July 30, 2018
Noto Is a Free, Quick and Efficient Text Editor
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Product: Noto
Price: Free
Edit
Noto is a free text editor available on macOS. It is not as full-featured as some of the other alternatives like CotEditor or the free version of BBEdit. What it lacks in features, Noto makes up in speed.
If you are a person who lives in text files, you must have a dedicated text editor which you use. This product is not for you. You have time and energy invested in learning the inner workings of your text editor and there is no reason for you to use a simple solution like Noto. On the other hand, if you are not wedded to text files and are looking for a simple text editor which will let you deal with the occasional text file, Noto should fit your needs.
Noto Has Few Features
- Noto has extensive encoding support. That means Noto can support files containing text and characters from many different scripts and encodings. It is equally comfortable with Japanese characters and mathematical symbols, or Windows, macOS, and Unix text files.
- Noto does “smart multi-selection.” Hold down the ⌘ key and highlight multiple selections of text. You can now indent or un-indent the selected text with spaces or tabs.
- Noto shows invisible characters. View>Show Invisible Characters, shows you the gremlins hidden in your text files. Useful if you are copying text from other programs into Noto.
- Noto supports Versioning. You can revert back to a previous version of your document through Noto’s support for the macOS feature of Versions.
- Noto has themes. You can get some additional themes from here. You can also make your own with instructions from here.
Noto Is Minimal in Its Preferences
Editor Preferences
You get to choose your own font.
Noto lets you assign spaces instead of tabs. You get to specify number of spaces for each tab.
Sys Pref
Noto supports the macOS features of turning two spaces into a period and it capitalizes the first letter of each new sentence if you have that selected in System Preferences>Keyboard>Text preference pane. In case you have internalized this “bad typing behavior” (I am guilty of this), this is a great feature.
Themes
Noto supports themes and the implementation though minimal is effective and user-customizable.
Conclusion
Noto is competent software. If you are looking for a simple text editor, it fits the bill. I love it. It is quick and easy and a pleasure to use.
Noto is recommended heartily.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
macOS
Text Editor
Noto
July 24, 2018
Softorino YouTube Converter 2 Converts Video From Popular Sources
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Product: YouTube Converter 2 | Softorino
Price: $19.99
I like single task utilities. These are the utilities which set out to perform a single task and do it well. YouTube Converter 2 from Softorino is one of those utilities.
Video Sources
It is misnamed. The most popular task it performs is converting YouTube videos for your macOS and iOS devices, but it converts video from more than sixty other popular sources. It downloads videos, music and ringtones from these sources and makes them available to you on the computer or on your iOS devices.
Video Conversion
YouTube Converter 2 Interface
YouTube Converter 2 converts the source video into a choice of different resolutions for you. 2160p to 360p is supported and you get to just click a few buttons and get the video you want on any device you want.
Conversion to Audio
Audio
You can take any video and convert it into audio. A choice of formats is available to you on the conversion. MP3, AAC are useful formats for this.
Conversion to Ringtones
Ringtones
This is a much desired feature. You can convert a video into Ringtones for your iPhone, transfer it to the iPhone and use it for your incoming phone calls. All by clicking a few buttons. The length of the ringtone can be adjusted to be the usual 30 second ringtone.
Conclusion
YouTube Converter 2 is an utility which does what it is supposed to in an intuitive and efficient manner. If you need to download videos or download videos converted to audio or ringtones this is a product which performs those tasks efficiently.
I am happy with the product. It is recommended heartily.
A license was provided by the developer for review.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Other Reviews of the Product:
Softorino YouTube Converter 2 review: The most convenient way to download website videos and transfer them to iOS devices | Macworld
Softorino YouTube Converter 2 Makes Downloading Streaming Video Effortless – MacStories
YouTube
Ringtones
Video
July 4, 2018
Keep It Icon
You Gotta Keep It, Keep It
Product: Keep It
Price: $49.99
Keep It belongs to the category of products I call a “Digital Dump”. Like Evernote, this is the repository of files that you want to keep around and search periodically to reach the pebbles of wisdom that are contained in them. On macOS, the primary products in this space are:
- DEVONthink
- Yojimbo
- EagleFiler
- Keep It
I use DEVONthink Pro Office for my digital dump. I am going to write about it soon. In this article, I am going to talk about Keep It. Keep It launched version 1.4 with the ability to deal with Markdown and that is what I am going to focus on.
Digital Dump
Keep It is an efficient digital dump.
Let’s break this up into the things you expect from a digital dump and see how well Keep It does them.
Collecting
In a digital dump, you collect notes, links and the wide category of everything else.
Default Note
Keep It takes notes in plain text, rich text and Markdown. You have the option of setting a default format for your notes. Notes have the ability to contain the usual elements: checklists, ordered and unordered lists, images, links and other attachments.
New Note
Keep It has an interesting stationery feature which lets you choose the format of the note you are taking.
Bookmarklet
You can save web links to Keep It. You can view them in the app, or open them in the web browser, save them to PDFs or web archives for offline reading. Keep It provides a JavaScript snippet to import a web link for the current page in the browser. If you select some text on the page and press the bookmarklet, Keep It creates a note with the selected text and URL.
You can add any file you want to Keep It or any of its folders. They can be opened in their original applications and through iCloud, changes will be available across all your Macs and iOS devices.
Organizing and Accessing Your Items
A digital dump has to be able to search quickly and efficiently through a plethora of files to locate the document/s you are interested in. Keep It does not disappoint. It provides you several ways of organizing your files and that makes the search function focused and efficient.
In Keep It, you can access thumbnails and summaries for most files, edit your own notes in rich text, plain text and Markdown files. You can add highlights and notes PDFs, show images, web pages and most other documents. Any item, in your Library, can be encrypted with a password.
Keep It can store everything in iCloud and that makes your library accessible across all your Macs and iOS devices (with Keep It for iPad and iPhone).
There are various ways you can decide to store your library in Keep It:
- You can choose to keep all your files in the Library while using tags to put them into categories. Tags are not nested. I prefer the implementation of tags by Bear - Notes. Nested tags would be an improvement over the current implementation in Keep It. Nested folders give you the same feature and thus Keep It forces you to use a mix of folders and tags to attain what in Bear is implemented through nested tags.
- You can choose to organize your items into folders and put the items into discrete folders. You can double click to focus the sidebar on the folder you are working in.
- You can create bundles of things. Items can belong to more than one bundle at a time. When you get rid of the bundles, it doesn’t get rid of the files in it. They remain where they are in your library. It is an interesting way of focusing on a subset of relevant documents and working through your project. Finishing it and getting rid of the organization.
- You can mix and match your organizational scheme with folders and tags and bundles. Keep It is flexible in how it lets you manage your organization of documents.
- You can decide to implement no organization and use the find function to get to files you need.
The reality is that the more documents your Keep It database collects, the more you need some organizational criteria that you are comfortable with to impose some order to it. What method you choose is up to you but you need some method to control the madness which is intrinsic to a digital dump. For me? I like tags. I keep everything tagged and have set up saved searches to provide the organization that I am comfortable in.
Saved Search
With the introduction of Markdown to Keep It, I decided to see whether I could use it to maintain my writing for Bicycle For Your Mind. I put all the text files into the Library and then tagged them:
BlogToDo: Ideas for blog articles got this tag.BlogWIP: Ideas I am working on got this tag.BlogPosted: Articles which have been posted got this tag.Untagged: I have this saved search to remind me of articles that have not been tagged.
It is a simple system and it works. This is similar to the organization I had in Bear but the implementation is a little different here since I am not able to use nested tags. I have also not in any sense stretched the limits of what can be done in Keep It. I am not using it as the digital dump that it is meant to be. I am much more interested in using this as an organizer of my writing. With its adoption of Markdown, I can use the product to maintain order in my writing and also do the occasional edit of my files. Markdown implementation makes this a possibility.
Markdown Implementation
Keep It’s support of Markdown is a hybrid of CommonMark plus strikethrough. In the editor you can type anything you want. The support of Markdown is designed to be basic and geared towards the preview of Markdown as being something more than plain text.
Markdown Settings
You can set the preferences for the Markdown editor by going to Markdown>Settings.
Markdown Preview Settings
The preview pane of Markdown settings shows you what is supported in Keep It.
The good news is that a file in Keep It can be edited in any application you want. Right-click on the file in the Sidebar and you have the option to open the file in your default Markdown editor or any application which the system thinks can handle Markdown files. This feature makes Keep It a manager of files and you can use any editor you want to do the actual writing and editing of the files in Keep It.
Keep It provides you with the ability to write Markdown but it is not a core feature of the product. The core feature is the digital dump nature of the product. The Markdown support is almost an afterthought. If you care about your writing environment and are looking for a product to live and write in, Keep It falls a tad short. Keep It wants you to edit your files in your Markdown editor of choice and doesn’t want to compete with products like Bear and Ulysses. Both of those products perform a subset of functions that Keep It provides with a focus on note-taking for the former and writing for the latter.
My problem with the approach that Keep It takes is that it is such a missed opportunity. If you are going to include Markdown support in a digital dump, let’s take it a step further. Let’s make it a creating environment as well as a collecting one. You are so close. These are some of the steps that would make the product complete:
- Ability to change line-spacing in the editor.
- Typewriter scrolling in full screen mode.
Keep It Files
Keep It Files
Keep It, like EagleFiler, keeps its files outside a database. There is a database file but the files you add to Keep It are kept in their original format in the Library folder. That is different from Yojimbo or DEVONthink and its various editions. I like having the original files accessible. I can work on those original files in whatever application I choose and Keep It accesses the edited files without a complaint. Makes the process of working on my files easier and I am not stuck to always editing my files in the sub-optimal editing environment of Keep It. Having the original files accessible ensures that I am not stuck with Keep It or its database for continued access to my files. This absence of a lock-in makes the product versatile and useful.
Theming
Keep It uses the same themes as Mou, MacDown, and, LightPaper. It is based on PEG Markdown Highlight. The technical details are not that important. What it means in real terms is that you can adopt or use themes from other programs to come up with usable themes for Keep It.
I like writing in Solarized - Ethan Schoonover and have both a light and dark version to use in Keep It. That makes the Markdown editor usable and comfortable to me.
Usability
Keep It is a mature product with a well-developed system of preferences.
Preferences>General
You can specify the behavior of Keep It when it opens a new document, or where to open items, where to allow tabs. The behavior of Compact Mode.
Preferences>Import
You can set the behavior of whether you want to copy or move files when you bring them into Keep It. The default destination of imports can be specified.
Preferences>Fonts
You can set the default font for Rich Text documents and Plain Text documents. The Preview fonts and text sizes can be set here.
Preferences>Advanced
Some advanced preferences including the nature of iCloud logging can be set in this pane.
One of the many things I like about Keep It is its support for extensive keyboard commands all across the program. Its support for keyboard commands for Markdown editing is exceptional. It is a pleasure to write in this program.
Conclusion
This is a mature product which has been well designed and is feature rich. If you are looking for a Digital Dump, Keep It will not disappoint. And like me, if you are looking for a home to manage your Markdown based writing, Keep It fulfills that function admirably well.
The only thing I would change about Keep It is the implementation of a few features which extend the product to become a better creation tool in addition to its present incarnation of well-designed collecting tool.
Keep It is recommended heartily.
The developer provided me with a license code to review the product.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
KeepIt
Digital Dump
macOS
Bicycle For Your Mind
