It looks like 2012 is another busy year for David Sparks. He has a great article about Instapaper add-ons and another Macworld article about Scrivener for business writing. Not to mention MacPower Users have really picked up the pace and MacSparky.com is seeing regular posts once again.
I hope he has hit his stride, because I don’t have enough time to keep up with him. Man that guy must not sleep.
I've been researching some BBEdit scripts and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. A logical source to review is Daringfireball. It was fun looking over the old articles and seeing how BBEdit evolved and how much Gruber contributed.
Here's a canned Google search for anyone that's interested:
Daringfireball
I may be working in BBEdit more, but I still love Marked and Multimarkdown Composer.[1]
Here’s a couple of AppleScripts to open the current BBEdit document in those two great applications.
try tell application "BBEdit" set myFile to get file of front document of window 1 end tell tell application "Marked" activate open myFile end tell end try
Just replace “Marked” for “Multimarkdown Composer” as needed. This script will only work if the current file in BBEdit has been saved to disk.
Here’s a bit of a BBEdit hack for a very specific problem. There are a number of words I either confuse or overuse when I write hastily. I’m not talking about misspelling of words, but rather using one word in the place of another.[1] For example, using “peak” when I meant “pique” or “your” when I meant “you’re”. I wanted a custom grammar checker to let me know when I might have a problem with a document.
The Escapers (makers of Flux, Stuf and more) have an interesting new task management service called Instruktion. Or maybe it's called "New York Minute", it's not clear to me. It is cross platform and the apps are free. It requires a $20/year membership which sounds like a good price.
It looks very nice on all of the application platforms and works offline too. I'm an OmniFocus user but I'll keep an eye on how this evolves.
Looks like MacUpdate is having a sale on PDFPenPro. 50% off makes it a cool $49. It's a great application and FAR better than Acrobat. If you have any need to edit, OCR or manipulate PDF's this is the application to get.
I haven’t made the leap to the Spotify or Rdio train yet. I’ve watched as a lot of people have made that transition but I’m not ready to get onboard. I still buy at least one album a week from Amazon or iTunes.[1]
Someone might think that I’m an old man scared by new technologies, but I love my Pandora subscription too. So what’s my deal? Here’s my deal:
<li>Curation</li> <li>Persistence</li> <li>Recommendations</li> Curated Content My iTunes music has been curated and rated over many years.
Just to prove how late-to-the-party I am, here’s Brett’s Markdown Services from September
Nice tip from Macworld to automatically backup versions of applications. I’m not sure I agree with the reasoning for doing it though. If a developer removes or changes a feature that I’m not happy with, I’m more likely to find a different app than to constantly skip updates or hassle with reinstalling an old version. It’s way too easy to choose “Download All Free Updates” than it is to selectively update individual apps.
Following on the previous post, I decided to try something new (for me). I wanted to turn my Safe URL Python script into a services extension. The easiest way I know to make a new services menu item is through Automator. I typically shy away from services because my list of text services is already quite long and disorganized. In this case, I really just wanted to try converting a Python script into a system service.
