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.

The guys over at The Sweet Setup asked me to share my iPad home screen. How could I say no? The funny part is that since submitting that my home screen has gone through even more changes including the addition of a few folders. Gasp!

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As an admitted Star Wars fan, I couldn’t help buying this book from the iBookstore. It uses the iBooks Author tools that I so love for my own Field Guides and includes tons of great photo galleries, interviews, and outtakes. If Episode V is your favorite one (and shouldn’t it be for all of us?), then check this book out. Just make sure to be careful when you read it because every time I open it up, time seems to stop.

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There has always been an interesting dichotomy between Apple and Mac Users over history. As users, we relish in little trips down memory lane about the original control panel or how bleak things were in the 90s. It has been a journey for us all and we can’t wait to talk about it.

Traditionally Apple has, at least publicly, shunned these nostalgic trips. The logic was that it is a tough, competitive world and Apple needs to focus on the future, always. There are several reports that Apple sent its own collection of historic Apple hardware to Stanford to make room. Apple all but ignored the Mac’s 25th birthday, which made me a little sad.

I understand why Apple feels compelled to stay focussed on the future but also very much appreciate the love they’ve been giving to the Mac for its 30th birthday. In case you’ve missed out, they’ve got a special website set up for the event with plenty of cool (and nostalgic) images and stories. They made one video all about the Mac’s impact and another video (shot entirely with the iPhone 5s) giving us a day in the life of Apple products shot on the Mac’s birthday. If you haven’t already, set aside 20 minutes and go celebrate 30 years of Mac with Apple.

A few years ago I wrote about doing optical character recognition with AppleScript and PDFpen. Remarkably, it still works. Katie Floyd had a great idea of incorporating that script into a Hazel rule that looks for PDFs without OCR and performing the OCR automagically. She just published a how-to.

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This week’s Mac Power Users episode is ready for download full of great Mac and iOS tips from Federico Viticci from Mac Stories. We had a lot of fun recording this episode and it came out great.

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