If you’ve read any of my writing or looked at any of my projects, you’re probably fully aware of the nerd wood I get for plain text. You know, the stuff that’s been around since the dawn of the computer and will still be around when there’s not an application left that can open a DOCX file. I have to admit, though, that there are some things I can’t–and don’t want–to do in plain text.
brainstorming, mindmapping, productivity, text
Yet another giveaway here at brettterpstra.com. We’re wheeling, we’re dealing… and I got you five licenses for the excellent QuickCal application for Mac (and iOS, but we’re not giving those out… yet). If you haven’t used it, it’s a way to add events and todos to your calendar using natural language. I could say, for example, “End the QuickCal giveaway noon on Wednesday” and I’d get a new calendar event set for noon on Wednesday, October 05…
apps, giveaway, macos
I forget a lot of things. I forget how I did something, or where I found an answer, or where I put my glasses. I use technology to help with that to some extent, and Notational Velocity/nvALT are excellent at helping me find previous notes, assuming I bothered to take them.
logging, macos, notes, productivity, tagging
To pick the winners for the Yoink and Listary giveaways, I wrote an AppleScript to make the process completely random and as painless as possible for me. I still have plans for making a similar WordPress plugin, but that’s still in the planning stages. For now, this is working quite well and I thought I’d share it. I doubt many people have the exact same setup and requirements, but the basic structure might be helpful for other projects.
applescript, automation, ruby, scripting
The Listary giveaway has ended, and the five lucky entrants have been sent their promo codes. If you’re on the list below and didn’t receive a notification (and you’ve checked your Spam folder), contact me and we’ll get it sorted out. If you didn’t win but still need an outstanding syncing list app, be sure to check out the Listary homepage.
giveaway
I worked out a somewhat cool trick this morning using Twitter, some PHP and Wordle.net. If you’re curious to see what the major topics of conversation are in your Twitter stream right now, follow the instructions below. It currently piggy backs off of a dead project (JustTheLinks) I was working on, so it needs some polish before it’s presented as any kind of usable service. Before I put too much time into it, though, I wanted to get some reactions.
experiments, twitter
Gradient is a very polished tool for creating CSS3 gradients in a visual way. If you’re not familiar with CSS3 syntax, it looks a little like this:
appreview, css, webdesign
I just posted a minor update to the Marked Bonus Pack with a few bugfixes for the included Service and AppleScripts. The biggest fix is for the issue some people were having where running the Service would always open TextEdit. I was unable to replicate the problem, but I think I found a solution for it.
markdown, marked, multimarkdown, scripting
