Today’s Web Gems

Things are nutty for me today but there are a few posts of note:

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Key Bindings

A few weeks ago, Brett Terpstra posted about Key Bindings. I finally got around to installing Brett’s bindings over the weekend and can tell you I am already loving it. There is a lot to absorb with all of these new shortcuts but there are already a few I’ve internalized:

  • Opt-y – Copy paragraph
  • Opt-+ – Uppercase word
  • Control-Command-W, Return – Force line break

Between Brett’s snippets, services, and keybindings, he is nearly singlehandedly revolutionizing the way we can write on our Macs. That makes Brett pretty swell in my book.

Web Forms with TextExpander

I recently found myself repeatedly filling out the same web form on a work-related thingy. It is seven fields with the same data, every time. It was driving me nuts. I opened up TextExpander in desperation and found the %key:tab% command. It was really easy building a snippet that tabs between fields.

One caveat: Don’t use this feature for passwords. Snippets + passwords = bad. There are other apps for passwords.

See Me at the Petaluma MCE Next Weekend

While at Macworld, I met some very nice people who organize the annual Petaluma Macintosh Computer Expo on October 1. This year I agreed to speak about using the Mac and iPad for getting work done. If you are in the Northern California area next weekend, it looks like a lot of fun with some outstanding speakers including: Jason Snell, Chris Breen, Derrick Story, Ted Landau, and more. If you do attend, make sure to say hello to me.

BBEdit ♡ Automator

While I’m not sold on using BBEdit for my writing workflow, I’m really impressed with its Automator support. There are so many services I could cook up with these toys. Where to begin?

Home Screens – Jorge Pedroso

This week’s home screen features my newest friend from Portugal, Jorge Pedroso (Twitter). Jorge is one of the two developers that created my current favorite simple text editor, Byword. Jorge loves his iPhone and agreed to share. So Jorge, show us your home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

  • Instacast is filling my recent addiction to podcasts—thanks a lot, 5by5. It made the podcast subscribing+listening experience much more pleasant. Streaming is a killer feature and the iTunes and iPod apps simply don’t cut it.

  • Droplr I use to quickly share iPhone screenshots and video over-the-air with co-workers. It’s a great way to quickly show issues in the apps as we develop when one of us is working remotely.

  • RTP is how I keep up with portuguese news. These days, the news coming are mostly not that good but the app is pretty great.

  • Tiny Wings for casual gaming. Perfectly designed, relaxing, challenging and different every day.

What is your favorite app?

Mobile Safari. For me, it alone revolutionized the mobile internet and made it a first class experience on handheld devices. When I’m on the go, I find myself using it all the time, directly or indirectly through other app.

Mail and Twitter for iPhone deserve honorable mentions for being my most used apps.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Ranky. I can’t help it. Having apps selling on the App Store puts one in constant desire of checking the App Store ranks. I hope this gets better with time.

What is the app you are still missing?

Not missing much but I’ve been looking for a simple, yet comprehensive, personal analytics app. A smart writing app with Markdown capabilities would be nice for the go too. Just saying.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

As many times as I hear it emitting a sound. I check Mail and Twitter on the iPhone and Metaclassy’s customer support comes through those channels. I’m not complaining (yet). I love my job.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I’ll pick two, if I may. One on software and another on hardware.

On software, it’s iOS in general and the App Store in particular. They destroyed so many barriers, both for users and developers. I thank iOS for the overall quality of most apps and the App Store for the simplicity of getting those same apps.

On hardware, it’s the Retina display of the iPhone 4. I still remember the wow moment when I first had it in my hands. For weeks, it made it really difficult for me to use an iPad frequently again (or any other mobile device for that matter). I got used to the differences but I eagerly wait for the day where pixels are no longer human-detectable squares in our screens.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

Well, I hate it when I’m laying down in bed/couch, reading or something, and the iPhone slips and falls on my face. So, I’d consider adding Velcro on the iPhone’s back and a glove. Skin magnets could work too. Needs research.

Other than that, giving high priority to all radars (issues and improvements) I submitted to bugreport.apple.com would be pretty cool.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I’m eagerly anticipating the next year, as a developer and as a user. After the mobile shift, it seems everyone is already undergoing another shift in personal computing where data is supposed to come full-circle seamlessly across all devices. MacSparky was spot on calling multi-platform as a feature at the center of it. Consequently, data portability and interoperability will increasingly become features/concerns to look out for. For me, it will be yet another busy year—in a good way.

Thanks Jorge.

To read more home screens, clicky here

Managing Spammy Friends

Spam is usually a simple problem for me. Somebody sends me a spammy e-mail and they get the honor of a special rule in Mail.app that looks something like this.

Basically, anything from that person goes straight to trash. Problem solved. SpamSieve also helps.

However, I have unique problem with a few friends and relatives that think I actually give a damn about their newly found web collections of humorous kitten photos (“Oh, Shit”) or their hokey political rants. Unfortunately, these people sometimes also send me information that I actually need. In other words, I can’t simply give them my usual spammer=delete rule. So how do I get rid of their spam but still get their non-spam mail?

The solution lies in the fact that spammers – even friendly ones – are not capable of sending spammy type e-mail to just one person. These objectionable e-mails are always copied to my spam friends’ other contacts, usually several of which are complete strangers to me. This is the key to this hack.

I created a rule that looks for e-mail from my spammy friends with copies to a stranger that shows up in prior spam-type e-mails. The rule sends those to the trash. If my spammy friend then sends me an e-mail with actual substantive content (which wouldn’t be copied to the complete stranger), the rule doesn’t catch it. The rule looks like this.

I explained this rule and talked ad nauseum about e-mail in a recent MPU Episode.

Markdown Reference Links Revisited

Following recording the most recent MPU episode, I got serious about Brett Terpstra’s Markdown Services. These are a really nice collection of tools that I’m completely incapable of replicating with my usual bag automation tools and chewing gum. I used to do this with TextExpander. I talked about this a little bit during the show but since recording, I’ve particularly picked up on using the services that convert inline links to reference links and the other that assembles reference links from open Safari tabs. Think about that one for a moment: Write an article, open Safari and find your links, run the service. Boom. It’s a service so it works anywhere you write text.

I’m not alone, since the episode hit the airwaves I’ve received several e-mails from bloggers and web-writers explaining how this changed their workflows. Nice work Mr. Terpstra, indeed.

Dr. Drang also covered this today and talked about how he pulls off these tricks with TextMate. (The good Doctor also is the first to publicly unmask me as a tramp.) While I get that you can do a lot more with a tools like TextMate, at this point I’m thinking Brett’s services plus Byword are enough for me.