• # articleMay 20, 2021· 8 min

  Extra Searchable Meeting Notes

  The pandemic changed how I took meeting notes at work. With video calls being the new norm, I found myself grabbing screenshots of the meeting window to capture shared slides, documents we were collaborating on, and the latest screens the design team was showing off. So now, in addition to my detailed text notes, I found myself compiling a visual archive of my team’s communication as designs changed and evolved – as Gantt charts shifted over time. But where the hell do I store all this stuff? And how do I keep it correlated to the notes I was taking?

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• # articleApr 1, 2021· 10 min

  Finder Catalog Numbers

  Stick with me, folks. This is going to get super nerdy and may take a while to explain. It’s also going to cover some of my favorite topics: a custom-built Mac app, a small server-side script, Keyboard Maestro, the command line, and URL schemes. Let’s talk about the stuff you need to do and the files, supporting documents, and reference material you need to accomplish those tasks.

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• # articleMar 20, 2021· 6 min

  Mortal Mac App Sins

  Maybe I'm just an ornery old man yelling at the new kids running through my lawn. Maybe I should be content to retrain myself to hit ⌘H instead of ⌘W when I no longer want to see a non-document-based app but want to keep it running. Maybe Apple has done the research and realized that a decade-plus of relearning computers with iOS had taught the over-60 crowd that fullscreen apps are the be-all-end-all. And Gen-Z, who grew up with touch screens, intuits that as well. Maybe there are diminishing numbers of us in the middle reluctantly dragging overlapping windows around like cave people? Regardless, there is one specific UX sin that interrupts my workflow and annoys me more than anything else on macOS. I want to call out a few of those offending apps now before offering my dumb solution.

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• # articleMar 7, 2021· 3 min

  Calendar Hero

  Let’s be honest. I’m an idiot. If it weren’t for technology holding my hand and functioning as a second brain, I wouldn’t be able to make it through this modern world. That’s why I trust software to remember all the things I would otherwise forget. And with the number of meetings I’m in now, it really helps if my calendar is front and center. So, another week, another app. This time it’s a small little open-source calendar for your macOS Desktop I call Calendar Hero. I made it last week after I was late to a meeting because, well, I was vacuuming and not thinking about the day ahead. I used another Mac app to do this, but it stopped working for me sometime during Catalina in 2019. I missed what it did, so I reimplemented a simple version of it last week. This is Calendar Hero.

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• # articleMar 1, 2021· 5 min

  TextBuddy for macOS

  "You either die a programmer, or you live long enough to see yourself build a text editor." —Harvey Dent (or someone) Two weeks ago, I released TextBuddy – a new text editor for macOS. And now I'm finally getting around to sharing why I built it.

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