I dislike wading into battles of opinion. While I may be cranky, I’m not all that self-important. But I’ve recommended the Mac and iOS app TextExpander many, many times and feel like I’ve endorsed it enough that I now have an obligation to all the people that listened to me, even if I don’t want it. I recommend Dr. Drang’s post and the latest Back to Work episode for additional opinions from similarly invested nerds.

Eddie Smith has sampled the nectar of static blogging and now he’s hooked. He provides a very nice rundown of moving from Squarespace to Jekyll. As for they big “why”, Eddie has the saddest and most accurate reason for fighting the good fight: Even though indie blogging has been relegated to third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-class citizen status on the internet in the last few years, I’m still grateful it lives on through the people who won’t let it go.

My thanks to Internodal, the makers of Agenda Minder, for sponsoring Macdrifter this week. I don’t carry a lot of sponsors but I like to think the sponsors I work with are the best people out there. Agenda Minder is a new Mac App for managing meetings made by people that know how effective meetings are created. So many people forget how important an agenda is and I love that Agenda Minder focuses on fixing this common problem.

The Omni Group just released version 2.5 of OmniFocus for the Mac and it brings back custom styling. They even provide a FAQ for creating custom styles using the OmniFocusColors app or a text editor. The transition from version 1 to 2 was rough for many people. The lack of theming in v2 was a big complaint for a lot of people I know. I might consider OmniFocus again when it reaches parity with version 1.

I can’t pass up a good article about Drafts. Tim Nahumck has a thorough discussion of how he uses Drafts for iOS.

Wow, this new Sketch version looks like it will be dyn-o-mite. The symbols will save so much time prototyping apps and websites.

I’m probably done with IFTTT. I’ve waited for a business model and instead I get crazy service integrations I’ve never heard of. Now it looks like IFTTT integration with Pinboard will end in the near future and it’s ending for bad reasons. Browse through the amusing Twitter feed of @pinboard and you’ll see tweets like this: Tweet Link I am invited to join their private Developer Platform and feast on the rich analytics therein, which isn’t really my cup of tea

I installed the DSM 6 release candidate several weeks ago. As usual, it’s a great update for the Synology NAS. The most notable improvements over DSM 5 for me is the file indexing. Now it’s available as a final release for owners of many Synology NAS boxes.1 From the Mac Finder I can now do a spotlight search on 7 TB of data within a few seconds. Not to mention, some of the contents of text files are also indexed by DSM 6.

ProtonMail is a secure email service and app with end-to-end message encryption. I’m not using it but I think security is rapidly becoming a business model. I expect to see the government versus citizen arms race to generate a lot of new commercial options. Even if you’re not important or scummy secure messages are valuable.1 I’m always frustrated when dealing with attorneys or accountants. They rarely have a secure file transfer service.

I found this article to be a good summary of what’s going on with the FBI and their inept bungling. If true, it’d be pretty funny that Issa was more technically savy than the FBI. But even with all of this, it’s still dependent on human frailty: More importantly, this technique wouldn’t work at all had Farook used a complex alphanumeric passcode. The weak link in all of this has been Farook and his poor choice of security.