After all these years of promising the successor to nvALT, it’s amazing to be able to tell you that the nvUltra beta has begun. We (Fletcher Penney and myself) still don’t have a final name, but the app is really solid and I’m excited to be bringing people on board to put it through its paces.
beta, nvalt, nvultra
A little while ago I ran into some issues that required me to do a full clone of my MacBook Pro’s disk, erase, and restore from an external. It was painful with my external Thunderbolt drive (a Buffalo MiniStation 1TB Thunderbolt). Then (after a week of banging my head on the desk) I realized that in the process of restoring, I had also converted my disk back to HFS from APFS. Which meant I couldn’t update the OS or install the latest version of Xcode. Which is a problem.
backup, hardware, reading, review
Thanks to NotePlan for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I started using Noteplan when it first came out and have been impressed with how refined it’s become over time. The concept of using Markdown files for planning, scheduling, and note-taking is brilliant, but it takes some special execution to make it work. NotePlan pulls it off!
markdown, sponsor
David Sparks is at it again, releasing the latest in his video tutorial series: the Keyboard Maestro Field Guide. It’s almost 4 hours of video training on this nerd favorite, with 76 separate videos, plus downloadable samples and code.
automation, keyboard, tutorial, video
I should probably eventually try to make money off of Bunch. But for now it’s just what I’m going to do to stretch my fingers (and brain) in the morning before I start my day’s work on nvUltra (I’ll post an update on that soon, things are going quite well).
bunch, macos
Yeah, this has become my morning habit. Make coffee, add something to Bunch. If you haven’t been following, Bunch is my batch application launcher for the Dock that I wrote way back on Tuesday of this week. As of today, it’s not just for your Dock anymore.
bunch, macos
Apparently this is just what I do early in the mornings now. Bunch 1.0.4 is out. It’s a pretty heavy code overhaul, switching most functions that were using AppleScript over to NSWorkspace, which you probably won’t notice but it solves some security and performance issues. It also does a better job of checking whether it really needs to execute a function (i.e. is the app already running? Closed? Hidden?). It’s speedier all around.
bunch, macos
Thanks to Tower for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’m a huge fan of this Git version control app, and I use it daily. It makes complex Git tasks as easy as drag and drop, including integration with GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab, and more.
developer, git, sponsor
A quick update to Bunch: it can now quit apps in addition to launching them. If your bunch file has an exclamation point before the name of an app, it will attempt to quit it instead of launching it, making Bunch an actual context switcher. For example, to quit Slack and open Hulu, your would include:
bunch, macos, scripting
Thanks to Taz Goldstein on Twitter, it came to my attention that my tool for generating downloads for my TextExpander snippets had partially broken. In the process of fixing it, I made some improvements.
snippet, textexpander, tools
I’ve more or less finished a little side project I started to make it easier to find and use Marked Custom Styles. I have a lot of plans for improving the styling system itself, but for now I wanted to make a little more user-friendly way to look around than just going to visit a GitHub repository.
gallery, marked, userstyle
If this note applies to you, you already know what a Hyper key is. If you don’t, go ahead and start with the post I wrote a while back on using Karabiner Elements to make your Caps Lock key more useful. If you’re starting from scratch, you won’t need the info below, I’ve already updated the instructions.
hyper, keybindings, keyboard, macos
