In Praise of Skitch

Skitch, the image swiss army knife for the Mac has gone through a few phases of existence. First, it was this mysterious beta that you had to have a secret handshake to get in on. Then it became the perpetual beta product that everybody used and nobody paid for. Finally, it is now the successful Mac OS X App store product that has 27 five star reviews.

Throughout all of these iterations, Skitch has remained the perfect app for quick and easy image annotation. Everyone I’ve turned on to this app (ranging from my science teacher niece to my graphics artist friends) loves it. Today I came clean and finally paid for Skitch. How about you?

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Powermate Cough Button

My friend, George Starcher, recently posted about using a Griffen Powermate as an oversized cough button for a podcasting rig. I must admit, since my Podcasting setup doesn’t use a board, I’ve always had a bit of cough button envy and the the MPU listeners can attest to the many random strange sounds that come out of me on some episodes. So I took George’s advice and bought a Powermate. It works brilliantly and sits very nicely next to my Magic Trackpad. Griffen did a good job with the controller software. It even accepts Applescrips. I expect to get creative with this thing. Stay tuned.

Reeder Sync

Macdrifter makes a great point about Reeder, it syncs really fast. I went and downloaded a few of the Google Reader apps I’d given up on in the past and sure enough, they all feel slow compared to Reeder. As much as I like trying new apps, when it comes to news readers, I’ve been using Reeder since it released.

Key Bindings with Mac OS X

With all of Mac OS X’s spit and polish, it is easy to forget there is a Unix computer under there. Reader Francois recently turned me on this excellent collection of Mac OS X key bindings. Take a long look. I’m sure you’ll find a few that can help you out, today. For instance, I had no idea you could tab inside a form box with Option + Tab.

If that isn’t enough, roll your own bindings with KeyBindingsEditor, which I haven’t had time to test but looks interesting.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Join My Macworld Live Talk on May 12

Macworld Magazine is starting a new program where they feature an author for an online question and answer session. I’m going to be in San Francisco on May 12 at 11:00 a.m. PST to broadcast live and talk about Macs and iPads at work with Macworld editor, Jason Snell. Please join in and tell your friends. It should be a lot of fun. You need to sign up to see the event so get cracking.

Automating OmniFocus Task Entry

Since publishing the first screencast on capture, I’ve received several e-mails asking for a way to automate task creation based on a text list. The idea is making a task list in a text file and having your Mac convert it to tasks. While I haven’t looked into this, Josh Betz did and came up with this nifty AppleScript.

Despite Josh’s scripting prowess, I’m still adding tasks from a text list manually. I do this because quite often something that seems like a good idea when I peck it into a text file, like perhaps running with scissors, doesn’t pass the sniff test when it comes time to add the tasks to OmniFocus. Moreover, it really isn’t that hard to add new tasks to OmniFocus directly on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Home Screens – Wendy Cherwinski

I first met Wendy Cherwinski (twitter) in the Macworld speaker room several years ago. Wendy has this disarming, infectious smile and near encyclopedic knowledge of Keynote and presenting skills. It makes sense after all. Wendy pays her rent writing speeches and teaching people to communicate at Echelon Communications.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

We’re probably talking about the suite of apps I’ve named ‘productivity’. As a writer, I’m always reaching for a note-taking app such as SimpleNote to copy some gem I’ve gleaned from Twitter or the Web. It’s also great to have a text editor like PlainText handy so I can start working on a speech, presentation or article and then pick up the project later on either my iMac or MacBookPro. As you might guess, I’m a big fan of DropBox.

What is your favorite app?

My very favorite app is Scrivener, which is actually a Mac app. It’s superb for writing speeches because you can dip into your research so easily while you work on a draft. Using Scrivener and TextExpander together really helps chip time off speech assignments. My favourites apps on the iPhone are Captio and Say It Mail It. I generate some of my best ideas when I’m out for a walk. Captio lets me capture my thoughts and email them to myself. I use Say It Mail It to record spoken ideas that I want to share with my husband.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

I’m mostly all business when it comes to using my iPhone. However, I like to relax with my Crosswords app on the iPad. Blocking out the world, and concentrating on what fits ‘down’ and ‘across’ for an hour or so is definitely a guilty pleasure.

What is the app you are still missing?

I just bought Notesy and can’t wait to give it a spin. It’s a note-taking app that syncs with DropBox so you can work across your iPhone, iPad and computer. Plus you can email your notes, which is a feature I find especially attractive. Actually, I’m missing every note-taking and text editing app that has yet to be invented. I love to get new ones and give them a test drive.

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

I use both of them too many times a day to count. When the alarm goes off in the morning I grab one or the other to check Twitter and email while I listen to the news on the radio. Over breakfast, I scroll through news sites while I read the paper. (I often have to search through sections of the paper to retrieve my iPhone before heading off to my office.) Basically, if I’m not in front of my computer, I have either my iPhone or iPad in hand. Before bed I set them up to recharge.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I love watching videos on both devices. My husband likes to shoot video on our holidays and then create tightly edited movies complete with music. In an idle moment I can watch a movie and enjoy the walk down memory lane. Priceless.

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

I would improve the integration between mobile devices and the desktop (less dependence on iTunes). MobileMe should behave more like DropBox and wireless syncing of docs between iOS and OSX apps would be terrific.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Another of my favourite Apple products is my iPod nano. I bought a band so I can wear it as a wristwatch. It works great!

Thanks Wendy.