Latest Posts from Download Squad

It's no secret that Notational Velocity is my favorite Mac note-taking application. It synchronizes with the SimpleNote online service, which means you can access your notes on your Mac, iPhone, online, and, if you store your notes in a folder that is in your Dropbox account, on a plethora of iOS plain text editing applications. It's made for speed, letting you find what you need instantly, make your edits, and get out. No fuss, no muss.

But what if you took the simple but powerful platform of Notational Velocity, and started adding some amazing features like Markdown, Textile and MultiMarkdown support (with a preview window to see your formatting), a widescreen layout, the ability to hide the notes panel, and some very nice stylistic improvements? The result is a fork of Notational Velocity by Brett Terpstra called Notational Velocity ALT, and it's a thing of beauty.

At this point I have to tell you that I've been lucky enough to use Brett's software for years now. In addition to writing software, Brett's a blogger for TUAW, a sister site of Download Squad, and when I was writing for TUAW I was lucky enough to get involved with using the Mac text editor TextMate with a bundle Brett wrote. He built it to allow writers to write for Blogsmith -- the CMS that runs TUAW and Download Squad -- using Markdown, but with a bunch of added features to make the writer more efficient, and their life easier. It's brilliant software, and it's what I'm using to compose this post.

I'm sharing this because it illustrates that Brett's role of writer puts him in a position to really understand the headaches writers run into, but his role as a coder empowers him to solve those headaches.

Notational Velocity ALT is already the best note taking app I've ever used, but what excites me even more is that Brett's plan is to make it not just a fantastic note taking app, but a fantastic text editor optimized for people who write online. I'm looking forward to the day when I write everything I intend to post online in Notational Velocity ALT, and that day may not be terribly far away.

Based on what Brett has already done with Notational Velocity ALT, and what he's done writing software for writers, this software's future is very, very bright.

Computer benchmarking applications abound for Windows machines, but what if you want to judge the capabilities of your current Mac against one you're considering buying? Though I'm in that situation far less often than I'd prefer, when I do need to measure the relative performance of two different Macs, I turn to Xbench.

Xbench is a free performance benchmarking utility that measures the following items: CPU, Threads, Memory, Quartz Graphics (2D), OpenGL Graphics (3D), User Interface, and Disk. For a full list, including the sub-categories of what Xbench measures, check the bottom of the Xbench homepage.

When you run the app you can run all or only some of the tests, however running the entire suite only takes a few minutes. When you're done, you're presented with a report showing how your machine performed in each area.

By itself, it isn't that interesting, but if you send your report to Xbench's website using the Submit button, you can then compare it against other machines' scores.

As both a huge Gmail nerd and a huge keyboard shortcut nerd, I was pretty excited to learn that Gmail has a couple of shortcuts that are not documented anywhere. If you often find yourself needing to compose messages that include people on the CC or BCC fields, you can now launch a brand new message with one or both of those fields available by default. As Google Operating System reports, instead of hitting the 'c' button to compose a new message, you can now hit 'd' to compose a new message with the CC field showing, or 'b' to compose a new message with both the CC and BCC fields showing.

There were rumors about it yesterday, but today we find out that it actually happened: AOL has purchased TechCrunch, one of the biggest blogs (and blog networks) in the technology industry. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced the news this morning at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference, noting that TechCrunch will become part of the AOL Technology Network that includes sites like Engadget, Switched, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and Download Squad.

Read more about it in the press release posted on TechCrunch by Tim Armstrong himself.

HyperDock is a System Preferences pane, which you can install on your Mac, that adds some nice visual improvements to the dock, as well as some very useful window-handling functionality. Currently, it's in beta, but you'd never know it; I have yet to have a single problem with it on my system.

Visually, HyperDock adds window previews when you mouse over icons for running applications, much like what you see in Windows 7. I haven't decided if I like this feature (on my Mac, or on Windows), but even turned off, HyperDock is still worth having installed.

HyperDock adds the ability to set up mouse and keyboard shortcuts for your applications individually or en masse, with options like Activate App, Hide App, Hide Other Apps, Quit App, Kill App, Exposé, Reveal App in Finder, Open Location, and Execute AppleScript. But as much as I love adding keyboard shortcut functionality to my system, it's HyperDock's window handling abilities that really shine.

You can set hotkeys for moving and resizing windows. This fixes one of the biggest UI problems in OS X, which is that in order to resize a window, you must grab a tiny widget at the bottom right of the window. Using HyperDock, you can press a key combination (it defaults to Ctrl+Option) and whatever window the cursor happens to be over suddenly starts moving with your cursor. Release the keys, and the window stops right there. Adding Shift (for Ctrl+Option+Shift) resizes the window under the cursor.

HyperDock is currently in beta, and while so, it is a free download. Once it is released, it's likely to "cost a small fee" according to the site.

[via TUAW]

Gmail's new Priority Inbox feature has revolutionized how many people deal with their email. Unfortunately, you may have noticed that it's only available on the standard desktop version of Gmail in your browser. Well, that's not entirely true.

Priority Inbox works based on a label called "Important" that Gmail's priority algorithm applies to messages it considers important. Just like you can compose a Gmail search that will include items in your inbox or starred items by using the in:inbox or in:starred search operators, you can include items that Google's algorithm considers important by including in:important.

On your iPhone you can go to the mobile version of Gmail in Safari, and compose the following search:

in:inbox in:important 

This is the basic criteria for what Gmail shows you in the top Important pane in desktop Gmail when using Priority Inbox. Once you've run the search, tap the + button at the bottom of the iPhone's screen, and choose Add to Home Screen. Voila, you've now got one-tap access to your Priority Inbox on your iPhone.

You can actually get access to the Important label as an IMAP folder on any IMAP-capable mail client including those on mobile devices, but because there isn't a way to compose a search query on mail clients that says, "show me messages that are both in the Inbox and the Important folder" you can't really create the same effect. But if your goal is simply to see what Priority Inbox deems important, this might be a worthwhile option.

While I'm as excited as the next guy about Twitter's new Web interface, one shortcoming that I'd really like to see fixed soon is Twitter's lack of archiving. If you're not aware, once you get over 3,000 tweets on Twitter, you'll find that your oldest tweets start to disappear. Apparently, Twitter isn't purging them, and they still have them somewhere in their database -- but at that point, they are no longer exposing them to the public. In other words, you can't get to them.

Tweet Nest is a new product that you can install on your Web server that will back up all of your tweets, and it offers an attractive interface for searching through them and viewing the media that you've linked to. It's like your own personal archive of your tweets.

To me, this makes perfect sense, and it's a much more graceful way of archiving your tweets to your blog, rather than relying on syndication as some people do. Tweet Nest is well designed, reasonably easy to install (if you're comfortable with Web software), and nice to look at.

And did I mention that it's free?

The official Twitter for iPhone app has updated, and with the latest update it became a universal app, meaning it has native iPhone and iPad versions. While the iPhone version continues to incrementally improve, it's the iPad version that is really remarkable.

It took me a little while to get used to it, because the user interface is fairly busy. But you get a heck of a lot of bang for your buck with all that busy-ness. While most Twitter apps on the iPad work best in portrait mode, and Twitter for iPad works fine that way, it really seems optimized for use in landscape mode.

Loren Brichter -- who created Tweetie which was then purchased by Twitter and became the official Twitter iPhone app -- has continued his revolutionary approach to interface design on the iPad version. Your list of tweets acts as a sort of launching point, and tapping on a tweet opens a pane from the right that gives you either more information about the tweeter, the conversation if that particular tweet is in response to something, or the webpage of any link that is contained in the tweet. Basically, it tries to show you the most relevant information that can be pulled out of any given tweet when you tap on it. It's nothing short of brilliant.

I really only have one beef with Twitter for iPad. It's a bit awkward to clear the right pane once you're done with a given tweet. It stays off to the right out of the way, but still provides visual clutter that annoys me. Tapping a different list and then back to your timeline clears it, but it should be more simple than that.

Otherwise, Loren has really knocked another one out of the park with Twitter for iPad.

If you're a fan of life hacks of any kind and you can't touch-type, you're wasting your time. Just like the best current upgrade you can give your computer in terms of overall speed improvement is a solid-state drive, the best overall speed improvement you can give yourself when it comes to the time you spend on a computer is the ability to touch-type. I'm not kidding, and if you're skeptical I intend to convince you.

For our Back-to-School series, I really wanted to write a post about how great Gmail's keyboard shortcuts are. They really are fantastic, and if you learn them, you can really fly through your email without using the mouse at all.

But, I realized that most of the people I've talked to about keyboard shortcuts -- for Gmail and for any other application -- feign interest, then politely lets me know that they "can't memorize keys", or some other similar excuse.

The thing is, I don't believe this. But I'm getting a clear message that people aren't interested in keyboard shortcuts. And I think I know why: most people can't touch-type. Keyboard shortcuts lose almost all of their value if you constantly have to look down at your fingers to find the right key.

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It seems like you can't go anywhere online without running into the latest trend: infographics. The idea is to take a bunch of information, and distill it down into something easily digestible. It can be a very effective tool, but it can also be abused.

Scores.org has an interesting infographic that shows Google's acquisitions through the past 10 years, starting with their purchase of Deja, which became Google Groups, right up until their most recent purchase of Like.

One of the things that stands out the most when looking at this vertical graph is how much Google's appetite for acquisitions has increased. They bought three companies in July, and already another three in August of this year.

To be honest though, it takes longer to figure out how this graphic is trying to present information than it would to simply view these statistics laid out on a spreadsheet. And that's my general beef with most infographics.

On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have taken the time to look at a plain-jane spreadsheet of this information, so I guess pretty pictures aren't going away any time soon.