ABA Techshow 2010

I’m on the ground in Chicago for the second straight year talking about Macs and other sufficiently nerdy subjects at the American Bar Association’s Techshow. I’ve already met several new friends (like iPhoneJD publisher Jeff Richardson) and am now locking myself in to polish my presentations. If you are in attendance, make sure to stop by and introduce yourself. In addition to my sessions, I’ll also be co-hosting a dinner tomorrow with Mr. MacLawyer himself, Ben Stevens and I’ll be available to chat at the conference concierge desk on Friday the 26th for two hours starting at 10 a.m. If you are here, come by and say hello. We can compare menu bars.

Mac Power Users, #2 Technology Podcast

We have received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for our new “Workflows” series. Of course it helps that we kicked it off with Merlin Mann and his sublime nerdiness. Tonight I was flabergasted to see the MPU as #2 on Apple’s list of top technology podcasts. Amazing. Thank you to all the listeners (veterans and newcomers) and Merlin for joining in the fun.

Mac Power Users – Workflows with Merlin Mann

Katie and I have been thrilled with the success of the Mac Power Users podcast. With the new year we began talking about ways to improve upon the podcast. One common theme in the show feedback is how much people like hearing about our workflows so I got thinking why stop with Katie and I? We decided to start doing shows where we feature some other Mac Power Users. One of my tasks at Macworld this year was to seek out some interesting people for such shows.

During Macworld, I had the pleasure of meeting Merlin Mann. Merlin and I share a lot of similar neurosis and immediately hit it off. He was extremely gracious and when I asked him if he would be interested in doing one of our “Workflows” episodes, he immediately jumped on it.

We recorded the show last week and it quickly digressed into a drunken bash of power tips, workflows, and ideas. If Katie hadn’t been there to occasionally push us along, we’d probably still be recording. This will be a great episode to listen to in front of your Mac since the application recommendations run fast and furious. You can access it in iTunes here but also will probably need the show notes here.

The idea is to run one of these episodes every two or three months. Let us know what you think.

TextExpander 3 Released

Today SmileOnMyMac released TextExpander 3. I’ve been using the beta for a few weeks and am sold. The big difference with the new version is user functionality.

There is a new quick entry window that makes creating new snippets a breeze. One of my favorite upgrades is the ability to set a key combination to edit the last expanded snippet. Correcting and updated snippets just got a lot easier.

It also now supports fill-in-the-blank snippets. You can create a snippet. “Dear Mr. _, I can’t help but notice your dog _ is beginning to smell funny. I suggest you give him a bath. Very truly yours, __.” Once you engage the snippet, a window opens with blank fields and you can tab between to fill in the data.

You can now search your snippets from the menubar. This is particularly helpful if you, like me, sometimes forget your abbreviations.

Also, TextExpander was liberated from the System Preferences window. It is now a separate application. This makes getting into TextExpander a lot easier. They also now have baked in support for Dropbox syncing which, while possible with version 2, required a bit of hoop jumping.

If that is not enough for you, the balloon icon also got an orange ribbon. Nifty. The upgrade price is $15, or free to users who purchased on or after November 1, 2009.

FileMaker 11

FileMaker, Inc. today released FileMaker 11 and Filemaker Pro 11. The new version includes new graphing, customization, and sharing tools. Apple owned FileMaker, Inc. continues to dominate the database market on the Mac with FileMaker and Bento.