System Preference:
At first glance, Ulysses III’ features read like a set of common sense additions to Writer’s spartan feature set. And yet beyond the obvious lies a set of decisions that manage to augment productivity in meaningful ways while sacrificing as little as possible of Writer’s opinionated tabula rasa.
This post, more than any other, perfectly encapsulates why I love Ulysses III so very much.
Justin Williams:
We tend to give Apple grief when things are buggy or don’t work as well as we’d hope. It’s things like this lunch purchasing experience that are why I use and champion their products. When it works, it really works.
Apple Pay and HealthKit are two of those things that will only be really great when they are fully implemented and accepted. I can’t wait for that day.
Files can now match multiple rules. Use the new “Continue” action to have Hazel continue evaluating rules if the current rule matches and hasn’t been moved out of its folder.
Oh, now that is going to be neat.
In my recent Airmail review, I talked about how I needed to wait for official Yosemite apps to make the final call between Airmail and Mail.app. Well, I now have both and Airmail got a big 2.0 update in the process.
I had a crazy idea a while back: why not do my own TabDump now that it is gone? Well, I partnered up with Bradley Chambers and created just that. We will be covering a lot more than just tech news, so come look and let me know what you think.
Also, Conor McClure, Steven Owens, and Yuyang Guo are contributing to the content daily. Big thanks to them.
Simply gorgeous new standalone Mac app: Deliveries. I use this app all the time on my iPhone and in Dashboard and this new version is top notch.
Looks like a great book for fiction writers, I read through the preview version of the book and it has some great tips for people getting started with Ulysses III.
Pretty clever move. I reserve my top row on the iPhone 6 for things that I rarely use. Smith has a clever solution too, but it looks too off-putting to me.
MacStories has the detailed review of Drafts 4. Personally I have been using the app now for a week plus and it’s quite the app. It does a hell of a lot of stuff, and it actually quite complex. For me the best part of Drafts 4 is that I don’t have to figure out how to do too many things as the workflow exchange helps quite a bit.
While I like Drafts 4, these types of apps have really fallen by the wayside for me of late. The best use I have for it as of right now: a Birdhouse replacement.
Powerful app, and there is no doubt in my mind that some pretty cool stuff will come of people using it.
Alex King:
Inspired by Brent’s consideration of an off-the-shelf blog engine, Santiago Valdarrama has written a post outlining the problems he has with off-the-shelf blog engines. What was so interesting to me about this was that a self-hosted WordPress site addresses nearly every one of his concerns.
First things first: I’m not a headphone guy. By that I mean I don’t listen to a ton of music, or a ton of podcasts — I typically just listen to the environment around me. I do, however, find myself wearing headphones a often, so I need to have a pair on hand, but they need to travel with me.
In the past I’ve followed Marco Arment’s recommendations, and I’ve liked them. But I’ve broken them all, or never carried them. What I really needed was some earbuds, and some that I liked because I use them so infrequently, why not like looking at them as they kick around the bottom of my bag?
I bought Transmit for iOS when it came out, setup my servers and then left it. I never used it and never saw where it was useful. And then I read this post from Gabe and saw that the power is in the iOS extension. Essentially allowing you to send any file to a web server for saving.
Now do that, and then sync that folder you send stuff to over BitTorrent Sync back to your Mac — and well I am a happy camper. Awesome.
I often write with a lot of black and white language, and part of that is wording choices I deliberately make. Saying something looks like ‘shit’, that I ‘hate’ it, or that I ‘don’t like it’. Those word choices leave little room for doubt about my meaning, and in most cases I stand behind my choice in those words looking back at them now.
To go along with the latest podcast episode, Rich Mogull has a great post up about iOS 8 security changes as well.
I’m joined by Guillaume Ross to talk about iOS 8 security. Very good show if you care at all about not having your iOS data stolen.
RT.com:
In particular, Snowden advised web users to “get rid” of Dropbox. Such services only insist on encrypting user data during transfer and when being stored on the servers. Other services he recommends instead, such as SpiderOak, encrypt information while it’s on your computer as well.
“We’re talking about dropping programs that are hostile to privacy,” Snowden said.
Rob LeFebvre has a great article on the shut down of The Magazine.
I personally think the biggest contributor to the failed subscriptions can be directly attributed to the lack of focus. You never knew what you would get and that is annoying as shit. The best long-existing publication that does this is The New Yorker, which is a pretty high bar.
I think they would have been better off picking any topic and sticking to that.
A simple app isn’t simple by virtue of having fewer options, a simple app is simple because of usability. The fewer the options an app has, the more complicated it can actually become to use — I know that sounds counter intuitive, but allow me to explain.