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.