Did you know that Joe Kissell wrote a book about cooking your turkey? It takes a lot of moxie for a tech publisher to go after Thanksgiving dinner but Take Control Books did just that. If you need a little help going into the holiday, check this out.
I paid full price ($70) for this keyboard a year ago and love it. It has solar charger so I never need batteries and it pairs with three separate bluetooth devices. I use it with my iMac, iPad, and iPhone. The keyboard feels like an Apple keyboard but the keys are slightly concave, which is nice. For a short while (I believe this ends tomorrow) it is just $30. If you are looking for a versatile keyboard, you’ll like this one. Thanks Chad for pointing this out.
Brian Almeida’s free service to convert emails to PDFs from your iOS devices is now out of beta. If you sign up, you get a magical email address. Forward any email there and it comes back to you as a PDF. I know there are also some apps that try to do this natively on iOS but I’ve never been very impressed with any of them. If this is also an issue for you, check out Brian’s service.
Speaking of Dragon Dictate, it’s on sale today for half price.
Macworld published an article I wrote today comparing the accuracy of Dragon Dictate vs. Mavericks Dictation. Short version: Dragon wins but I still have use for Mavericks Dictation.
When I was on Brett Terpstra’s Systematic podcast this week, we both bemoaned the inability to change search token criteria without using the mouse. Turns out we were both wrong. You can. The key shortcuts are:
Option-Command-F to get in the Apple Mail search bar (We got that one right).
Up Arrow, Down Arrow, Return to select a name.
Shift-Left Arrow to get into the search token selections, like To, From, Any.
Below is a 20 second screencast demonstrating it with 100% more banjo than anything I’ve ever made before. Thanks listener Thomas for the tip.
Two of my favorite podcasts are Adam Christianson’s MacCast and Chuck Joiner’s MacVoices.
The MacCast was the first legitimate Mac podcast. Adam has been producing his show with his pleasant mix of news and tips for years. I joined Adam to talk about the Email Field Guide and my experiences with iBooks and self publishing.
Chuck Joiner is the James Lipton of the Mac community with his regular interviews of Mac and Apple luminaries. Chuck lowered his standards to let me on the show this week to also talk about Email. I feel privileged to be on both of these shows.
I’ve been running pretty hard the last few months between the day job and finishing up the Email Field Guide. In the process, I’ve fallen off the wagon a few times with my OmniFocus task management discipline. Everybody probably knows that feeling of seeing the red badge of “Overdue” show up on the icon and know that it has been several days since you opened up the application and sorted through things. You know there is ticking bomb under your kitchen table and part of you would rather pretend it’s not there and keep eating Cheeze-Its.
I’m here to tell you to put down the box of delicious cheese-flavored crackers and instead cut the red wire. If you are using some of the tricks I showed in my OmniFocus Screencasts, it will not take that long to quickly get through your task list. Even if that means pushing 95% of your tasks off until next Monday, that 5% left is manageable and just think how much more time and money it will cost to rebuild your kitchen if you let that bomb go off.
Here is how I did it under fire the last few weeks.
I have a special perspective to help me sweep the decks. It removes all project distinctions and instead just gives me a long list of all active tasks. This makes it really easy to grab big fat chunks of them using the shift or command keys while selecting.
On the Mac version of OmniFocus, open up the inspector and move the start date to some safe date in the future for large swathes of your selected task backlog. Set a record for how many you move with one selection.
There will be a few important things left. Deal with those and get back to the big project that put you behind in the first place. Remember, this too shall pass.
The thing is there are the problems you know and the problems you don’t know. It is the ones you don’t know that will get you every damn time.
Have you seen these pictures of the solar farms Apple built in North Carolina? It looks like Apple is most certainly putting its money where its mouth is with respect to clean energy. While I have no basis for such an opinion, I feel Tim Cook’s hands all over this.
I’m surprised people aren’t making a bigger deal out of the new feature in iOS 7 that allows hardware manufacturers to develop game controllers for the iPad and iPhone. I think there is room here for someone to make a really great controller and I’m sure if they did, game developers in the super-competitive world of iOS game development would quickly adopt it. I also think it would usher in a whole different breed of joystick and button-mashing games that we really aren’t currently getting on iOS. Touch arcade recently reviewed the MOGA Ace Power controller, which doesn’t appear to be the killer controller we are looking for.
