Catching Zebra

The Nebulous Notes Utility Bar and Markdown

I heard Merlin mention Nebulous Notes on Back to Work this week.

I’m a massive Markdown nerd and a reasonably prolific note taker so I’m always looking for the next, great iOS text editor. I’d seen Nebulous in the App Store before, but honestly I’d been a bit put off by the icon and screenshots. It didn’t seem to have the polish of Elements or the simplicity of Simplenote.

I dug a bit deeper and found that this assumption was largely unfounded. Plus it has one absolutely killer feature — the Utility Bar. This is essentially and extra row of keys above the standard keyboard. iA Writer was the first app that I saw implement this. Their version is nice, but it’s limited to the set of keys they decided would be useful. As lovely as Writer is, it forces you into their way of writing. It really is made for writing, not note taking, or outlining, or anything else you might use a text editor for.

What Nebulous Notes lets you do is customise this Utility Bar with your own macros. This is great for Markdown. When I take notes they’re usually bulleted lists with indented bullets for sub points. For example:

* This is my first point
    - This is a sub point
    - This is another sub point
* This is my second point
* This is my third point

Typing this on an iPad or iPhone is a pain in the arse. You need to change the keyboard to get to the hyphen and you need to change it twice to get to the asterisk.

In Nebulous I can setup a macro key that adds an asterisk with a space after it — ready to type a point. I also setup another that adds a tab, then a hyphen, then a space — ready to type an indented bullet.

I did the same for ordered lists. Tap a button and 1. with a space after is inserted. Tap another button and 2. with a tab before and a space after is inserted. As Markdown automatically re-numbers ordered list items. It doesn’t matter if all items in your list start with 1. and all sub items start with 2.

Similarly for heading levels I setup buttons for h2 and h3 that insert two or three hash’s respectively, with a space afterwards.

The macro’s can also reference things. $sel will use the currently selected text and $paste will use the contents of the clipboard. This means selecting a word and hitting the button programmed with *$sel* will wrap it in asterisks (which outputs as emphasis/italics in Markdown). If you tap the button again it simply adds an extra set of asterisks for strong/bold.

This makes Markdown links really interesting. [$sel]($paste) would turn the selected text into an inline link using the URL in the clipboard. [$sel](http://$cursor) would take the selected text but insert http:// with your cursor ready to type.

I prefer reference links so I use [$sel][$cursor] and [$paste]: $cursor. The first of these takes the selected text and wraps it in square brackets with an empty set of square brackets next to it, ready to have a reference name typed into them. I’d then copy the reference name to the clipboard and run the second one at the bottom of the document — so I’d have a list of links I need to find when I’m finished writing.

It’s pretty killer.

Download mine

You can export your custom macro’s as a text file. If you want you can download mine. Just (unzip it then) dump it in the root of your Dropbox folder. At the bottom of the list of Macro’s in the app, theres an import button.

A few notes about the rest of the app

• When you’re using a bluetooth keyboard, the Utility Bar stays on screen, even though the software keyboard disappears.
• Due to the nerdy nature of this customisation, I also expected support for custom CSS for the Markdown preview. This means Notsey is still hanging around for the one single task of previewing in a nicer, custom style.
• You can pinch to zoom to change the font size.
• There is a decent selection of built in typefaces, both monospaced and variable width. And you can set the background and text to be any colour you like.
• Sync works a bit differently to other apps in this category. I think this is a good thing, but I’m not sure yet.
• It’s worth noting that I’ve customised the Utility Bar for Markdown. But you could can customise it however you want. You could any other strings you use regularly like 's or even regularly used single characters that are on the next keyboard like &, : or ?.
• It’s universal. So you get iPhone and iPad for the same price.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I highlighted so many great parts of this biography, that it’s hard to pick just one to share. But this—from the day he resigned as CEO—is quite salient:

When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that HP had suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber and declared that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought that they had left it in good hands,” he said. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It’s tragic. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple.”

Me too.

iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII Side by Side Comparison by Robino Films

Here’s a “fair” test between the iPhone 4S and the Canon 5D MK II. I made a little rig that allowed me to shoot both cameras at the same time side by side. All scenes are perfectly synced together so you can pause and scrutinize the frames!

Now I really want one.

via Jordan Halvorsen

The Vasco Era — Rock and Roll Is the Only Thing That Makes Me Feel Good

It’s not often that I really like a song the first time I hear it. When they played this at the Corner Hotel gig a month or so ago I knew this new album was going to be very good. It is.

First verse:

I tried transcendental meditation.
I tried transatlantic vacation.
I tried driving all night with the windows down where the hiss of the tarmac was the only sound.
I tried psy-trance festivals.
I took as many nangs as I could.
I tried taking some biblical precautions. Always wore my robe and never had an abortion.
Rock and roll is the only thing that makes me feel good.

Killer.

The New Value of Text

James Bridle:

We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, “enhanced” books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of advertising, publishers’ reactions to new technologies betray a profound lack of confidence in the text itself. We are being distracted by shiny things.

via Craig Mod

And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.

Ghetto coffee roasting

I heard Shawn and Ben talking about roasting coffee in a popcorn popper on the B&B Podcast. So I decided to give it a shot.

I watch the videos they linked to and quickly started searching for where to buy green beans in Melbourne. I found the CoffeeSnobs Starter Pack which seemed good. They send you four random varieties of green beans to get started with. I then told my wife about the plan and she offered to sacrifice her popcorn popper.

Roasting

Supposedly there’s a first and a second crack. The first is supposed to be quite audible, the second not so much.

I did two batches, the first for 8.5min, the second for 11min. The first had a few under-done beans and some that looked perfect—a bit inconsistent. The second looked better—darker, with a more even roast.

I’m not even sure I heard the second crack either time. The first I probably stopped too early, as I didn’t want to over-do it. The second time there was one or two cracks before I took them out, but they didn’t sound any different to the ones from first crack.

Video of the first batch

Result of the second batch

Next time

On the Coffee Snobs Forum there’s a whole lot of people making chimney’s out of tin cans. I think I’ll try that. The beans weren’t exactly flying out of the popper, but I had to keep shaking it to keep a few stray beans in the chamber. A can would definitely keep them in.

Results

Before roasting, the beans smelt alright, but not anything like coffee normally does. Straight after roasting they smelt pretty good—like coffee, but nothing to write home about. I went to have a look an hour later and they’d started to smell really good. In the morning they smelt even better and after I ground some—holy shit.

I made a short black first. I figured pure coffee with no milk or sugar was a good way to test it. Shawn had said his first batch was about as good as any coffee he’d buy (which could only leave room for improvement). I’d say mine is a bit better than coffee I’d normally buy, and I’m convincing myself that it’s even better again.

Very minimal bitterness, but still really strong and full bodied. I’d say batch two was a success. Time for another coffee.

Biggy Smalls VS Thomas the tank engine

Posting this purely for the top rated YouTube comment (even if the reference is totally wrong):

smoke coal erry day

SEO for Non-dicks

Matt Legend Gemmell:

I fully acknowledge the value of, and need for, actual SEO; I just think that in many cases, the tactics employed under that title would better be described as Search Engine Manipulation or even Abuse.

I agree with absolutely everything in this article. Make good shit, people will want to look at said good shit. Nuff said.

Do users change their settings?

Jared Spool:

We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

Turns out pretty much only programmers and designers change settings. Granted the study was based on Microsoft Word. But it’s still very interesting and worth keeping in mind.

It also showed that most people trusted Microsoft to choose good default settings — Which they hadn’t.

The takeaway: If you’re going to add settings, don’t add too many. And make the defaults as good as possible.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Straight Up And Down

The Coatwolf Model II & Bellflower

Evan Glodell invented a camera; the Coatwolf Model II. Then made a film with it.

…Glodell wanted cinematic looks that he didn’t think he could get with standard-issue gear. Glodell knew that Bellflower’s wacko plot — which follows “two friends who spend their time building flamethrowers and other weapons in the hope that a global apocalypse will occur and clear the runway for their imaginary gang,” according to the press kit — would require highly stylized visuals, so he decided to push his camera-tinkering skills to the limit.

The trailer for Bellflower looks brilliant.