I first heard about this new minimalist text editor over at the Systematic podcast. Yes, there’s too many minimal text editors out there, with WriteRoom, ByWord, and iA Writer – my current choice – all being well developed options.
But FoldingText is a bit different. FoldingText reminds me a bit of iA Writer with its lack of a preferences pane and font customization, opting for a soft Courier New. But FoldingText balances it out by adding a lot of power user features: auto Markdown conversion as you type, text folding and focusing and lots of keyboard shortcuts. Then there’s this crazy todo list, Taskpaper like outline and timer functionality, all set and evaluated with plain text.
I can’t say that this will be my new default writing app, but I’ll keep an eye while the app remains in beta.
Quick writing iPhone app Drafts is one of my favorite apps of the year so far. It’s fast, customizable, and has great Dropbox syncing. As of late last week, dev shop Agile Tortoise released Drafts 2.0: extra polish, FF Tisa as a font option (hell yes) and auto sync with a new iPad Drafts app.
If you’re a writer, blogger, habitual Twitter user, or just want to get down your thoughts fast, give this app a try.
I like Pixelmator as a lightweight alternative to Photoshop. It’s perfect for a quick resize on an iPhone photo or Tumblr snippet before uploading or sending somewhere else. Yet I greatly dislike the Lion preferred auto save/versioning that comes with Pixelmator out of the box. It’s unnecessary and adds bloat to my throwaway, multi MB files.
After a few google searches, there’s actually a really simple solution buried in the support forums. Just one line in the console. Scroll to the thread buttom.
Quip isn’t your average Twitter client. While you can just read your timeline, the focus here is on alternative modes: check out extended conversations, read the most retweeted tweets, and lay out all Twitter friendly embedded images in a simple grid. It’s really cool as a ‘lean back’ experience to run through on my iPad at the end of the day.
As is the case with any major Mac OS X update, third party apps may have to be updated for compatibility with Mountain Lion. The best resource, recommended all over my Twitter stream and various tech blogs – is RoaringApps. Type in an app name and see if it’s confirmed ready for the 10.8 switch.
With the last few Mac OS X releases, I’ve gotten progressively less and less worried about app compatibility; when in doubt, it works. That said, for critical apps, a quick check over at RoaringApps is well worth your time.
I’ve lately been giving the cross platform to-do list app Cheddar a run through it’s paces. Bottom line, it’s a well built app, one I’ll write more about in the future.
For now though, if you use keyboard launcher Alfred, there’s a new Cheddar extension developed by Chris Vaughn. It’s simple but solid and should make entering new list items much faster in my workflow.
Gimme Bar takes various media you find online – photos, audio, video, text – and saves it to a cloud based library. Yes, been there, done that to some extent (e.g. ZooTool). But Gimme Bar has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. First, it’s more inherently private than public. The last major bookmarking/tagging app I’ve seen do that is Pinboard, which I love.
Then there’s the extra features: a full API, optional auto backup of items to a Dropbox folder. The interface looks nice as well.
It’s free right now in beta. I plan on giving it a proper spin over the next few weeks.
Tweetbot is by far my favorite Twitter client for iOS, and today they just released a free alpha of their Mac client. (the download link is still pretty busy as of this writing, so try this download as an alternative.)
Already first impressions are good. Its UI has very similar functionality and layout to the iPad version. It still has many rough edges (e.g. thin font ligatures, stuttered scrolling) but the app is off to a good start.
Given the quality of Tapbots other software I’ve got high hopes for Tweetbot. Right now Osfoora is my main Mac client, but I could easily see myself switching to this.
I’ve recently been diving into Steam games on the latest Humble Indie Bundle. But early on I had a big problem with control input via the standard Mac keyboard. Especially in games that rely on quick, arcade-like movements (e.g. Super Meat Boy), the keyboard isn’t precise enough and ill equipped to handle the bangs and keypresses of an average gaming run.
Enter the Mac app Joystick Mapper. For $5 on the Mac App Store I plugged in a PS3 Dualshock 3 controller via USB, mapped several buttons and directions to some keyboard and mouse commands, and I was ready to go. It makes a huge difference. Highly recommended.
You’re presented with this white room. In the middle of the white room is a black cube. If you touch on that black cube, you’ll zoom into it. This black cube is made up of millions of tiny little cubes. You can tap away at that cube.
As you’re doing that, these words will come up: ‘Curiosity, what is inside the black cube?’ That’s when you realize it’s not just you tapping away at that black cube, it’s the whole world. The whole world is tapping away is revealing layers of this cube.
So so Molyneux to run a project like this. Here’s hoping it translates into a kick ass game.