Nebulous Notes is, in my opinion, the most powerful iOS text editor the App Store has seen so far. Here's what I wrote last August:

Combining Nebulous’ support for text substitution and cursor position macros has enabled me to achieve a powerful workflow when it comes to writing in Markdown. For instance, I can select words I want to turn into inline links, and have the app automatically wrap them between square brackets, and paste the contents of my clipboard (the link) to the right. To copy Markdown-ready links, I use my own bookmarklet. Or if I want to create a list, I can hit a button that inserts an asterisk and a space. Or again, if I need to create a text file with a format that OmniOutliner recognizes correctly, I can indent items with Nebulous’ $tab and $cursor macros.

I posted a follow-up in October showing the macros I use for faster Markdown editing, and then I noted in a separate post that Nebulous's preview feature could use some work:

Nebulous Notes‘ own preview generator is far from ideal. You can use your custom CSS to make it prettier, but it still won’t handle footnotes (formatted as once suggested by John Gruber, though Markdown doesn’t officially support them) and the image isn’t centered.

Nebulous Notes 6.1, released today, brings a number of improvements focused on previews and sync with Dropbox. First and foremost, the app now comes with proper MultiMarkdown previews that render footnotes correctly: while images still won't be resized and centered on screen (this, for me, is an issue on the iPhone's smaller screen), this new version is undoubtedly a big step forward for those who rely on MultiMarkdown for their daily writing. With the addition of Avenir (in both regular and Next variations), Nebulous Notes previews are now MMD-ready and nice to look at.

The other noteworthy addition is full folder sync for Dropbox. It used to be that, per Nebulous' own “syncing” mechanism, each text file would have to be manually refreshed to get the latest changes; in 6.1, an entire folder can be synced by tapping the refresh icon in the bottom toolbar. Nebulous Notes is still far from Byword's no-manual-interaction-required sync, but the change is welcome.

There are other minor improvements and new features in Nebulous Notes 6.1. The iPhone app now has two new one-button toggles to lock the orientation and hide the macro bar; there are new $rline and $lline macros to jump to the end or start of a line; and last, you can now tag files with #hashtags, which I guess can come in handy if you want to search for specific groups of files in that way (I don't).

Nebulous Notes still needs a complete overhaul in terms of search and sync (and an in-app browser for research purposes would be useful), but version 6.1 is a solid, much-needed update. You can get it now from the App Store.

I have written about Nebulous Notes before. Back in August, I posted an overview of my workflow with the app, plain text, and Markdown:

Combining Nebulous’ support for text substitution and cursor position macros has enabled me to achieve a powerful workflow when it comes to writing in Markdown. For instance, I can select words I want to turn into inline links, and have the app automatically wrap them between square brackets, and paste the contents of my clipboard (the link) to the right. To copy Markdown-ready links, I use my own bookmarklet. Or if I want to create a list, I can hit a button that inserts an asterisk and a space. Or again, if I need to create a text file with a format that OmniOutliner recognizes correctly, I can indent items with Nebulous’ $tab and $cursor macros.

Since then, a major 6.0 update to the app has been released, which, in my opinion, deserves another look. For the occasion, I’ve put together a few videos showing how I use the macros I have created for easier and quicker Markdown (more specifically, MultiMarkdown) formatting. The videos were recorded on a Mac using QuickTime capturing an AirPlay Mirroring session through Reflection. I have embedded them here using the video tag supported by most modern browsers (video files are encoded in MPEG-4). For Firefox users, there’s a fallback to Theora .ogv files (converted using ffmpeg2theora). I will also make my macros available for download at the end of this post. (more…)

If there’s a category of iOS apps I’m always interested in checking out, that would be text editors. I write for a living, and while a better app won’t make me a better writer, a text editor that works for me can make me type and research more efficiently. Text editors are tools, and I’m always curious to see whether the market is offering new ones to get the job done with faster, smarter techniques. As Gabe said, fiddling often gets a bad rap, but my fiddling with text editors has actually allowed me to find apps that facilitate the only process that matters: typing words on a screen.

In the past year, I have taken a look at several text editors. I compared my favorite ones – picking Writing Kit as my go-to editor and research app – but I also kept WriteUp on my iPad’s Home screen, as the app received some interesting updates including iCloud support and swipe text selection. For the past two months, though, I have found myself coming back to another text editor that I had been previously recommended by various Internet pals: Nebulous Notes. And in spite of my publicly stated praise for Writing Kit, I have been getting lots of writing done with it – so much that I haven’t used any other app for my posts and notes. (more…)

I’ve been intrigued by Keyboard Maestro since I first heard about it on Daring Fireball years ago, but never installed and tried the app because of a somewhat widely shared notion that it’s “too difficult to use”. Recent Keyboard Maestro coverage on Brooks Review, ShawnBlanc.net and MacDrifter took my curiosity to a whole new level, so thanks to the Productive Macs bundle, I pulled the trigger and got a copy of Keyboard Maestro, which was later upgraded to version 5.0 for free with the same license.

There’s no easy way to describe Keyboard Maestro, but I’ll try: Keyboard Maestro is a trusted and powerful assistant for your Mac. When you don’t know how to do something, or how to make an existing menu or functionality faster and easier to use, you can turn to Keyboard Maestro and start building your own way out of options third-party developers or Apple didn’t think about.

Keyboard Maestro empowers you to take existing apps, menus, keyboard shortcuts — anything your Mac can perform — and mix them together to achieve something that fits better your workflow.

Keyboard Maestro isn’t strictly about tweaking. The app’s real power lies in how it puts the focus on discovering and building what’s better for you, and sticking with it. It’s no toy, but it’s fun to use once you get the (easy) hang of it.

Writing a review of Keyboard Maestro it’s like asking someone to “write a review of Apple”. The subject is so broad, the offer so variegate and ever-changing, it makes almost no sense to go into every single feature and over-analyze it with no context. Rather, I’d prefer to provide a more empirical look at this app in that I’ll share some of the tricks and functionalities I’ve come to learn and use in the past weeks.

A simple way to understand Keyboard Maestro is this: you tell the app to do something for you automatically, in the background, whenever you want, and all you have to do to start such sequence is a trigger. The trigger can be a keyboard shortcut, something you typed, a system event — you choose the trigger and there’s plenty of options to look at when deciding which action should initiate a process. (more…)