This Safari extension lets you choose your search engine for Safari 6’s omnibar (including DuckDuckGo).

Bryan Kyle is one clever nerd.

I’d like to thank SquareSpace 6 for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. I’ve been a paying customer for years and I love it.

Design a visually rich website with magazine-quality layouts that scales to any screen size, –all without touching a line of code. Squarespace 6 is a revolutionary new website creation platform with over 50 new features. Squarespace’’s breakthrough LayoutEngine technology allows anyone to create visually-rich pages with any configuration of text, images, or blocks by dragging items exactly where you want them.

The platform comes equipped with 20 new fully customizable templates and offers sophisticated media management, a robust blogging engine, deep social network integration, real-time statistics, multiple author support, and more.

Try Squarespace 6 today –free 14-day trial.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

Greg and his friends over at Agile Tortoise just released an update to Drafts 2.0 for iPhone. I’ve written about Drafts before. It is a great little app that lets you generate pieces of text and send them off to email, Byword, and other places that make sense. If you’ve ever seen me talking to myself as I walk to lunch, I’m probably just filling up Drafts with notes, OmniFocus tasks, and emails to process when I’ve returned from my excellent taco. I’ve also started using it with Day One.

Version 2.0 brings it. The interface is more refined and you can now choose your font. Swipe down on the toolbar for full screen reading and there are some nifty sounds, which make me happy.

There is more.

When I first wrote about Drafts I explained how I’d prefer to create drafts on my iPhone on the go but edit and process them on the iPad. Agile Tortoise made it happen. There is now a separate Drafts app for the iPad ($3). It has a custom interface designed specifically around the iPad and looks great. There is a stack of drafts on the left column arranged in reverse order of their creation, so the most recent one is on top. Moreover the whole thing syncs brilliantly with the iPhone. As a point of interest, Agile Tortoise is pulling off the sync using the Simperium Sync Platform from the creators of Simplenote. I’ve been running the Drafts betas for several weeks and it’s wicked fast. I never would’ve guessed with the existence of Dropbox and iCloud that there is room for another sync platform, but it appears there is. I’m also told Symperium is very easy to implement so I suspect we’ll see more of it.

The space on my home screen is precious. This app is worthy.

Mac Power Users Episode 99, Workflows with Marco Arment, is up. Get the episode over at 5by5. Here Marco personally advise me on how to use Instapaper and explain why he hates software. Also, don’t forget to subscribe in iTunes.

∞

Thanks Boom for sponsoring the feed this week.

Boom is a volume booster app for your Mac.

It increases the system audio volume to produce better-quality audio from the built-in speakers. The system-wide graphic equalizer can further enhance your Mac’s audio quality.

Boom won the Macworld Best of Show award for its simplicity, elegancy and well-crafted user interface. It is priced at $6.99 and can be purchased from the Global Delight Online Store or through the Mac App Store. There’s also a free 7-day trial. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.
Post Image

http://syndicateads.net/cms/images/Boom-volume-booster.pn

My friend, Yuvi Zalkow, is facing a crisis. You see, he is the most famous failed writer on the Internet. Getting rejections is his thing. Yuvi is much too busy producing charming little videos about The Tyranny of The New Yorker or Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s excellent Obsession x Voice talk to hoodwink a publisher and push a novel out.

The problem is that today Yuvi did just that. His new novel, a brilliant novel in the works, released and it’s good. I’m halfway through and I don’t know how to describe it. It makes me smile, frown, and occasionally wrenches my guts. So far there are no secret agents, no government plots, and no 50 shades of bodice-ripping. Instead, it is a book about life and neurosis and I’m really enjoying it.

Yuvi is one of us and if this book sounds remotely interesting, go buy it.

Wow.

The latest Pixelmator update is really nice with several new features including iCloud syncing across multiple Macs, alignment guides (which I love), several new effects and an effects browser that lets you instantly preview effects and color adjustments to your image. Did I mention it now fully supports the retina display? I can’t believe this just costs $14.99.

First, I just love the way this video was produced. (I’d love it even more if the music was a little softer.) Second, if this gets widespread adoption, it is going to be really handy.

Here is sample of how I answer security questions.

I always felt those silly questions were way to easy to guess. Where did I grow up? Really? Who said the answers have to be true or even make sense?
One of my 1Password tricks is to use its password generator to create jibber-jabber responses to these questions. You can do it from the 1Password plugin right in Safari or Chrome.

This makes so much more sense to me. There is no way you are going to figure out my security question answers reading my Twitter stream or (in some bizarre, twisted alternate universe) my Facebook account. Likewise for people who knew me back in the day and happened to grow up in the same place I did.

Just make sure to save your responses to 1Password so when the need arises you can find them. Also, make yourself the mother of all master passwords for your 1Password vault. Not “Pencil”.