Joe Workman's Blog

Innovative Site Nav with Compass Compass is a new and innovative...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:16:00 -0700

Innovative Site Nav with Compass

Compass is a new and innovative way to navigate through your website. It analyze your site’s navigation menu and provides previous and next links for the corresponding pages in the menu. Compass also ships with 300 different navigation arrow images that you can use to jazz things up.

Compass Product Page

New Searchpath Stack

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:50:00 -0700

A nice custom site search is difficult to implement. Most website simply piggyback on search engines such as Google or DuckDuckGo. However, Searchpath.io came on to the scene earlier this year and I think its pretty cool. It’s a freemium search service that lets you implement fast and simple search directly onto your website.

I am releasing a FREE Searchpath Stack so that you can easily integrate and customize Searchpath into your RapidWeaver websites.

Download the Searchpath Stack

New Floaty Stack

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:44:00 -0700

The out of the box float stacks are great. However, they have there limitations. I find that I want to sometime add data above the text area that will be flush at the top with the floating content. Floaty makes that possible! It also adds responsive support so that the content still looks great on all devices. The content will be displayed in a single column on iPhone (or similar width) mobile devices.

Floaty is available for only 95¢. For more details and demos, head over to the Floaty product page.

Kiwi Safari Extension Update

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:09:13 -0700

The Safari Extension for Kiwi received its first update today. The keyboard shortcut was changed to be shift-ctrl-p. This will prevent some accidental triggering of the extension that users were experiencing with the original shortcut.

You can obtain your update via Safari Preferences. By default Safari will automatically update all extensions.

You can also re-download the extension from Kiwi Services on Github.

Paperless got some polish

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:18:00 -0700

I have been spending the last few days adding some polish to my Paperless automation tool that I released a couple of weeks ago. If you peruse through the release notes, you will see that I’ve added a couple small features and fixed some bugs. However, those weren’t the biggest changes…

New User’s Group

In an effort to promote user interaction, there is a new Paperless User’s Group. This groups runs on Glassboard which is an awesome way to communicate with groups of people. Think of it as a cross between a chat room and a forum.

Revamped Documentation

The Paperless documentation has been restructured into a wiki instead of one huge confusing page. It should now be much easier to discover the tools functionality and find exactly what you are looking for.

There is also a new quickie video overview that will help you get jumpstarted.

Lowering the Entry Level

My biggest request from user’s was that they really wanted to use Paperless, however, they could not get over the technical hurdle of getting it all installed. So I started a side project that is a really simple Paperless Installer. If you can click a few buttons, you can get Paperless installed now. Its that easy!

There is also a video that goes through the entire installation process step-by-step.

Kiwi Services for App.net

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:23:07 -0700

Kiwi Services for App.net:

So I use this thing called Kiwi to access this other thing called App.net. So I developed all these other things to integrate those things into every popular automation thing that you could want… Got it? Get it…

In all seriousness, Kiwi is an awesome app developed by the amazing YourHead Software. Its by far the best Mac client for the up and coming social network App.net. It’s quickly became my new hangout instead of Twitter. However, Kiwi has an awesome feature that lets you cross post to Twitter so that my followers over there don’t get too lonely.

You probably know that I love to automate things. Well I spent some time with the Kiwi developer at an App.net hackathon earlier this month and we decided to add a URL scheme into Kiwi. We could then leverage that new URL scheme, we could integrate Kiwi into all your favorite Mac OS X productivity and workflow tools. There are integrations with the following apps…

You can pick up a copy of these Kiwi services for free over on the public Github page.

Developing a Paperless Automation Tool for Mac OS X

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 10:39:38 -0800

Developing a Paperless Automation Tool for Mac OS X:

I have been trying to hone my paperless workflow over the past couple of months. My ideal workflow for anything involves as little human interaction as possible. This is why I love to automate! In the paperless world, after you scan in your document, you need to file it away. I am currently moving from DevonThink to Evernote. I don’t know about you, but my paperless inbox was starting to look bigger than the pile of paper that I need to scan in. The reason for this is that I would never take the time to file away the document after I scanned it in. This problem is prime for automation…

I searched everywhere for a tool that would analyze the contents of a scanned document and automatically file it into the correct location. I saw a lot of people trying to build hundreds of Hazel rules in an attempt to accomplish this. That just did not seem efficient to me. It would take forever to build those rules in Hazel and maintaining it would be a nightmare. I needed to develop something myself…

I decided to build a command-line tool so that I could still leverage a great tool like Hazel. My scanner would spit documents into a folder and then Hazel would pass those along to my tool to do the rest of the work. This is exactly what I built!

Yesterday I pushed an alpha version of this automation tool that I am simply calling Paperless. I worked really hard to document as much of the tool’s logic as I could. It’s a ruby gem, so you will need to not be shy with using the terminal in order to get this bad boy installed and working. I tried my best to give as simple instructions as possible for users that may be a little scared of the terminal. If you are feeling brave enough, play around with it. I can’t wait to here your feedback!

Paperless on Github

Evernote defeats DevonThink 6 - 2 - 2

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:26:00 -0800

Update: (03/07/2013) I updated the Sync section to reflect my thoughts on the new sync features of DevonThink.

I am in the process of building my paperless workflow. I have everything nicely automated from my ScanSnap Scanner to Evernote now. The workflow is powered by Hazel and even OCRs the document using PDFPenPro. I will not dive into the details now. Once I have everything done, I will make sure to document the entire process for you.

What I wanted to chat about was why I decided to go-all-in with Evernote instead of DevonThink (I actually own the Pro Office version) for my paperless workflow. Here is a list that explains my though process around comparing the feature sets.

Evernote

DevonThink Pro Office

Look and Feel

DevonThink has a very beautiful icon. Sadly, it ends there. The user interface feels Finder’s ugly brother. I have used it for about a year and still get confused with some of the UI configurations. I think this is a prefect case of too many options. The Evernote 5 UI, got a big overhaul from its previous versions. Some of the new UI I loved and some I feel blah about (everything seems so big).

Winner: Evernote. I have said many many times that I am vein and like to use pretty things. DevonThink is far from that.

File Access

Evernote stores all your files in sandboxed library of seemingly endless system of files and folders. Basically, hands off. If you want to access your notes, you will need to find it in Evernote and copy or drag (images only) notes out manually. DevonThink gives you straight forward access to files directly in Finder. Accessing your files is a piece of cake.

Winner: DevonThink. This was my biggest obstacle for deciding on Evernote. But in the end, all the other pluses of Evernote made this tolerable.

Organization

DevonThink is essentially like Finder. You are your own enemy here. You can make your folder structure as simple or as complicated as you like. Evernote 5 finally brought notebook stacks which allows you to at least have one level of hierarchy. by groups multiple notebooks in a single group.

Winner: Evernote. While you may think that DevonThink would win since it more flexible, I think that Evernote’s limitation will help me from creating folder structures that could get too complex.

A.I.

One of the main selling points of DevonThink is its AI engine. However, Evernote 5 has greatly improved its search capabilities. I have to admit that I never really needed the power AI abilities in DevonThink. The search in Evernote seems to work just fine for my needs. My guess is that it would be fine for most users as well.

Winner: Draw. Which is a small win for Evernote since AI is one of the big features of DevonThink.

Web Clips

Both DevonThink and Evernote have browser extensions that let you save web pages for later viewing. DevonThink allows you to save the webpage in multiple formats: webarchive, html, pdf, and bookmark. Evernote’s web clip extension has a nice feature that allows you to clip just a portion of the webpage.

Winner: Evernote. While I like the save to PDF feature of DevonThink, the ability to clip a portion of the page puts Evernote over the top for me.

PDF Plugin

This one is simple. Both DevonThink and Evernote have services that allow you to import a PDF file via any standard print panel.

Winner: Draw.

Import Automation

DevonThink has a sorter that resides on the side of your display. This sorter contain aliases to folders within your database. You can use this to quickly drag files directly into your referenced folders. Evernote does not have anything like this. Both also offer Applescript support which allows you to develop your own custom solution if you are geeky enough.

Winner: DevonThink. To be honest, I don’t really care for the sorter though. Its still a manual process and I like more automation than that provides.

This is actually the last piece that I need for my paperless workflow. I need an automation tool that will auto sort & tag documents based on content. Sadly, I never found an easy to use solution. Some people are doing it with TONS of Hazel rules but that is a pain in the rear. So I am starting a side project today to build this myself. It will be a Evernote CLI for Mac. I will make sure to report back when I am done.

Sync

I think that is goes without saying that Evernote was built from the ground up with sync in mind. Its main selling point from day one was that you can access your data from any device. DevonThink allows you to sync with your iOS devices with DevonThink ToGo. However, its 100% manual. You need to open up DevonThink on your iOS device and manually click on the sync button. Then only files explicitly set to sync will get downloaded to your device.

Winner: Evernote. This is a no-brainer. Evernote cleans the floor with DevonThink here. You have access to all of your notes (except for notebooks configured to be local only) on every device. It also all happens auto-magically!

Update: (03/07/2013) The day after I wrote this post, DevonThink v2.5 was released and it now supports sync! You can now sync 5 different ways. The two most interesting ways is via direct connection or Dropbox. The direct connection is a great option if you have data that you want to ensure does not get onto the cloud. However, the developers are still working on adding their new sync technology into DevonThink ToGo. While this update is definitely great for DevonThink users, I still think that Evernote is the winner here. Setting up sync within DevonThink matches the app perfectly: its complicated. That is not necessarily a bad thing, I think that it really fits with the app and their audience. Evernote’s sync process is zero! Plus Evernote still allows access to ALL your data from any device.

Sharing

DevonThink has a webserver where you can share (on your local network only) your database via a web browser. I tried syncing my DevonThink database over DropBox and while it works, you get warnings about the database being open on another machine. This tells me this is not supported and could break something eventually. In Evernote, I can easily right click on a notebook and share it with any other Evernote user.

Winner: Evernote. Its seamless and insanely simple to do.

Integrations

DevonThink has some APIs that allow other apps to integrate into it. However, Evernote has the Trunk! Over the past year Evernote has purchases some very prevalent apps such as Hello, Food, Skitch and Penultimate. They have also have a public API where hundreds of developers have integrated their apps with Evernote.

Winner: Evernote. Duh! However, it is kinds of an unfair fight. DevonThink was developed to be an app. Evernote was built to be a full online service.

New QuickPics Instagram Stack

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:38:00 -0800

I started using Instagram almost exactly one year ago. The only reason that I started to use it was to build this stack. I have since grown to love Instagram and it’s my favorite way to post my photos to the world to see. However, this stack hovered around 95% done for-ev-ver! Things like writing my book (Which you have right?) and stuff got in the way. However, I am happy to finally get this awesome stack out into the world.

The QuickPics Instagram stack is not only a dead simple way to get Instagram photos on your site. It’s also a really awesome responsive gallery and slideshow. You have full customization controls how to style all aspects of the photos. You can display your captions in four awesome formats.

With QuickPics Instagram you can, as Ron Popeil says, “set it and forget it!” Once you have the stack setup on your RapidWeaver website, all the images that you take with Instagram will auto-magically appear on your website. Its pretty awesome.

Launch Special

I wanted to give you $5 off for the launch of this great stack. Use the coupon code QuickPics at checkout. If you have already purchased the stack before this announcement, ping us and we will make sure you are set straight.

Make sure to check out the demos and video overview on the QuickPics Instagram product page.

Vacuuming your Mail.app index still works wonders - Brett Terpstra

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 19:03:45 -0800

Vacuuming your Mail.app index still works wonders - Brett Terpstra:

If Mail.app is feeling a little sluggish for you, then you will totally want to check out this post by Brett Terpstra. Mail was starting to feel a little sluggish to me over the past few days and then I remembered about this blog post from Brett. Mail is zippy as can be now! I have setup a scheduled job to run this on a weekly basis so Mail always stays this way.

Thank you! It was a success...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:24:00 -0800

In my last newsletter, I informed you of the passing of an invaluable member of our RapidWeaver community, Ed Brenner. To honor him, I was going to donate 20% of my January gross sales to the Children’s Cancer & Blood Foundation and the National Military Family Association.

I am happy to say that this morning I donated $4280.00 to these charities! Thank you very much to everyone that donated and purchased one of my products to support these causes and honoring our good friend.

To show I’m a man of integrity, click on the links below to see the donation receipts for each respective charity. The letter I received from NMFA, while a canned response, was very nice.

Simple RapidWeaver Search

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 23:57:00 -0800

Adding search to your RapidWeaver website has never been easier and more protected than with the new DuckDuckSearch stack. It leverages the great search engine at DuckDuckGo.com to display your site specific search results. The styling of the results page can be customized to match the color schemes used with your RapidWeaver sites.

Sometimes the most useful things are the ones you build for yourself. I built DuckDuckSearch as a search mechanism for my new documentation portal. I think its a very easy to implement and elegant solution. That’s why I use it.

Pick up your copy of DuckDuckSearch today for only $4.95.

Critical Stacks Update

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:15:54 -0800

Critical Stacks Update:

I just wanted to remind everyone about an important update to the Stacks Plugin this week. Please make sure that you update to v2.1.8 and republish your website as soon as possible.

More info: http://forums.realmacsoftware.com/discussion/60599/stacks-v2-1-8-released Direct Download: http://yourhead.com/stacks/download

Have a great weekend everyone!

'Place Holder' Nav in RapidWeaver

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:54:53 -0800

I get asked pretty often how you can add a simple place holder item in your site navigation that is not actually a link. If you have used RapidWeaver for a while or if you read my book, you know that you build your site navigation tree by adding new pages to your project and organizing them into a hierarchy. Obviously each page that is added into the navigation hierarchy is a link to itself. However, there are times that maybe you don’t want a 1-to-1 mapping. Here are two methods that will serve you well in you bag of tricks.

Linking to Another Page

In my book I talk about using an Offsite page in order to inject items into your navigation that may exist somewhere else within your project or maybe even external to you website. I use this trick several places on my site. If you head over to my RapidWeaver products page, you will see a link in my 2nd level navigation in the side bar to my Stacks Blog. That is an Offsite page in my RapidWeaver project file that links to the Stack Updates page that actually lives under my Blog navigation. Have a look at this picture, it should all be clear now.

If you also notice the ‘RapidWeaver Book’ link on that same page, it’s an Offsite page that links outside my website to http://rapidweaverbook.com. As you can see the Offsite page is a handy little devil. For a more elaborate walkthrough of this, pick up a copy of my book and check out chapter 6.

No Links, Just a Place Holder

Now what if you want to add a layer to your navigation that actually is not a link. This could be nice to have if you want a way to better organize your navigation. Have a look at the image below. What if I wanted the Galleries navigation item to actually not link to anything? It’s only purpose if to better organize my navigation.

Unfortunately the Offsite page is not going to work for us in this situation. There aren’t any plugins (that I know of, maybe I should look into that…) that will simply add a placeholder entry into your navigation. However, this can be done very easily with some JavaScript.

/* Instructions - Please Read 

1. Insert this snippet in the Javascript tab in RapidWeaver's Page Inspector.
2. Modify the 'page_title' variable to contain the name of the page that you want to disable in your navigation.

WARNING: If you ever have a link that is inside a bullet list and the text of that link matches the exact text that you type in page_title, that link will be rendered inactive as well.
*/
var $jq = jQuery.noConflict();
$jq(document).ready(function() {
    var page_title = 'Place Holder'
    $jq('ul li a').filter(function(){return $jq(this).text() == page_title;}).attr('href','javascript:void(0)');
});Check out this Pen!

The above JavaScript snippet will effectively disable the link within the navigation for the defined page. The means that when a user clicks on it, nothing will happen. TO use this, it will need to be added into the JavaScript tab of the Page Inspector. You do need to make sure that you modify the ‘page_title’ variable in order for this to work. You will also need to add this to every page of your project. If that seems like a bare, check out a plugin call @Stash. It has a small learning curve but it will make your life a little easier.

I also made an RWSnippet for this solution, so that you can quickly access it from RapidWeaver’s snippet browser. Download it now.

Update: I updated the RapidWeaver snippet. It should now work with all themes. Please download it again. I also updated the code snippet embedded above with the latest version of the snippet.

Automating with Powermate

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:08:00 -0800

The Griffin PowerMate is a USB powered knob that can be configured to do pretty much anything you want with it. You can turn it, press it, hold it down and any combination of those, even alongside modifier keys. It has a configuration app that allows you to configure actions from a default list of actions. If you know a little scripting, sky is the limit in what you can make it do. It supports both global and app specific actions.

I bought a Griffin PowerMate over a year ago now from Amazon and it’s been sitting on my desk barely getting used since. I bought it thinking that I could use it to make editing screencasts easier in ScreenFlow but never seemed to get around to configuring it. It came shipped with a ton of default settings and macros that I never seemed to get used to. This is probably the main reason that I stopped using it. However, a couple weeks ago, I decided that I really wanted to give it another go. I wanted to start from a clean slate though. So I open the PowerMate config app and deleted all of the settings that shipped with the app.

I decided to start really simple. With most new things, I wanted to use it for one or two simple tasks. Once I get used to using the device more, I will add more actions over time. Before you know it, I will be using it for all kinds of stuff. After a couple of weeks, here is my current setup.

As you can see, every action right now has to do with audio. This just seemed like the most logical first steps to use PowerMate for. I recently moved to a Natural Microsoft Keyboard. This meant that I lost some very convenient global keyboard controls to interact with my music. I setup some custom actions for FaceTime that override the global actions while FaceTime is the active application. Here is a run down of my current actions.

Volume Up/Down: My new keyboard does have buttons that I use for this, however, I could not think of a better use for turning the PowerMate left/right.
Play/Pause: My keyboard has a play/pause button but it never seems to work consistently. So now, I just need to tap my PowerMate!
Next Track: I lost my next/previous track buttons with my new keyboard. So now I just need to hold down my command key and tap the PowerMate to skip to the next track.
Audio to Headphone/Desktop: I use DPS Plugin on my MacPro. It has a nice way to setup audio profiles for different setups. They also have a nice set of custom URLs that interact with the app, including switching between profiles. I have profiles setup for my desktop and headphones. Now with my PowerMate, all I need to do is press and hold and I can switch between my desktop and headphone audio profiles. This is sweet!
FaceTime: Set Input to 85%: This is a complete hack to fix an annoying bug with FaceTime. Whenever FaceTime connects on my MacPro, it sets the input volume on my Blue Yeti mic to 0%. This bugs the crap out of me! But thanks to my PowerMate, with a quick tap, my input volume it set to 85%.
FaceTime: Input Volume Up/Down: Depending on who I am talking with, I may want to adjust my input volume up or down based on the feedback that I am getting from their side.

I am excited about using my PowerMate again. Its started to become more natural to use for me. I am sure over time I will add a lot more actions to it. Next time I do a screencast, I will probably spend some time figuring out how I can best use the PowerMate to improve editing. If you use your PowerMate, I would love to hear how you use it to make your life easier.

Migrating from Github to Bitbucket

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 16:41:25 -0800

Once Bitbucket started supporting git last year, developers started migrating off Github, especially for private repositories. While most of my open source repos are still on Github, I moved all my private repos about 4 months ago. The primary motivation for this was Bitbucket’s pricing model. I can have unlimited private repos with up to 5 users. That would cost a pretty penny over on Github.

Bitbucket has a super easy to use migration tool that will automatically move all of your source code and commit history over with a simple click of a button. It blew me away how easy it was! While I moved all my private repos over 4 months ago, I have still been paying $12/mo for my Github plan. This is because Bitbucket does not have the ability to migrate issues. I still had a ton of bugs and enhancements filed away in Github’s issue tracker.

Today I released an open source utility that will seamlessly migrate all of your issues from Github to Bitbucket! Its called git2bit. It successfully migrated over 300 records from Github into my Bitbucket repos.

git2bit is a command-line utility written in Ruby. It’s a ruby gem, so its super easy to install from terminal.

$ gem install git2bit

Here is an overview of the options available to git2bit along with some helpful examples. See below for how to set these values using a .git2bit.rc config file.

Usage: git2bit [options]

Options:
    -h, --help                 Show command line help
        --version              Show help/version info
        --[no-]closed          [Do not] migrate closed issues
        --issue ISSUE_NUMBER   Process only a single Github issue number
        --guser USER           Github username
        --gpass PASSWORD       Github password
        --grepo REPO           Github repo name
        --buser USER           Bitbucket username
        --bpass PASSWORD       Bitbucket password
        --brepo REPO           Bitbucket repo name
        --log-level LEVEL      Set the logging level
                               (debug|info|warn|error|fatal)
                               (Default: info)

I have written pretty extensive documentation on git2bit to make your migration process smooth. However, please feel free to contact me if you have any issues. Also feel free to file any bugs or enhancements in the Issues tracker.

Climate v1.1 Released to MAS

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:27:00 -0800

I am happy to announce the first major update to MyNest. First off, the app has been renamed to Climate and it has a beautiful new icon (designed by KaL Michael). I appreciate all the feedback that went into developing this release. I hope that you enjoy it. Please remember to quickly rate the app or take a minute to post your loving review. :-)

You can pick up your copy of Climate on the Mac App Store for $2.99.

Make sure to check out the new screencast on Climate. Here are a list of new features and fixes for this release.

New Features

Current temperature setting is displayed in the menu bar
Displayed temperature supports up to 3 Nest devices
Reconnects to Nest every 15 mins to ensure displayed temperature is correct
The icon is only displayed when a temp cannot be retrieved

Fixed

The reload and action buttons moved to a contextual menu from the menubar icon
Climate now opens on launch
The open animations have been improved
The menu bar icon now supports retina displays.

How to obtain your free update

Since the name of the app needed to change for this release, the app will not be displayed in your updates section in the App Store app. Follow these steps in order to obtain the new version of Climate, assuming that you had purchased it from MAS previously.

Go Climate on the Mac App Store
Click on the install button.
You can safely uninstall MyNest application by dragging it to your Trash.

Poll: RapidWeaver Meetup at Macworld

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:23:17 -0800

Poll: RapidWeaver Meetup at Macworld :

I am thinking of doing a meet-up for RapidWeaver users at Macworld 2013 this month. At minimum we could get together for drinks at night. However, I thought that it would be great to get a meeting room somewhere and maybe do some cool sessions. However, to do this, I would need to charge a cover to attend. Based on the response to the linked form, I will know if this will be possible. I really have no clue how much it will be to rent a place, I am throwing numbers out there to get an idea on budget.

If you or you know someone who would like to help sponsor an event, please let me know.

Take the Poll now

New SqueezeBox Stack

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:27:00 -0800

I am happy announce my first new stack in quite a while. SqueezeBox v2.0 is a stylish and responsive accordion stack. SqueezeBox gives you a wonderful way to present content to your users in an organized way. You can split your content into sections that can be expanded and collapsed. It even supports linking to individual sections.

To pick up your copy of SqueezeBox, head over to the SqueezeBox product page.

Honoring Ed Brenner by donating 20% to charity

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:46:50 -0800

Honoring Ed Brenner by donating 20% to charity:

By now, if you subscribe to my newsletter, you should have received my latest newsletter. If not, you can read the newsletter online.

We lost a good friend and fellow weaver this past November to leukemia. Ed Brenner strived to make everyone better weavers. Ed was a good man and he will be missed by the entire community. For more information about Ed, Larry Pollock wrote a nice blog post about his friend.

Instead of doing a big sale in January, I have decided to honor our good friend Ed Brenner by donating 20% of all sales in January to charity. The donations will be going towards the Children’s Cancer & Blood Foundation and the National Military Family Association. Both of these are upstanding charities and I feel both reflect causes that Ed would greatly appreciate.