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.

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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.

WeMo Long Press Contest

Did you know the gang at Belkin has added a “long press” function to the WeMo switch. Now when you long press a WeMo light switch, you can fire off an IFTTT function. This is actually kind of awesome. For instance, your could have a long press send your significant other a text message that you are home safely. 

Moreover, Belkin is giving away some switches to people with interest and fun public recipes. Get the details at the Mac Power Users.

Mingle, A New Take on Contacts



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I’ve been playing with Samir Ghobril’s new contacts app, Mingle (website)(iTunes). The application breaks the usual “tap to view” paradigm of a contacts app. Instead, you swipe a contact and it gives you several options, including email, Twitter, call, and chat. This is not unlike some of the email applications that give you multiple options when you swipe an email message. I still find it fascinating how developers are innovating some very traditional categories of software (like contact managers) now that we’ve got these new interfaces. Mingle is definitely worth checking out.

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Mac Power Users Live, May 3 at 10am PST


Things have been nuts for me lately on several fronts. I spent some time this afternoon feeling sorry for myself until I realized I have the perfect cure in a live podcast about spectacularly geeky things planned for tomorrow. That’s right. The Mac Power Users monthly live show is set to go tomorrow at 10am PST/1pm EST. If you’ve got nothing better to do on Saturday, why don’t you stop by at the appointed hour.

Launch Center Pro Tutorial

I keep trying to get into using Launch Center Pro on my iPhone and iPad. I took to Drafts like a duck to water but for some reason LCP just isn’t sticking. Today Alex Guyot published the mother of all Launch Center Pro tutorials over at MacStories. If after I read this, I can’t incorporate Launch Center Pro, then Launch Center Pro just isn’t for me.

∞