I think the ABBYY Fine Reader OCR engine is one of the best on the market. I actually do most of my OCR with DevonThink Pro Office because of the accuracy of the ABBYY FineReader engine. That’s why I was initially very excited about the series of iOS apps ABBYY released in 2011.
But, after trying various versions of the apps, I lost hope. They were incredibly bad at OCR and were awkward to use.
AppStorm has a very good series about programming Python in Pythonista. If you are just getting into Editorial then you really want to catch up on this series as well as their introduction, Pythonista 101.
Here are a pair of Editorial macros that do something very simple that I find extremely useful. They create a new file in Dropbox titled with a time stamp.
The first one just names the file with the current time stamp and adds a date header.
The next one asks for a title, appends the time stamp and then creates the new Dropbox file. It also creates a title header with just the user entered title and a date header with the time stamp.
I’m back from vacation and so is this site. To get the life juices flowing, I’m sharing my SFTP workflows for Editorial.1
I use this first one to edit posts I’ve already uploaded to my host. It reads the first 20 text files in my Pelican raw text file directory and shows them sorted by modification time stamp. Tapping one in the list downloads it to the Editorial local file storage for editing.
This workflow takes selected text in the Editorial editor and replaces it with HTML encoded character strings.
It’s just a few actions:
The magic is in the bit of Python that uses the CGI module and should handle most non-english characters as well as special characters like emdash.
:::python #coding: utf-8 import workflow import cgi action_in = workflow.get_input() tempString = workflow.get_variable('origString') encodeString = cgi.escape(tempString).encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace') #TODO: Generate the output... action_out = encodeString workflow.
Occasionally a new computing platform comes along that changes the way we interact with technology. The iPhone changed what a phone was to me and the iPad changed my definition of a personal computer. But with each of those shifts, I quickly settled into the opportunities and limitations inherent in their software. For all of it’s innovation, the iPad still felt like a limited little piece of glass. This was never more apparent than when I was writing.
From the OmniGraphSketcher support page:
What exactly happens next? We’re still pondering that question, and we’re very open to ideas. At the moment, our first choice is to release it to the world as an open source app so that other developers can keep it moving forward, but for that to really work we think someone would need to volunteer to shepherd the app. If you know someone who would be interested in doing this, please send us email at omnigraphsketcher@omnigroup.
Ken over at NotMillerTime:
But FileMaker’s announcement has revealed a space that I think needs to be filled. In FileMaker terms, something way more powerful than Bento, but way less complex and expensive as FileMaker Pro. FileMaker Pro 12, even at its promotional $175 price, along with the free FileMaker Go iOS app, is way too expensive. Plus you can’t even create or modify databases in Go, just deal with records.
This bit from Dr. Drang is going to be so handy in Editorial.
Evernote is great for quick capture, especially on iOS. But I find the camera capture for things like business cards to be a little too fiddly and limited. While there are a few alternatives for quickly capturing business cards and photos into Evernote, none work as easily and accurate as Scanner Pro by Readdle.1
Scanner Pro doesn’t need an Evernote account but it certainly is a great companion. For example, I capture all of the business cards I receive with Scanner Pro.
