Copied - Copy and Paste Everywhere

This is just a quick entry to mention this very nice little app that I’ve started using on both my Macbook Pro and my iPhone. It’s a deceptive simple program that allows for copied content to be transferred between devices in either direction via a very rapid iCloud connection, and it really does work as intended. Once configured appropriately a Command C on selected content on the Mac almost immediately populates the Copied app’s iPhone window (and clipboard) with that text (or image) and this transferred content is then available for pasting into any appropriate iPhone app.
I found it immediately useful for creating text on my Mac to deliver to Instagram which I run on my iPhone. Since Instagram lacks decent Mac applications I prefer to just stay with the iPhone app for uploading pictures, but text annotation (particularly lengthy content) can be troublesome to enter on the iPhone and so the ability to seamlessly create an entry for Instagram on my Mac and have it available on my iPhone in seconds makes for a winning combination of apps with real synergy occurring between Copied and (in this case) Instagram.

As well as using it for this type of general copying and pasting, Copied can also be used as a way of storing content in lists named according to different categories. I have a Facebook and Political list, for example, and store text snippets into the appropriate list. At any time I can quickly take a snippet in a Copied list and move it directly into the device Clipboard (either on Mac or iPhone) for pasting elsewhere.

I should mention that this product is available in a free version on the iPhone with an in-app upgrade allowing for the iCloud sync described above. Make sure you get this upgrade to what the developer calls Copied+ to make full use of this product on all devices.

You can get the Mac version from the Mac App Store here and the iPhone version here.

Here’s what the program looks like on my Mac.

New Desk Version

Good to see the update to this interesting blog editor. I notice that the update is essentially a bug fix for version 1.0 bringing the editor up to version 1.1. I certainly have not problems with the developer doing this rather than just bring out a new update with new features while ignoring bugs. I am hoping, however, for some new features to try out in a future update, although at the same time I know that I’d be upset with an editor which ended up with everything including the kitchen sink added, suffering from featuritis!  At this point Desk is hitting the sweet spot.  

This editor was reviewed recently just after I purchased version 1.0 of the software.  

StackEditing Environment

In a further attempt to discover the best environment for writing and posting blogs, I’m presently writing the post in stackedit which I’ve used before but only briefly. I particular like being able to write using markdown of course and I also like having live preview showing up on the right hand side of the screen. I’m not too sure, however, just how much of a slowdown said live preview will create on this left hand side text window. Still, I’m ahead of the gain at the moment and I’m not experiencing any delays in writing of text. There’s a slight lag in the preview window, which is actually probably good since it’s less distracting to have that window being updated character by character, as it were.

I’m also curious about using this environment in conjunction with Google Drive. So far the response for synching to this service is very good, but it’s hard to compare it with Dropbox which I’ve also never had a problem with.

Written with StackEdit.

ithoughts

I’m presenting testing the latest version of iThoughtsX for OSX. I’ve just upgraded to the new version on IOS and so I thought it a good time to do the same for the desktop product of this mindmapping software.

One of the first things I noticed about the IOS version was the disappearance (I think) of the wifi service that allowed transfer of files between device and desktop. If this really is the case then I think it unfortunate as it compels the user to probably use a cloud based solution. Now I have no objection to storing and synching files in dropbox (which works well, incidentally, with this software) but I do become nervous about including too much person information in my iThoughts file given the apparent lack of encryption with this product.

And so I’m ending up talking more about both iPhone version together with Mac desktop version because they really do work most efficiently as a team, but with the above situation noted, I’m finding myself workng (at this point in time) primarily on the desktop since I don’t want to set up cloud synching and it’s just not as convenient to keep temporarily moving a file to/from dropbox and then doing upload/downloads to the iPhone. Thank goodness those last features are included. Obviously that transfer has to happen at some point, but (for me) just not that frequently. This will probably change if and when I come into possession of an iPad at which time I’ll probably be primarily using iThoughts on that portable device.

Written with StackEdit.

StackEdit

I’m always on the lookout for easier and more convenient ways of publishing to my blog and so I am happy to see that I can use markdown with this particular web based editing environment to publish directly to this Wordpress blog.

The first time that I sent this off to my blog it incorrectly contained markdown code. Of course this is an editor that allows this code to be included as source, but it has to be converted to html for a clean entry in Wordpress unlike for Tumblr which can gracefully handle the markdown conversion.

Written with StackEdit.

Blogging with Fargo

This is perhaps slightly off track from previous entries, but then again perhaps not. I've recently been writing about using Byword as a convenient text editor for creating blog content so this is a continuation of that theme. The software that I'm using for the creation of this entry is actually web based and specifically is located at fargo.io. It uses a dropbox account for local content storage and then takes files created (in markdown if you like) as input into a javascript server running on your own machine. html files are then served up to the web via a host machine that's presently being run by Dave Winer who has created this software. I'm not sure if I've gotten those details precisely right but in the end it all seems to work smoothly. And it should also be noted that this online editing environment is also an outliner which is not surprising since Winer is also the creator of early outlining software for the Apple and the IBM PC. All very interesting, and just in the last couple of days Fargo has obtained the capability to download the complete contents of a WordPress blog via opml so we now have something of a two way transfer of data although I'm not quite sure how this is going to work out in practice. I'm not giving up my copy of MarsEdit just yet!

Byword Update

Update:  After writing this review I was not able to use the new paid for feature of direct posting to my blog. It turned out that there was (frustratingly) a bad character inserted into the text which threw an error message.  All is fixed, but that was frustrating. Some time ago I mentioned that I’d upgraded to the latest version of Byword (version 2.0 to be precise) and that I was tempted by the in-app purchase for the ability to post directly to various blog services. I did finally bite the bullet a few days ago and paid the extra fee to obtain the full benefits of Byword 2.0. I suspect I was influenced by the recent blog entry by Frank Eves where he goes Back with Byword. I’ve enjoyed Frank’s blog over the last few months and have generally agreed with his software writing tools opinions. And so when I noticed that he’d revisited the subject in this entry and placed Byword as number 1 on his list of markdown apps, I remembered that I was actually originally impressed with the editor although I’d strayed away from it over time. His bulleted list of Byword advantages specifcally caused me to serious reconsider using the app and here I am posting this new entry to a blog directly from this Markdown editor. Now if can only remember the short cut for posting this entry from Byword to the cloud!