When we recorded MPU 121 about building a website, I wanted to bring in someone that does nothing but eat and drink WordPress. That guy was John Chandler and he delivered. John pays for his shoes building beautiful WordPress sites and now he is sharing some his knowledge in this Mijingo screencast series.
If you are running a WordPress site and want to get better at it, here is your chance.
I’ve made no mystery of my love for iThoughtsHD. It is a great iPad app that finally brought home for me the utility of mind maps. It wasn’t long after I got hooked that I wrote the developer, Craig Scott, explaining how much I wanted iThoughts on my Mac. Craig wrote back with a very nice note explaining how he was focussing on iOS for the time being. So you can imagine my surprise when Craig wrote me about a month ago with a beta of iThoughtsX for the Mac. I’ve been using it ever since and now it is released for sale. If you like iThoughtsHD, you’re going to feel right at home with iThoughts X on your Mac.
Many of the features I like about iThoughtsHD also appear in iThoughtsX. The color pallet includes Ethan Schoonover’s great Solarized color scheme. There is a rich assortment of line and box types along with icons and images. (I’ve got to admit I’ve never used iThoughts’ clipart feature.)
The Mac version also inherits the iPad version’s quick entry method. Need a child branch? Tap the space bar three times. Need a sibling branch? Tap return three times. This is so second nature to me that I spit out mind maps as fast as the ideas hit me.
Using these tools I’m able to quickly start assembling ideas for later use in writing or dictation. I described this workflow at length in MPU 82, Cooking Ideas.
Like its iPad predecessor, iThoughtsX also can export to several formats including PDF, Image, Docx, Powerpoint, OPML, Markdown, and CSV.
The Markdown support is particularly clever. You can drag Markdown text into a blank canvas and it automatically creates a mind map based on linked images and heading levels. You have to see this part to believe it so I made a short video. (Sarah, my 11 year old, provided the Ukulele music.)
The file format (.itmz) is the same used on iThoughtsHD for the iPad so you can move the file back and forth between the two platforms. The app is sold directly by the developer and not in the Mac App Store. Sadly, that means there isn’t any iCloud support but all of the iterations of iThoughts play nicely with Dropbox.
You can watch additional screencasts and view galleries at the iThoughts website. The app is $60 and available now.
I’m increasingly relying on ratings for my iTunes playlists. Setting up smart playlists that just include four and five star music make it really easy to get your favorite music on an iTunes Match enabled iOS device. The trouble is I don’t have time to go hunting down unrated albums and when I do, I tend to spend way too much time fiddling with iTunes. Instead, I’ve created an “Unrated Jazz” smart playlist that looks like this.
I’ve got several Jazz Genres including Cool, Bebop, Classic, Contemporary, Vocal, and more. They all have the word “Jazz” in their genre so this smart playlist pulls from them all.
I’ll load this up in iTunes and then open the I Love Stars app that puts a rating doo-dad in my menu bar. I can start playing this smart playlist then and rate the songs as I work. Once I rate a song, it dissapears from the list and stops playing. I’ve then got to hit the play button on my keyboard or in I Love Stars to get the next song started.
I’ve been doing this for about a month and it is working. I’m getting through my jazz library without spending a lot of time fiddling. Moreover my other smart playlists built on ratings are getting a little better every day. Once this is done I am going to alter the list to attack some of my other favorite genres.
Clayton Morris’s ReadQuick (App Store) (Website) recently received a nice update. The App now works on the iPhone. We talked about ReadQuick at some length on MPU Episode 127. If you are unfamiliar with it, ReadQuick is an app that helps you speed read through your marked articles. It probably sounds nutty but it really works and I use it often for both work and fun related reading.
They’ve also got a content partnering deal with Macworld and TechHive. Since these are two of my favorite publications, this is a great source of material even if I don’t have anything marked.
This is a free update if you’ve already bought the iPad version. if not, ReadQuick is $5.
We’ve had lots of software guys join us on the Mac Power Users but I’ve always been interested in talking with a hardware guy. Geoff Barrall describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. He’s founded several companies that got successful hardware products to market including the Drobo and Transporter. Geoff is also a big Mac nerd like the rest of us. This week Geoff joined us to talk about how he uses his Apple gear and what’s involved in developing and releasing hardware devices.
I often hear from readers asking for an easy way to jump between markdown and Microsoft Word. It’s never really been that easy. The most recent version of iA Writer takes a lot of work out of this problem. They have built in a converter that goes between docx files (Microsoft Word 2007 or later) and markdown. You can drag and drop the word file on the icon and it opens as a markdown file. Conversely you can export a markdown file from inside the application to docx.
Obviously there will be problems if you bring in multi column documents with advanced formatting outside the bounds of markdown. I tested it with a complicated document and it imported just fine but it did strip out some of the advanced formatting.
There’s a lot to like about iA Writer and I’m glad to see they’re continuing to innovate.
I’m thinking there is a pretty good story behind this that none of us will ever know.
I cannot understate how repulsive I find the actions reported in this Ars Technica article. An App Developer made a successful photo app called “A Beautiful Mess”. The app was successful and then a group of copycats began submitting confusingly similar apps with names like “A Beautiful Mess Free” and “A Beautiful Mess +”. In some instances, the copycats used identical icons and screenshots. The article opines how some developers will even grab the code from the original app and reverse engineer it. How does Apple not see what is going on here? If I submitted an app called “Logic Pro X Free” do you think it would get approved? When someone so blatantly rips off another developer, Apple shouldn’t only reject the app, they should also ban the developer. There simply is no excuse.
The tragedy is that with the approval process Apple has the ability to stop this practice in its tracks. Indeed, Apple is the only app store that can do this since it is the only one requiring approval. As a community we need to put as much light on this as possible so, in addition to looking for malicious code, Apple also starts looking for (and banning) scummy developers.
If you are a Transporter owner, you may want to log in and check out the public beta for the new 2.0 software. It improves the experience several ways:
The new interface is really easy to use with the things you do most often. Creating folders can now be done right in the Finder. Sharing files is a right click away. When you drag-and-drop files and folders to your Transporter folder they will now automatically sync across all of your Transporters with no further setup required. I’ve combined this feature with some Hazel rules to make uploading podcast files a breeze.
No longer do recipients need a transporter account to receive file links. Did you get that? Load a big file on your Transporter, right click, share with anyone. Boom.
You can now limit what content gets placed on your local drive. For instance, if you are putting a big movie library on Transporter, you can keep it off your internal SSD.
This is beta software but I’ve been using it for awhile and had no problems. Moreover, I can’t imagine going back to the version 1 software. I’m spoiled.
If you want to try it out, login to the Transporter management website using your registered email and click the “Desktop & Mobile Software” link on the left side of the page to download the beta 2.0. Learn more here.
Over the past few years, cloud sync has become a “thing”. Users are working on multiple platforms now more than ever and they want their data to seamlessly show up everywhere. As this demand first emerged, we naturally looked to companies dedicated to providing cloud synchronization to offer solutions. This led to the rise of Dropbox, Box.com, and other similar service providers. Shortly afterward, the big companies got involved and now Apple offers iCloud, Google offers a variety of synchronization services, and Microsoft is also in the game with SkyDrive. When this first started, I assumed that that would be the end of the discussion. Companies like Apple and Google would offer synchronization services for which software developers would plug in and we’d move on. The reason I was so willing to think synchronization stopped with companies like Apple and Google was because the servers and back-end required to make that happen were so expensive that small developers simply could not roll their own sync services. I’m no longer convinced that is the case.
Tying a key component of your software—such as synchronization—to somebody else’s technology isn’t a good idea if it can be avoided. For instance if a developer wants to use Apple’s iCloud, she must sell her application through the App store. Even if there were no conditions tied to it, a developer is still relying upon the continued support from these large companies to keep their applications running. If it suddenly didn’t make sense for Apple or Google to continue supporting synchronization or perhaps they made a small change that breaks syncing, the developer is screwed. Another problem with giving synchronization over to a different company is the loss of control. If a customer has a sync problem, there is a good chance the developer can do nothing about it. Tying to an app to iCloud also makes it difficult if you are selling on multiple platforms as well. iCloud doesn’t support syncing to an android device.
For these reasons, app developers are looking to host their own synchronization services. This leads to what I would call the third phase of synchronization development. Specifically, app developer hosted synchronization. We are already seeing this happen. Earlier this year The Omni Group release its own synchronization service for its applications. I know that this was no small effort. The Omni Group spent years getting this right. Rovio has done the same with the popular Angry Birds franchise. The latest Dropbox initiative also seeks to provide a platform for developers to easily sync rudimentary bits of data for their applications. Wheels are now in motion.
While not all developers have the resources of companies like The Omni Group or Rovio, it is still early days. As people figure out this widget, it will get faster, easier, and cheaper to build. I suspect in the next two or three years, hosting and managing synchronize data will be a realistic option for small app developers. It makes a lot of sense for app developers to maintain control of this vital component of their software.
So what does that mean for us users? For one thing, we are no longer going to have all our data-eggs in one synchronization basket. The reliability of a synchronization mechanism will become a key component when evaluating software. A great app with a lousy sync won’t make the cut. Another effect of this will be the overriding concern for security. Instead of giving all of our data to Google or Apple, we are going to have bits and pieces of it spread out between various companies. Users are going to have to make a decision as to whether or not they can trust the vendor with key data before giving it to them for their synchronization engines. I also hope this generates a bit of an encryption arms race between vendors, resulting in better cloud encryption for users. Most importantly, this allows developers to control the entire widget and should result in a better user experience.
We’ve witnessed a revolution in data sharing and syncing over the last five years. I think the next five should prove just as interesting.
