RSS Sponsor: WeatherSnitch 2


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Thank you WeatherSnitch 2 for sponsoring MacSparky this week.

Finding the perfect weather app isn’t easy. Most apps rely on free information; providing the bare minimum and accuracy that leaves much to be desired. They lure you in with fancy effects and a flashy interface, distracting you from what matters most — the weather forecast. WeatherSnitch throws these tired gimmicks to the wayside. Focusing on highly detailed, highly reliable weather forecasts and an interface void of any ads, clutter and other convoluted features that get in the way.

Powered by SnitchWeather, you have access to 30,000 local weather stations in over 240 countries. Get detailed 15-day forecasts, precise hour-by-hour forecasts and near real-time observations for millions of locations around the world. Try it today and see for yourself why iTunes named WeatherSnitch 2 the best iPhone weather app in App Store Rewind 2011.

This week you can get WeatherSnitch 2 for only $1.99.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

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iOS 6 and Every-Day Life

Shawn Blanc just saved me a bunch of time. I have an outline that includes a post highlighting the same features. Soon we will take these all for granted. I used the iOS 6 beta and the decline call and send a text message feature is already one of my staples.

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The Trick to a Good R2D2 Ringtone …

… is to make sure to include spaces. He just can’t jabber endlessly. The little robot will give you a chance to respond. With five minutes in GarageBand and some web downloaded WAV files (which I’ll leave up to you to find), I just made the perfect weekend ringtone.


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Twist for iPhone

Ever want your iPhone to automatically notify friends, family, and collegues when you are about to arrive? TechHive has a nice reveiw of an app I’ve come to rely upon.

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Kaboo Bags

My wife can’t stop talking about how much she likes her Kaboo Bag, a purse that includes a handy iPad pouch. They are made by a friend of ours and with the holidays coming up, you may want to check this out.

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iOS OmniFocus ♥ TextExpander touch

Today’s iOS OmniFocus update is a doozy. The headline feature is the addition of iOS TextExpander support. As I’ve explained before, I aggressively use TextExpander snippets when creating tasks in OmniFocus. I even made a screencast about it. Now they work on the iPhone and iPad as well. I love that.

You can download a few of my OmniFocus related TextExpander snippets right here. In order to get them on your iOS device, install them in TextExpander on your Mac and use the Dropbox sync to transfer them over. If you don’t own a Mac, just create them manually in TextExpander Touch on your iOS device. These are really just a sampling. Once you get the idea, customize for whatever works for you.

While Apple added Keyboard Shortcuts with iOS 5, they are inferior to TextExpander shortcuts in several ways. First, they don’t synchronize. You have to add them manually to every single iOS device you own. (UPDATE: I’m told iOS 6 remedies this and Keyboard Shortcuts will sync between iOS devices.) TextExpander syncs to Dropbox and takes that tedium away. I find I create very few TextExpander snippets on my iOS devices and instead create them on the Mac and let Dropbox take care of the rest.

Also, there are some strange behaviors using the iOS Keyboard Shortcuts. Specifically, they need to be typed with no trailing characters. If you copy and paste text into a new OmniFocus entry and then move the cursor to the beginning of the pasted text to add a Keyboard Shortcut, it won’t work unless you add an additional space and then, using your finger, move the cursor back yet again another space before typing the Keyboard Shortcut. I found this vexing. With TextExpaner snippets in OmniFocus, the snippet fires whether or not there is an additional space. This makes a difference.

Another part of today’s iOS OmniFocus update is an improved synchronization with the native iOS Reminders database. This makes it much easier to synchronize these lists. The power tip here is that it gives you the ability to dictate with Siri to Reminders and have that automatically move over into OmniFocus. I use this feature every day and quite often. Again I made videos about this. However, the setup is simpler now than shown in the video.
The Siri command I use when adding items to my OmniFocus list is as follows:

“Add [task] to my reminders list.”

i.e., “Add fumigate DeathStar garbage room to my reminders list.”

OmniFocus watches the Reminders list titled “Reminders” (I appreciate that is confusing) and, once you open OmniFocus on your iPhone, incorporates any items found in the “Reminders” list to your OmniFocus inbox. This does not prevent you from having separate Reminders lists for other things. I, for instance, have Reminders list for Target, Groceries, and other running list type matters.

Overall, the addition of TextExpander support in OmniFocus is huge for me. I’ve been running the beta for a few weeks and couldn’t imagine going back. I’m guessing I’m not alone.

Paperless, Version 1.2


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I’m pleased to announce the update to Paperless is now live both in the Apple iBookstore and in PDF form.

Why An Update?

It always made me a little crazy with my prior books that I couldn’t update them. I was in Barnes and Noble just the other day looking at a copy of iPad at Work on the shelf. By and large, the book held up pretty well. However, there are a few areas in it that I would desperately like to update. Of course that’s not possible given that most of the copies are sitting on people shelves and I don’t have control over the digital copies either. The ability to update a book was one of my big motivations to self-publish.

The Paperless Update

As soon as Paperless shipped, I began making a list of things I wanted to update. I found a couple of amusing/horrifying typos. But moreover, the workflows evolved. I became even more reliant on OCR technologies and some of the software got better, including the TextExpander 4.0 update. I also received a lot of feedback from readers with questions that should’ve been addressed in the book. For instance, exactly how do you compress a PDF file to save size?

The update includes several new screencasts and updates prior screencasts. It also includes additional sections addressing the above questions and more. (For instance, I added a section pointing out similar applications to Hazel and TextExpander on the Windows PC side of the fence.) This is an update, not a second edition. A lot of the book remains the same.

Getting the Update

To get the update in iBooks, delete the current version of the book on your iPad, go to the iBookstore, and re-download. Apple will already remember that you purchased it and you will not have to pay again. In the process, you will lose annotations that you made to the prior version. Sadly, there is no delta update mechanism for books. We are pioneers together.

If you purchased the PDF version, go back to your original confirmation email and just downloaded again. If you’ve run out of download tokens, send me a note.

While it’s downloading, you may want to go eat a cookie or, better yet, make some cookies from scratch and then slowly eat them. The book file even bigger than it was before. The download is going to take a while. It took me 30 minutes this morning.

I hope everyone enjoys the update. I put a significant amount of work into preparing it and I love the fact that I can write books this way. Sometimes I think I’m living in the future. Don’t be surprised if there’s another update to Paperless sometime next year.

What’s Next?

On the general topic of the Field Guides, the next book is so close to submission that I can taste it. I’ve written it with a co-author, someone most readers of MacSparky will already know and love. I can’t wait to tell you more. Stay tuned.