Software

Software

Apps in use: Audio Hijack Pro

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I can't remember how long I have been using Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro on my various Macs. It's long enough that I forget it's software, I just know it in my bones, and it's long enough that it's years since I noticed ow Rogue Amoeba is an unusual name.

I use it for clipping my and friends' radio appearances, I use it for recording Skype interview calls, I can't count how many things I've used it for and I'm frustrated that I'm so used to it that I can't remember a longer list of examples. But trust me, it's a favourite and it is indispensible – and today the Rogue Amoeba blog ran a little news story about uses of it that I didn't know and am immediately nicking:

Real World Usage: Podcasting With Audio Hijack Pro

Our audio recorder Audio Hijack Pro has long been a favorite tool among podcasters. Whether you want to record a conversation from Skype, or just your own microphone, Audio Hijack Pro can help you get your podcast going. As the podcast world has grown, we’ve been thrilled to see our app used by thousand of podcasters in the past decade.

One podcaster making great use of Audio Hijack Pro is Dave Hamilton, who might just know more about the app than we do! Recently, he started dishing out some tasty knowledge. First up is a video on sending multiple audio sources over Skype, using Audio Hijack Pro and Soundflower. Next, Dave had a clever trick for creating a noise gate on your Mac, to record only when audio reaches a certain level.

Seasoned veterans of Audio Hijack Pro may already know about these tricks, but if not, check them out. And of course if you’re new to the app, you can always download a free trial of Audio Hijack Pro to try it out.

Rogue Amoeba blog

Take a read of the full piece, look at the videos and add Audio Hijack Pro to your Mac.

Reeder for Mac now available

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This week’s updates to the iOS versions of Reeder have been followed by the first full release of Reeder 2 for Mac. It’s now out of beta and available to buy from the Mac App Store for £2.99 UK, $4.99 US.

It’s an RSS reader: it brings you all the news from any number of websites who have these RSS feeds and that you chuck into Reeder. There are many such services and if they’ve stuck around for any length of time at all, they each have their fans. I’m sufficiently a fan of Reeder, though, that when it was pulled from the App Store last year because Google changes stopped it working, I stopped reading RSS.

Only on my Mac. I couldn’t stop reading it on iOS and I’m not sure now what the chain of events was. I think Reeder lasted longer on iOS but anyway, the iPhone one was updated last September and I so very clearly remember the delight at that coming out while I was on holiday. Learnt about it, bought it, had a really good time getting reacquainted with an old friend in a new design.

Similarly, the iPad version is a pretty constant friend.

But I did miss reading news on my Mac, most especially on those days when I’m here for twelve or fifteen hours. Maybe I should go take screen breaks, but I just used to really enjoy spending a few moments downtime catching up with news. Today, after so very many months without Reeder being available on the Mac, it is again and I’m enjoying it again.

Here’s me enjoying it.

Screen Shot 2014-05-29 at 21.06.48

I’m not going to claim that Reeder is the very best RSS software, I am just going to say that it is the very best for me. And along with OmniFocus, Evernote and Mail, it’s got to be on my machine for it to feel like my machine.

 

Quickie: Reeder update review

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Previously… yesterday the new 2.2 version of Reeder came out and amongst bug fixes and a couple of visual twiddles, the reason to remark was that it added background refresh. (Where instead of my getting the app to add the latest news whenever I open it, the app itself does that continually through the day.) I wondered whether this would work and whether it would make any difference if it did. Now read on.

It worked.

It makes a big difference.reeder

On the one hand it’s slightly disappointing because I’m used to the anticipation of waiting to see if there’s anything new to read and now I just know at a glance. But it’s unexpectedly faster. Logically, rationally, it can’t be saving me more than a few seconds compared to when I would have to wait for it to update in front of me, but it feels faster. Much faster.

I’m also reading more because of it. I find I clear down all the remaining articles and then the next time I pick up my iPhone, there’s an unread news notification. Who can resist?

Reeder for iOS is a universal app (so it’s for both iPhone and iPad) and costs £2.99 UK or $4.99 US. The Mac version is currently still free in beta but the finished and to-be-paid-for version was reportedly submitted to Apple about a week ago.

Tweet in your sleep

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This came up at a couple of recent The Blank Screen workshops: how to send tweets or Facebook messages when you’re not around. Both times it came up, it was evil people who’d just learnt I start work at 5am and they wanted to send me a tweet to check. But weren’t so keen or so evil that they wanted to be up at that time.

If you have nicer reasons to do it, try one of these two possibilities:

HootSuite
Free for personal use hootsuite.com
Log in once to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and/or Foursquare and write a message for it to send to any or all of them whenever you tell it to.

Buffer
A free iOS app and a free website – buffer.com – doesn’t have Foursquare, so far as I can tell, but does the others easily and reliably.

I use Buffer for my personal Self Distract blogs that I write and publish on Friday mornings. The first tweet is live but then I always intend to send another one around lunchtime. And then that evening. And a last one the following Monday. Buffer lets me write the lot one after another and know that it is being sent for me at the time I say.

I do this because I regularly forget to send the tweets live. Now I regularly forget that they are going to be sent live and I suddenly get a unexpected notifications of retweets from the various tweets Buffer has sent for me.

Add numbers to your phone as soon as you get them

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I’m not great at this but I try. If you give me your phone number or I’ve found you on some research thing, I will add you to my Contacts list. I don’t like the word Contacts, I’m not suddenly thinking of you as a contact instead of a human being. But I am adding and I will add you to my Contacts app. Whatever machine I’m near at the time – iPhone, iPad or Mac – I will try to enter your number right after we’ve spoken.

Given how easy it is to get photographs of people now too, I will often drag a photo to your contacts page too. That usually happens if I’m on my Mac and you’re not obscure. Or have the same name as someone who turns up a lot on Google. If all of this is true, one drag and you’re in my book.

Which is why today I got a call from a charmingly modest woman who wondered if I remembered her – and of course I did. She rang on my mobile, there was her name in big letters and there was her photo from her website. I hope that I would’ve remembered anyway but I’m suffering under a cold not terribly with it today, so this was a real boon.

All because when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, I put her name and photo into my contacts app. Right away.

Reeder updated with background refresh

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reederMy favourite newsreader app for iPhone and iPad has today been updated to version 2.2. It includes a lot of bug fixes (can’t say I ever noticed any bugs in my daily, near hourly use) and behind the scenes differences to how many news feeds it can handle. But the biggie, the reason to mention this instead of just update it on my iOS devices and forget about it is this:

Background app refresh (per account setting, disabled by default)

It sounds like such a small thing and perhaps it will be but I’m looking forward to trying it. Background app refresh means that Reeder will get news stories for me behind the scenes. I won’t even have to be in the app. So instead of opening it and refreshing the list for myself, I can pick up Reeder and know that it us up to date right now.

But.

You saw that bit about it being “disabled by default”. It took me a minute to find out where to switch the thing on.

To do that, go to Reeder and swipe left-to-right until you reach a screen with a settings cog wheel. Tap that, choose your account name toward the top of the screen that appears. In there, tap on Sync and change it from On Start or Manually to Background refresh. Then tap the < arrow to get out of that screen and the √ tick to confirm the change. Reeder for iOS is a universal app (so it’s for both iPhone and iPad) and costs £2.99 UK or $4.99 US. The Mac version is currently still free in beta but reportedly not for very much longer.

1Password for Android coming 10 June

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From the official Agile Bits blog:

1Password 4 for Android arrives on Tuesday, June 10. It is an entirely new and full-featured app, built for both phones and tablets!

It is also an experiment. All new features will be unlocked and free for everyone to use through August 1, 2014. After that, 1Password 4 for Android will go into a reader mode, and all features can be unlocked for an in-app purchase.

Free OmniFocus tutorial video from Screencasts Online

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I’m working on my own review for the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac – quick prom ahead, I’ve found two and a half things I don’t like about it and around eleventy-billion I do – but others are way ahead of me. And one, Screencasts Online, isn’t reviewing the To Do software per se, it’s just showing us how to use it.

Screencasts Online is usually a subscription service and joining it gets you an enormous and growing number of very good video tutorials. If there’s some software you’re using or you’re just considering, join Screencasts Online and learn all about it very quickly. Very easily and very thoroughly.

Just sometimes, though, the service will make one video free. Yes, I agree, it’s an advertising promotion but they do it with integrity: the last one they did was 1Password and it was made free because of the Heartbleed servility problem. The software 1Password is particularly good at security so their releasing the video free felt to me like a service to the community. Now they’ve done this one about OmniFocus 2 for Mac and I think it’s practically a kindness: showing us how it works and what we can do with it is better than a straight review.

Get more from Screencasts Online and, now you’ve seen it in action, get OmniFocus 2 for Mac.

How a fan recommends Nisus Writer

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We're in a spot where Microsoft Word has lost its strangelhold on the word processing market and other alternatives are doing well. But before it got to that level, Word had competitors then too. One of them was Nisus and I knew it well from writing news stories in computer press that covered it. I'm not sure I ever tried it myself, though I must surely have done at some point, but I had and still have a high opinion of it for two reasons.

One is that Nisus introduced some features that all the best word processors now have – and yet which took them all years to adopt. I'm thinking chiefly of non-contiguous selection: the way that you can select this sentence, scroll down a bit, select another one and then when you copy or cut, those two sentences are taken.

But the other reason I rate Nisus without having much or maybe any direct experience of it myself is that it used to engender passion in its users. Nobody ever evangelised Word. But Nisus had its champions.

And now it does again.

Things turned around in 2011 with the release of Nisus Writer Pro 2.0. This was the first version of Nisus Writer to include both change-tracking and comments, plus most of my favorite features from Nisus Writer Classic and a bunch of new capabilities. All of a sudden I had my old toolkit back, in a modern package. It was as though I'd been limited to a machete and an open fire for all my cooking needs, and then walked into a fully equipped restaurant kitchen. In the years since, it has grown even more capable and reliable.

Tools of the trade: Why I prefer Nisus Writer – Joe Kissell, Macworld (21 May 2014)

The full piece is very interesting about Nisus's place in word processing history – and even its lore – but also specific about its advantages. If you're on a Mac and you dislike Word, take a look.