weblog.masukomi.org - software

Software worth recommending

2015-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

There are lots of great tools out there. Far too many to try. Here are the ones that I’ve tried, and found worth recommending. Mostly they’re

OS X

Developer Things

Quiver is a “Programmer’s Notebook”. I’ve recently switched to it from CodeBox which seems to have been abandoned by its developer. I’ve got some minor quibbles with Quiver, but overall it’s pretty nice and I’ll be bringing all my code snippets and reference material over to it.

Dash is excellent for anyone who needs to search language / framework docs semi-regularly.

MacVim because I can’t fathom why anyone who wants to use vim on a mac would limit themselves to using it in a terminal when they don’t have to.

Kaleidoscope It’s a great visual diffing app. If you use diff on anything resembling a regular basis, you should give Kaleidoscope a try.

Markdown

Marked 2 for previewing Markdown files and exporting them to other formats, this is the app you want. That being said, I’d only recommend it to people who really love Markdown. People who only use it occasionally probably don’t care enough to justify buying this.

Deckset It’s presentation software, but you build your presentations with Markdown. Yay. Not as full featured as I’d like, but it’ll let you build very nice presentations.

Flow Charting

OmniGraffle is the king of the flow charting apps. It’s awesome. End of story.

But…
Monodraw has earned a special place in my heart. Recently I had to wrap my head around a complicated data flow. When I was done, I created a flow chart in Monodraw and pasted it into the source code so that the next time I have to look at that code I’ll have a nice graphic to guide me through it.

Miscellaneous

Noizio is great for noisy work environments. Turn it on, along with some music and you won’t make out anything your coworkers are blabbing about. And no I’m not suggesting making everything so loud as to drown them out.

Day One This is a really beautiful app, and the iPhone version is great. The companion app on the watch looks like a really nice addition too. I haven’t been using it much, but it’s the kind of app that makes you want to use it.

Pixelmator Screw Photoshop. Get Pixelmator. It’s affordable, powerful, and exceptionally well made.

DaisyDisk Helps you figure out what’s taking up your disk space. I don’t need this very often, but when I do it’s invaluable.

Skitch If you need to make and annotate screenshots, this is the app to use.

Bartender Helps address an excess of menu bar icons.

Transmit If you deal with FTP, SFTP, S3, or pretty much any other file transfer system on a regular basis, then you want this app.

Screenflow Excellent, easy to use screencast software, that lets you go back and add really useful annotations, highlights, and more.

Multiplatform

Spacemacs “The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it’s Emacs *and* Vim!”. I love Vim. I envy the extensibility of Emacs. This is the first implementation of Vim (technically it’s Evil) on Emacs that has come even close to working. Normally they piss me off within 30 seconds. This has me wanting to take the time to figure out how to replicate my vim workflows in it.

Scrivener Writing anything of significant length? This is what you want. Be sure to go through the tutorial. There are a ton of powerful features hiding in plain sight. Out of the way until you need them.

1Password It’s the best password manager out there, and they’ve had their code independently audited by security experts. Don’t even get me started on how ignorant / stupid it is for people to not be using a password manager.

Vim plugins

The list of plugins I’m currently using is generally in flux. I’m always trying to improve my vim setup. Check my .vimrc for the lastest complete list. Here are some that I think are definitely worth sharing by all.

Vundle Best vim plugin manager I’ve found.

Fugitive Spectacular git integration. If nothing else, check out the GBlame command.

Tabular Align your text! Make things more readable. Check out this vimcast for a good idea of what you can do with this.

tcomment lets you easily toggle if a piece of text is commented out or not.

airline it’s the successor to Powerline.

expand region is a Vim plugin that allows you to visually select increasingly larger regions of text using the same key combination. Doesn’t seem like much but in practice has proven pretty nice.

vim-renumber For folks who like to edit markdown in vim. This will renumber ordered lists for you.

Command Line

Oh My Git The best prompt enhancement I’ve found to tell you what branch you’re on, if it’s been pushed or not, and tons more. That link’s to my fork of the project, which has some visual tweaks. The original is here.

git-wtf Helps you know wtf the differences are between your current branch and the upstream branch it’s tracking.

The Fuck Every time you type out some long command and then git is all “did you mean…” because you made a typo? Yeah well, The Fuck fixes that. It picks up on the suggested correction, and let you type fuck to execute the command you meant to type.

[Review] Byword for OS X

2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

[Some perspective][]
[What’s good][]
[What could be better][]
[Bugs][]
[Would I recommend it?][]

Some perspective

I purchased Byword because I think Markdown is a spectacular way to write and was looking for an app that would allow me to create new documents, easily preview them and grab either the formatted preview text or the generated HTML.

Until now, I’d been using Marked for previews while I typed in Vim. Now, Vim’s great. I love coding in it, but it’s really not the greatest when it comes to writing text, and I’m not really a fan of any of the other apps that handle plain text well. So, I went off in search of an app specifically designed for creating documents with Markdown.

What’s good

It does what it claims. Easy markdown editing. It also supports Rich Text and Plain Text.

It’s nice to be able to bold or italicize with Markdown using traditional key-combos instead of having to manually type the asterisks.

Full Multimarkdown support.

You can use it in conjunction with Marked. No need to stop writing to preview the formatted version. Below we have Byword on the left in edit mode and Marked on the right reloading a preview of the changes whenever you save.

It’s only $9.99. Totally worth it. It’s nearest competitor iAWriter is almost twice the price at $17.99

What could be better

The default file format is Rich Text. You can change it to Plain Text or Markdown in the preferences, but I get the feeling that the creators were making a minimalist text editor and then decided to add on Markdown support rather than making a Markdown editor that also supports the other formats.

Preview can be a little slow sometimes.

If you look at the screenshots on the site you’ll see a little popover menu for text styling. That’s there, but only on Rich Text documents. In their defense most of the options there aren’t supported by Markdown, but it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to have a version of it for Markdown.

Its main competitor iAWriter has “reading time” as one of the running counts along the bottom in addition to the standard word count. I really wish Byword had this.

Like most apps that partially format your markdown while you’re typing it (making *foo* italic in between the asterisks, etc.) it bolds the headings, but there is no difference between a #, ##, or ### heading. They’re all just bolded. I really wish that apps like Byword would make the # headings larger than the ## headings, and so on.

Bugs

At the time of writing (Aug, 14 2011) there are a few bugs that I’ve encountered in my first few thousand words of writing with it:

If you like to balance out your heading tags with octothorpes at the end (e.g. # foo #) you can’t have any trailing spaces afterwards or the final octathorpes will be treated as text not formatting.

Clicking on footnotes in the preview has an odd quirk. The first time you click the footnote number (in preview mode) it opens in the default application associated with the document’s extension. Ditto for the first time you click the return link at the end of the footnote itself. The problem arises when the default application is not Byword. For me clicking the footnote opened it in Vim, but only the first time. Very strange.

Sometimes the traditional keycombos for making text bold and italic simply stop working. For some reason they no longer work in this document but do in others.

The documentation claims that “If you drag images into the text, they will automatically be replaced by a Markdown reference to the file.” Like the key-combo problem this seems to not work all the time. And when it does work it’s missing the initial exclamation point. When you drag an image from the browser you get a link in the markdown, and I don’t mean [foo](url here). I mean a blue underlined http://www.foo.com/img.jpg thing that you can click on in Markdown editing mode, which should never happen. When you drag an image from the Finder it gives you file name which ends up being a link instead of an image (because it lacks the inital exclamation point) and it’s a link that won’t work on any computer other than your own.

Saving a file with the .mkdn extension instead of the expected .md makes it cease to display correctly in editing mode (markup is no longer greyed). It still previews correctly though.

Searching for a word or phrase will highlight it, but hitting the delete key will not delete it.

Yeah. Byword is a decent app. It doesn’t wow me, and the bugs are frustrating, but infrequent. The drag-and drop image linking that it promotes simply doesn’t work in any useful way, and I’m annoyed by that because it’s one of the reasons I bought it over iAWriter. With that said though I don’t feel particularly disappointed by it either. Full Multimarkdown support is nice, especially when you consider that iAWriter doesn’t even support full Markdown, and really, at $9.99 you’re still getting a lot of value for your money.