iPad Experiment
Ok, so I’ve had the iPad for a while now and it’s been a great help to me for work. Just being able to mark up PDF papers (I read a lot of academic papers and the ability to highlight corrections etc in my thesis drafts is fantastic), keep a copy of my notes beside my Macbook screen and be a small, easy to use, portable device I can easily carry around, easier than my MBP is terrific.
This past weekend I visited Leeds and managed to use the iPad as my main method of working/browsing the web/connecting to people and it performed pretty damn well.
However, tomorrow I’m going to try and last the day using only the iPad, based on an article I mentioned earlier last year (I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode 
). So tomorrow, I’ll be attmepting to work solely from my iPad. Well, maybe note quite solely, I’ll be using the equipment below.
Equipment
- iPad 2 (16GB wifi model)
- Logitech Tablet Keyboard
- Mac Mini (running at home – connectable via VNC)
- Headphones and iPad Stylus
Based on that equipment, I should be covered for everything I need. I’ll be using iPad native apps where possible – ideally I’d like to minimise the use of the VNC connection as I know that isn’t an option if I don’t have a network connection (either where I am or if my home network craps out!)
Either way, I’ll be posting tomorrow (or Saturday) on how it goes!
Reasons Why I Hate Email
Email is a daily fact of life for most people. Whether it’s just getting the updates from web stores about special deals or swapping files for work, email plays a big part of our lives. And I’ve begun to hate it on the Mac.
This seems like an odd statement and especially as its aimed at just OS X and Apple. Don’t get me wrong, I use email a lot. It’s de facto communication method at work and I use Gmail and iCloud like others but I’ve begun to dread sending emails for a variety of reasons which I’ll discuss.
Formatting
My first bug bear is formatting. Regardless of the email client I use on the Mac, I’ve not nailed this down right yet. It hadn’t been an issue until recently but now it really gets on my nerves. Mail.app seems to have a mind of its own with formatting. I set it to only send plain text emails, because then I can guarantee how it’ll appear in the other persons window (subject to whatever font they use). Simple. Until you start adding attachments and this is where Mail.app appears to go mental. Adding an image will instantly convert your message to HTML. Even if you select to put the file at the end of the message and have windows friendly attachments. Enable the settings to put the image in as an icon only and when sending you get icon sized images in Gmail and Outlook Online (I assume it’s the same in Outlook but I’m not opening it to try… Urgh!) Overall, Mail.app really sucks here.
I been sending HTML emails for years with no issues but would always get annoyed when emails would come back with writing to small to read due to a mess up in settings between different applications and settings. Sparrow seemed to reduce the number of emails I got like this and made it nice and simple to send emails and for a while I used it (until I moved my email to iCloud and then Sparrow initially had problems with it – all sorted now though) but its time had passed – it’s lack of various options annoyed me and it was never clear if I was sending plain text email, no support for mail certificates etc. Mail’s handling of converting any file with an attachment to HTML just made it worse – I never had problems with people reading emails in Outlook but when you viewed the emails in a webmail client, things looked ugly (what’s this ATT00001.htm file that got sent with it?) Things weren’t good so I tried Postbox and then Thunderbird which led to the next few niggles that I didn’t realise I had at the time!
The use of Postbox managed to get me around some of the formatting niggles – it seems to obey my commands in terms of sending text emails with attachments etc. however, it doesn’t seem to also obey my settings in displaying emails sent from others. I can overall this and force all emails to be displayed in plain text only but that’s a bit ugly for newsletters and emails with pictures. Say what you like about Facebook and Twitter but at least the styling is consistent and that your words and images will look the same on their screen as yours, providing they’ve not overwritten the default CSS layout of those sites (so non geeks probably won’t!).
Signatures
Signatures are a basic part of email. But why, oh why, will Mail and Sparrow continue to send them in replies? Often replies can be simple yes/no answer and I don’t want to manually remove an email signature that’s longer than the email body itself! The signature is helpful to those people you’re emailing who might not know your full details. If they’re emailing you, at least they know your email and have a point of contact! Thunderbird and Postbox seem to handle these well and let you turn signatures off in replies but I’ve no idea why Mail and Sparrow can’t do this.
I quite like having random signatures for my personal accounts. Mail manages this, the only app I’ve found that does! I assume Thunderbird might should I find a plugin for it but then I have to hope its a cross platform one.
OS X Integration
Mail and Sparrow manage this fairly well (Sparrow probably better than Mail!) Postbox makes a valiant attempt but Thunderbird falls flat. I know it’s cross platform but so is Postbox and they manage it quite well! I’m on about Growl notifications, contact pictures and contact emails etc etc. The latest version of Mail doesn’t work with the latest Growl (without a plugin) so gets somewhat annoying. Postbox is good but it wouldn’t hurt to display the senders image in the notification, rather than the Postbox icon. Thunderbird is just nasty – doesn’t even show the contact pictures in the app.
Ease of Setup
Sparrow and Mail win out here – incredibly easy to setup. Mail just worked, Sparrow I had to change a few folders for access when accessing an IMAP server but it was straight forward. Postbox and Thunderbird required some considerable effort to send deleted emails to the right trash folder, the right archived messages to the right archive – this being on IMAP, iCloud AND Gmail. Once done, it seems ok but it was just hassle. Sparrow, however is hit from a lack of settings. As a minimal email client, I can see why it does it but it’s a bit of a pain.
Overall
Overall at the minute, I seem to be enjoying using iOS for email! On the iPad the layout is quite nice, the fonts always seem to be the right size, it all seems to work incredibly nicely. iOS even supports S/MIME email certificates which makes it better than Sparrow (which doesn’t). I know certificates aren’t widely supported but I like to use a program that does so that they might become widely known about and used.
At the minute, Postbox has replaced my default email software of Mail. Mail works but it’s such a pain now in terms of formatting that I can’t attempt to use it – I don’t know how my emails are appearing on iOS devices (something I have to consider as my supervisor does a lot of work from his phone).
As far as I’m concerned, there currently isn’t a Mac email software that meets my needs exactly. Sparrow seems to be trying to bring iOS email to OS X but it’s lack of some of the more complex iOS bits means its lacking a bit where I’d like. However, both Sparrow and Postbox seem to be improving so it’ll be good to follow further developments on both.
5 Mac Apps I Can’t Live Without
So for the second part of my 5 items I can’t live without, I’m focussing on Mac applications. I use a Mac at home and at work (I’m lucky – basically I bought my work laptop myself!) so I’ve a fair few apps that I’ve tried for various tasks, both at home and work. However, the best tools will be the ones that are used in both locations.
Alfred
Alfred is one of the most used apps on my Mac. Think of it as a supercharged version of Spotlight. Not only can it sort through your files, folders and web search, with the extra powerpack, you can expand it to run applescripts, shell scripts and hotkeys at will. It’s a fantastically useful tool. I’ve even designed a few extensions for it myself which you can find at my Github page.
The extensions and powerpack really make the tool worthwhile – otherwise it’s a slightly expanded Spotlight.
Total Finder
Total Finder is a plugin for Finder that lets you have a tabbed interface. When I first discovered this, I didn’t think it would be worthwhile but after testing for a while, I realised it made far more sense and worked very well. In fact, I miss it a lot if I have to use Windows for any length of time now (and Total Commander that it’s based on isn’t as good as this) It allows you to use one Finder window for two folders, ideal for comparing two folders of work or if you’re moving files around. Simple, unobtrusive and incredibly helpful.
TextExpander
TextExpander is a program that expands small text snippets into either full sentences, runs Applescripts or more. It’s incredibly handy to be able to type a small abbreviation and have it insert a full sentence for you. I use if for all sorts – I have it able to convert a few three letter acronyms into my email addresses for me (which are case sensitive), I use it to insert LaTeX code automatically (in a restricted number of programs – i.e. only those programs I use for LaTeX coding) and I use it for inserting dates from a simple two letter abbreviation using an Applescript. Other features mean you can have it expand a text clip and ask for an input as well (I use this in my Markdown codign for example, where I have a tag to insert a HTML centre tag pair but a pop up box asks me what I want to go between the start and end tags – saving me editing the expanded snippet when I’ve input it)
It’s incredibly powerful and get used daily. In fact, you can see how well it’s doing for me from the in built statistics it records.
As you can see, it’s saved a fair bit of time so far (that’s since I bought it last month!). It also syncs with Dropbox and can be used on the iPhone and iPad with the iOS version of TextExpander (on that, I use a mixture of the new iOS text replacement (as that works everywhere on the phone) and TexTExpaner for apps that have TextExpaander support).
Divvy
Divvy is a window management software that lets you move and rearrange your windows with hotkeys or via a pop up menu and grid. It’s fantastic for setting windows to use half the screen left and right so you can have two windows next to each other (better on larger screens like my 25” monitor at home) but is also helpful for making apps screen full screen (on my 13” MBP). Again, it sits out the way until it’s needed and does what it’s supposed to do and does it well.
Tracks
Tracks is a primarily an iTunes search program that sits in the menu bar and lets you search your iTunes library. However, the reason I paid the (small) program cost is that the software gives Growl desktop notifications of what’s playing in iTunes and scrobbles all played tracks to Last.fm. As an avid Last.fm, that was great news as it means I didn’t have to use the blaoted and annoying Last.fm software to do so! Whilst the Last.fm software also did Growl notifications, it annoyed me it didn’t have album art in them, which Tracks does show – it’s a small point but something I wanted.
Summary
So there we have it, a list of my daily used bits of software that cover a broad range of my day to day workflow. I think there are a few others I feel I could have added here but I’ll briefly mention them below – I don’t think I use them on a day to day basis to warrant their inclusion above but they’re worthy of a mention.
- Type2Phone – It bugged me there wasn’t an app that let me send texts from my iPhone via my PC (Android has them and my old Motorola managed to do it). This fantastic app lets me use my computer as a bluetooth keyboard for the phone, letting me send texts quickly whilst I’m at my desk!
- myTumblr – A fantastic Tumblr client for the Mac that lets me type up posts in Markdown and send them to Tumblr without an issue. Cheaper than MarsEdit as well!
Blown Away by OS X Again
So the Mac has managed to blow me away again today, almost as much as when I first started using it, about this time last year. How you might ask?
Well I found out today that you can create custom keyboard shortcuts.
As a self confessed keyboard lover (I love shortcuts and desktop launchers, like Alfred ), I really missed some of the keyboard shortcuts in Mail that others such as Sparrow and Postbox have, such as the ⌘ + Enter shortcut key to send email. This was a complete pain to me (turns out the default Mail one is Shift + ⌘ + D which to me doesn’t seem right). Anyhow, it appears that with Mac, you can create shortcut keys for any application or remap them to whatever you want!
It’s all done in System Preferences, using the Keyboard option. On opening, select the Keyboard Shortcuts option and select Application Shortcuts. Clicking the + sign lets you choose what you want to add as shown below.
This lets you add whatever you want just by putting in the name of the menu item you want to change/add a shortcut for, so I added the ⌘ + Enter key that I wanted and when I restarted Mail.app, it was there ready for me to use (it looks like if the application was running, the application needs to be restarted for it to be picked up properly).
The fact that you can do this for any app blows me away somewhat – I don’t think Windows has anything like this (or at least, not so eaisly accessed and changed) which means that this is another of those features that Mac has that make it better for the user than Windows!
iTunes Match
So I took the plunge this week and purchased iTunes Match. After using it for a bit, I thought I’d make a quick post about it.
Background
iTunes Match is a cloud based music system built into iTunes and iOS devices that allow you to upload your music to iTunes servers and lets you download it to up to 10 iOS and OS X devices. It’s primarily a music storage service, rather than a streaming service like Spotify as when you listen to the song on an iOS device, it downloads the music to the device, whilst playing it as it downloads (streaming would then wipe it from the device to clear space, this doesn’t). It also only lets you access music you already own, not letting you stream different music from a catalogue, so it’s useful for those with an already large library. In the UK, the services costs £21.99 a year and you get unlimited use over that period. Note, iTunes automatically sets itself up as recurring, yearly, payment.
How it works
As mentioned above, it only works with music you already own and have in your iTunes library. If you don’t use iTunes, iTunes Match isn’t for you. When you sign up, iTunes match analyses your library and matches all the songs you own to those in iTunes database. These songs are then instantly “uploaded” to your account (in theory, they’re already in the cloud, iTunes just let your AppleID access them). Those tracks that aren’t in the iTunes library (I have some obscure Russian rock in my collection for example…), iTunes then uploads them to it’s servers to allow you download them to your other devices.
Overall, the system is fairly quick – I did have to leave it going over night but then with 7,532 songs to analyse, it’ll take a while. iTunes managed to find ~5,000 of my songs in it’s database so I did have to upload 2,000 but it seemed to go quite quickly and when I woke, it was all complete. Enabling Match on my iPad was a simple case of enabling it in the Settings > Music. It then deletes all music off the device and lets you see all the stored music in the cloud (though you can set the device to only display local songs if you don’t want to browse your entire library all the time).
Advantages
I must admit, the main reason for me upgrading to Match was not the fact I could have instant access to my music wherever I was (though it’s nice to see the iPad being even less reliant on syncing with a PC) but the fact I now have a cloud backup of my music. If I delete it off my hard drive or I have a hard drive failure, I load up iTunes and redownload. Boom. Simple. And for £22 a year (for upto 25,000 non iTunes songs!) It sort of blows the cloud backup services out of the water (in terms of pricing and ease of use.) Considering I was only paying for backup space to backup my music, it no longer makes sense for me to keep paying for a cloud backup solution for my media files.
Another benefit it that some of music is 192kbps MP3 (or less) files. iTunes lets you download the better sounding 256kbps versions to replace them. Macworld have a fantastic guide on how to accomplish that here . It may take me some time though as iTunes finds over 4,000 songs under 256kbps! This does replace your MP3 files with Apple .aac files. However, these are DRM free and should play in most desktop players and non Apple portable music players, even if you decide to not continue with iTunes match next year.
Disadvantages
Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages to iTunes Match – the big one I’ve found is that some songs wont upload because they’re under 96kbps which is what iTunes limit to be uploaded to it’s servers. I think the most annoying thing about this is that some albums I have are VBR encodings and one or two tracks won’t upload from that album. However, according to my install, I have 35 songs that either aren’t eligible or there are errors uploading to iCloud in some way (it turns out the main reason for this was that the files were no longer on my computer but iTunes hadn’t detected them as missing). I found this by creating a smart playlist using the criteria in the image below.
That’s less than 1% of my songs so I must admit, I’m pretty impressed overall. And to be fair, most of the songs that are below the threshold bitrate are songs I’ve ripped from Youtube videos (or acquired from disreputable means, which thanks to an eMusic subscription, no longer occurs) in the past so it’s a good way for me to either delete them or go back and purchase the songs.
For those that use non Apple phones or tablets, you’re out of luck – you can’t use iCloud on it (though if you use iTunes on different computers, you can use it in iTunes). This obviously restricts the users to those of Apple’s products but this is a very much a business move that Apple are used to taking so should come as no surprise.
Overall
Overall, the iTunes Match experience is pretty damn good. The ease at which it searches through your library and finds the tracks you already have and then matches these to the iTunes catalogue is amazing. As I said, the amount of songs I have which were picked up was staggering – a 99.5% success rate. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a resounding success.
I know it’s not marketed as a music backup service (as Apple reserve the right to remove any items from the iTunes store at any time), but it it makes a really cheap service that’ll allow you to redownload your music, should a disaster occur and your hard drive die/wiped/eaten.
If you are fully entrenched in the Apple eco system (like I am), then the £22 for the year is an easy choice to make – it’s reduced my offsite backup cost by 50% this year as I no longer have to spend so much on space for my music collection – I’m trusting it to Apple’s servers and my ability to store it on a portable drive at work. The ability to change the tracks on my iPad without being near my PC is also a good point (as you can now delete tracks from iPod and iPads in iOS 5). £22 for these benefits, to me is a price worth paying. And don’t forget, I can update those old sounding tracks upto the newer, better 256kbps tracks. Which is worth £22 alone!
Texpad - Revisited
I’ve reviewed Texpad once before here. I said it was a good, native, Mac LaTeX editor that had a lot going for it.
Well the version I reviewed was v1.0 and now it’s on v1.26 so I thought it was about time to review it again to see how it’s improved.
Improvements
The biggest one that the developers pushed was the code completion feature. This means it’ll complete any code that you start typing and will auto type the finish (for example, LaTeX codes are inserted as \begin{} and end with \end{} and Texpad will automatically create the \end command of whatever you inserted as the beginning command.)
Not only that, but if you’re using Bibtex for your referencing and have already added the Bibtex file location to the file, Texpad will automatically search it for the reference as you type. For example, if the Bibtex key for the item I want is Salter2011, I can type \cite{S and Texpad will display a dropdown list showing all the names in the Bibtex file with Bibtex key that begins with S. This easily allows me to then find the reference I need without opening my Bibtex manager.
Open to All
Texpad, unlike some other text editors for the Mac, doesn’t allow for any font to be used in the editor. It’s list of fonts, whilst decent, doesn’t allow the use of personal fonts. However, after emailing the developers and asking if this could be enabled (so I could use the fantastic Mono Dyslexic font ), they sent me the following email.
Hi Chris,
Texpad 1.2.6 is in the AppStore now. Among other fixes and new features, there’s a hidden feature being delivered on your request, which I’m sure will be useful to many other users. Texpad now searches for installed fonts with the string ‘dyslexic’ in their name and lists them in the menu. I do not have the font you mentioned on my machine, but have tested the functionality with other fonts. I’d appreciate if you gave it a quick try at some point and let us know if Texpad correctly lists the fonts you need in the menu.
Merry xmas.
Jawad
And indeed, Jawad is right. The changes appear perfectly.
As can be seen, the font list shows the font and selecting it works perfectly. So the editor is now in a much better position to allow anyone and everyone access to LaTeX.
Overall
Overall the improvements have added to Texpad immensely. It’s now a very functional LaTeX editor that is constantly being updated and works perfectly well, with an active development team that are rapidly adding features and improvements to the software. Hopefully, 2012 will see the software improve considerably on it’s already fantastic base.
Texpad can be found on the Mac App Store .
Transferring Preview Signatures
An excellent guide on how to move the encrypted signatures from one Mac to another. Just came in useful. Thanks to the author!
Alfredapp Extension
It always annoyed me that Chrome 
wouldn’t open by default in Incognito mode. Sometimes you just want to be able to open it Incognito for whatever reason you might have…
Anyhow, I lived with opening it manually until I found out about Alfred . This excellent tool lets you open any app from the command line and recent releases has allowed the ability to be extended with user made extensions. Wonderful! But I still couldn’t figure out how to open Chrome in Incognito mode. Until I found out that Chrome could open Incognito from the command line!
So I quickly created my own Alfred Extension using the information gleaned from Cool Geex.
You can download it from my Dropbox here.
Enjoy surfing in private in ease and enjoy Alfred!
