I noticed last night that the camera roll on my iPhone was using 6GB. Between iCloud and other mechanisms, my photos are backed up but I’ve been sloppy about cleaning out my camera roll. I could do this on the phone but it isn’t very fast. So I fired up my favorite Mac app for managing/copying/deleting lots of images at once, Image Capture. I’m often surprised by how many Mac owners don’t even know this application exists. It is part of the operating system and ships on every Mac. Rather than trying to manage large numbers of images from iPhoto or Aperture, Image Capture lets me triage my iOS photos first. I can select multiple images for management, export to my Mac, and, ultimately, deletion. There are even a few Automator hooks. There really isn’t anything magical about this little utility but once you know it’s there, you’ll probably find use for it.

Google Adsense makes my brain hurt. The best (and only) way to promote your company, product, app, or service to the MacSparky readers is through a week-long sponsorship. What do you get? An exclusive ad in the right margin and a post in the RSS feed. I only take one advertiser a week. I’ve got just a few weeks open between now and July and much more availability in the second half of the year. If you’re interested, send me a note.

The Omni Group has recently started distributing manuals and books about their software through the iBooks Store. I think it is a great idea. Frankly, I don’t know why more people aren’t using this method to connect with customers, especially in the Mac/iOS market.

I was disappointed to see the online document management service, Doo, shutting down. It seemed like they were onto something but perhaps they were too early. I have no doubt that at some point in the future online, organized document storage will be the rule, not the exception. The question is whether it will be our own private, controlled “online” (like The Transporter provides) or someone else’s.

This may be a lawyer thing but I spend a lot of time reading Word documents with tracked changes. Today Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. reviewed a Word file viewer, Reader 7, that doesn’t let you edit those documents but does an excellent job displaying them for review.

Awhile back, Chase Reeves made an excellent desktop image out of the hypothetical title for Merlin Mann‘s book. “Cut the bullshit. Do the hard stuff. Start making things you love.” I’m really not an inspirational phrase kind of guy. I don’t have pictures hanging in my office of bald eagles with quotes underneath them. Nevertheless, this phrase just resonates with me and Chase used a vintage hand plane which pushes even more of my buttons. I still find myself setting it as my desktop when I start losing my way. Chase was even nice enough to make a gray version for me.

For the last week I’ve done most of my writing on the iPad with the new Phraseology 2.0 (website)(App Store) from Agile Tortoise. I have to admit I buy a lot of text editors and for the most part I find them lacking in one reason or another and within a few days they end up on the scrap heap.

That has never been the case with Phraseology. Agile Tortoise is a one-man developer shop operated by Greg Pierce (yes, that Greg Pierce). Greg is one of the godfathers of the iOS url callback and he’s got three apps, Drafts, Terminology, and Phraseology that leverage these URL callbacks to the great delight of iOS writers everywhere. This lets you jump between these apps (and others supporting URL callbacks) at will. For example, you could write a lengthy email in Phraseology and with one button, send the text to Drafts for processing.

The new version has a shiny new iOS 7 interface. The app supports iCloud and Dropbox (including the ability to browse versions in Dropbox).

The most interesting new feature is speech syntax highlighting. Phraseology will analyze your document for you and highlight (with differing colors) nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions. With a little bit of analysis of my longer documents, this makes me look smarter. I like that.

Phraseology is an easy app to recommend. It is smart but not too heavy. It has an innovative developer behind it that you just know will continue to make it interesting and better. It isn’t my daily writing engine because there is no companion Mac app but if there was, I could see myself spending lots of time in this app. After my one week experiment, I’m definitely going to be using it more often, especially for longer documents.