Marco Arment, of Instapaper fame, has repeatedly stated that he is not worried about the new Safari Reading List. He’s not worried and may be a little hopeful for it’s success. I agree with his estimates. The new Safari feature will introduce an entirely new option for reading web pages to the mass market. Instapaper will benefit and, collectively, we will all be a little better off.
You see, Marco makes a product that is for the nerds.
You can bet I will be hacking around with this awesome work. Some clever little tricks. I love when people make awesome tools to solve their own problems.
By way of Simplicity Is Bliss
Back in 2006 I briefly discussed the use cases for Devonthink Pro. ($149) I'm still a fan of Devonthink Pro Office (the newly renamed top tier version) but I use it less and less for filing documents. I've been leaning more towards application agnostic file storing.
However, there is one workflow that Devonthink Pro Office accels at: PDF OCR. ABBYY Finereader ($99) is included with the application as a plugin. I've worked with many PDF OCR products, including the grotesquely expensive Adobe Acrobat Pro ($499).
Just a quick addendum to my recent post about intercepting the CMD-Q keys in apps. I wanted to let the developer, Peter Lewis, know that I changed his suggested macro to make it more universal. He responded to my email right away and blew my mind with another option.
Keyboard Maestro supports the Boolean conjunction “or” via pipes (that key just above the backslash on your keyboard) for arguments. Here’s a snippet from his email:
I’ve been enjoying Dr. Drang’s tales of file format lock-in and his crusade against closed formats for his data. His stories always feel eerily familiar.
I bounce back and forth between Macs and Windows machines in my daily life. My OS polytheism goes way back. I started with an old custom built 386 PC in high school. In undergraduate, I took advantage of the steep Apple student discount and acquired a Mac IIci.
This feature alone is enough to warrant the PathFinder price tag:
If you spend any time on Windows, you know that the Mac Finder is missing cut and paste in the OS. Don't even get me started on the other awesome features of PathFinder or this post will take all day to write. Let's just say the Drop Stack functionality is insanely useful.
Tinkering Dropbox is incredibly useful and I enjoy extending it's utility whenever I can. I also enjoy choosing projects that will teach me something new about my Mac. My latest project was to provide SFTP access to my Dropbox account. For security reasons, I am not allowed to install Dropbox at work. I considered several options for direct access to my files (email, webdav) but FTP is the most simple and universal access I could develop.
I had already been testing a new iOS app named Notesy when the boys over at the B&B podcast started to recommend it. I have to say, I really like the app. However, I started to see some funny business while I was test driving new note naming systems. I’ll post about that experiment later. However, I discovered some interesting limitations when using Dropbox for taking notes. Dropbox limits the characters used in note titles.
I have been a long time fan of the Logitech Revolution MX mouse. It was a comfortable mouse with a good bit of functionality. The prize feature was the weighted free-spinning scroll wheel. I could really zoom through a long post (which was much more useful before sites began spreading posts across multiple pages to scrounge for more views). I really liked the MX. However, it was a flaky piece of technology that lived fast and died young.
