Starting today Paperless and 60 Mountain Lion Tips are on sale in 51 countries, including Japan. I love that a little guy like me can publish in 51 countries.
Sponsor: RocketMatter
I’d like to thank RocketMatter for sponsoring MacSparky this week. Make sure to download their free ebook, Productivity Tips for the Discerning Cloud Computing Lawyer, to see the future of legal (and other professional) services. Leave the dinosaurs behind and move your practice into the future.
PDFpen Version 6
This weekend’s Mac Power Users episode announced the pending release of PDFpen for Mac, version 6. I’ve been in the beta test and I really like this update. PDFpen has always been a great PDF solution on the Mac and this upgrade really improves upon it.
User Interface
The new tool bar and edit bar make performing quick edits much easier. Everything is accessible with one mouse click. The new icons are also all retina friendly and look great on my fancy MacBook Pro.
Export to Word
I’m trying to figure out if I’m an edge case but I really love this new feature. Shady attorneys send me PDFs (when they should be Word or Pages documents) for review on a weekly basis. Now I can easily take the PDF, convert it to Word, and send it back to them with change tracking. I’ve already been doing this and they think I am some sort of dark wizard. This new feature does a really terrific job, capturing things like columns, graphics, and even some typography. This feature is worth the upgrade price alone.
Form Creation
Here is another great feature I didn’t know I needed but now love. If you scan a form, you no longer have to manually add the form fill in boxes. PDFpen does it for you, with one button. (This is a Pro version only feature.)
Pricing
Because the App Store doesn’t provide for upgrade pricing, Smile is going to put the apps half off for the first 48 hours they are available in the App Store. That’s $30 for PDFpen and $40 for PDFpen Pro. Buy it then. I’d get the Pro version because some of those features are really useful and at $40 it is a steal. You can do the traditional upgrade route through Smile but if you want iCloud support (I do), you’ll need to buy it from the Mac App Store. (Both the version they sale directly on their web site and the Mac App Store version support Dropbox syncing.) Exactly when this sale starts is unclear. Last I heard, they are waiting for the green light from Apple. As soon as it does go on sale, however, I’ll post and tweet about it. You’re going to want to get in on this sale.
I love it when a software company delights me. This new version of PDFpen does just that. It takes a product that I already loved and makes it better (without screwing up the things I loved about it to begin with). Here is a video I made showing off some of my favorite new features.
Permalinking SquareSpace with TextExpander
I get a lot of requests about how I put permalinks at the bottom of link posts. People think I’ve done this with some clever bit of web programming but the answer is really just a TextExpander snippet.
Here is the snippet text:
[∞](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/%clipboard)
You’ll have to replace the “macsparky” bit with your own domain. The trick is to grab the name of a pending post and put it in your clipboard. You do this in the Options tab for a new SquareSpace post.
As you can see I’ve highlighted the blog post name and the copied it (⌘+C). Then I flip back to my post text and put the cursor at the bottom and fire off the above snippet. (I uses “pperma” for my shortcut.)
That produces the following markdown.
[∞](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/permalinkingss)
This shows up as a permalink.
Home Screen: Thanh Pham
This week’s home screen comes to you courtesy of Thanh Pham (Twitter) from AsianEfficiency. I’ve long been an admirer of Thanh’s and his excellent content. I was fortunate enough to meet him this January at Macworld and found out that in addition to being a really smart guy, he’s also a really nice guy. Also, remarkably, he lives in the same county as me and we’ve never had dinner. We’re going to fix that. Thanh, show us your home screen.
What are some of favorite apps?
This app is a must-have. I almost browse more in 1Password than I do in Safari.
I have a lot video courses on my Macbook that I want to access with my iPhone and iPad. Instead of syncing the video files (which can be big) I like to stream them to my iDevice. So whenever I’m in bed or on the couch, I can pull out my iPhone, pick a video, stream it onto my iPhone and continue learning.
I’m always experimenting with my habits. Sometimes I’ll add or change multiple habits at the same time so having an app to track my progress is great. Over the years I’ve tried many different ones but I like Habit List the most.
Do I really need to say more? It’s the best task manager out there. Period.
I’m pretty new to listening to podcasts and I’ve found that Downcast appeals to me the most. Design is really important to me and this app is the best designed out of all podcast apps (just play with a couple gestures to see why).
I do a lot of reading so Instapaper is a must-have. Whenever I get a chance, I like to catch up with my articles in my inbox.
This is my go-to app for capturing. It’s fast, simple and you can easily store your notes in the right places. I’ll often use this too for dictating my thoughts because it’s so easy afterwards to get it stored in OmniFocus or Evernote.
Simply the best twitter client out there.
A gorgeous weather app that gets the job done. I mostly use this app just because it’s so beautiful.
Which app is your guilty pleasure?
It’s not on my home screen for a good reason. If you want to throw productivity out the window, this is the tower defense game you must have. You have been warned.
What is the app you are still missing?
I’ve tried a bunch of fitness apps for tracking progress, nutrition and measurements but none have really won me over. There are a lot of apps that excel at one thing but there is no app that does it ALL really well. I just want to easily track my progress, know how many calories I had today, track my weight, body fat and water weight without much effort. Integration with Siri would be really nice to have so I can just say what I did and ate, and have it all processed for me.
How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?
During the hours I’m working, maybe once an hour. I try to hide my phone whenever I’m engaged at work. However, as soon as I take a break or call it a day, I’m constantly on my phone.
What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?
I really like Siri. I use this feature a lot for sending texts, starting a timer, weather forecasts, reminders and directions.
If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?
I would like the idea of “charging your phone” to be non-existent. It’s something you shouldn’t have to think or worry about.
Another issue is iOS. I got an iPhone the first day it came out and I have never used another phone since then. However, with the lack of iOS innovation sometimes I feel like I’ve been using the same phone for a decade. There are a lot of opportunities for iOS to be even better, e.g. customizing the look and feel, lock screen utilities, customizing gestures and much more.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Thanks for having me! I really love your home screen series because I get to see how other people use their iDevices and I always learn something new. I hope I did the same for someone else.
Thanks Thanh
The Case for Paper
Thanks to @macosguy and Reneé for sending me this.
The RSS Apocalypse
Aldo Coresi explains:
“The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.”
I spent most of today in meetings. As a result, I didn’t have time to fiddle in Twitter or check in on the web. It was the kind of day where I knew I could catch up on the day’s news the way I do most busy days, through RSS. So you can imagine my suprise as I drove home today chatting with Katie Floyd on the phone and she tells me Google is uplugging Reader.
I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services. We all wondered how Google monetized its Reader expense but we wonder that about most Google services so we all cancelled our paid services and leapt.
Now Google is yanking the cord. Since Reader is the Google service I use the most, that made me a bit sad but I didn’t see it as the end of the world. I’m sure some enterprising folks have already filled the whiteboard and are spitballing ideas for the next great RSS reader service. Within a month competitors will be on the market and I’ll switch. It will probably cost a few bucks but they won’t be collecting data on me or selling to advertisers. (At least not the RSS service I evenutally choose won’t.) In other words, with Google exiting, the free market will take over. So my initial reaction was, “meh” and even a bit of enthusiasm that with paid RSS, people may start innovating again.
Then I got home and my wife was really upset about it. My wife is a bit of a nerd too but she travels in circles of electronically connected paper-crafters and they are absolutely up in arms about this. To them, Google Reader is RSS. They don’t know of alternative services and as far as they know, new services will never again exist. They think RSS is going to die on July 1 and that’s that. Now some of them will figure out they can go elsewhere but some won’t. Those people will stop reading blogs via RSS and those blogs will lose readers.
That got me thinking. I’ve spent years building up MacSparky.com. There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a new RSS system and subscribe again? The closing of Google Reader is going to result in the great RSS purge of 2013. Then Brett Terpstra tweeted this article by Aldo Cortesi which sums it all up in the above cited paragraph better than I ever could. This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad.
On Running Lists
I was getting a lot of email about running lists and, frankly, puzzling over it myself. So I went on my very own running list spirit quest and wrote it up for Macworld. The winner was, surprisingly, Apple’s Reminders app.
OmniFocus Setup: Do Stuff!
Do Stuff! from The Omni Group on Vimeo.
Here is my talk from the OmniFocus Setup called “Do Stuff”. There were some great presentations that day and the Omni Group production people did a superb job capturing it all. You can watch them all right here.
MPU 128: Typography with Ina Saltz
I’ve wanted to do a typography show for ages but never found the right guest. Fortunately, I recently did with Ina Saltz, who was knowledgeable, helpful, and patient as I butchered my way through the interview. There are lots of great tips for upping your typography game in this episode.