Circus Ponies’ Notebook is one of the most mature productivity apps on the Mac. Its developer, Jayson Adams, is a stand-up guy that has been pouring himself into this application for a long time. Over the past several years, Jayson and his team have been hard at work in a big update that just went live. I haven’t tried the new version yet but a lot of people like it. Courtney Stafford Hickey gives it thumbs up over at iPhone JD. Notebook’s appeal is the idea of one app to hold all your data. I know students that use it exclusively and lawyers that run entire lawsuits through Notebook. If you’ve not seen it before, it is definitely worth checking out.
iThoughts for iOS Update, New and On Sale
For nine months, Craig Scott, has been hard at work with a ground-up redesign of iThoughts for iOS. The new version is universal (working on both iPad and iPhone) and looks great in its iOS 7-ified brilliance. There are quite a few new features in this version including rich text support, faster Dropbox sync , Bluetooth keyboard support, and it imports Markdown files.
With the re-write, the app feels smoother than ever and really gets out of your way as you create and move entries around the screen. Like its predecessor, iThoughts gives you a lot of control over the look of your mind map with color palettes, tools, objects, and typography. iThoughts is firmly entrenched as the power-user mind mapping application on iOS. It has a lot of useful features.
This is a new version requiring a new purchase. iThoughts is 80% off for a short time making it easier for upgrades and first-timers alike. You really should have this app in your tool belt and at the temporary price of $2, you should probably go buy it now.
New Sonos App
Sonos released it’s updated iOS app and having spent some time with it, I approve. We continue to see repercussions from the iOS 7 redesign with companies not only giving their apps an iOS 7 coat of paint, but also rethinking how their apps work. I think this is one of the biggest positives to come out of the iOS 7 transition.
I also still love my Sonos system.
Efficiency vs. Delight
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of delight in application design and how it relates to (and sometimes trumps) efficiency. I wrote a small piece about this and Macworld published it today.
MPU 192: iOS Picks
In Mac Power Users episode 192, Katie Floyd and I share some of our favorite iOS application picks. In the midst of it all, we had an interesting conversation relating to read it later services and the sometimes-fallacy of “efficient” software. Enjoy.
Fixing Word Crashes with “Smart” Copy and Paste
I vented my spleen a bit on a recent Mac Power Users episode about instability in Microsoft Word on the Mac. I received a lot of email about that and it appears I’m not alone. I did, however, also receive a very nice email from listener Don that explained how he made Word crashes go away by unchecking Word’s “Use smart cut and paste” feature. I’ll try anything once so I went ahead and unchecked it a week ago. I’ve got a big “thing” at the day job starting Monday so I’ve been working in Word most of this week. Guess what? No crashes. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be knocking on a lot of wood.
MPU 191: Sparks-Floyd Methodology
Katie and I are finding a rhythm with the monthly live feedback shows. Don’t believe me? Check this out.
The Little Duck that Could
I’ve written about DuckDuckGo before. It’s an alternative search engine that has, as item number one on it’s white board, “don’t track users”. My searches really aren’t all that interesting but I don’t like becoming a Google product all that much either. DuckDuckGo isn’t as fast, or frankly as good, as Google but it is narrowing the gap. They continue to evolve and most recently announced a redesign that you can try right now at next.duckduckgo.com.
The search results, show in the below gallery, are very attractive and pretty good. I’m back to using it full time and it’s not annoying me. The features to search images, videos, and the dictionary are very clean. Best of all, I’m not anybody’s product. If you’ve not tried DuckDuckGo in awhile, go back. You’ll be surprised.
My Meeting Tips Article in Macworld
I recently published an article at Macworld on a few tricks I use to set and keep meetings. I didn’t realize it had already published. You can check it out here.
New PDFpen Scan+ Screencast
Here is my latest screencast demonstrating PDFpen Scan+ 1.3. This new version has a lot of improvements on both the front end (with a new iOS 7 friendly UI) and the back end (wait until you see how good it is at edge detection). This is my favorite app for turning bits of paper into digital PDF files full of OCR’d bits of awesomeness.