Together Services / OmniFocus Tip

January 6th, 2009 by Steve Harris

Together 2.2.4 introduces a very small, but potentially quite useful feature addition following a feature request. You can now send a Together item link for the selected item in the list (or the item in the current tab) to another application using the Services menu.

To give a practical example, OmniFocus‘s Clipping feature allows you to set a keystroke that can be used to import the current selection into OmniFocus. For most applications, it achieves this using the Services menu.

OmniFocus Quick Entry window

As of Together 2.2.4, when an item is selected in Together and OmniFocus’s clipping service is used, whether through the keystroke or Services menu, OmniFocus will create a new task with the Together item link in the tasks’s notes. Clicking the item link will open the original item in a tab in Together.

As I mentioned, this is using Mac OS X’s system services, it’s not an OmniFocus-only tip, so you may be able to find a use for this in other apps, too.

Give Good Food to your Mac, Third Promotion

November 17th, 2008 by Steve Harris

This time last year, Give Good Food to your Mac’s kitchen opened for the first time, presenting allowing you to cook up your own bundle of Mac apps by choosing the ones that suited you the best, and the more apps you bought the more you saved with a progressive discount rate. In the summer, there was a developer special.

Today, the promotion is back for another fortnight. While the recipe is the same, you can now choose from around 70 apps from independent developers across the globe. Together is included in this promotion. Discounts start at 20% when you buy three or more apps and rise to 50% for five or more apps. The promotion runs from Nov 17th to Nov 30th.

So, to create your own bargain bundle, head over to the Give Good Food to your Mac store.

Together 2.2

November 11th, 2008 by Steve Harris

Together 2.2 is available today, bringing improvements to tagging, groups, item categorization, tabs, the Shelf, imports and previews. Here’s a summary of the main changes:

Tagging

Together 2.2 introduces intelligent auto-tagging based on items with similar content. When items are imported or saved, Together will analyse their content and tag them based on other items with the same tag.

Tag BundlesAlso in 2.2, tags can be organized into bundles, and system tags (which show things such as labels, ratings and groups as though they were tags) are also shown in their own bundles. It’s now possible to show items that have all the selected tags in the tag browser, rather than any of the tags.

The new Change Tags panel replaces the Add Tags panel to add or remove specific tags from multiple items or all items in a group. This is useful as is not possible to edit specific tags in the Info view when multiple items are selected and not all items have the same tags.

Items

Together 2.2 adds a new Web Page group to show all web archives, web pages and PDFs of web pages, whether printed from a browser or web PDFs created by Together.

Items’ file creation and modification dates can be edited in the Info view by clicking on the date.

Tabs for items can now be rearranged and will scroll horizontally when there are too many to be displayed in the main window.

Web PDFs have also been improved so that you can specify the minimum size for a web page when creating a PDF in Together, with default settings in Together’s Previews preferences panel that will be used when PDFs are imported from dragged URLs.

Also, the content for notes and text documents can now be zoomed and the default zoom percentage can be set in Previews preferences.

Groups

Nested groups in Together 2.2Groups and smart groups can now be nested in folders. Items can be added to new or existings groups and moved to folders using the Items menu.

Shelf

Together 2.1 added the ability for the Shelf to show options when importing. This is now improved so that, in the case of single-item imports, you can edit the name of the item being imported.

Also, Together will return to the previous application after the Shelf closes and there is a new “Find in Library” hot key to open the Shelf with the search field selected.

Importing

Together now has better handling of file promises. Sometimes when dragging from other applications, the other application is responsibile for creating the file in Together’s library, but Together would only know when that process started and so would show the new item in the library before the copy had completed. This could cause some confusion for larger files, so now Together will wait until the file has been fully copied to a temporary location.

This change also works around a problem where Mail.app will silently overwrite exported email files with the same subject, as Together now has control over the name of the imported file.

There are plenty of other smaller improvements and tweaks in this version. See the Together release notes page for a full list.

Feeder Podcasting Tutorial

August 12th, 2008 by Steve Harris

Allison Sheridan has created a ScreenSteps (which looks very cool) tutorial on how to create a podcast feed for Feeder as part of her Podcasting on Podcasting series.

You can hear Allison give the tutorial on PoP Episode #9 (enhanced podcast) and read it on her site: Feeder Tutorial.

The Podcasting on Podcasting (PoP) series should prove very useful to budding podcasters as the entire process can be very daunting, as it covers everything from the technical side of recording equipment, software and web hosting on the one hand, and the creative aspect on the other, not to mention considerations such as time and family commitments.

Allison’s been podcasting for a long time now, and occasionally brings in other experienced contributors such as Don McAllister of the excellent ScreenCastsOnline.

The Podcasting on Podcasting series can be found as part of Allison’s main podcast, NosillaCast, at podfeet.com. Allison also contributes to the Mac Roundtable Podcast and the Mac ReviewCast.

Scripting Sparkle Appcasts with Feeder and RubyCocoa

August 4th, 2008 by Steve Harris

Nick Brawn has written a post on scripting Feeder to publish Sparkle appcasts using Leopard’s Scripting Bridge and RubyCocoa, which as well as being potentially useful for developers, serves as an interesting example for this combination of technologies:

Link: Scripting Sparkle Appcasts with Feeder and RubyCocoa