November 15, 2012

What good are auto-closing braces in editors?

A tweet from Brett Kelley from yesterday:

I’ve also often wondered how much sense this feature really makes. I can’t tab or press enter to get past the enclosing character, I have to either enter it anyway or hit the right-arrow key, which is even less desirable. What’s more, in many cases auto-closing quotes get in my way, for example when I’m not entering a string literal in code but rather writing something like don’t, which gives me don’t’ (good editors should at least only activate auto-closing quotes for code, not for plain text files). This feature can be disabled in most editors, but I still wonder why it’s there in the first place. What’s its real-world usage scenario?

November 14, 2012

Print from anywhere from your iPad or iPhone without AirPrint

Out of curiosity I looked around for printing solutions for iOS today. My printers are pretty old and don’t speak AirPrint, so I needed to find another way to print from my iPad.

There’s a Mac app called Printopia which makes any printer available on your Mac usable via AirPrint. But it’s $20, which is a little much for the little iOS printing I’m bound to be doing in the foreseeable future. What’s more, printing through AirPrint will only work when you’re connected to the same network your AirPrint-enabled printers (or, in the case of Printopia, your Mac) are in.

Fortunately, there’s a free solution that also comes with the benefit of letting you print on your printer at home even when you’re on the road. All you need is an internet connection, Dropbox and some Folder Action magic.

Setting up automatic printing

First, you need a free Dropbox account. Once you have that set up and the client installed on your Mac, create a folder inside the Dropbox folder on your Mac and name it something like AutoPrint.

Next, open Automator and create a document by selecting the Folder Action document type.

Folder Action

Select the Folder Action document type in Automator

From the list of actions select Print Finder Items and drag it to the area on the right of the Automator document. Optionally, if you want the folder to be cleaned up automatically after printing, drag the Move Finder Items to Trash action right beneath the printing action.

The AutoPrint Folder Action

The AutoPrint Folder Action

Then click the dropdown box labeled Folder Action receives files and folders added to and click Other….

Navigate to the AutoPrint folder you just created in your Dropbox folder and click Choose.

Now select File->Save from the menu to attach the Folder Action to the folder. Give the Folder Action a name like AutoPrint. From now on, any printable files – PDFs, iWork documents, images, text files, etc. – that show up in this folder will automatically be printed on your Mac’s default printer.

Printing web pages

For printing web pages, the process is a bit more involved. Since Safari can’t export a web page as a printable document, you’ll need to take the extra step of creating a PDF from a web page and then sending that to your Mac for printing.

The first option for creating a PDF from a web page is using a browser that has that feature, for example iCab. iCab is a great browser with tons of features, so I’d recommend getting it either way. But for just creating PDFs there’s another option: PDF Printer for iPad.

PDF Printer for iPad ($5.99) lets you create PDFs from its built-in browser. Just open the web page, click the Convert button and send the PDF to your Dropbox AutoPrint folder from within PDF Printer.

Printing emails, photos and more

PDF Printer can also convert photos, messages and contacts to PDF (I don’t really know how much sense that last option makes). The most versatile feature, though, is converting the clipboard contents to PDF. So, for example, to print an email, just copy the email’s contents to the clipboard from within the Mail app and then select the Clipboard option from PDF Printer’s menu.

An HTML email in the clipboard in PDF Printer

An HTML email in the clipboard in PDF Printer

Removing the Folder Action

If you ever want to disable the automatic printing, just navigate to the AutoPrint folder in Finder, right-click it and select Services->Folder Actions Setup…. You can disable or delete the associated Folder Action from there. You can of course also just delete the entire folder.

Caveats and possible improvements

This solution isn’t perfect. You can’t print just a range of pages. Whatever you send to the AutoPrint folder gets printed in its entirety. You also can’t print multiple copies and you can’t select a specific printer to print to. Printouts always go to your Mac’s default printer.

These limitations could probably be overcome by writing an AppleScript or with some bash scripting. But for my very limited needs (and even more limited AppleScript abilities), this setup is perfect. It definitely beats buying additional software or an AirPrint-compatible printer.

November 13, 2012

Dice2

Here’s another great little game for passing the time while waiting in line or any other situation where you need to kill a couple of minutes: Dice2 by Emma Assin.

The game’s rules are simple: You get 20 turns to roll the dice and build rows and columns with the dice to score points. Rows can be either all the same number or a sequence composed of four or five dice. You score based on how long your rows and columns are and you can earn bonuses for combos (clear a row and column at once) and clearing the board (either during the game or with your last turn).

The game’s visuals are very cute and it’s fun to try and hit combos for the bonus points. Like all dice games, Dice2 is luck-based to some extent, but you can still employ strategies to optimize your chances. While Dice2 probably doesn’t hold too much long-time appeal, it’s great for a little 5-minute brain teaser during lunch.

Dice2 is a universal app and costs $0.99.

November 12, 2012

Buyral ◆

*Whips out credit card.*

via Flyosity

Lessons learned from one year of writing ◆

I started this site in 2010 but I haven’t learned 10% of Matt Alexander’s lessons from his one year of writing. Maybe I need to take this a bit more seriously…

Why I Canceled My iPad mini Order

When the iPad mini became available for preorder, I ordered the 64 GB WiFi+Cellular model in white with a red Smart Cover. After a while I became unsure of my out-of-character color choice, canceled the order and ordered the same model in black. I also passed on the Smart Cover after reading several unfavorable reviews (I also hardly use the Smart Cover on my iPad 3).

But then I started thinking. Or, as some might call it, the Apple reality distortion field started to wear off. The biggest selling point of the iPad mini is of course its size. It’s not the price, as it’s only $130 cheaper than the 9.7-inch model. And it’s certainly not the hardware specs, which are worse than those of the iPad 3 or the most recent iPad 4 in almost every way. No Retina display, older processor and only half the RAM. Is the smaller size worth these compromises?

The most worrying part of the iPad mini’s specs to me isn’t even the non-Retina screen. It’s the RAM. I still remember how crappy the iPad 2 with 512 MB RAM started behaving when multitasking was introduced. The whole OS became noticably laggy, Safari was constantly reloading tabs when I switched back to it and even the keyboard had a noticeable lag. The iPad 3 with its 1 GB of RAM is significantly more snappy and put the fun back into using iOS.

I haven’t tried an iPad mini in person yet, so my concerns may be baseless. But even if they are, I have the feeling the iPad mini is a compromise in too many ways. Apple wants us to believe that the iPad mini is “Every inch an iPad”. But I’m not willing to go back to a laggy UI and (now) sub-par screen just for the sake of a (admittedly intriguing) smaller form factor, especially not at the price Apple is asking. Instead I’ll just wait a year for an iPad mini that really is “Every inch an iPad”, including the hardware specs.

November 9, 2012

Nerdquery ◆

I can really see niche search engines like Nerdquery catching on. Google often returns crappy sites that game their way into the top 10. With curated, focussed search engines that’s not an issue.

Pro tip: As detailed here you can easily add Nerdquery to your Launchbar search templates.

The Whiteboard To-Do List

I decided a while ago that OmniFocus is overkill for my needs. So I switched to TaskPaper, a plain-text-based Mac (and iOS) app that lets me organize my tasks simply and efficiently.

One thing I didn’t mention in that OmniFocus post is that there actually is one more component to my task management system: a whiteboard.

The whiteboard

On the wall right next to my desk, there’s a 120 x 80 cm magnetic whiteboard that I’ve divided, much like a wall calendar, into seven areas representing the days of the week. Each day is again vertically separated into two areas representing morning and afternoon/evening.

Whiteboard

Whiteboard

All the tasks for a given project are stored in a TaskPaper file. But since these files can get fairly large, and there’s usually not a single “next action” but rather multiple alternatives, I pick the two or three tasks I want to work on on a given day and add them to the appropriate day and time range on the whiteboard. Everything else that’s not a project but that I want or need to get done on a specific day (but not at a specific time; those go into OS X’s Calendar app), like mowing the lawn, running errands, etc., also goes onto the whiteboard.

It works

This method has several advantages: The whiteboard gives me a good overview of my work for a specific day without needing to fiddle around with any apps (a fairly common problem with many task management systems). It also forces me to pick just a handful of tasks instead of working from a long list of all possible tasks and it encourages me to make my choices for a specific day in advance.

Finally, there’s a strangely satisfactory feeling to wiping an item off a whiteboard. Marking a task as done in a task management app isn’t quite the same. Getting rid of an item physically makes it really feel done. And since the number of items for any given day is limited, it’s also nice to see how much work is still on my plate. Working from my main tasks lists, I’d always have the feeling that work will never end.

Conclusion

My needs for task management are fairly simple. All I really need is a big list of tasks separated into projects. I don’t need due dates, flags, contexts or multiple views into my tasks. Except for @done, I hardly even use tags.

As (overly) simple as this system (dare I even call it that) is, it works for me. I don’t fiddle with my task management app anymore (except when I do) and I actually do get things done. And in the end that’s what counts.

November 7, 2012

CloudClipboard

The big cheese of iPhone clipboard management has always been Pastebot. The app itself is still great, but there’s no native iPad version, it only runs in portrait orientation and there’s no sync to other iOS devices.

Enter CloudClipboard.

CloudClipboard runs on iPhone and iPad and captures text, images, Web clips and URLs automatically from the clipboard. Just launch the app and then go and merrily copy stuff to the clipboard. CloudClipboard runs in the background (for up to 10 minutes; this is an iOS limitation) and will remember everything you copied. Switch back to the app and you can copy any item back to the clipboard for use in another app or export images to the photo library, launch URLs, edit text or send an item via email.

But that’s not all. CloudClipboard sync items via iCloud to any other devices running CloudClipboard. This is probably the first really good use of iCloud I’ve seen so far. The only thing that’s missing is a companion Mac app.

CloudClipboard is a universal app and costs $2.99.

via Macdrifter

Linking to bullshit ◆

This isn’t bullshit, it’s spot-on:

If you truly dislike bullshit writing and don’t want to support it, hit the publishers where it hurts: don’t read it, and don’t link to it.

I have several sites in my feed reader that, while otherwise posting great content, regularly refute “bullshit” articles about Apple. I always wonder why they spend so much time defending a multinational, multi-billion-dollar company that has so far proven that it’s perfectly capable of defending itself. What’s more, these defensive posts aren’t even funny. They’re mostly bitter, whiny and snooty, making for great examples of why some people like to call Apple customers “fanboys”.

If you come across bullshit writing, be it about Apple or just plain and obvious link-baiting bullshit, resist the urge to refute it and just move on. If you write a defensive post, along with the requisite half dozen or so block quotes, each one meticulously taken apart and proven false, you’re just taking the bait.

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