Consider this post to be a gripe. The gripe is about iCloud, the Apple voodoo that will keep all of your documents, photographs, and music magically in sync between your iOS and OS X devices. Just turn it on and it works, without any further effort on your part. Edit a document on your iPad, and there it is waiting for you when you pick up your Mac. Except that it doesn’t quite work that way if you’re a Mac user.
MarsEdit is now my Mac blogging platform of choice. Until recently, when I wanted to work on MarsEdit drafts on multiple machines, my workflow consisted of uploading a draft of my post to my blog, and then downloading it to my other machine. With a little bit of tinkering, you can do away with such a workaround, and use Dropbox to automate your workflow.
A few months ago, we wrote about five ways to increase your productivity using text expansion software. With text expansion software, you create snippets of text, and then set up abbreviations to trigger the typing of those snippets. TextExpander is our favorite text expansion app on the Mac, because of its ability to sync via Dropbox with Breevy, a Windows text expansion app. If you don’t want to cook up your own snippets, or are just looking for some inspiration for snippets, then TE-Snippets has you covered.
In our previous looks at Markdown, we focused on a couple of free apps (one Windows, one Mac) that have native Markdown support. If you have a favorite text editor, though, and want to bring Markdown to it, then check out Marked. (For a discussion about why you should care about Markdown, head on over to our post about why you should bother with Markdown).
Steve Jobs was an innovator, a forward thinker, and an incredible entrepreneur. He took no prisoners in the battle with his competition and wasn’t afraid to make fun of them, belittle them, or otherwise express his opinion. He used that persona to help create a sense of elitism and superior quality around Apple products that catapulted the brand to wild success – a success only strengthened by the fact that the quality of Apple products often was superior.
Steve Jobs used all of his forceful personality to do what forceful personalities should do: change the world. Love him or hate him, without Steve Jobs the world as we know it would be a very different place. The man is responsible, on some level, for the computer, tablet, or smartphone you’re reading this on, for the mouse that you use to navigate your PC, and for changing the face of the music industry. And that’s just for starters.
I’m not going to bore you by reiterating what thousands of other blogs have already said. I just wanted to take a moment to express my respect for the man who helped define how I spend my life. He was no angel, and he might well have been a little crazy — but as he himself said:
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Rest in peace, Steve. You did big things.
