Gather is constantly improving at this point, and a lot of its rough edges have already been polished. I’m loving all the feedback I’m getting, both for fixing bugs and for adding new features. It’s hard to test something like Gather on every possible permutation of a web layout, so I appreciate hearing about edge cases (even if I do have to weigh how much effort they’re worth).
bookmarklet, gather, shortcuts
I got a request to add a option to Gather. Makes sense; when you’re using it to save Markdown to notes, you’d want the title of the page to be the title of the note. You could parse that out of the Markdown version in several ways, but in some cases it might be easier to just call and get an undecorated string back. So that’s been added in v2.0.29.
gather, markdown, nvultra
So the first project I worked on with the libraries that went into Gather was the WebMarkdown extension for PopClip. It worked great… for me. I suffered from the all-too-common hacker mistake summed up as “well, it works on my machine.”
extension, gather, popclip
As promised, I’ve updated Read2Text as a standalone binary using the Swift versions of Readability and HTML2Text. In the process I made it a whole new tool called Gather. You may recall that name from a little utility I made a while back. This does the exact same thing, just without the GUI, and I liked that name enough to revive it.
gather, html, macos, markdown, shortcuts, swift, tools
So Apple stopped shipping Python with macOS, which they warned quite a while ago they were going to do. Unfortunately, I still have a good number of apps and scripts that rely on Python scripts in the background, meaning people who haven’t installed the Command Line Tools are unable to use some of my tools. I’ve slowly been working to rectify this, but it’s going to take some time.
extension, markdown, popclip, scripting
In case you’ve missed it previously, SearchLink is my macOS Service for doing web searches and inserting Markdown links in your writing without ever switching to your browser. I use it daily, and it’s been solid enough that it hasn’t changed much over the last year.
hookcli, hookmark, productivity, search, searchlink
I’ve been using Howzit almost daily for years now. I made a bunch of upgrades to Howzit over the last month, including packaging it as a gem and completely refactoring the code. In the process it’s become pretty obvious that not many non-me people have actually tried it, and I really think they should, so I figured I’d at least make sure everyone understood what it does and how to use it.
automation, developer, hookmark, howzit, markdown, mdless, scripting, shell
The last time I talked about Bunch I had just added a command in the Bunch beta for running macOS Shortcuts. After working with a user on Sunday, I made it a bit more useful.
beta, bunch, shortcuts
It seems like just yesterday that I was saying I’d never gotten around to making howzit into a gem that you could easily install and update. Then I had a bit of a sleepless night and decided to go for it.
howzit
I’m putting a renewed focus on Overtired right now. Setting up more social media accounts, getting our episodes out on YouTube, amping up cross-promotions, and refining the podcast itself. I’ve got a great editing workflow down and it’s replicable, so now I can share the responsibilities with others without worrying about losing quality. I’m working to automate as many of the editing and promotion tasks as I can so that we can focus on making a great podcast and still…
health, overtired, podcast, podcasting, youtube
I took a couple weeks of paid time off this month. Partly I wanted some downtime surrounding Macstock, and partly I just wanted to refresh myself a bit so I could tackle my work more effectively. And a little bit of it was spent putting some time into code polishing and new features. So here’s a general update, in case you were wondering.
bunch, howzit, macstock, mdless, personal, scripting, shortcuts, webdesign
Thanks to SaneBox for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve been a SaneBox user for years now, and can’t imagine my email workflow functioning without it.
email, sponsor
