davidsaccess.com » Tools I Use

RSS: Enabling the art of skimming

David — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 14:25:03 +0000

This may be a sign of my laziness, but I have always felt that one of the primary things one learns in college is the art of skimming, and being able to determine what 20-25% of the assigned reading is the most important to really read. Professors do not expect you to be able to get through all 500+ pages of assigned reading a week, and skimming is a skill one needs throughout life.

We all know information overload — there is so much content coming at us (both online and offline) that it is nearly impossible to keep up.

My surfing patterns have changed dramatically over the past few months. I do not “go to” sites anymore. The growing popularity of RSS and RSS Readers like Netnewswire (Mac) or FeedDemon (Windows) allows me to skim many more sites (currently I subscribe to over 60) than I would ever be able to if I had to go to each site.

MarsEdit

David — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 16:04:14 +0000

Ranchero software released the first public beta of MarsEdit, and I must say I like what I see. It is very similar to ecto, but jsnt “feels” better. I have not put my finger on exactly why yet.

Launchbar 4 beta

David — Sat, 28 Aug 2004 15:45:40 +0000

I mentioned Launchbar a few days ago. I decided to go “bleeding edge” and install the beta of the next version. I am glad I did — the feature set is unbelievable!

I am now able to get to ANWY resource, whether it be an application, document, bookmark, Itunes song, ANYTHING just by navigating with the arrow keys. (I can also type the name and get very smart guesses). Though the developers had no intention, this application would work very easily with single-switch input.

My gut says that some of the functionality offered will be built into Tiger (OS X 150.4), but in the meantime this is a very useful tool.

Launchbar — A killer application

David — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 13:25:54 +0000

I just found out about Launchbar, and I am completely blown away. As described on their website:

LaunchBar is an award winning productivity utility that offers an amazingly intuitive and efficient way to control your computer. It provides instant access to thousands of documents, folders, bookmarks and email addresses, applications and preference panes just by entering short abbreviations of the searched item’s name.

I find that it already eliminates the need to actually launch applications. I can see a person’s phone number right in the Launchbar menu, without having to open address book.

Amazon does magazine subscriptions

David — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 13:45:15 +0000

I had heard some time ago that Amazon sells magazine subscriptions, but had not tried it. I FINALLY got around to renewing my subscription to Wired that I let lapse months ago.

The amazing part is, not only was it less hassle (I’m an Amazon one-clicker) but the price was $2/year less than if I renewed the “normal” way!

iTunes — my assistive technology

David — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 20:29:30 +0000

I talked about this a few years ago in an article I co-authored with Richard Wanderman and Monika Koethnig: Digital Independence, bur I think it is so cool that it warrants repeating.

iTunes is a major piece of assistive technology for me. I don’t do well with handling CDs. I used to have a 200 disk CD changer, but there was no way to quickly and easily play a particular CD or song. But, with iTunes, I have “ripped” all of my CDs and now have them on my hard drive.

Combine that with the iTunes music store and and streaming radio, and my stereo has been relegated to being a pair of powered speakers for my computer..

KeyCue

David — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 17:23:49 +0000

I read about KeyCue a few weeks ago on MacOSXHints but did not have time to look at it until today.

It is a nifty little application that displays a list of all the keyboard shortcuts for the active application It works in 10.3 only.

Grammarian Pro X

David — Mon, 31 May 2004 20:12:57 +0000

Since I migrated from Windows to Mac completely about 6 months ago, I have become a huge fan of Grammarian Pro X. OS X does have a systemwide spellchecker built-in (it underlines misspellings in red), but Grammarian has autocorrect, which allows me to use the abbreviations I talked about previously in any application.

The one trick that took me forever to figure out is that even though Grammarian works automatically in most applications, sometimes it is necessary to turn it on by setting the options of the “interactive checking” menu of Grammarian.

Ecto — the web author’s best friend

David — Sun, 23 May 2004 14:23:38 +0000

I cannot say enough about Ecto application that I use every day. I am using the Mac OS X version, and there is a Windows version in beta.

The reason why I find it so useful is that it is a text editor (with productivity supports like HTML tag maker) rather than a plain browser text area. Since it is OS X native, Apple’s system level spellchecker is built-in and all misspellings are underlined immediately.

Just an all-around great tool –check it out.

Wordpress Fixed!

David — Wed, 19 May 2004 17:42:19 +0000

I have been having trouble for about a week with Ecto (a tool that allows me to edit entries in a text editor rather than in the web browser). It turns out the issue was with the xmlrpc code in Wordpress that was fixed in last night’s build.

Update: After finding this patch everything is working wonderfully.