Many Tricks is Sponsoring Macdrifter this week and their Name Mangler application is the best way to give meaning to file names again.
SponsoredThis tutorial is about a sponsor's product. The concepts, words and opinions are mine. I like Many Tricks. I use Name Mangler and I feel good about recommending it.
Now, I know a lot of us have scripts we’ve made to rename files and those certainly do a great job, for some very specific cases.
I’m what you might call an iThoughts fan. It’s on all of my home screens on iOS and almost always open on my Mac. iThoughts is my playground for ideas. Many of my longer articles start in a context map and many of my expansive projects live in that form permanently.
That means I can’t silo my data on one device. iThoughts provides a couple of reliable ways to sync data and make sure it’s portable to any other application I need.
Listening to the latest MPU podcast, I was surprised by a comment that it’s not possible to make free form context maps in apps like iThoughts. While I think Scapple is cool (which was specifically mentioned in MPU as a free form tool), you can create multiple free-form nodes in iThoughts too.
Just tap on the blank canvas and choose “New Floating” from the popover. You can even create annotation arrows between nodes for extra craziness.
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.
Andreas has started a nice little series of MindNode tips. They are short and sweet and very useful. What’s not to like?
I’ve already written about my move to a Synology NAS. I’m happy to say that after serveral months of use, I’m even more satisfied with my decision.
The Synology As a refresher, I opted for the Synology 1812+.1 It’s a $1000 commitment to data storage. But that price gets you a dead-simple unix server with 8 drive bays.
Half of the value of the Synology server is the software that runs the little beast.
Eric Pramano over at GeeksWithJuniors has some nice examples of using Due and Drafts together.
The first example uses Drafts and Launch Center Pro to send a message with an embeded Due reminder. I didn’t even know that it was possible to send a Due reminder to someone else this way.
The second post is a series of clever ideas to time-shift work like sending emails. Type in the address, title and reminder time in Drafts and get a nice little Due reminder.
Panayotis Vryonis has a nice post about moving out of iPhoto into Dropbox. Dropbox has done a lot recently to make that easier and there are a number of good apps for iOS photo management with Dropbox.
I highly recommend Seth Brown’s post about naming files and adding searchable meta data to photos.
I’m certainly not a model of effectiveness but I do pride myself on a few things.1 One of those things is the direct answer. I try, given enough time to edit myself, to give a short and specific answer to a question. I try to be direct.
Here’s how I attempt to edit myself in emails:
1. I do not ask for additional clarification up front unless I absolutely do not understand the question.
I guess this is part of my blogroll series, but there are a few folks that cost me a lot of money. These are people with opinions I trust that also like the kind of stuff I like. Be warned, if you follow them, you will likely spend more money than if you do not.
Rob Agcaoili
Shawn Blanc
Jeff Hunsberger
Eddie Smith
David Sparks
Brett Terpstra
Tools and Toys
