Recent Articles

[This is a fascinating way to create HTML5 based iOS apps.](http://www.lakercompendium.com) This model uses The Baker framework and adds custom styles giving a non-coding user a complete system for publishing an iPad app that is a Magazine. All you need to know is CSS and HTML — and from the 20 minutes I have spent with it that seems to hold.

All of the content is simple HTML pages.

Fascinating.

I may just have to give this a go.

[When we last left off, I had come to the conclusion that the SOG Aegis Mini was the knife for me](https://brooksreview.net/2012/11/edc-search-pt1/). I love that little knife, but readers started to pour in with suggestions of their own — I whittled those suggestions down to five knives to try out.

I purchased all five of these knives with the intent to see if any of them could de-throne the Aegis Mini and two did. First a refresher on my criteria:

– Has to be under ~$100, so the coveted Chris Reeve Small Sebenza is out of the picture (for now).
– Could not have a thumb wedge that could potentially wear holes in my pockets.
– Has to be sturdy enough, that should the worst case scenario happen, I would feel confident in using the knife in the wild to survive.
– Has to look great. Whereby I mean it needs to have a discernible personality that I like. (Dangerous, sleek, tactical, old-timey, etc.)

## KA-Bar Dozier

I won’t provide a link to this knife because I think you would be better off with your butter knife. This is easily the worst knife I have tested.

Of the things I hate about the knife:

– It feels like a cheap knife you would be given at a corporate golf tournament.
– The thumb stud is not ambidextrous so one must decide which hand they want to be able to open the knife with one-handed — you can’t have both.
– The lock-back is terribly easy to disengage when using the knife.
– The handle feels like you’d break it if you cut anything harder than packaging tape.

I really could go on, but I think you get the picture: don’t buy this knife.

## CRKT Drifter G10 & Stainless Steel Handle

[This knife](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001DZMBY4/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20), and it’s [stainless steel counter part](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001BG8PP4/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20) are seriously inexpensive — both under twenty dollars. In fact, for the price, it’s hard to fault these knives at all. They are leaps and bounds better than the Dozier. Both are more capable, better balanced, and easier to deploy.

Yet neither are better than the Aegis Mini. So while these are solid knives on their own, when we compare them with the winner of the last round of testing, they aren’t even close.

What bugs me most about these knives is their lack of personality. I find them both a bit boring and knives should never be boring.

Both knives are comfortable to hold and have a recurve in their blade to make for a little easier control when whittling wood and other things. All around this is a solid average knife — just not what I am looking for.

On the bright side, the G10 without pocket clip is an amazingly light knife to pocket. Easy to stash away and forget you are carrying — that alone makes it a handy knife for some. Just not for me.

If I am pressed to decide between the two I would take the G10 over the stainless steel handle for no other reason than the weight — but the stainless steel handle model looks and feels much better.

## Spyderco Sage 1

Ah yes, Spyderco, far and away the most recommended brand to me from readers. I had my doubts as I previously carried one for years, but the overwhelming support for Spyderco forced me to try them out again. [After careful research I purchased the Sage 1](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0013AW8Y2/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20), a tribute to Michael Walker, when I saw that [Dan at Blade Reviews has it pegged as “the perfect EDC”](http://bladereviews.com/spyderco-sage-i-review/) I knew I had to try this blade.

This is one hell of a knife.

The fit and finish is to Apple standards. The handle has an internal metal frame with a Walker liner lock (remember, tribute knife) and a carbon fiber shell that is wrapped around it.

When held, this knife feels exquisite.

Further the knife is made from S30V which many hail as the best knife steel out there right now — and holy shit are they right. This knife holds an edge like no other knife I have used before. I am seriously impressed with this knife steel and now am beginning to think I won’t buy another knife with lesser steel.

My one complaint: is this knife is big, not too big to carry, but it is noticeable in your pocket. Whereas the Aegis Mini slips away until you need it, I found the Sage 1 to be impossible to carry, and get to quickly, without a pocket clip being used — something I am not very fond of.

In fact my only complaints about the knife are:

1. You need to use a pocket clip with it.
2. I worry about the long-term durability of the handle — especially if one needed to rely on it in a survival situation. This however is really a nitpick as I think it would take years of abuse in the woods before flaws would be seen in the handle. Still I have my concerns about the handle durability in extreme cases.

After using this knife full time for a week, I was pretty sure it had won the whole thing. It is a better blade shape, steel, and lock than the Aegis Mini. It feels better in my hand. It is far more useable in a survival situation than the Aegis Mini. Things look pretty perfect after testing this knife.

## Spyderco Sage 2

Of course, [I bought the Sage 2](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B002DUZL3G/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20) alongside the Sage 1 — this one is a tribute to Chris Reeve, as it has a titanium handled frame lock. The Sage 1 and 2 have identical blades, both S30V, both phenomenal to use.

The big difference is in the handle. The Sage 2 has an all titanium handle with an integral frame lock. This is a heavier knife to carry, but I’d argue a much better looking and handling knife.

I used this knife last out of all that I tested, as I expected it to be clearly the best of all of them. But I’m not so sure that actually is the case.

The Sage 1 is very nearly a 50-50 balance between the handle and blade and the Sage 2 is more 60-40 with the handle being heavier. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing. This is something that will likely be loved by many, but not all. Personally I like the extra weight tilting back towards my hand instead of away.

My first concern about the Sage 1, the size, carries over on the Sage 2 as they are very close in size — the Sage 2 also needs a pocket clip. But the biggest plus, the blade steel, also carries over as well.

With the Sage 1 I had an outside concern of wilderness durability, but with the Sage 2 that fear is completely gone. The all titanium frame should last through even the worst abuse and then some. In fact this feels just as solid as the Ontario RAT folder that I tested last time.

My biggest concern with the Sage 2 is that it is a bit slicker than the Sage 1. Because the handle is smooth, my hand tends to slide on it when I am holding, but not using, the knife. My concern is what happens if my hands are cold, wet, and muddy? Will I be able to grip the knife confidently? With the Sage 1 and the Aegis Mini, I know I would be able to, but I’m not sure with the Sage 2. Then again, how often does that happen? Still like with the Sage 1, this is a concern — as minor as it may be.

The last concern is that this knife breaks my budget, clocking in at `$156` on Amazon. It’s not horribly expensive, but it is more than the $100 I wanted to spend — [and I have good reason to not want to spend over a hundred dollars](https://brooksreview.net/2012/11/knife-follow-up-2/). Even so, I almost don’t care after having spent time using the knife — it’s just a really good knife perhaps the best of the lot.

## The Winner

The winner still isn’t clear to me. What I know is that the Aegis Mini is out as the best of the group — it’s still an awesome knife, but the Sage 1 & 2 are both better in many ways. Mainly: the Sage knives take away all concerns I have about survival situations with an EDC knife which was the primary concern I have about the Aegis Mini.

For me, the Sage 2 holds a slight lead over the Sage 1 for two reasons:

1. For whatever reason my Sage 2 deploys easier and more fluidly than my Sage 1.
2. I prefer the frame lock to the liner lock in most scenarios. This is largely due to the fact that I am left handed and thus the frame lock is easier to operate in my left hand than the liner lock.

Having said that, there’s no way I am getting rid of either knife and expect to oscillate between the two for months to come.

And having said all that, I also expect to get continued use out of the Aegis Mini, as I will be keeping that as well and rotating it in from time to time. All three, great knives.

## For You

If you are new to knives, if you have been reading all my writing about pocket knives, and you are thinking about taking the plunge — if that is you — I’d suggest you buy the [CRKT Drifter G10](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001DZMBY4/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20). It’s not the best knife, but for `$17.40` on Amazon with Prime shipping I am confident that you will get value out of the knife regardless of whether you form the habit of carrying it with you.

Then again if you just want the best one, pick between the Sage 1 and the Sage 2 based on their looks. Both are excellent knives.

My first and only thought when I heard about [Fantastical for the iPhone](http://flexibits.com/fantastical-iphone): I wonder how that app translates…

I wasn’t very excited and because I like Agenda I wasn’t yearning for a new iPhone calendar app.

Time passed, and my love for Agenda began to wain from love to like — nothing major, just realizing it wasn’t a perfect solution for me. Then I was contacted by Micheal Simmons, asking if I would like to check out Fantastical for the iPhone in advance.

I was sent a copy of Fantastical for iPhone to test out. Again, I didn’t know what to expect, but wasn’t that excited over the prospect of the app because I didn’t think it would be as great on the iPhone as it is on the Mac. Reason being: natural language input on the Mac is easy, but on the iPhone I’m skeptical about the utility.

Fantastical for the iPhone is awesome.

## The Good

The app is fast and light, so it just pops open as you would expect. The icon is what I expected and is nothing great, but it’s also not blue, so let’s just consider that a win for everyone.

What I really love is the date picker (not the design). I love that I can slide the date picker to get an overview of how busy my schedule is all without having to look at the appointment names and times. I can see that my Thursday is loaded up in the afternoon, that Friday has an all day event, and so on. It’s a very nice way to get an overview, without having to be overwhelmed by the who-what-when-where of calendars.

And of course you can enter new events with natural language — which isn’t new on the iPhone, but is still pretty nice. So even though I was very skeptical about the utility of natural language input on the iPhone in reality Fantastical implements it very well. I love the way the data is pulled from your natural language string to give you a glance-able confirmation that Fantastical has it right — this is done better than it is on the Mac.

Even better is that with one tap you can get a more normal looking event entry screen. A lot of my appointments are entered via Siri these days, however it is really nice to have this option for those times when I can’t lecture Siri.

There’s also a little hidden gem: if you just give a light tug down on the date picker, the app will reveal a search bar. Yes, searching isn’t new — but I bet you will love how it is implemented.

In Fantastical you can search everything, or by: Title, Location, and Invitees. This is a killer feature if you are trying to find the last time you met Sally at your office. (To those that never have to recall meetings, this isn’t much of a feature, but for those that do this is awesome.)

## The Not Very Good

There’s not a lot of bad things, but there is one thing that I don’t think is very good. The action from moving to and from the day picker view to the month view is not very good.

The action is a swipe down on the days which makes a lot of sense, so when you want to rid yourself of the day view what do you do?

Swipe up? Nope.

Same swipe down? Yep.

Maybe I am the only one that finds that counter intuitive, but I stumble when I am switching between the two. It’s not horrible, and with more use I’ll get used to it, but this doesn’t follow the normal iOS app conventions and really bugs me.

## The Ugly

I wasn’t aware that there are problems with app title bars falling from the top of the screen to the bottom, so it is a little unsettling to see two (what I assume are) staples holding the app title bar up.

Yes, the textures and “real calendar” feel have always been a Fantastical *thing*, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

## The Wishes

My absolute biggest wish is for the app to allow me to turn off the calendar color dots that appear next to each event. I use one calendar for everything and would love to clean up the UI with the absence of those dots.

My second wish is for a little better design of the event details screen — it is iOS standard as far as I can tell and I would hope for a more consistent look as it seems like an after thought as it is.

## The Wrap

Overall this is a really solid app. It’s on my iPhone home screen now and for an introductory price of `$1.99` I can’t see how you could go wrong with this app. Even with the staples, I love [Fantastical for iPhone](http://flexibits.com/fantastical-iphone).

*(This post is a part of a series on Keyboard Maestro, [see more here](https://brooksreview.net/tag/KM-SERIES/).)*

As a blogger (I’m sure this applies to others) there are a lot of times when I am writing and need/want to grab a lot of source material to use. For me this typically involves a lot of copy and pasting and command-tabbing between Safari and Writer.

I was fed up with this, so I created a system where I could just copy an infinite amount of data and paste it back into an app all at once.

Enter Keyboard Maestro: with these two macros you can write things to a simple text file with one shortcut and then paste it back out of the text file into your writing (and then you clear the text file). This is all done quickly and simply.

Here’s how:

## Docu Store – Build

The first part I had to build was the engine that would write everything I want to a text file. Here’s how I did this:

I’ve set the hot key trigger to `CTRL+CMD+C` so that it is not something easily triggered on accident, but only one modification from a standard copy command. ((An added bonus, that made it easy to remember, was that it is the Windows copy shortcut and the Mac copy shortcut in one.))

From there, Keyboard Maestro performs three simple actions:

1. Copies the text so it is on your clipboard.
2. Appends what is on your clipboard to a specific text file. In my case that is stored in Dropbox, in a Workflows folder, with a file name called `Docu-store.txt`. This writes the info you want to the text file. I’ve further set it to write in plain text, thus removing any formatting.
3. The last bit is a simple formatting preference. If you don’t add this part, all the stuff you copy will all be on one line. I’ve added two carriage returns between each entry add by telling Keyboard Maestro to append `%Return% %Return%` at the end of every add to the file. This way, when my text is pasted in the next macro, it is easy to see. (You can also use: `%LineFeed% %Return% %Tab% %Space%`.)

That’s it for the first macro — we can now add text. Next we just need to extract it.

## Docu Store – Paste

Now we need to extract that text back out of the file and paste it at will.

Here’s how I have that setup:

I’ve kept things standardized by using the `CTRL+CMD+V` shortcut. From there Keyboard Maestro runs four actions:

1. I first set the contents of the text file we were writing to, to a variable called `DocuStore`. All this does is get data in a place where we can use it. (I first tried loading the data directly to the clipboard, but had very inconsistent results when I did that — this seems to be the most predictable way to get the file contents.)
2. Next I set the clipboard to the `DocuStore` variable. (Again, this could be one step, but it wasn’t working correctly for me.)
3. The data is then pasted by hitting `CMD+V`.
4. This last action is one you might want to think about not adding. I write back to the text file nothing — which clears everything out of the text file, making it a blank slate for the next round.

All of that gives you a nice clean way to grab say an author name, link to the article, and block quote from the article — all in one fell swoop.

I love it.

## Notes & Tips

You may not always want to wipe the file, so there’s an easy way to make that an option you can decide on at the time:

By adding that one action a dialog will pop up asking if you want to wipe the file. Say `no` and nothing is done.

Lastly, I use a text file because it is a non-volatile way to store the data. It will persist if you restart your Mac, it won’t be wiped out for some odd reason, and is backed up. You could use a custom clipboard for this, but a text file has an added advantage of being a document you could just open and edit if you wanted or needed.

[Miłosz Bolechowski wrote in to tell me that using Automator to change the date was silly because all of it can be done in Keyboard Maestro](http://www.fabryka-pikseli.com/2012/11/28/keyboard-maestro-i-data-w-nazwie-pliku/). This is a really complex version, but does work much faster than using Automator (my method).

I actually had no clue just how easy it was to grab files from Finder in Keyboard Maestro, so this is incredibly helpful to me long term as well.

Thank you to Miłosz Bolechowski. This is awesome.

*(You’ll probably need to translate the page, but the last link in the post is a zip to download the macro.)*

[Some common questions about my knife philosophy](https://brooksreview.net/2012/10/pocket-knife/), answered.

## What blade shape do you prefer?

A few people have asked about what my preference is on [the shape of the blade](http://www.knife-depot.com/knife-information-112.html). Overall I like the standard ‘drop point’ shape. It find it most comfortable to use and highly versatile.

The most common offering besides a drop point is the tanto — which I believe is mostly popular because it looks pretty cool. I’ve only had one blade that was a tanto, and I found it frustrating to use at times.

## Why not spend more money?

A lot of people want to know why I am staying under $100 and why I am not willing to pay for the best knife I can find. This is a good point as it is a break from the norm for me. Typically I’d never hesitate based on price, but I feel differently about spending big money on an EDC knife.

First, I view EDC knives as a tool. Because of this the most important aspect is utility. Secondly, I never want to be hamstrung over when and where to use my knife because I paid a lot of money for it.

There are a lot of instances where I will use my knife that could easily damage the cutting edge of the blade, or snap the blade all together. Things like cutting close to metal, or against metal, and prying are all things I would never do with an expensive knife.

Those scenarios don’t come up every day, but when they do I never want to feel like I can’t just use the knife as a tool to get the job done. I figure that one of those scenarios will come up a year where the knife is damaged, and I want to know that I can afford to replace my knife if it does get irreparably damaged. If I don’t feel confident I can afford to replace the knife, it is far less valuable to me as a tool.

For me, that means keeping the price under, or close to, one hundred dollars. This should vary based on your budget — there are some great knives to be had in the sub-fifty dollar range.

## What about the folding utility/box knives?

I have a couple of these and they are very popular with people that work in construction, but I think they are a very bad EDC choice. I have a few reasons I think these are a poor choice:

1. The blades are brittle. Yes the blades are sharp and cheap to replace, but they are very brittle and it is unlikely that you will want to carry extra blades with you.
2. These knives are typically bulky, this allows for changeable blades, but is also a weight and size factor.
3. This type of knife blade is disposable. These blades also cannot be sharpened and they are therefore a poor choice for a lasting knife. Even when a typical EDC is dull, you can still use the blade however, when a utility knife blade is dull it’s pretty much worthless — I’ve seen utility blades lose their point entirely. These blades are cheap and so is the steel used to make them — they don’t last long even if you rarely use your knife.

Overall these knives are not a good all around choice.

## Will you check out XZY knife I have, or want to buy?

Probably not.

[Over the long weekend the developer of iTorch contacted me encouraging me to try the latest, fourth, version of the iTorch app.](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/itorch-pro-flashlight/id392550196?mt=8) The claim was that iTorch had been made to be the fastest gun, umm flashlight app, in the west.

[So of course I had to try it given all my past searching](https://brooksreview.net/2012/08/flashlight-iphone/).

What I found is that iTorch is incredibly fast. It really isn’t even a challenge (the free version is just as fast). And while I don’t like the icon, or UI, as much as I do in Lighty — the bottom line is that speed is far more relevant to me than design of a flashlight app.

To get an idea of how fast iTorch is, just launch your current flashlight app, quit, now relaunch. That relaunch speed — that’s just about how fast iTorch is.

I’ve added it to my home screen, replacing Lighty.

[Sam Barillaro purchased the Hard Graft flat pack for the retina MacBook Pro 15″ and he wasn’t impressed.](http://thetechedit.com/2012/11/why-i-returned-the-hard-graft-flat-pack-for-15-retina-macbook-pro/) [I really like mine](https://brooksreview.net/2012/10/flat-pack-2/). Barillaro has some very good comments on the flaws of this bag, but one I want to point out doesn’t strike me as accurate. Barillaro says:

>The shoulder strap is attached to the bag at a ninety degree angle. There is no hinge, so the strap can’t move around depending on where your holding your bag.

That’s actually not true. On all the smaller Flat Packs this is true, the strap is stitched in the 90° position, however on the retina MacBook Pro 15″ Flat Pack Hard Graft added a hinge. Here’s a picture of that hinge from my review:

Now it doesn’t seem like a hinge at first, you have to wiggle it to get it moving initially, but it is a hinge. Hard Graft had this to say about it when they announced the bag:

>It has two simple inside pockets and a nifty new detail – the straps have a secure screw hinge which makes it possible to adjust them to fit to the carry position that feels best for you.

That came from the email announcement that was sent out from Hard Graft. So while all of Barillaro’s points are very good, the hinge one is not accurate (unless I misunderstood what he was saying somehow).

One last thing I would note is that Barillaro doesn’t like that a charger doesn’t fit well in the bag — I agree — however I have also found that I rarely need a charger for my computer. Your mileage will vary on that aspect, but I think, with most modern Macs, that carrying a charger is more a safety net than a necessity.