Tag Archives: Mac

Stack Social Sale Ending Soon…

If you follow as many Mac websites as I do, you’ll notice waves of people talking all at once about the same apps being on sale. Usually it’s because there’s a good affiliate program promotion going on and, you know, earning money for helping other people save money is A Good Thing™ (especially for hard-working writers).

Case-in-Point – Making its way across the Twittersphere right now are really good sales on three Mac apps via StackSocial.

Quickly, they are:

  1. Text Expander 4. Truly one of my “essentials”, TE4 has become one of those “How the hell would I live without this?” apps for me. When I use my wife’s computer and forget that she doesn’t have it installed, I groan every time I have to type something out the long way. (The fact that I haven’t convinced her to try it yet is, to date, my greatest failure of Nerd-suasion ever.) You’ll want to snap this one up ASAP as the sale ends in a few hours.
  2. Dragon Dictate 4. I’ve used Dragon Dictate for years and it keeps getting better and better. The latest version adds built-in transcription of audio files (a feature that I’ve been concocting some fun/unholy experiments with here in my secret Veritrope Lab). If you’re a creative person who sometimes can’t type as fast as you think, I think this is a fantastic tool to capture those thoughts quickly.
  3. Undercover. This is one of the better theft-recovery apps and it’s what I use for peace of mind on all my Macs. Warning: If you steal my Macbook Pro, I have the ability to track you down and/or play bad US Top 40 songs at full volume until you lose the will to live and are begging Ryan Seacrest to offer you the sweet release of death. (This is a little extreme, don’t you think? Just give me back my computer and no one gets hurt, capiche?)

I use each of these apps myself and think these prices represent a very good bargain. If you’ve been considering purchasing any – or all – of these apps, I’d buy them on sale while you can!

Automate your Mac: four smart hacks for managing files | Macworld

Four Macworld contributors share their tips for easier file management. I especially like Brett Terpstra‘s flagging rule for Hazel – I’ve seen how these types of visual prompts can help people create better habits and I’m a big fan of the concept of training your computer to gently nudge you into doing the right thing.

This is a link post – You can visit the site mentioned by clicking the main link above (or just click here).

Part Two of a short tutorial on how AppleScript can streamline your work, make you more productive, and save you time! This lesson focuses on how to plan a new script and prepare to write it!

Click Here To Read Part One of “Learn To Speak AppleScript”


To recap the end of Part One, your goal will be to build a script that will save your emails as text files. The actual programming will be covered in Part Three and, when we get there, I’ll try to stay more “conceptual”.

My goal will be to give you a feel for how an AppleScript does its job — but still include enough real-life code to keep it interesting for more experienced scripters (or for people who came here from a search engine looking for a bit of code to get their scripts up and running!)

But, if you are a beginner, don’t let those computer code snippets intimidate you! They are included primarily so that you can see what a real-life Script looks like and not with any expectation that you master the intricacies of the AppleScript language.

After all, this is really an exercise in teaching you the fundamentals of thinking and speaking AppleScript. In other words, this is going to be more like an English class in literature where we talk about books and what they mean — and not a grammar lesson.

In fact, that metaphor is actually a pretty good way to get started!
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