Launchbar 6 is coming soon and they are gearing up for a public beta. Version 6 is a long time coming but I’m pretty excited to see what they do with it. There’s stiff competition for keyboard navigators these days but there’s also some really creative solutions. It’s a good year for Mac software, that’s for sure.
I thought this Esquire story was compelling, not because of the extraordinary situations, but because of the painfully common and ordinary story of a father with a terrible job:
Anthony Edward Dokoupil was known for his on-the-job sanity. If he was working, he was happy and healthy, drug-free, focused, flowing, time bouncing off him. He had enough hair on his chest to float a gold chain, his belly was trim, and when he walked he swung his legs in loose semicircles, exuding a practiced magnetism, a put-on air of immortality.
One of my long time favorite iOS text editors for iOS, Nebulous Notes, just received a design refresh. It’s nice to see it getting updates. It’s been around for over 3 years now and was my app of choice for a long time. The macro system is great and it’s one of the few Dropbox-centric text editors with full text search in folders as well as search within the current open document.
Thomas Phinney takes a logical walk through the spurious claims that changing fonts will save the US government $400M per year.
There is a different way an effectively smaller font will definitely save money: by allowing multi-page documents, especially long ones, to take fewer pages! So maybe it all works out—if you don’t worry about legibility.
Personally, I don’t think many of the documents are even written to be read.
A great update to Keyboard Maestro. Version 6.4 adds support for reading and writing tags on files.
The new asynchronous macro execution has some nice potential for chaining macros without holding up the current macro. It fires off sub macros without waiting for them to complete.
It’s great to see one of my favorite apps constantly getting new and clever additions.
Phillip is pretty clever with URL schemes on iOS. He’s probably the best person to explain URL encoding with actions:
I’ll explain each one of the elements with analogies that would make Scott Forstall proud. First, there is the CALL, which can be interpreted as a phone number. One app calls the other, in the previous example we’re calling Drafts in the create extension.
URL actions can be really powerful but one of the most common hurdles is getting the URL encoding right.
From the Life After Photoshop blog:
Reference library pros and cons: Your Aperture library is much smaller and can be stored on a super-fast SSD in a MacBook, for example, while your master images are stored on an external drive – and as your library gets larger, you can simply invest in larger drives. You can carry out all your organising, keywording and previewing without the masters being present, and your masters are also visible to other applications.
Path Finder 7 may be my most anticipated Mac app of this year. They just announced one of the new features: native Dropbox integration. My first thought was “but the finder does this.” Then I thought about all of the Dropbox API possibilities like sharing and versioning.
Another great episode of MPU with Merlin Mann. This one was expensive. It also has the best opening banter of any MPU episode ever.
You guys saw this right? I love these people. I love Twitter.
The only thing they missed is the person in the Webex chat windows saying that they can’t hear anyone.
[View the story "Every Conference Call Ever" on Storify]
