has quickly become the place where I actually do my writing.
appreview, byword, macos, writing
Yesterday’s news of Steve Jobs’ resignation was sad for me. My concern is not for Apple; Apple is a vibrant community of designers and developers and Tim Cook will be excellent at the helm. My concern was for Steve Jobs. He has been one of the few people in my later life that I’ve truly admired, and his work and principles have been of great inspiration to me. I’d like to join many others in saying “thanks, Steve.”
apple, personal
I’ve been wanting to write more here, and seriously considering what I want to write about. Obviously, I should stick with what I know. What do I know best? Apps.
appreview, news
I’m super-duper excited to announce that Marked version 1.2 is now in the Mac App Store. It’s a rewrite from the ground up… same great flavor, all new file watching mechanism. It uses Spotlight to track changes now, which is far more stable and adept at handling things like name changes and deletions of open files. The only catch is that you have to have Spotlight indexing turned on and available in the folder where your file is (i.e. not set to private in Spotlight settings…
macappstore, markdown, marked, multimarkdown
There’s a somewhat mysterious individual who is consistently leaving brilliant little pieces of code and information in my comments. Dr. Drang has been visited by this apparition as well. We’re both duly impressed with what he (or she?) does.
keybindings, keyboard, macos
