Category Archives: Mac

Transmit is on Sale for $17 (50% off)

transmit

Panic’s Transmit is the best FTP app for OSX, by far.

While the new kid on the block, Forklift (which I also own) may have a bit faster transfers & more (admittedly great) features, Transmit makes up for it in overall ease of use, and most importantly, reliability of transfers. I’ve had Forklift repeatedly botch transfers with some SFTP servers, which is unacceptable for a file transfer type of app.

Plus, Panic is a wonderful Mac developer (e.g. Transmit is Applescript-able, Forklift is not) that I’m glad to support. You can buy it from the App Store, or directly through Panic’s site.

PS: If a paid FTP client isn’t your thing though, Cyberduck is nimble & free. [via]

Deadliest Finger

Fist of the nvALT Star

Mac, , ,

You wa SHOCK

Like many Mac Geeks who live in plaintext, Brett Terpstra’s nvALT has probably become my most used app outside of a browser & finder; It’s become my bread and butter for storing notes, and I rely on the usually rock-solid combo of nvALT-markdown-dropbox combo for just about everything I do.

You never want to see Red text in an update window…

You never want to see Red text in an update window…

Yet a few months ago, I would search for a frequently edited note, and find that it had vanished, deleted from dropbox completely without my knowledge. This was a problem1; While not one I could fix myself, I could at least do some damage control. Continue reading →

Increasing Productivity with Marked and nvALT

Mac, , , ,

Like any respectable .txt file geek on a Mac, I’m really into the apps nvALT and Marked. Since pretty much everything I type up these days is in Markdown format, there are many times throughout the day where I’m switching constantly between these apps to preview, and edit my documents.

While, the robust features that Marked ($3.99) provides when rendering your content in HTML are really nice, nvALT’s built-in Quicklook-style previews are more convenient in that they only take one quick keystroke to pop up. But there’s a way to get the best of both worlds! After a few quick tweaks in the “Keyboard” System Preference Pane, I can now use ⌘E to seamlessly switch between from viewing a document in nvALT and Marked!

I accomplish this in 3 steps.

nvALT Keyboard Shortcut Changes

  1. Open up your System Preferences to the Keyboard Prefs. Then Select the “Keyboard Shortcuts” Tab.

  2. First, we’ll need to unbind the Export command in nvALT. Click the [+] to Add a new shortcut. Then for the Menu Title, type: “Export…” (Notice the ellipses, not 3 periods). Change the Keyboard Shortcut to whatever you want. I used the common shortcut for “Export” commands, ⌘⇧E.1

  3. Click the [+] again, but for this Menu Title have: “Marked” with the ⌘E shortcut.

Now, when you are in either app, you can switch back and forth between them with 1 keystroke.2

Workflow fixed!

  1. You could also flip this around to use the ⌘⇧E shortcut instead of ⌘E by using this same method to unbind the respective command in Marked. ↩

  2. After thinking about it a bit, I’m sure you could use some dedicated Keyboard Shortcut app like QuicKeys or QuickSilver to replicate the “hold control for preview” feature… ↩