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October 25, 2015

Writing email outside the email app

(Originally posted on 2015-01-08)

Email is a necessary evil. It is evil because it is distracting. I find myself in the middle of a task and an email arrives which I have to respond to, and then another and then another and very soon I have no recall of what I was originally working on. So, I have time windows. I do email in thirty minute windows two or three times a day. At the end of each window, I quit the email program, I use Apple’s stock Mail app.

However, the need to send email beckons a lot more than the windows I have designated for email. The solution: an app which lets me send email without the need to launch Mail.

On iOS devices, I use Drafts. On both the iPad and the iPhone, Drafts lets me compose an email, in markdown.

Then I hit the action button on the top right hand corner, and get this.

Choose Markdown>Email and it gives me a compose email window with my content neatly turned into rich text. Fill in the recipients name, send, and I am done with the email.

On the Mac, I use Let.ter. It lets me do a similar thing. I write the email in markdown.

I can preview it.

And then I send it along.

Textwell lets me do the same thing from within the program. I write my content. I highlight it. I can send it to a predefined recipient or I can just choose email and it will give me a mail compose window, and I can enter the email addresses of the intended recipients. Click send and I am done. The only downside of Textwell is that it doesn’t do the markdown to rich text conversion. So, if you don’t always write in markdown, Textwell can do the job fine.

I use these apps several times during the day and they are very useful to me. I get the benefit of sending email without the distraction that the category brings with it.

You can buy Textwell Mac version here. $9.99.
You can buy Textwell iOS version here. $2.99.
You can buy Drafts 4.0 for iOS here. $9.99.
You can buy Let.ter app directly from the developers for $3.99.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Let.ter Drafts Email Textwell Mac OS
October 25, 2015

Review of Ulysses 1.1

Ulysses III hit the App Store a couple of days after the Maverick launch. Naturally with my obsession for text editors, I was excited about the product, hoping that this would be the product that the developers promised. You know, The most advanced text editor on the planet.

Version 1.0 met with rave reviews around the web. There were few dissident voices, one of them, mine. I have included the whole review of version 1.0 below this updated look at version 1.1.

Firstly, the two major issues I had with version 1.0: Lock in and arbitrary changing of file content when you bring in files from external sources have not been solved. The lock in is an integral feature of the design of the application and I am sure that the developers can't do anything about that. With the improved export options, I am willing to give up that criticism. I am not so forgiving about the change to file content that happens with files in external sources. I have a feeling that this criticism is going to be addressed when the developers revisit the design of the text editor. This is not based on anything the developers have said explicitly. It is based on the tweets from the developers (@ulyssesapp), and a lot of wishful thinking on my part. I might be still wrong and the application might exhibit this unacceptable behavior for the rest of its existence. The criticism was valid for version 1.0 and it will remain valid till they explicitly fix it. It was unacceptable behavior and it continues to be so. It has forced me to not enable external sources at all for the application.

The claim of being the The most advanced text editor on the planet is somewhat shaky if I have to keep another text editor involved in the process of handling text files because the application is ill-behaved. But, I am getting old and discovering patience as a virtue. So, I will wait, hoping they fix this obnoxious behavior.

Now the good stuff.

Ulysses III is much improved over the last version. Version 1.1 is considerably better and it adds a whole host of features which were conspicuously missing from the last release.

Typewriter Scrolling

It is back. It is well implemented giving you complete flexibility on the placement of the text. No one else does this in the text editing field. I get to choose the most comfortable position for me, and the program keeps the line I am working on right there? Fantastic. You have to try this to get it. I am telling you, that it has made writing on the application an absolute pleasure for me. I think this feature alone has made me want to live in this application. It is something that other writing environments like Scrivener should look at adopting. Impressive and indicative of the innovation The Soulmen have always brought to their software.

Quick Open

The way Ulysses III is organized gives me the opportunity to have different collections of documents on the Mac. So, I have a collection of files which deal with my blog. Another collection, which deals with my book, another one which deals with ideas I have on politics and so on. ⌘ + O gives me a fuzzy searchable panel somewhat reminiscent of Sublime Text, my other favorite text editor. Importantly, it makes switching between documents I have been working on easier.

New Window

Sometimes you need a few documents to be open while you work on one. Type ⌥ + ⌘ + N and you have a new window. Choose the document you want to remain open. Switch between open documents with the standard ⌘ + `. Makes working with documents much more convenient in Ulysses III.

Smart Paste

Yes. The developers have made pasting text into a document smarter. If you use the old ⌘ + V keyboard command, the text takes the same format as whatever you are pasting into. So, if your section is code and you paste into that, whatever you pasted, is now code. You get to invoke smart paste by holding down the ⌘ + V keystroke. You get a nice panel which lets you choose the format you want to paste in with. You can select through the keypad or numbers on the top or select through the mouse. Intelligent.

Smart PasteSmart Paste

Assorted Other Improvements

  1. The export options have been much improved in this version. You can export to epub, pdf, rtf (word documents) and you can use styles to control the look of the output you will generate. The customization of this feature is explained in detail in the Styles section of the website. I have not finished exploring this section yet. I am more interested in generating markdown documents and html documents from my writing.
  2. Fuzzy search through all the documents that you have asked Ulysses III to manage for you. This coupled with in-collection markup search or in-file content search means that you are now equipped to deal with a large collection of documents in the application. Search by MarkupSearch by Markup
  3. There is now an efficient in-app preview of your document. I must admit that I prefer previewing my document in Marked 2. It adds a host of tools to improve my writing and that is essential to me. You can customize the style of the preview and have your custom style applied to the preview window.
  4. There is an integration with Daedalus Touch available to you. So you can work on a document both on the Mac and on the iOS devices, with some constraints.

Takeaway

Ulysses III has evolved. It has gained more polish. It has grown some amazing one-of-a-kind features. It is still one of the prettiest environments to write in. I am impressed. It still hasn't sorted out the habit of turning into reference links all the inline links in your external source documents. My workaround is to not let it handle my external source documents. I must admit that this is not an optimal solution and it would be much better if the developers changed this behavior. In the meantime, I am going to keep working in Ulysses III, and Sublime Text.

I recommend Ulysses III with some reservations.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Previous Review

Ulysses III - The Pretty, Passive-Aggressive-Braindead Text Editor

The web is replete with rather glowing reviews for Ulysses III. This is a fair sampling of what is available on the Web:

Mac App Review: Ulysses III - the candler blog

Ulysses III: A Next Generation Writer's Environment for OS X - The Mac Observer

Mac App review: Ulysses III - BrettTerpstra.com

Ulysses III – A Markdown Writing App Like no Other | Mac.AppStorm

Ulysses 3, A Text Editor From The Future [Review] | Cult of Mac

Ulysses strives and seeks to be a better text editor for Mac | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Ulysses 3 review: Get ready for change | Apple 24 Seven

Wordius - Ulysses III: A review

These two are the exceptions in that they are not particularly gushing:

Ulysses 3 (The Soulmen) Mac App Review - Stale Coffee

Ulysses 3 by Gabe

I am going to add my perspective on Ulysses III to the "not-so-gushing" category.

I am not going to be doing a very thorough review of the product. You can find that in a selection of the reviews which already exist. I am going to raise two issues: One philosophical and the other a matter of execution.

Before I go to the criticisms, let me reiterate some of the positives which have already been pointed out in detail by others.

  1. Ulysses III is beautiful. The UI is very well designed. The look is unique and a pleasure to work in.
  2. The improvements in the markdown specification which the developers call "Plain Text Enhanced" are very nice and useful.
  3. The developers have paid a lot of attention to the details of the application and it shows all over the product. You are going to be pleasantly surprised as you discover the many and varied little details of the implementation and it is going to make the process of writing in it, a truly immersive experience.

Philosophy of Lock in

One of the many reasons I use text files is that I don't want to be locked in to any particular program when it comes to managing my text files. I can have a folder full of text files and I can use any program I want to interact with my folder of text files. At any given time, I am using Sublime Text, BBEdit 10, nvALT, or Byword to interact with my text files. The advantage is that there is no lock-in. I don't have to use any particular program. I can use whatever I want and the text files are there and ready to be used. Ulysses III goes against this convention. It's main selling point is embodied in the statement "All your texts. In one place. Always." Of course, this implies a lock-in. Most of the improvements made by Ulysses III on the Markdown specification are only available to you if you agree to be locked in to using their application and their application only.

I have a philosophical problem with this concept of lock-in. I don't want to be tethered to any one particular application. I use text files, it is an universal format avaiable to a whole host of free and paid applications on all computing platforms. By contrast, an Ulysses III file is only readable by Ulysses III. Ergo, the lock-in.

Ulysses III tries to get away from this problem of a lock-in by giving you the opportunity of using Ulysses III as an editor of your text files which you can add from external sources. So, technically, you can bring in the aforementioned folder of text files into Ulysses III as text files and you can edit it in the program. You lose all the advantages of the "Plain Text Enhanced" when you are dealing with files added through external sources but that is a compromise which makes sense. What doesn't make sense is what happens to the external source files when you bring them into Ulysses III, which leads me into the second part of my critique.

Execution Foul up, or Thou Shall Not Screw With My Markup

If you make the mistake of adding a folder of your files to Ulysses III to manage as an external source, be prepared for your files to change in ways that you are not really prepared for, or change in ways that you really should not be asked to expect.

One of those iron clad expectations from a text editor should be the following: When you handle a file, you will not change the contents of the file unless I explicitly ask you to. That should be so obvious that I never imagined that I would have to state this maxim. So, what happens?

I have a file I maintain as a text file with a bunch of inline links.

Bunch of inline LinksBunch of inline Links

When I take this file and add it to Ulysses III as an external source. This is what Ulysses III does to it:

Bunch of Reference LinksBunch of Reference Links

Excuse me?

WTF?

You changed the content of my file? Why? What makes you think that you have the right to do that? You didn't ask me. You just went ahead and did that?

When asked about this the developer said the following:

We've had a lot of discussion regarding this issue and decided to use reference-links instead of inline links in the end. You'll be able to customize the way your markup is exported with custom markup and full exporters, which are coming in future versions.

Excuse me? You had discussions and decided that it was prudent to change my content to fit some arbitrary model of yours? You changed my content. You changed my markup. Without asking me. And I can put it right by exporting? It is a text file. I don't want to export it to another text file. It is a damn text file. Leave it the fuck alone. The solution is some export model which will be available in future versions? What are you smoking? Can I have some?

I was trying to imagine the discussion between three imaginary engineers when this product feature was being discussed:

Engineer favoring reference links: We are going to be using reference links.
Engineer favoring inline links: (was busy playing with himself/herself)
Engineer favoring giving consumer the choice: What happens if the consumer wants inline links?
Engineer favoring reference links: Fuck them.
Engineer favoring inline links: (was busy playing with himself/herself)
Engineer favoring giving consumer the choice: They might have a reason for favoring inline links.
Engineer favoring reference links: Fuck them.
Engineer favoring inline links: (was busy playing with himself/herself)

Another alternate take on the discussion between three imaginary engineers when this product feature was being discussed:

Engineer favoring reference links: We are going to be using reference links.
There were no other people in the meeting.

Do me a favor. Leave my markup alone. Don't make decisions for me. And don't change my content. Don't ever change my content.

Summary

I had very high hopes of Ulysses III. The developers promised to revolutionize text editing. I followed their Ulysses 3 devblog | Building the greatest text editor the world has ever seen. with great interest. I bought the product in the first few hours of it being available in the App Store.

In its present incarnation, I am not going to be using the product though. I can look beyond the problem of a lock in. The ability to export to other formats from the program makes that somewhat easier to overlook. It introduces an extra step into the workflow but that is something I can compromise with. However I cannot trust or recommend an application which changes my content. Can't put up with that. Will not put up with that kind of passive-aggressive-braindead behavior. Sorry.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie.

Ulysses Writing
October 25, 2015

The Panoroma Investigation and Apple's Lame Response

(Originally posted on 2014-12-21)

The Panorama program is available here:

[BBC Panorama Apple's Broken Promises BBC Documentary 2014 Workers Life in china Making iphone 6

This is what we learned from the Panorama program:

  1. Apple’s supplier Foxconn had to put nets around the buildings to stop the workers from committing suicide.
  2. The workers at the Pegatron plant are working insane hours 12, 14, 16 hour days are not uncommon.
  3. The workers are sleeping on the job. They are exhausted.
  4. The paper trail doesn’t mean anything. The reality and the paper trail are not the same. So when you audit the books, you are auditing a mirage which has nothing to do with reality.
  5. The sleeping quarters are not compliant with the company regulations.
  6. When Apple buys tin from Indonesian smelters, you have no idea of the origin of the tin. They might be coming from illegal mining operations which hire child labor.

I thought these were the salient portions of the program.

This is the letter from Apple senior vice president of operations Jeff Williams to the UK employees of Apple, it was posted at Read: Apple's letter to UK staff over Chinese factory conditions - Telegraph:

UK Team, As you know, Apple is dedicated to the advancement of human rights and equality around the world. We are honest about the challenges we face and we work hard to make sure that people who make our products are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. Last night, the BBC’s Panorama program called those values into question. Like many of you, Tim and I were deeply offended by the suggestion that Apple would break a promise to the workers in our supply chain or mislead our customers in any way. I’d like to give you facts and perspective, all of which we shared with the BBC in advance, but were clearly missing from their program. Panorama showed some of the shocking conditions around tin mining in Indonesia. Apple has publicly stated that tin from Indonesia ends up in our products, and some of that tin likely comes from illegal mines. Here are the facts: Tens of thousands of artisanal miners are selling tin through many middlemen to the smelters who supply to component suppliers who sell to the world. The government is not addressing the issue, and there is widespread corruption in the undeveloped supply chain. Our team visited the same parts of Indonesia visited by the BBC, and of course we are appalled by what’s going on there. Apple has two choices: We could make sure all of our suppliers buy tin from smelters outside of Indonesia, which would probably be the easiest thing for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism. But it would be the lazy and cowardly path, because it would do nothing to improve the situation for Indonesian workers or the environment since Apple consumes a tiny fraction of the tin mined there. We chose the second path, which is to stay engaged and try to drive a collective solution. We spearheaded the creation of an Indonesian Tin Working Group with other technology companies. Apple is pushing to find and implement a system that holds smelters accountable so we can influence artisanal mining in Indonesia. It could be an approach such as “bagging and tagging” legally mined material, which has been successful over time in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We are looking to drive similar results in Indonesia, which is the right thing to do. Panorama also made claims about our commitment to working conditions in our factories. We know of no other company doing as much as Apple does to ensure fair and safe working conditions, to discover and investigate problems, to fix and follow through when issues arise, and to provide transparency into the operations of our suppliers. I want you to know that more than 1400 of your Apple coworkers are stationed in China to manage our manufacturing operations. They are in the factories constantly — talented engineers and managers who are also compassionate people, trained to speak up when they see safety risks or mistreatment. We also have a team of experts dedicated solely to driving compliance with our Supplier Code of Conduct across our vast supply chain. In 2014 alone, our Supplier Responsibility team completed 630 comprehensive, in-person audits deep into our supply chain. These audits include face-to-face interviews with workers, away from their managers, in their native language. Sometimes critics point to the discovery of problems as evidence that the process isn’t working. The reality is that we find violations in every audit we have ever performed, no matter how sophisticated the company we're auditing. We find problems, we drive improvement, and then we raise the bar. Panorama’s report implied that Apple isn’t improving working conditions. Let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. Here are just a few examples: Several years ago, the vast majority of workers in our supply chain worked in excess of 60 hours, and 70+ hour workweeks were typical. After years of slow progress and industry excuses, Apple decided to attack the problem by tracking the weekly hours of over one million workers, driving corrective actions with our suppliers and publishing the results on our website monthly — something no other company had ever done. It takes substantial effort, and we have to weed out false reporting, but it's working. This year, our suppliers have achieved an average of 93% compliance with our 60-hour limit. We can still do better. And we will. Our auditors were the first to identify and crack down on a ring of unscrupulous labor brokers who were holding workers’ passports and forcing them to pay exorbitant fees. To date, we have helped workers recoup $20 million in excessive payments like these. We’ve gone far beyond auditing and corrective actions by creating educational programs for workers in the same facilities where they make our products. More than 750,000 people have taken advantage of these college-level courses and enrichment programs, and the feedback we get from students is inspiring. I will not dive into every issue raised by Panorama in this note, but you can rest assured that we take all allegations seriously, and we investigate every claim. We know there are a lot of issues out there, and our work is never done. We will not rest until every person in our supply chain is treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. If you’d like to learn more about our Supplier Responsibility program, I encourage you and our customers to visit our website at apple.com/supplierresponsibility. Thanks for your time and your support. Jeff

This letter made me gag. What a bunch of poppycock.

Firstly, what the hell is Williams and Cook offended about? Does Apple have material objections to the findings of the program? They explicitly admit the situation in Indonesia. They do not challenge the assertions about the working conditions or hours in the factories in China. Apple points to their audit of the documentation and the program explicitly shows the documentation to be meaningless and not representative of what exactly is happening. What are they offended about? And more importantly, who gives a shit about whether they are offended or not? Apple increasingly talks about the values that guide their organization and everything Apple does and stands for. Set a bar. You have to meet it. When someone points out that you are falling short, you are offended? Give me a break. Get off that self-pity horse and fix the problems. Don’t whine. Fix the problems.

Apple’s get out of jail free card is based on the notion that they are the only company who tries? Apple is one of the largest companies in the world. Its claim is that there are deep underlying values guiding every decision it makes. That is what gives them the ability to charge the premium prices they demand in the marketplace. Their products are not just electronic gizmos. They are electronic gizmos which were produced within a value system. Apple’s value system includes this one “…that people who make our products are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.” Really? Remember that this one has taken a few hits in the last few years. Remember this executive team was also in charge when Steve Jobs made a deal with Google, Intel, Adobe and other silicon valley companies to stop poaching engineers from each other. That was a collusion amongst employers to keep employee wages down. That is the effect of discouraging poaching. Keep a lid on engineer wages. That was treating people with respect and dignity? That is Apple’s history. So now when they tell me that they are offended by the suggestion that workers at one of their suppliers are being made to work overtime without their consent, I have to ask them, how gullible do you think I am?

You are telling me that you try. I accept that. You are trying. The situation is still not perfect, so try harder. This is important.

Your products are imbued with a value system. That is what makes your brand special. It is not Dell, or HP, or Samsung, or Walmart. All of the earnest pronouncements you make about your value system guiding your decisions is the added aura around your products. That is the added advantage you have in the marketplace. That is the source of your margins, that is the source of your brand loyalty, that is the source of your consumers’ obsession with your products. Don’t screw that up. If you screw that up, you will have the moral standing of Walmart or a Shell.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

BBC Apple Values
October 25, 2015

Textwell - The Modeless Textbox for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac.

(Originally posted on 2015-01-04)

In the world of text editors this is a strange beast. The closest product that this is analogous to is Drafts on iOS.

Conceptually it is one sheet of paper. You type on it. You fill it with content that you are working on, and then you send it somewhere. You can save it to a file, prepend or append it to an existing file, or you can use a bundled action/write an action yourself to do with the content what you wish.

Does that sound confusing enough? It does because it is not what we usually do with a text editor. We edit text, we save it to a file, and then we move on. We might occasionally take the content and put it into an email message or a tweet and use some other dedicated program to send it along, but in Textwell it is all done within it. The program ships with a slew of actions which let you do a whole bunch of things with the content you create. When you are done, you clear the one sheet of paper you have, and start with a new blank sheet of paper. Efficient and a little different from the norm.

It has a companion iOS version. With iCloud Drive support, you can work on the same piece of paper on all your devices.

The Mac version of Textwell

This is a well designed piece of software. Don't get me wrong. This is not competing with BBEdit or SublimeText. It is not feature comparable with a text editor. It is as the developers describe it, a "modeless textbox.” A window where you input text. Then you perform some actions on the text.

For instance, I wrote the following tweet: Trying out the Mac version of #Textwell, the modeless textbox for iOS and Mac OS devices. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textwell/id905944937?mt=12&uo=4&at=10lrLv.

I selected the text of the tweet and hit ⌥⌘T, which is the keystroke I assigned to the Tweet action, and it posted the tweet through the Twitter app. Done. I cleared the textbox and it was now empty and waiting for the next thing I wanted to do with it.

The interface of Textwell is simple. It is a textbox.

You can extend the window to the right and the left. The left extension is a panel which shows different versions of documents you have been working on. I think this is the version control provided by iCloud Drive. But they are a listing of the different iterations of the content of the page you are working on. On the right is the actions panel. This contains all the actions available to you. You can arrange these in folders and that helps you locate the particular action you are interested in. The actions are Javascript programs which run in the built-in web view. They are very well documented here.

The application ships with a bunch of these actions and you can easily write more if you need them. I have just started learning Javascript, so it will be a while before I write my own actions.

Textwell is customizable to a certain extent. You can use any font you like, and design your own theme to a point. I came up with a version of Solarized Dark. I wish the cursor was a little thicker. I changed the cursor color to Red to help it stick out a little more. Textwell lets you set the maximum text width and that defines the width of the text in your input window.

Interestingly, Textwell doesn't provide a keyboard command for full screen view, but if you click on the green doohickey on the top left of the window, it will switch to full screen view. It is a usable full screen view, and that is the mode I am in when I am in Textwell. The absence of a keyboard command for that is a little weird.

One suggestion to improve the product for me would be to add a typewriter scrolling mode. It is something I have gotten used to and miss when it is not available.

When I started this review, I was planning a comparison between Drafts and Textwell. The more I use Textwell, the more I realize that the two products are essentially build around the same idea. Write something, move it on to other uses.

The comparison with Drafts on iOS

There are a few differences between the two programs which make a direct comparison between the two somewhat problematic:

  1. Drafts does not have a Mac version.
  2. Textwell is at version 1.3.4 while Drafts is at version 4.0
  3. Textwell on iOS costs $2.99 while Drafts costs $9.99
  4. Drafts is markdown friendly. Textwell just does text.

On iOS, Drafts is much better designed. It is not even remotely close. Textwell is functional, but Drafts is heavenly. I have been using Drafts since the day it was released, and I think that it is one of the best designed apps for the iOS. Textwell has a long way to go to catch up.

So where does that leave us?

Do you need a textbox? I am a SublimeText user and initially looked on the whole textbox idea as a bit of a gimmick. The more I gave it time, the more I realized that there is something to be said for the modeless textbox that Textwell provides. I like having a dedicated program where I write something, do something to the text and then move on the next task. It focusses you on the task and then lets you clear the page and move on to next task. It deserves a place in the workflow and it is adding value to my routines.

The Mac version is well designed. It is a worthy addition to any text file users arsenal. My hope is that the iOS version matures and becomes as useful on the iOS devices.

Recommendation

If the idea of a textbox on the Mac intrigues you. Get the Mac version and the iOS version of Textwell. You are going to find a lot of ways you will use this neat little program. If you spend more time on the iOS devices than the Mac, get Drafts.

You can buy Textwell Mac version here. $9.99.
You can buy Textwell iOS version here. $2.99.
You can buy Drafts 4.0 for iOS here. $9.99.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Textwell text Drafts
October 25, 2015

Sublime Text 3 : Select, Skip, and Select All

(Originally posted on 2015-09-08)

Select a word:

With your cursor anywhere in the word:

⌘ + d selects the word
⌘ + d again selects the next occurrence of the word
⌘ + d again selects the next one

Skipping over an instance of the word:

Type ⌘ + k, ⌘ + d to skip the next occurrence of the word.

Selecting all instances of the word:

^ + ⌘ + g will select every occurrence of the word

(Obviously, these are Mac keyboard shortcuts)

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

SublimeText3