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Friday Favorite: Using Zapier to automate my workflow (Updated)
Recently, the TUAW staff talked about their workflow, and the tools they use to keep their day moving smoothly. One detail that didn't come out in my contribution is my growing usage of automation tools to help me get things done. I'm an avid IFTTT user, using the web service to send tasks to my children's iPad or mood updates to my Jawbone Up. Recently, though, I found myself needing to do a complex task that fell outside the capability of IFTT. That's when I discovered Zapier, a web-automation service very similar to IFTTT. Zapier is an online tool that taps into the APIs of over 200 different web services. It includes major services like Evernote and Dropbox as well as niche ones like Campfire, Freshbooks and Github. You can create a "zap" that pulls data from one service and then performs a task based on that data. These zaps run automatically every 15 minutes and can be turned on or off as needed. In my case, I needed a quick and efficient way to take the contents of an email in Gmail and send it to a shared Google spreadsheet. For a while, I tried copy and paste to move the subject, body and other details into my Google spreadsheet one cell of data at a time, but that task was extremely tedious and time consuming. I looked to Google to see if it had some built-in tools that would let me easily and automatically send data between the two services, but I found none. It was only after hours of searching through other email task-management solutions that I stumbled upon Zapier. Zapier supports the major Google services, which means it can plumb data from Gmail and then send it to Google Docs. The granularity of control available to you in Zapier is fantastic. I was able to set up a zap that would scan my Gmail account for emails with the label "app review" and then add those emails as new rows to a Google spreadsheet. I could pick the timestamp as column one in the spreadsheet row, the subject as column two and the body as column three. All I have to do now is label an email and wait for my zap to run. It is such an elegant and easy solution to a problem that had been plaguing me for weeks. This only scratches the surface of what you can do with Zapier. Zapier is available for you to try for free for 14 days. Once your trial is over, you can choose a free plan, which provides you with five zaps that perform a task every 15 minutes. You get up to 100 tasks per month for free. You can purchase additional zaps and tasks starting at US$15 per month for the basic plan which includes 20 zaps and 3,000 tasks. If you want zaps to run faster than every 15 minutes, you can purchase a business plan for $49/month. This plan gives you 15,000 tasks and 50 zaps that run every five minutes. Update: As pointed out by Rohan Sharma, this same automation can be accomplished with a Google Apps scripting macro in the Google spreadsheet. The script uses Google's API to read your Gmail messages and enter that data in the spreadsheet. This is more or less what Zapier does for you when you set up your zaps, which is why I chose the service. I started down the path of scripting, but it was much more involved and time consuming than I wanted. As mentioned above, I wanted something easy to implement. It's worth mentioning the macro option as those with experience in this type of scripting may want to forgo Zapier and venture out with their own code. For the rest of us who prefer to let others do the heavy work of scripting, Zapier is an excellent tool.
Friday Favorite: Type2Phone
Type2Phone (US$4.99) is one of the most practical tools in my development toolbox. It emulates a Bluetooth keyboard from your Mac. With it, you type to your iOS device using your normal desktop keyboard. While this may not sound like a big thing for many iOS users -- after all, the onboard keyboards and new dictation features streamline text entry -- it is a huge deal for devs and IT coordinators who have to keep typing similar things into apps and settings, over and over again. For example, take Game Center development. You usually work with many different accounts, testing to see how access works for new users, for those with a good history of application use or for those who have unlocked certain achievements. In a normal debug session, you may sign out and sign in with various credentials dozens of times. Type2Phone makes that a practical exercise in testing instead of torment. Or, take today. I was trying to set up a SOCKS proxy system and had to keep typing addresses for various configurations. Once again Type2Phone came to the rescue. It's so much more practical to type or paste longwinded URLs like http://10.0.0.1:8888/Public/socks.pac from my home desktop than to laboriously tip-tip-tap it on the phone or iPad. Type2Phone was designed smartly, with re-use in mind. I long ago synced it to my primary dev units. Now, I just select each unit from the in-app pop-up list, and I'm ready to type right away. To be fair, there are a few unhappy reviews over at the Mac App Store, but they describe situations (primarily beachballs) that I have not encountered, and I'm a pretty heavy user of the product. For me, Type2Phone is an essential software component. My development life would be way harder without it. And that's why I consider it my Friday favorite for this week.
Friday Favorite: CommandQ for Mac
CommandQ is a Mac utility that stops you from accidentally quitting apps when using the keyboard shortcut "⌘" (or command) and "Q". Unfortunately, we are all susceptible to moments of human error. This means, with the ⌘ + Q shortcut, we sometimes quit apps we don't mean to. Perhaps when we're meaning to hit ⌘ and W or ⌘ and the TAB key. I know I've done it too many times to count! Thankfully, there's an app for that! CommandQ is a Mac utility app that stops apps from quitting unless you press and hold down the ⌘ + Q shortcut for a short period of time. This gives you a moment to catchup with your mistake and let go before the app quits. It's a straightforward concept, but has the potential to save you a lot of frustration and stress. CommandQ lets you customize the period of time it takes for ⌘ + Q to take effect, from half a second to two seconds. You can also specify which apps CommandQ works with, so it's only the important apps which require a longer ⌘ + Q press to quit. CommandQ is a simple, well-designed app that will go largely unnoticed until it saves you from an unfortunate mistake. It costs US$3.99 or is available as a free trial for 30 days. It's not available on the Mac App Store, but you can get it from the CommandQ website here.
Friday Favorite: Sock Puppets
Sock Puppets allows just about anyone to quickly and easily create short animated movies using not only sock puppet characters, but (via in-app purchases) aliens, politicians and Halloween characters. The adorable app is from a software company Smith Micro -- not exactly known for its consumer wares. Sock Puppets is powered by Anime Studio, however, and some time ago the company bought up applications like Poser, and now offers some cool specialized visual artist tools. As for Sock Puppets, I can tell you the app is a lot of fun. My kids have already created a number of short films with it. The free version comes with a few basic sock puppets, but for about $5 you can unlock all the added characters, plus extended recording and the ability to save to your camera roll. There's also a fully unlocked version of the app for $4. It's well worth it. Basic recording time is 30 seconds, but extended is 90 -- just enough time for kids to get in enough story. Creating animated puppet shows To create a video you select your puppets, a background, some props and tap the record button. The app detects voice, and attempts to move the mouth of the puppet along with the vocals. The puppet animations are well-done although more than once the audio clipped, causing a small glitch in some movies. Since this isn't a pro app, you're not going to see extensive support for phonemes or the ability to separate vocals from music -- it's just mostly going with the overall sound. Still, it's quite good and looks fluid and natural. Combined with the animations used when moving a character around, it's a lot of fun to see. While recording you can move your puppet around, not just side to side, but in a pseudo-3D which scales the puppets up or down, depending. Not all puppets can do this, as the sock puppets are locked into sideways motion only. In-app purchased puppets like the aliens and Halloween characters can move all over and can be resized during the animation. My kids enjoyed scaling a creature up or down as if they were shrinking or growing. What's cool is you can just tap and move any character at any time, and pinch to scale them. Sock Puppets alters your voice as well on a per-puppet basis. You can tweak the settings of the voice changes, customizing them to your liking. I found the defaults to be quite pleasing and well-done. They matched the look of the characters, especially (my favorite) the aliens. Recording is easy enough, as there's a record button available while you move stuff around, but saving your masterpiece to the camera roll will require an in-app purchase. You can share your video to YouTube without this, although the export can take a while. Conclusion While there are a lot of apps to distract kids out there, I found Sock Puppets easy to use and a lot of fun. My kids agree -- they created over a dozen short movies within a few days, and all of them looked excellent. If you're willing to spend $4 you can buy the "complete" version with all characters, sets and utilities unlocked. I'm hopeful Smith Micro will expand Sock Puppets with more characters in the future, but it also has me more intrigued with their pro apps (which was perhaps the goal as well). We'll keep an eye on the consumer efforts from the company going forward, especially if Sock Puppets is an indication that the company is looking to provide more of these fun tools.
Friday Favorite: Due
Yesterday around the TUAW water cooler a number of us expressed our love of Due, an app for Mac and iOS that is basically a simple timer/reminder application (my original review here). After trying dozens of timer apps, I think Due wins for a number of features that make it stand out from a very crowded field. After all, your iDevice comes with a timer in the Clock app, and there's Apple's Reminders app. While Reminders syncs with iCloud, your alarms in the Clock app do not. Due can help you stay focused and never overcook a boiling egg again. Due's interface is simple as can be. There are three views: Reminders, Timers and Logged Reminders. You can quickly set a reminder for later in the day, or whenever. Due accepts natural language instructions, so you could say "next Thursday at 1 PM" and it'll set a reminder alarm for just that. Note that Due doesn't integrate with the built-in Reminders app, so I'm only referring to reminders (lower case) within Due itself. Once a reminder has gone off or you check it off manually, those go into Logged Reminders. This is handy if you need to recall what you did or if you need to remind yourself of the same thing again, later. I tend to use the timer function more frequently (as I use my calendar for appointments and OmniFocus for repeating tasks and "to do" items). I have a 25-minute timer for Pomodoros, a 5-minute timer for breaks and a couple of others for things I need to do at some point in the day, but things which require me to focus on just that thing for an allotted amount of time. By doing this, I help my squirrel-like brain stay focused on some critical tasks throughout the day, but it also helps me be flexible enough to not dread going out of being flexible in my daily schedule (more on this in next week's Productivity Tip). Best of all, Due has just the right number of preferences. From changing sounds to setting a snooze time, Due can be as intrusive or quiet as you like. You can even change the alarms to use Notification Center or Growl -- handy especially if you use something like Prowl. I particularly like the option to "suppress alerts on launch and wake" because I hate opening my Mac to have 30 alarms from past events going off all at once. Is it just me or is that "throw a million notifications at me on wake" thing seem a very obtrusive, Windows 98-like behavior? But I digress. Due is a rock-solid, beautifully designed app. iCloud sync works flawlessly (you can also use Dropbox) across my Macs and iDevices, meaning I always have what I need where I need it. Most importantly, Due keeps me focused on doing things, and not setting myself up to do things, which is precisely what technology should be doing. You can get the Mac app here or the iOS version here.
Friday Favorite: Using AppleScript to work with tasks in Things 2
A few weeks ago I purchased Things 2 when it was on sale in the Mac App Store. I've used the demo before and have always enjoyed the simplicity of the Things interface and the power of its tagging system. One difficulty that I faced with Things is its closed environment, which keeps all your tasks inside the app. That's great if you work only with Things, but not so convenient if you want to share your tasks with other apps or other people. You can drag and drop your tasks individually to other apps like OS X Calendar, but the easiest way to export your tasks is to use AppleScript and transfer them in bulk. One script I regularly use is this export Things to text script from Dexter Ang (thepoch) on github. This script exports the Things database to the desktop as Things Backup.txt. You can tweak the script to export certain parts of the Things database like your Today tasks or Next tasks. This is very handy as you can then edit the text file and upload it to Google Docs or any other app that'll import and format a text document. Another one of my favorite scripts is this Reminder export script from NightLion.net. This script lets you export all the tasks in your Today list and import them into the OS X Reminders app. I've been using this script each morning to pull my tasks down into Reminders, which I then use to set flexible notifications for the tasks. The last script that I've adopted is this Mail To Things script posted by marekz on the Cultured Code forums. This script lets you select a message in your OS X Mail inbox and send it quickly to Things. The task will appear in your Things Inbox with the subject as the name of the task and a link to the email in the notes. These are just a few scripts that I have found during my initial weeks with Things. If you have any favorite scripts, please share them in the comments. If you want to create your own scripts, you should check out Cultured Code's PDF guide to using AppleScript with Things as well as our growing list of AppleScripts for OS X.
Friday Favorite: Timehop traces your digital footsteps through the past
Human brains are funny things when it comes to time. We spend a lot of our mental energy thinking about the future -- where to vacation, what to eat, when to quit and who to marry -- but what really fires our synapses is a little taste of the past. The future may be awesome and mysterious, but we can't remember things that haven't happened yet; memory is just as powerful as imagination, and more emotionally charged. Whole industries have grown up around our innate desire to remember more, longer and with higher fidelity than we could in the absence of a technological assist. That's what makes an app like Timehop so interesting; it hitches itself to our deep affinity for nostalgia while delivering a clever dose of spontaneous discovery. If an app's MO is to send me a daily notification, I usually delete it in short order; the daily reminder from Timehop, in contrast, has helped it work its way into my frequent rotation. Timehop's feature set is magically minimal. Sign in with Facebook, then point the app at your image-centric social media feeds (currently supported: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr) and your phone's camera roll. Wait a day. After that, every morning Timehop will crawl back into the mists and pull out what you were doing, or what you photographed, on the same day one/two/three or more years before. Within the Timehop app, you can re-share that moment with Timehop friends, flag as a favorite, comment or re-publish the status update or photo to Facebook or Twitter. It seems so simple, but it's surprisingly engaging -- almost-forgotten moments taking you by surprise, whether adorable or bittersweet. The service originally kicked off in February 2011 as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, an email-based rewind that shadowed your Foursquare history and told you where you'd been. Since January of last year, Timehop has centered on the app experience exclusively and let the email piece fade away. With leadership from Jonathan Wegener (who created one of my favorite transit apps, the NYC subway where-to-stand guide Exit Strategy) and venture backing from several NYC tech elites (OATV, Spark Capital, TechStars, Foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, and shiny new MIT Media Lab faculty member Kevin Slavin), Timehop has the pedigree and the resources to shine. Even if you don't think the idea of reliving your past posts and snapshots sounds particularly appealing, give Timehop a try. You may discover something unexpected. Timehop is a free download in the iOS App Store for iOS 5 or higher.
Friday Favorite: Exif Everywhere reveals the data that's hidden in photos
Everyone enjoys a good photography-driven website, but folks with a technical eye can't look at an image without wondering what camera took that shot, what settings were used and where it was taken. Exif Everywhere from MyLove Company is a browser extension and desktop app that provides those details and more. Exif Everywhere operates either as a standalone desktop app or a browser extension in Firefox, Safari or Chrome. When browsing, all you have to do is place your cursor over an image and hit the Control key to reveal the EXIF data in another window. It worked with most websites that I tested. The biggest exceptions were the photo hosting websites like Flickr and SmugMug, which hide that information from the browser. The browser extension also shows different information depending on how images were processed. Some images had their EXIF data stripped during post-production and Exif Everywhere showed only the dimensions, file format and the app used in processing. Other images, uploaded with minimal processing, were filled with details like the f-stop, exposure time and the ISO. The OS X app is similar to the browser extension in that it shows you all the EXIF data contained in a photo. These details mirror the information you can see when you select "Get Info" from the contextual menu in Finder. Exif Everywhere not only shows the EXIF information; it also allows you to strip it from your images. With a simple click of a button, you can remove either the EXIF data or the GPS data from your photos. There's no bulk tool built into the app, so you will have strip your photo library one image at a time. Exif Everywhere is a handy utility for users who want to find out more about the images they see on the web or have stored on their hard drive. The app is packaged into a standalone OS X app that is installed separately from the browser extensions. This is useful as customers have the option to install one or both tools. Exif Everywhere is available for US$14.99. You can download it from the app's website or from the Mac App Store. There's also a 20-day free trial so you can try it, before you buy it.
Friday Favorite: Voila captures your screen with ease, on sale now
Given the issues with my former screen-capture app-of-choice Skitch, I recently went on the hunt for a replacement that can grab screenshots and handle video capture. I've finally landed on Voila. While it isn't perfect, Voila offers plenty of functionality and does almost everything I need. As is pretty standard for a screen-capture app, Voila lets you grab whatever is on your screen however you need it, either in a full-screen grab, from a specific window or from a drag-and-drop selection. You can grab videos in almost any configuration. I mostly use it for snapping rectangular pictures, but you can grab circular or polygonal pics as well. Voila even has an in-app browser and a connection to your webcam, for even more options. Once the picture has been captured, you can add annotations, blur or adjust it as you like and then export the file using an in-depth "Save As...". Unfortunately, this process isn't as simple as I'd like. You must hunt to find some functions, and while hotkeys can be set up, the Re-size function doesn't have a clear one. There's a re-size option on the save screen, so even when Voila doesn't have exactly what I'm looking for, it does have some fairly smart shortcuts. There are a few bugs in the app as well. One bug I'm getting recently has my pictures being saved as just a white screen rather than whatever I captured, but the support team has been more than ready to help with any problems or concerns. As for video capture, I think that's where Voila really shines. It's got a very powerful and steady video-capture functionality. You can select a window or draw a selection on the screen, and you can choose to use an external mic for audio, grab your computer's audio or use your Mac's internal mic as needed. Again, there are some small issues: The included YouTube connection won't accept videos if you've used a strange ratio when drawing a selection on the screen. But that's only a minor issue. I've still been able to just drag the videos out of the app, and then upload separately to YouTube. Voila isn't without its problems, but an app like this is designed for so many different use cases that it's not surprising there are a few hiccups. Plus, Voila is right in the middle of an awesome sale. It's only US$4.99 on the Mac App Store. If, like me, you were looking for a Skitch replacement with a little more functionality, Voila might be just what you need.
Friday Favorite: Bartender
There comes a time in a power user's life when the number of his menu bar applications exceeds the amount of real estate in the menu bar, a condition made worse by primary applications with a lot of menus. The cure for this? A handy little app, which is still undergoing testing, called Bartender. Bartender will roll up menu bar items into one little drop-down menu bar item. That's pretty much it! You can have Bartender hide something entirely, or just pop it under the Bartender menu bar icon. Keep in mind this is still in beta, so many of my TUAW colleagues weren't able to put system icons into Bartender, but I was. Your mileage may vary, but while the app is in beta it is basically free. You can also choose to buy it now for $7.50, which is half what it will cost when it is out of beta. If, like me, your menu bar has exceeded the width of what your screen can handle, try Bartender. It's just what you were looking for.
Friday Favorite: Desktop Tidy
Part of my blogging workflow uses Skitch for screenshots. As a result, I wind up with images all over my desktop at the end of the day like, well, a messy desktop after a busy day. If you find yourself with files constantly cluttering your desktop as well, check out Desktop Tidy on the Mac App Store. It'll hide those files clogging up your workspace at intervals you set, from every few seconds to every few days. But wait, there's more! Desktop Tidy includes a ton of customization features. Sure, it stashes your files away in your Library folder where Spotlight won't index them (and Finder likes to hide the Library folder by default these days), but that's part of the beauty of the app. Using the menu bar, you'll easily see what files were sent over, make them come back, or search and organize them on the fly. Here's a neat trick: Ctrl-clicking an item in the menu will restore it to your desktop. There are filters for filetypes which will allow you to easily spot the files you may typically save to the desktop. In my case these are image files, and Desktop Tidy comes already configured to show a filter of images, easily accessed from the menu bar. In a way, this is easier than mucking about on the desktop itself. Yes there are other tools and ways to do this, but I think Tidy gives the user a ton of options and ease of use for a decent price (currently US$4.99). Check out Desktop Tidy if you just can't stand having all those files littering your desktop, no matter how tiny you make them.
Friday Favorite: A bushel of educational apps for learning fun
A friend on Twitter asked me the other day if I had a list of the educational apps I have on my iPad. With all the reviews I have done, I was ashamed to admit that I've never taken the time to list those apps that I use on a regular basis with my children. I reached out to the other writers at TUAW and asked them the same question. Together, we compiled a list of our favorite learning apps for children, and wow, what a list. The apps are presented below in no particular order. NXTapp ($0.99) Khan Academy (Free) Elmo Loves ABCs ($4.99) Where's my water? ($0.99) Simple Physics ($0.99) Simply Find It ($1.99) SparkleFish ($0.99, 99-cent in-app purchases) My First Wood Puzzles: Dinosaurs (Free, $1.99 in-app purchase) Zoo Sounds ($1.99) Paper by FiftyThree (Free, in-app purchases of $2.99 for tools and $7.99 for everything) Plants HD for the iPad ($1.99) Discovery Kids Sharks ($4.99) Minecraft-Pocket Edition ($6.99; more game-ish, but building with blocks is learning, no?) Articulation Station (Free; sound packs are $2.99 to $5.99, full app is $49) Letter of the Day Interactive Activities ($1.99) AniMatch ($0.99) iBuildABCs ($0.99) Junior Bingo ($0.99) Rocket Speller (Free) Wood Puzzle USA Map ($1.99) Word Bingo ($0.99) Math Bingo ($0.99) Beginning Sounds Interactive Game ($0.99) Motion Math Hungry Fish (Free, in-app purchases from $2.99 up to $8.99) Letter Quiz ($1.99) Phonics Tic Tac Toe Interactive Game (Free) Sentence Maker (Free) Flashcards+ (Free, in-app purchases to get new voices) Word Jigsaw (Free, in-app purchases to get extra hints and unlock all the levels) Monster Coloring Book ($2.99) Math Tables ($1.99) Word Search + (Free, in-purchase of $1.99 for premium version) Missing Link (Free, in-app purchases for hints and extra levels) Bookworm ($2.99) If you have any educational apps you enjoy, please share them with us in the comments.
Friday Favorite: Satechi 12-port USB Hub
It's rare to come up with a Friday Favorite for something as seemingly ho-hum as a USB hub, but this particular model caught my eye a while ago when a colleague brought it with him on a project. "What is that?" I asked, wonderingly. The blue glow of the ports was so hypnotic that I nearly missed his explanation, "It's my favorite USB hub; I bring it with me everywhere." The Satechi 12-port hub wouldn't look out of place on the control deck of the Death Star. It comes in one color -- black -- and features two banks of ports that glow enticingly when switched on for power via the twin rocker switches at the back end of the unit. One bank includes six ports atop the hub; the second bank has five on top and one front-facing port. You can use the hub with or without the power adapter, but with it connected you can support self-powered devices; you can charge an iPhone (or multiple iPhones) with ease. iPads will trickle-charge ("No Charging" indicator on screen) but, like most hubs, the Satechi unit doesn't support the double-wattage port spec that the iPads need for rapid charge. You may not think you need twelve USB ports, but if you're dealing with flash drives or other peripherals, or if you have a MacBook Air and want to maximize your expansion options, the Satechi hub is a perfect fit. The hub currently retails for US$27.99 and comes with a power adapter and a one-meter extension cable. You can check out our other Friday Favorites, hardware and software alike, here.
Friday Favorite: Optimal Layout brings app switching and window controls to your fingertips
Optimal Layout is a great utility that fundamentally alters the way that I interact with my Mac. In short, it gives me the ability to use my keyboard to quickly change between windows. That might sound like what you're been doing with ⌘ + Tab, but there are a few important differences. The first is that you can choose not only which app you are switching to, but also which window in that app. Optimal Layout can even switch you to specific browser tabs in Safari or Google Chrome. You can use the mouse with Optimal Layout, but it works especially well for those who prefer the keyboard. Type ⌘ + Option/Alt + F and it will bring up a list of available windows. Start typing and it will match window names. When you find the one you want, simply press Return. This is especially great if you are on a Mac with a small screen or working in multiple full-screen apps, because you can switch between them without using ⌘ + Tab to find the app you want to use. Optimal Layout is more than just an app/window switcher, it also lets you control the location of windows on the screen with your keyboard. You can maximize (full screen minus the Dock and menu bar), half-screen, quarter-screen, or center any window via the Optimal Layout UI, without bringing that application forward. Just type to find the window you want, and then press the keyboard command for where you want that window to go. Or you can use the menu bar controls (which can also be hidden, if you don't want them to appear) to control the front-most window. If that's not enough, there is even a grid that Optimal Layout can show you and help you position all of your windows on your screen if you need to see multiple windows at once. The best way to understand Optimal Layout is to see it in action and try it yourself. There is a 94-second screencast on the Optimal Layout homepage, and a few other short screencasts on the support page. There's even a trial version available so you can try before you buy. Optimal Layout is US$14 and is available on the Mac App Store or directly from the developer. It support Mac OS 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7.
Friday Favorite: After the Deadline
I spend a lot of time in the web browser, so much that I use web apps more than their standalone counterparts. I use twitter.com to compose a tweet, gmail.com to check my email and so on. As a result, I use several plug-ins and extensions to improve the efficiency of my online work. In a previous Friday Favorite, I covered Lazarus, a form recovery tool. Today, I'm going to tell you about After The Deadline, an extension for Firefox or Chrome that'll spell and grammar check your writing. After the Deadline works with most text fields in a web browser. It appears as a small ABC icon in the bottom right corner of a text box. When you're done typing your comment, tweet or feedback, you can click the icon and the extension will both spell and grammar check your writing. When you're checking with After the Deadline, the ABC icon will change to red. Spelling errors will be highlighted in red; grammar errors in green. One little drawback with the tool is that you can edit the errors, but you can't edit the surrounding text until you click the ABC icon and turn the checking off. It's a step up from OS X's spell check feature because the grammar check will pick up a lot of writing errors that spell check doesn't detect. The most common one I get is word repetition such as "the the" or "a a." It's not as thorough as a dedicated grammar tool like Grammarly, but those tools cost money and don't integrate into the browser as an extension. After the Deadline is perfect for informal writing like comments, emails, or feedback forms. It'll prevent you from making a glaring spelling error when you're communicating online. There's also a Wordpress plugin, if you use that CMS. The extension works with Firefox and Chrome for the Mac and is available for free from After The Deadline's website.
Friday Favorite: Lazarus Extension for Safari saves your form text
Don't you hate that sinking feeling you get when you spend five to ten minutes filling out a form -- and then you lose all the data because of a hiccup in your Internet connection, or because of Safari's tab reloading quirks? Before that happens to you again, you should check out Lazarus. It's an extension for Safari, Chrome and Firefox that stores your form data in case you lose it. It works with almost all web forms, with web-based email clients and even in some content management systems like WordPress. The extension/plug-in stores your text in a database and lets you restore it with a single click. Each field that is supported by the extension will display the Lazarus ankh symbol. If you lose your data, you can click on the symbol to restore the cached text. The Safari extension has a few options that'll let you encrypt form data, exclude sites from working with Lazarus, and change the number of days the form data is stored. Lazarus is lightweight and doesn't affect browser performance. It's a life-saver for WordPress bloggers and anyone who fills in a lot of online forms. Lazarus is available for free from Interclue's website.
Friday Favorites: Using Little Snitch to stop apps from phoning home
One thing that drives me mad is when applications try to phone home with information. Usually, these requests are benign; the app is either looking for the latest update or making a serial number verification request. If it's a rogue app, though, it could be sending back information you'd rather not share. To find out which apps are phoning home, you can install Little Snitch. It's a US$30 app that alerts you whenever a program tries to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can choose to block this connection, or let it through on a case-by-case basis. You can also specify a rule to handle this connection attempt in the future, so you don't have to be alerted each time the app phones home again. Little Snitch gives you fine control over these connection attempts. Besides permanently blocking a connection, you can also choose to stop it for a single session. This session-based blocking is convenient for travelers who are using a cellular connection and want to limit their data consumption. Little Snitch is an excellent app for tracking your outgoing Internet connection. You'd be surprised by the number of apps that try to phone home and how often they do it. Google Chrome is one of the worst offenders in this group as it tries to connect to the Google mothership several times a day. If you want to try it out yourself, there's a limited time trial of Little Snitch that runs for a 3 hours at a time. The full, unlimited app costs $30 and is available from Objective Development's website.
Friday Favorites: Unit Converter
Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that we feel is indispensable. To me, Dashboard feels like the forgotten relative of OS X, the one that sits quietly in the back of the room during the family reunion that has surprisingly good stories. There's some amazing widgets for Dashboard, and Unit Converter is one of them. It can convert a number of categories including area, currency, power, pressure, speed, weight, volume and more. It's a free converter that might not have all the units you're looking for (compare more than 130 currencies in Currencies to 40 in Unit Converter). I'm in a marriage that requires regular translation of meters to inches, stone to pounds (weight), Celsius into Fahrenheit and pounds (currency) into dollars, and the Unit Converter widget is an indispensable tool in sorting out what my husband is telling me. If you need a quick converter, Unit Converter is free and already on your Mac.
Friday Favorite: BetterZip
BetterZip is a utility I might not use every day, but I'm very thankful for it when I need it. It's an archive/compression utility which handles a broad array of archive formats, including ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, and some that you rarely see on a Mac, such as 7-Zip and RAR formats. While the unarchiver built in to OS X can handle quite a few of these formats -- and is what I use on a day-to-day basis -- BetterZip adds a few very useful tools to the mix. BetterZip opens or creates your archive in a file-list format, and you can drag files between Finder and BetterZip to add to or extract from the archive. Creating new archives is just a "File->New" or Command-N away, and you can save them in Zip, TAR, TGZ, TBZ, 7-Zip or XAR formats. While the Finder lets you easily create archives by right-clicking a file selection and choosing "Archive," it doesn't allow you to easily edit the archive or add to it. For quick compression of one or more files for emailing, it's fine and I use it regularly, but for larger archives that need to be more flexible, BetterZip is an excellent choice. BetterZip also makes it easy to search large archives for a single file you're looking for. Read on for more reasons BetterZip is my Friday Favorite ...
Notational Velocity, Simplenote, and Dropbox bring child-like wonder
The phrase "game changer" is no doubt cliché and overused, but every now and again it just fits. I had heard about Notational Velocity when Merlin Mann posted about it on 43Folders. It changed how I use my iMac, MacBookPro, and iPhone, bringing them all together in a very cool way. The app has been around for awhile (we talked about it five years ago!) but some new features and new technologies make it well worth another look. It took me a minute to understand why I'd want Notational Velocity, it because it sounded like yet another "everything box" like Yojimbo, which I was already using. Notational Velocity does save notes, either in ASCII, RTF, or HTML, but with the latest version, Notational Velocity syncs with Simplenote or WriteRoom for iPhone. It also easily syncs via Dropbox if you follow the important configuration notes here. Imagine if Apple had created an over-the-air method of syncing Notes and it all Just Worked. That's what Notational Velocity has achieved. Notes on my iPhone, my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Edit a note anywhere, and the changes are synced nearly instantly and appear everywhere. It's fast, it's seamless. Thinking about getting an iPad? That's only going to make this setup even sweeter.
