Beer Tracking Trilogy Episode 4
See this post for the introduction and ground rules
Bento I started this project in Bento. A couple of years ago, I created a Bento database for cataloging beers I drank. The purpose was to know what to buy again, and what to avoid at all costs. Bento worked moderately well but had some frustrating rough edges.
Bento on the Mac has two different views into the data.
I modified my scratch file script. The new version appends the clipboard to the top of the file rather than the bottom. That way the scratch file is in chronological order.
WARNING: This script overwrites the contents of a file.
[cc lang="AppleScript"]do shell script "pbpaste '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' echo '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' cat '/Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Dropbox/Notes/qqq_Scratch.txt' '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' cat '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' '/Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Dropbox/Notes/qqq_Scratch.txt'"[/cc] Just as a Unix reminder, the double angle bracket "
I keep a scratch file in my NVAlt library. I use it to keep random bits of information that I want to out live the clipboard. It's not meant to be permanent just a stop-over to some other destination. My clipboard is pretty volatile since I have a number of macros and scripts that temporarily hold bits of information on the clipboard. If it's something I might need later, then I better get it into something a bit more permanent.
I’m in heaven… CommandLineFu.com
Some much good stuff. At least an evening worth of fun hacking to be had with this site.
The Trilogy This is the opening crawl to a trilogy. Like any good trilogy, it will begin with episode 4 and never, ever speak of episodes 1–3.
The trilogy will describe a quest to find the ideal solution for curating my collection of micro-brewery beers. The quest spans several suites of applications: Bento, OmniOutliner and iWork Numbers. I’ve learned a lot about how I can use these tools and I hope someone else gets something out of this series.
As I have mentioned, my dear wife is now a full time OmniOutliner user. She started on the iPad and eventually migrated to the Mac. One major advantage of using OmniOutliner on the Mac is that you can design templates that automatically handle formatting based on context. The Omni Group provides some tutorials and some specific demos of styles but I decided to whip up a little tutorial for my wife and I am presenting it below.
In the never-ending pursuit of hard-won laziness, I often develop scripts to do simple tasks. Sometimes the joy is in the problem solving and sometimes it's in the final product. In this case it was in both.
Yesterday I was working on an as yet to be published post that has a large number of images. My typical workflow is to make an annotation in the text of the image I want to insert.
This is a really good deal for an upgrade. There are some pretty serious issues with using older version of Bento on Lion and this is a great way to get past that. I'm not a fan of their typical upgrade pricing since I don't think the iterations have provided much new value.
Unfortunately for me, I already purchased Bento 4 on the MAS because of the bugs with Lion. I have a couple of Bento databases that I use a lot and needed to make sure I would continue to be supported on Lion.
I'm not sure which application or service is responsible for it but I've noticed that a large number of my text files have been converted to Markdown (.md) and MultiMarkdown (.mmd) files. This isn't be so bad since the contents are still just plain text. However, several applications that I either use or I am testing do not recognize the md or mmd extensions.
Recently I went to find a file in NVAlt and it was not available.
As my last post revealed, I’m now thinking a bit more about a variety of use cases for outlining as a form of note-taking. One thing that I’ve discovered is that lawyer-ly folks love 'em some OmniOutliner. There’s almost a cult following around the application. Maybe that’s where everybody’s favorite Power Users got their start with Omni products.
Here are just a few links I have discovered while figuring out how a new Law student might take advantage of OmniOutliner:
