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Infinitesimal Bits of Time→

Adam C. Engst, in his overview of Keyboard Maestro 6:

In fact, many of my macros are utterly simple and obvious — I could type “cheers… -Adam” at the end of every email message I send, or I could press Control-period. Just because I’m saving only a few seconds doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile, when added up over tens of thousands of messages. Similarly, much as I love LaunchBar and use it heavily for many things, because I set F1 to open BBEdit via Keyboard Maestro, switching to BBEdit via F1 is a third of the work of LaunchBar’s Command-Space, B, Return. Those infinitesimal bits of time are like the energy drain from glowing lights on otherwise inactive electronics — meaningless in the individual instance, but vast in their overall impact.

According to Keyboard Maestro, I have saved 420 hours since I started using it 635 days ago.

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Behind the Scenes of Paper’s Zoom→

FiftyThree gives us a closer look at Zoom, explaining why they chose to use a loupe instead of expanding the entire drawing.

Our team spent many hours with the accessibility zoom, and looked at the best implementations of zoom across a range of apps. One thing that became clear in our testing and observation was that the time spent in zoom while drawing is typically pretty short. You go in and add the eyelashes or write something funny on your character’s t-shirt, and you’re out. In the vast majority of cases, zoom is task specific and tasks are region specific. This discovery supported our idea that zoom is a tool that’s activated on a particular region instead of globally on the canvas.

It seems to me that they also wanted to remain mindful of the idea that there is no infinite canvas and that the pages you’re drawing on have this real finite space. Paper is an app that is carefully restrained, making the point of realizing what the available tools can actually do. Their implementation of Zoom allots just enough freedom to clarify a drawing, but not enough to obsess over the perfect stroke or modify a drawing beyond disbelief. Paper provides an interface that naturally transfers what’s possible with physical tools onto a touchscreen.

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Scanner Pro Gets Real-Time Border Detection

Readdle’s Scanner Pro has been my favorite iOS scanner app for over a year now:

…for the professional who runs a small business, or individuals who do scan documents, just not so many every day, I’d seriously suggest considering Scanner Pro on the new iPad. The device’s camera will give you decent images — especially with good lightning and background — and the app works with the services many are already using for document storage and archival.

I have been experimenting with different paperless systems (I still haven’t settled on a specific one), but Scanner Pro was and will remain at the core of my mobile scanning workflow. Every day when I get home, I fire up Readdle’s app on my iPhone/iPad, take the receipts and paper documents I’ve collected during the day, scan them using Scanner Pro, and send them to one of the services built into the app (such as personal favorites Evernote and Dropbox). With today’s 4.5 update, which I have been testing, Scanner Pro gets even faster and more intuitive thanks to real-time border detection.

It used to be that Scanner Pro let you take a photo and adjust borders for cropping a document by manually moving a series of controls around the area you wanted to scan. Scanner Pro did a decent job at guessing where it should place the borders, but they still needed tweaking most of the time. In version 4.5, the Readdle team has completely reworked the algorithm behind border detection to make it smarter and bringing it into the camera view as well.

When taking a picture of a document, Scanner Pro 4.5 will overlay borders directly on top of the object, with impressive results. In my tests (a screenshot of which you can see above) Scanner Pro capably recognized borders of paper documents against dark and light backgrounds, in both normal and low-light conditions. Because borders are detected in real time, you can move objects or place other items in the shot and view borders update within a fraction of a second without leaving the camera view. It’s incredibly cool – but, fortunately considering the app’s utilitarian goal, also efficient.

While Scanner Pro tries to automatically detect borders and offer its best take in the Save screen, you can still tap Back to adjust borders manually. This is a welcome option – the app now defaults to the Save screen after a picture has been taken and processed, but you still want to retain manual control in case the new border detection algorithm doesn’t work properly.

It’s not a replacement for full-featured hardware such as Fujitsu’s ScanSnap, but for people who, like me, don’t have exorbitant amounts of paper to digitize every day, Readdle’s Scanner Pro remains a reliable, powerful iOS scanner app with tons of useful options. The new automatic border detection is a simple feature – but a handy one that’s uniquely suited for the iOS camera.

Scanner Pro 4.5 is available on the App Store.

Keyboard Maestro 6.0 Adds Syncing, Browser Actions, Device Triggers, And More

Keyboard Maestro 6

Keyboard Maestro 6

Long-time MacStories readers know how deep-seated Keyboard Maestro is in my OS X workflow. I use it every day, constantly, to automate my Mac to speed up writing, resize images, save PDFs, execute scripts, and more. Version 6.0 is out today and it brings over 100 new features. Unfortunately, I have only been playing with the app for a few hours, so an in-depth review will be published in the coming weeks.

Keyboard Maestro 6.0 retains the same interface and design principles of its predecessor while adding powerful new features that are exclusively built for Mountain Lion. For owners of multiple Macs, the good news is that Keyboard Maestro can now sync macros using Dropbox or any other sync service; in my initial tests, sync worked as advertised.

There are, of course, new triggers and actions to build macros that can automate (almost) any aspect of your Mac. You can now specify triggers for USB devices that are attached/detached to a computer, volumes, and wireless networks that your Mac connects to. This will be useful to build workflows (possibly to run at a specific time of the day) that handle backups or move files from one folder to another (the triggers can also be used as conditions in a macro). When you’re building a macro, you can now take advantage of a Macro Debugger that shows every action with completion status and breakpoints; this will come in handy to better understand why a macro isn’t working and, if so, how to fix it.

I’m personally excited to play around with the new actions for Safari and Google Chrome. As most of my workflows revolve around doing research in and grabbing text/URLs from a web browser, I have created dozens of macros that leverage AppleScript to store a webpage’s name and URL in variables to include in actions that output Markdown for my articles. With Keyboard Maestro’s new Safari and Chrome actions, you can eschew AppleScript entirely and let actions open and select tabs, get URLs and titles, submit and reset web forms, click links, wait until a browser has finished loading – while obviously accessing the same data as text tokens in your actions. On top of this, you can execute JavaScript in Safari and Chrome – which means activating bookmarklets from Keyboard Maestro with custom keyboard shortcuts is now easier than ever. I have already rewritten my actions for Markdown links to take advantage of the new browser actions; I have eliminated every instance of AppleScript, so there’s less manual saving to variables, the actions look more elegant, and I’m using built-in tokens.

There’s a lot of new stuff that I haven’t had time to properly test. You can now interact with styled text from Keyboard Maestro; you can write your own actions; there’s improved support for showing menus from installed apps (essentially enhanced GUI scripting); you can capture components of a regular expression by searching inside a variable or named clipboard – a power-user functionality that I am extremely curious to try with my regex to capture groups of Markdown inline links.

From what I’ve seen so far, Keyboard Maestro 6.0 doesn’t revolutionize the app but adds welcome (and needed) features such as syncing and browser actions while broadening its automation scope with intriguing new triggers, conditions, and actions. I look forward to seeing how I can update my macros to take advantage of the new functionalities introduced today.

Keyboard Maestro 6.0 is a paid upgrade. The app is available at $36, with an upgrade price of $25 for owners of the older version. A free trial of Keyboard Maestro 6.0 can be downloaded from Stairways Software’s website.

TextExpander Touch 2.0 Brings Fill-In Snippets, Formatted Text To iOS

TextExpander touch 2.0

TextExpander touch 2.0

I rely on Smile’s TextExpander to save keystrokes on my Mac on a daily basis, but the iOS counterpart, TextExpander touch, has always felt vastly underpowered due to limitations imposed by Apple on the iPhone and iPad. Today’s major update, TextExpander touch 2.0, aims at rising the app’s grade of efficiency by introducing several new features that have become must-haves for TextExpander on the Mac. I have been able to test the update for the past month, and it’s already become part of my workflow in interesting (and powerful) new ways. Read more

How To Wrangle Outlook 2011 To Work With Gmail - May 2013 Update→

I wrote MacStories’ tutorial on how to integrate Gmail with Outlook for Mac 2011 back in 2010. There’s been quite a few updates since then, and Microsoft has fixed many of the issues I mentioned in the original guide. Too, Gmail itself has been visually updated to reflect Google’s latest design trends. Even the screenshots were dated.

Instead of producing a separate article, I thought it would be best to keep the same URL so that people revisiting the tutorial would immediately see what’s new. Most of it has been completely rewritten and updated with the latest information on how to get the most out of Outlook with your Gmail account. I’ve substantially streamlined the article, cutting out filler such as the introduction and extended outro.

The new how-to is divided into two major sections, one of which is completely optional. You can read the updated guide by clicking the link below.

How To Wrangle Outlook 2011 To Work With Gmail

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