Droplr Pro launched recently, and the iOS app got a small update that allows you to mark shared items private or public. The Mac app, however, is in desperate need of an update. You still can’t mark things private. Invoking the shortcut with a file selected doesn’t upload the file, it creates a text note of the path to that file on your Mac. There are multiple types of notes you can create: plain text, Markdown, Textile, and Code but you can’t set the app to default to anything other than plain text and there’s no shortcut to quickly create a note. Lastly, another cool feature missing from Droplr that Cloud has is the ability to upload the contents of your clipboard. That can be very useful in certain situations. Droplr Pro is now a much better service than Cloud, but the Mac app is severely lacking. There are also no third-party Droplr clients for power users like the excellent Cloud to Go for iOS.
Tag: Mac
I wrote a little while ago about OpenMeta tags and some software to implement them. I continue to be a believer in tagging. At every opportunity, I reduced the number of folders I use and consolidate as many files as I can into one folder and then tag them, sparingly. Over tagging files can be just as bad as having too many folders. Here’s an example of overtagging:
For a while, I was tagging work documents as ‘work’ and ‘COMPANYNAME’. It was overkill. I should know that anything that is tagged with my employer’s name is work. I shouldn’t need to tag those documents as ‘work’ too. Those files are already in a ‘Work’ folder in Dropbox.
Two updates to applications I had tried in the past came out last week and their new inclusion of OpenMeta tagging support has gotten me back into them. The first is Path Finder 6. I tried Path Finder out in 2007, I think, and while I liked it’s extra abilities over the Finder, it wasn’t ready to be a replacement for the Finder. Path Finder’s come a long way, and I think you can safely leave Finder behind. What I essentially do is run both in tandem, and I redirect all “Reveal in Finder” commands to reveal in Path Finder and Path Finder lets you hide the Finder’s dock icon. Finder can run in the background for Time Machine and you can use Path Finder exclusively. It’s pretty seamless.
Path Finder 6 also adds the ability to work with OpenMeta tags. You can edit the tags for any file, but Path Finder has these nifty “tag groups” you can set up and then every time you apply a “tag group”, Path Finder adds multiple tags that you’ve already assigned to that “tag group”. I still use Tags.app because of the ability to tag anything, anywhere rather quickly and Tags.app has a great search feature and tag browser that Path Finder doesn’t.
Oh, one more bad ass thing. Path Finder 6 can queue file transfers! No more grinding hard drives to a halt when you initiate multiple transfers at the same time.
The other piece of software is the new version of the MailTags add-on for Mail.app. MailTags now adds OpenMeta tags so the emails you tag with MailTags show up in Tags.app’s tag browser. I guess tagging emails is a natural extension of my newfound love of tagging files. Adding tags like ‘@action’, ‘@followup’ and ‘@waiting’ have made it easy to create Smart Mailboxes that help me get to certain types of mail quickly. I have a Smart Mailbox called “Priority Mail” that contains flagged messages, ‘@action’ and ‘@followup’. I check this once in the morning and I can quickly see what needs to be acted on or processed in some way.
Overall, I’m really happy with my tagging setup. I keep everything in Dropbox, my MailTags tags sync through iCloud’s IMAP system (or at least they appear to be) and I’m taking advantage of Smart Mailboxes and Spotlight Saved Searches to keep everything at my fingertips.
Your mom’s probably always telling you to stay in touch. If you want to show your mom that you love her without having to remember that you need to show her that you love her, send her an “I love you!” email on a schedule using Automator.
Here’s an example Automator workflow:
- New mail message
- Send outgoing messages
- Quit application (Mail)
Set your loved one’s email as the “to:”, set a subject and message body and save. If you want to make this an automatic thing, save it as an iCal alarm and set it to trigger at a certain time(s)!
やっと日本語を使える？
TextMate finally got the ability to work with Japanese out of the box. It’s a slightly strange implementation however. In most apps, after typing out a word in Japanese, you hit [Space] to convert the hiragana into kanji and when you hit [Enter] you close that word out and move on to the next word. In TextMate 2.0 alpha, hitting enter not only closes the current word out, it shifts your cursor down to the next line! It’s a little jarring. You can hit [Space], convert to kanji and then just keep typing (this works in all apps) but if you’re used to hitting [Enter] like I am, it’s really strange.
Ejection
Quick Disk’s main selling point is that it sits in your menu bar and allows you to see all connected disks on your Mac and you can eject them individually or hit the big “Eject All” button and get rid of them all. Very handy if you want to see all the disks connected to your system if you don’t have them displayed on your desktop.
Free Space
Another cool thing Quick Disk does is display how much space is free on each drive and what percentage of each drive’s space is available. Could be useful to users who are always running out of disk space and will help them be aware of when they’re about to hit that wall. This info is of course displayed when you click the menu bar icon, but you can also set Quick Disk to display either the amount in bytes or the percentage of available space next to the menu bar icon. I’m not running low on space, so I’m simply displaying the icon.
Purchase
Quick Disk is a nifty little utility that a lot of people may not need but it’s nice to have and only $0.99. Buy it in the Mac App Store.
There are plenty of reasons why you might want to have a VPN connection. The biggest one for people outside the US is to access US-only media like Hulu, Netflix and gaming services. As an American with an American credit card who wants to purchase American content even though I live overseas, the policies of the companies I want to give money to can be extremely frustrating at times. My first such experience was with Playstation Network. For the first couple years of its existence, PSN played nice. By logging into my American account and using my American credit card, PSN allowed me to buy and download content just like anyone else back in America. Then about 18 months ago, Sony changed its system to disallow credit cards being used outside their area. Thus, my American credit card couldn’t be used from Japan. The best way to get around this was to buy PSN point cards on Amazon and redeem the code. Once redeemed, PSN would allow me to purchase whatever I wanted. It wasn’t the content that was restricted, but the payment method. I never tried using a Japanese credit card with it, so I don’t know if they would’ve accepted an overseas card from the overseas region either. I ran into the same problem with Steam as well on the Mac, but the US Steam store works with foreign credit cards, as long as you’re in the region that card is from.
Then I got an Xbox 360. The first thing I wanted to do was buy Mass Effect from Games on Demand. Xbox Live wouldn’t allow it. But it let me buy Shadow Complex, so I assumed Games on Demand was off limits overseas. Then one day, I happened to attempt buying Splinter Cell: Conviction from Games on Demand, and it worked! I thought Microsoft had loosened up. Then over the summer I bought the Gears of War Triple Pack and tried to redeem the DLC code inside the box. Didn’t work. Turns out that Microsoft published games and the DLC (free and paid) attached to them are region locked. It’s why Mass Effect couldn’t be purchased, but Mass Effect 2’s DLC downloaded just fine. (Because EA published Mass Effect 2, and thankfully Mass Effect 3.)
The only way to circumvent Microsoft’s roadblocks is to access Xbox Live through a VPN. I’ve known a lot of people who went about this by trying to log into a service like Hotspot Shield and then use OS X’s Internet Sharing feature through a wired Ethernet connection to their Xbox 360. It works to share your Internet connection, just not the one you want to share. This will not work. No matter how long you bang your head against, thinking you can make it work, you will not make this work. I spent hours and people I know have spent hours trying to share a VPN connection through this method. It won’t get you anywhere.
So how do you share a VPN? You need to dial in over PPTP. I haven’t found a free VPN that will let you connect through PPTP, so be prepared to open your wallet (or purse) a little bit. The VPN service I settled on was Hide My Ass. It’s got a silly name, but they have the ability to connect to their service through PPTP and OpenVPN. I didn’t have any luck with OpenVPN, but PPTP worked like a charm. Once you have set up a PPTP connection, you then share not your usual connection but the virtual connection you just created out to your Xbox 360 over Ethernet. Your Xbox 360 will not connect to Xbox Live through a connection that Live thinks is in the US. There are plenty of places you can choose to have your connection come out of, so choose whichever has the lightest load.
While HMA works, the speed isn’t great. It’s probably about 1Mbps. I’m quite used to 100Mbps here in Japan, and while 1Mbps was screaming fast when I was in high school, it’s painfully slow now. Downloading Gears of War map packs took way longer than it would have normally. There’s a quirk to Xbox Live that may be beneficial in your use of VPNs though. Xbox Live only checks region at the beginning and end of downloads. The fastest solution to downloading content is to:
- Purchase locked content through Xbox.com and then let it download from your queue.
- Keep an eye on it and switch over to the PPTP connection at about 97% completion.
This should allow you to download almost all of the content at your fastest speed, and then bypass the region check at the end.
Why It’s a Big Deal
MMD Composer is a big deal because it’s the first time the creator of Markdown (or a variant of Markdown) has created a text editor. It’s not a massive text editor like BBEdit or TextMate, but for me that’s fine. I don’t use more than a sliver of either applications’ power. I just want a straightforward text editor that handles MultiMarkdown really well. MMD Composer, created by Fletcher Penny, is just that. A lot of text editors on the market don’t do a great job with MultiMarkdown. They handle Markdown just fine, but a lot of them don’t do MultiMarkdown at all. Seeing as Fletcher Penny is the creator of MMD, Composer does the best job of MMD formatting I’ve ever seen.
So What’s New?
MMD’s best addition to the basic Markdown syntax is the ability to create tables. The biggest thing in MMD Composer for me is the automatic wrapping of tables.
It can take text like:
| Name | Phone Number |
| —— | ————– | Louise | 555-1234 Benny | 555-1285 Alex | 555-8320 [Contact Details]
And turn it into this:
It’s pretty nifty, right? It also adds more options for images like size customization and creating footnotes.
MMD Composer can auto-pair characters like [], (), and “”. Makes creating links and the like much easier. Another cool trick for links is that if you’ve got a URL in the clipboard, you can highlight a string of text in MMD Composer, paste the clipboard contents and MMD Composer will automatically create a link for you. Also, highlight text and use the usual RTF ⌘ + B or ⌘ + I and it wraps the text in asterisks for you. It’s quite handy. MMD Composer exports as RTF, LaTeX, HTML, OPML and you can even give it a custom shell script for custom exporting. There’s also a nice Table of Contents function so that you can open a ToC drawer and jump quickly between different # headers. Lastly, if you have Brett Terpstra’s Marked installed, you can have MMD Composer open up Marked when previewing documents.
If you write in MultiMarkdown on a Mac, you should definitely be using MultiMarkdown Composer. It’s currently available at an introductory price of $7.99.
Email Ennui
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Apple’s OS X Mail app for quite a while. I loved it because it was well integrated with OS X and unlike Outlook Express on Windows, Mail was actually quite functional. But Mail has its issues. I’ve had lots of crashes, every OS X update seems to break some add-on I’d installed, and searching old messages wasn’t very effective. I tried the power user-focused Postbox and liked a lot about it, but it was too much for me. I then hoped that Lion’s Mail would be the update to finally get everything right. While I think Lion’s Mail app is a good email app, I didn’t like the layout as much as I hoped I would (although I don’t hate it as much as some people seem to). I decided it was time to find something better.
I had tried out Sparrow when it was in beta, but I held off buying the app when it launched because I wanted to stick with Mail if possible and I was waiting to see how Mail in Lion turned out. Well, with me being disappointed with Mail in 10.7 and Sparrow having come a long way (now up to 1.4), I was happy when I got a copy to try out from its developer. After just two days of use, I’m sure I won’t be opening up Apple’s Mail again any time soon. I’m extremely happy with Sparrow and here’s why.
Email Excellence
Sparrow looks a lot like the original Tweetie for Mac. Accounts are laid out in the app’s sidebar and things like inbox, starred emails, and search are listed the same way as @replies, DMs and search are in Tweetie. The biggest difference between Apple Mail and Sparrow is that Sparrow was originally designed for Gmail. It now does normal IMAP as well, but if you’re a Gmail user, Sparrow handles starred email and labels like a champ. It even shows priority inbox tags if you’ve enabled the feature in the Gmail web app. Sparrow also features Cloud integration for sharing attachments, but don’t worry, you can still send them the old fashioned way too. The app can connect to Facebook too for acquiring contact photos of email senders. My biggest gripe about Apple Mail was its crappy search. The app had issues (for me, at least) with searching through messages back on the server. Sparrow does a great job syncing messages and allows for great searching (offline even!). There’s also a nifty “new message” shortcut option so that you can quickly start a new email no matter what application you have
The app sells for $9.99 (as of October 17, 2011) and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s lightweight, fast, and is built to wrangle Gmail like a pro.
I have wrestled with finance software more times than I care to admit. I’ve tried going iPhone only, Mac only, and a combination of the two. After a while, I settled on the belief that only a software package that syncs over-the-air would be worth using, but none of them ever got me to keep my financial records in order. Then I stopped using finance software for months. I then had the notion a few weeks ago that I wanted my finance software to be as easy as a GTD app. By that, I mean, I wanted an inbox. In Omnifocus, I can just add a bunch of tasks to the inbox and it syncs back to my Macs and I can process them all later at home (or on the iPhone if I’m so inclined.) The point is, I don’t need to be able to do everything on my phone. And to be honest, I hadn’t found a Mac finance app that fit my needs either. MoneyWell had too much going on, Squirrel didn’t work out for me, and none of the other apps felt right. (Cha-Ching was the exception but the developer of Cha-Ching were a bit scummy. If you used Cha-Ching, you’ll remember they didn’t keep you up to date on the progress of Cha-Ching’s Mac beta, the iPhone app was buggy as Hell, and when they got bought out by Intuit, they pulled all the software down and customers were given the proverbial “middle finger.”) Then I remembered Koku. I had downloaded a demo of Koku and I liked the look of it, but I had written it off because there was no iPhone app.
With my new plan of keeping financial tracking down to an inbox on the iPhone, I was free to try out Koku again. I started keeping a list of what I spent money on and how much in Simplenote, which syncs OTA back to nvALT on my Macs, and when I had the time, I could fire up Koku, whose library file I’m syncing over Dropbox, and process all the inbox items. Once in Koku, I could date, title and tag all my transactions. Koku doesn’t have MoneyWell’s buckets and doesn’t allow for budgeting, but I’ve found that budgeting for things is a waste of time, for me at least. I wanted software that would keep all my transactions together, make them easy to drill down through, and tagging does the trick. Koku is also smart enough to know when one kind of tag is a sub-tag of another automatically without you having to actually create a hierarchy.
For example:
- train ticket tagged as travel, train
- hotel room tagged as travel, hotel
Koku will automatically associate both as travel items, but you can drill down inside of travel and you’ll find train and hotel on your distribution reports. Oh yes, there are reports. Koku does three kinds of reports: summary reports, which list balances on all your accounts, distribution reports, which create pie charts from the tags you’ve associated with transactions, and history reports which give you a bar graph showing income or expenses over time. For each kind of report, you can tell Koku which accounts to use, which tags to use, and what time period to use. For time periods, you can use day, week, month, quarter or year, including this…, last…, and in the last…. After tweaking the settings, I’ve come up with seven or eight really useful reports to see things like my daily spending for the month, what I spent money on this month, how much income came from my day job versus the private English lessons I teach in the evenings. I was shocked to see how much of my total income private lessons had become. It never dawned on me how much I was relying on them until I saw it in a pie chart.
One of Koku’s biggest selling points is its Direct Connect functionality. You can connect to American banks directly and import up-to-date financial data. Koku can do this automatically in the background once you set it up. It won’t work for non-U.S. banks though, so if you aren’t in the U.S., you’re stuck manually downloading and importing statement data at the end of your billing cycle. My Japanese banks of course won’t work with Koku’s Direct Connect, but my American accounts would, if Koku could work with two different currencies! The biggest gripe I have with Koku is that you can only use the currency that is the default for your Mac. This means that if you’re like me and want to manage a library for one currency and a second library for another currency, you’re S.O.L. I emailed Fading Red, the developer, but got no answer about when it would be possible to manage multiple currencies. I’d love to have a “Japanese” library and an “American” library with separate yen and dollar settings.
Some people might not like that Koku has no iPhone app. You can check balances or add transactions when you’re away from your Mac, but for the most part, I’m very happy with Koku. Should they create an iPhone app eventually, I hope it maintains the simplicity of the Mac app and I’d be very happy to see a “transaction inbox” included. Koku is just $29.99 in the Mac App Store.
I remember my teachers always harping about us needing to create outlines before we started in on reports in school. I had it in my head that I was a good enough writer and that I could just sit down and go to town and I’d pump out a great piece of writing. About halfway through, I’d realize that I had meandered off-course and had no idea where my report was going. Then I’d tell myself that I should’ve created an outline. Even in today’s world of advanced text editors and word processors, outlines are still a necessary evil (or joy, depending on how you look at it.) In my efforts to write more and better, I’ve found that I have to create an outline for anything more than 500 words. Unless it’s me ranting about something, an outline is going to make my words more coherent. I took a look at two outliners. In the blue corner is the reigning heavyweight champion, OmniOutliner Pro. In the red corner is a fresh lightweight, Tree. Each have their strengths, and weaknesses.
OmniOutliner Pro 3 is a powerful outliner. Version 3 brought many new features that put it out in front of the outliner pack. OmniOutliner 3 lets you add file attachments to your outlines. You can add photos, videos, links, clickable email addresses and in the pro version you can record audio directly into outlines from the menu bar. OmniOutliner lets you add multiple columns to your outline. You can add as many as you need to make your outline work as you need it to. And similar to Omnifocus, there’s a clipping service (currently not available in the MAS version, but installing the demo from the Omnigroup Web site seemed to circumvent that for me) so that you can grab data from other applications and throw them into an outline.
For me, one of the biggest advantages that OmniOutliner has is its ability to mix file attachments with outline text. It’s extremely handy to throw screenshots you intend to use in a review directly into the outline that you’re working on. You can get a rough idea of what the flow of the review is going to be, images and all. If you’re doing an outline for business, OmniOutliner can let you add contact details to outlines so you can easily see (and get ahold of) people who are in charge of different things represented in your outline. And the ability to record audio is a huge addition to note-taking. I used OmniOutliner years ago in college for note-taking, but if I had been able to record the audio from my professor’s lectures and add my own notes to them along the way, that would’ve been amazing. Imagine going back through your notes and anytime you don’t quite know what your note is referring to, you could listen back to the audio and quickly find out. If you’re worried that audio files will start eating up your hard disk, OmniOutliner lets you tweak the compression of the audio files from Apple lossless all the way down to whatever the worst sounding thing could possibly be. A lot of iPad apps have attempted to do similar things, but having the ability to adjust audio quality, have a real keyboard, and have a fully featured outliner beats a silly iPad app with a notebook paper-stylized UI any day.
Unlike every other outliner I’ve used before, OmniOutliner Pro 3 lets you create multiple columns in your outline. You can designate them as different types of content too. You can tell OmniOutliner that the column will be used for checkboxes, rich text, dates or currency. Telling OmniOutliner what will be in the column will then make it easier to work with the data later and sort it. In a lot of ways, OmniOutliner Pro has replaced Numbers for me. I used to use Numbers to make schedules and draft budgets, but OmniOutliner Pro does the mostly the same things.
Another nifty feature of OmniOutliner is its clippings function. The clippings service allows you to take links, text, and photos from another application and import it into your outline. If you’re using OmniOutliner as a note-taking tool or researching a large project and want to organize your data as you go along, using the clipping service is a great way to collect research information and have it all in one place, ready to be reference when you start writing a first draft. OmniOutliner has a default clippings template, but you can create different layouts to suit whatever project you’re working on.
My only complaint about OmniOutliner Pro is that sometimes the sheer power of the application is overwhelming. There’s so much stuff to tinker with that sometimes you might spend more time adjusting settings than working on your actual outline. My advice to tinkerers would be to create templates for different types of outlines you’ll want to create. I’ve created a class schedule for one of my schools, and while it’s pretty basic in style, I saved it as a template so I can go in and make changes as they arise and I can even filter out checked off days so I can print fresh schedules throughout the month that include changes but exclude past days that I don’t need to see anymore.
The other outliner I looked at was Tree from Top of Tree. If OmniOutliner Pro is a the power user’s outliner, Tree is the everyman’s outliner. It’s a clean, simple, and easy to use outliner. I found myself taking to Tree faster than I did to OmniOutliner Pro. The UI feels a bit more modern, it has a menu bar button for quickly adding color labels to items and the keyboard commands felt a little more natural. The basics of OmniOutliner’s inspector tab, like labels, colors, and fonts are right in the toolbar in Tree. Things like file attachments, multi-column outlines and a clipping service are all missing from Tree though. At first I didn’t think it would be a big deal, but after having them in OmniOutliner Pro, I really missed them in Tree. Tree is very simple, and for a lot of people who just want a basic text-only outliner, Tree will do the job. If text-only is a problem for you though, you might want to pass on tree.
The biggest selling point of Tree is its “tree-like” branching outline mode. While Tree has a normal vertical outline mode, it has an interesting horizontal tree mode as well. When you invoke tree mode, Tree starts looking a lot like a mind-mapping application. You get to see how your outline spreads out and it takes on a much different shape than a standard outline. I think the best way to use tree mode is to write out your outline in the standard mode, and then switch to tree mode to view and edit. From tree mode, it’s very comfortable to drag parts around and adding color labels helps a lot as well.
While Tree is a good outliner, it doesn’t have the power features that OmniOutliner Pro has. If you want to add files, columns or use its clipping service, OmniOutliner Pro is your best bet. If you’re a more visual person in the way you think, you might get a lot of use out of Tree’s “tree” mode. I myself prefer OmniOutliner Pro in most cases, but for creative projects, I’ve found that visualizing where a story’s going and how it’s spreading out from the opening scene helps me get a better idea of how it’s going to play out.