Plain Text. Gadgets. Art. Geek. Speculation. Mac.
I have been experimenting with using the built-in Notes app on iOS and macOS lately. I’ve found some unique capabilities that make it a pretty interesting project management app, in particular the ability on macOS to add links to files from the Finder, as well as drag in links to email messages and setup names as mailto hyperlinks.
Continue reading “Project Management in Apple Notes”If you are looking to set up a condition in a spreadsheet function in a situation where you want to include everything but one thing, you need to use the following:
"<>EXCLUDED_TERM"
Turns out the “less-than/greater-than” combo sign means “not equal to”, and it applies to text strings in addition to number strings.
I wasn’t sure what terms to search for initially, and relevant results for “is not”, and “is not equal to” were not giving me the answer I needed. Including terms such as “spreadsheet”, “Apple Numbers”, “function” and “formula” didn’t help either.
Continue reading “Spreadsheet tip: “is not” or “is not equal to””
If you, like me, use the weird symbols on your keyboard to help you sort files in the Finder, then you’ll be happy to find that I went through the trouble of not only naming a folder full of folders with top-row keyboard characters so you can see exactly how they sort, and then naming those folders so you know what key commands will produce them, but I also made it downloadable so you can just use it yourself. I put this folder on my Desktop for quick reference.
See here for a web table for every last keyboard character in alphabetical order.
Enjoy.
Handy info for running Photoshop actions via Applescript on your Mac. I used this so I can send an image to Photoshop via the Acquire iPhone app (my “scanner”), and then have Drafts save a text file in Dropbox that Hazel picks up and tells Photoshop to run my default scanned sketch Photoshop Action on the artwork image.
So you want to send the audio from your iPhone to your Mac, and be able to control the playback functions on the iPhone from the Mac? Airfoil and iKeyboardRemote will do the trick. Read on for how to do this, and why you would even bother. Continue reading “Play & Control iPhone Audio on Mac”
If you are a fellow Photoshop user, and have experienced an unexplained loss of accessing the Hand tool using the spacebar keyboard shortcut, this may have been caused if you are running password manager software 1Password and have used the “Hide” menu option.
I would have never found this had it not been for the warning on TextExpander‘s menubar icon, and the resulting blog post they published regarding TextExpander and Secure Input.
Quitting 1Password and relaunching it fixed the issue for me, so I can only assume it was indeed the culprit.
Continue reading “Secure Input & Photoshop’s Hand Tool Spacebar Shortcut”
Probably the best improvement I made this past week for my productivity and focus was turning off that Pavlovian dopamine delivery system that is the “new e-mail” sound.
A very handy Photoshop script to export Photoshop layers to individual PNG files over at Graphic Design Stack Exchange. The script you want is the newest version, the link is in this comment.
Yes, Photoshop has a built-in script that does something similar, but this one will name each of the exported files with the name of the layer they were generated from.
Handy Adobe Illustrator script that will Convert Illustrator Point/Path Text to Area Text as well as a script to do the opposite.
Adobe Illustrator offers no way at all to convert between these two kinds of type objects, which is insane.
Continue reading “Adobe Illustrator: Convert Illustrator Point/Path Text to Area Text”
1Keyboard is a virtual bluetooth keyboard application for Mac OS X that allows you to wirelessly connect to Bluetooth enabled devices such as your iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. It does not require a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. Works great. It went from free to being a paid app since I tried it out. There’s a free demo that lasts for 2 days so you can give it a whirl.
The Overthinker 