Safari Extenstions - Instapaper Beyond

Before Brett Terpstra became a rock star for his nvALT fork of Notational Velocity, Brett made an equally useful Safari extension for Instapaper power users, Instapaper Beyond. The plugin installs straight from the Apple Safari extensions site. Once installed, you can use keyboard shortcuts to file, archive, and otherwise control your Instapaper articles. Go check it out.

ABA TechShow Next Week

I can hardly wait to head to Chicago next week to participate in the American Bar Association’s annual TechShow. I’m putting the final touches on my presentation about my love affair with text and working on my equally fascinating presentation on collaboration tools for litigation attorney. Even as the Grade A nerd that I am, I am constantly surprised at the new things I learn at the ABA TechShow. Moreover, every year I make new friends. The people in attendance (both presenters and attendees) are all tech savvy and everyone adds something interesting to the conversation.

If you are a legal professional, get yourself to Chicago next week and join in the fun.

Macdrifter and the Post Science Era

The Macdrifter makes a point about us taking science for granted. If you haven’t already discovered it, Macdrifter is most certainly RSS worthy.

nvALT 2.0 Releases

… and there was much rejoicing by text nerds everywhere.

• Lots of new features
• Still speedy and useful

Get it here.

NV Naming, Redux

It wasn’t so long ago that I wrote about my Notational Velocity naming system. Critical to my system was the use of a colon in the note names as my Frankenstein-like naming and tagging system. On our marathon Workflows interview, Merlin talked about a similar system using an “x” in replacement of my “:” After we finished recording, I thought about it and switched. The reason wasn’t so much a concern about Unix conflicts (since the use is inside Notational Velocity and I’ve been using this system for ages with no problem) but instead the iPad and iPhone keyboards, that require two taps to get to the colon versus just one for an “x.” Now instead of legal active matters coding at law:am as I explained here, I now use lawxam. Thanks Merlin.

If you want to get nerdy about colons and Unix, check out Dr Drang’s piece here. The good Doctor publishes a great blog.

Writing a Book, the Master Outline

When I announced the new book, I promised I wouldn’t torture MacSparky.com readers with the tedious (and often) boring details of writing a book. I have, however, received several e-mails asking me to share some of the workflows so I will make occasional post about what I’m up to.

Writing a tech book is fairly straightforward. There are no plot twists, things usually move linearly, and the butler never did it. So outlining such a book is not that difficult. I started in iThoughts HD with a single entry in the middle, “iPad at Work.” Then I started adding branches. Most of the rough work was done at Peet’s over tea.

When things started shaping up, I synced the file (as OPML) over Dropbox to my Mac and looked at it in OmniOutliner Then I sent it back to the iPad and iThoughts HD. With Mac at Work, this work was about 90% OmniOutliner and 10% mind map (MindNode Pro is my favorite mind mapping app on Mac OS X). With this new book, those numbers reversed. I attribute this to the iPad (which didn’t exist when I outlined Mac at Work), which makes mind mapping more intuitive (for me). Either way, the big outline is done and looks great. Here it is from MindNode Pro on the Mac.

Once I was happy with the outline, I saved the OPML file on Dropbox and imported it into Scrivener, which built the book file. I’ll write more about those steps in a future post. The word count is now 10,000 and I’m having fun.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Service Sunday - Send Books to iTunes

Here is a nice workflow from Chris Breen to send your ePub and PDF files straight to iTunes and sync them to your iPhone. I use it all the time.

OmniFocus Screencast, part 1

The OmniFocus Screencast (part 1 of 3) is live. The first episode is all about capturing with OmniFocus and is 20 minutes long. You can download it from the Mac Power Users Feed. The screencast is in Apple TV format. Enjoy.

Scrivener in the App Store

If you write anything more than the occasional letter and haven’t tried it out already, check it out.

GoDaddy CEO Shoots Elephant

Really, he did.

In a completely unrelated note, I switched my domains and IMAP Mail server to Hover last week and love it so far. They made it painless.