Read & Trust (me)

I’m pleased to announce that I, generally, and MacSparky.com, specifically, is a member of the Read & Trust consortium of writers and websites. When asked to join and I realized I already follow just about everyone at Read & Trust, joining was a no-brainer. In addition to discovering some great writers at Read & Trust, you can also sign up for their newsletter where members write about things important to them. I’m looking forward to contributing and thank the gang at Read & Trust for inviting me to the party.

Mattebox for iPhone

I seem to change camera apps on my iPhone with the same frequency as my socks but I’m really digging Mattebox by Ben Syverson. It has some real nice controls and feels like a traditional camera when you use it. One of my favoribe bits is the virtual shutter slider. When you touch it, Mattebox locks the focus and exposure. You can then compose your shot with focus and exposure locked It acts just like a half-press on a dedicated camera. You then pull down the virtual lever to fire off a shot. Ben did a video explaining the app.

To My Old Master…

Slavery wasn’t that long ago. I recently talked to a friend whose great-grandfather was a slave. This letter from a former slave to his former master brings the whole mess into focus for me. Former slave Jourdan Anderson’s closing line cinched it for me.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Kottke has an update that shows Mr. Anderson lived into the 20th century and along with his wife, Mandy, had many children.

Text Expander and OmniFocus

Sven Fechner recently screencasted how he goes about using TextExpander with OmniFocus. Sven has an interesting workflow where he uses a task’s note section to track projects. I do something similar inside nvALT, not in OmniFocus. I do, however, use TextExpander all the time for repetitive phrases in OmniFocus. Since Sven threw down with a video, so did I. You can also download my favorite OmniFocus TextExpander Snippets below.

Download the Snippets

TextExpander + OmniFocus from David Sparks on Vimeo.

Since OmniFocus for iPad doesn’t support TextExpander Touch, you’ve got to use Apple’s own iOS shortcut tools. This is where it gets wonky. For reasons beyond me, the snippet cannot start with a period (.), so I start them with an “x”. Moreover, you can’t simply insert the cursor at the beginning of some text and expand. There must be a leading space. So, when adding a snippet before existing text you have to place the cursor, then advance a space, then place the cursor again back a space (there is no key to move the cursor backward), and then fire off the snippet. Tedious.


Dumping Google Search

I’ve been looking at alternatives to Google Search. You should too. Lately, things are getting weird at Google. In short, I think they’ve lost direction. Google’s original thing was simple: fast, accurate search results without a bunch of clutter. That’s changed. Google is increasingly pushing itself into the social media business. I’m not sure exactly when the course correction started but the battleship is most certainly steaming in that direction now with the emergence of Google+ and the “added benefit” of Searching Your World.

Nevertheless, it seems increasingly clear to me that I don’t want to keep giving my information over to the Google masters. Looking at the original three reasons to use Google search (accuracy, clean interface, and speed), it occurs to me that Google search results are no longer as accurate as they give preference to their own services over others. Moreover, Google search results are no longer as clutter-free as they once were.

Then there is privacy. Lots of people are unhappy with Google’s latest revisions to the privacy policy, which makes clear they are sharing your data across all of their services, like it or not. This really doesn’t shock me. I’ve always known that in the Google business model, advertising agencies are the “customer” and I am the “product.” This is why I could never embrace Gmail despite its many benefits. Regardless, this adds a fourth component to choosing the best search engine that didn’t exist when Google was a plucky start-up, privacy. While my search results are pretty milk-toast, I don’t like the idea of someone using them to sell me milk and toast. Google indexes everything.

Adding privacy to the mix, my new criteria for a browser are, in order of priority: 1. accuracy, 2. privacy, 3. Clean UI, and 4. Speed. I list speed last because it is relative. I want something fast but it doesn’t have to be the fastest. So long as I don’t have to check my watch waiting for results I am fine. So where does this leave me with Google? On the outs.

Enter the Duck

I took Ben Brooks’s advice and started using DuckDuckGo a few weeks ago. It reminds me of Google 10 years ago. The search page is really clean and the results are very accurate. I’m guessing it is slower that Google’s search but it isn’t noticeable. Moreover, DuckDuckGo has the kind of security policy that I can curl up with and get comfy.

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell.

So I’ve been running it two weeks and I don’t miss Google. It displays search results on a clean page, they feel just as accurate as a Google search would without the spam and Google+ bias, it is fast enough, and they don’t track a damn thing. Winner.

Adding DuckDuckGo to My Life

Since Apple has not added DuckDuckGo as a possible default search engine for Mac OS X or iOS, you need to do a little bit of legwork.

For the Mac, you can use Glims to update Safari’s in-app search bar. Since I do >90% of my searches with LaunchBar, I created a custom search template. To create one, display your LaunchBar index (from the Index menu) and select Search Templates. Then tap the Add button and add a new search template for DuckDuckGo pointing at http://www.duckduckgo.com/*

Next time you fire up LaunchBar, type duck, hit the spacebar, and go.

For iOS, I just added the search page to my bookmark bar as Duck. This syncs between my devices using the iCloud bookmark syncing feature and performing a new search just requires me to tap the word. There is also an iOS apps if you prefer.

After using Google search for so long, I was surprised at how easy it was to dump it and how little I miss it. Give DuckDuckGo a try.

OmniFocus Forecast and Start Dates

A surprising number of attendees at my Macworld talk about OmniFocus were not aware that you could show start date items in the iPad version’s Forecast View. This is super useful. Here is the setting.

I use this every afternoon as I clear out my current day and look forward to the next. I also use it on Sunday to take an overview of what I’m up against in the following week. If I have days that are full of appointments AND 60 tasks assigned to the day, I make a decision and either move tasks, appointments, or both. Go nuts.