I use Marked 2 for preview and proofing my writing. Yesterday Brett Terpstra, the developer of Marked, in a blog post offered a way to add my blogs style sheet to Marked. Now my preview looks almost exactly like it does on my blog. This is cool! Thank you, Brett.
Brett Terpstra, writing on his blog
I present styleStealer, a bookmarklet to make grabbing a site’s design and applying it to your Markdown preview in Marked a simple process.
Safari is my main browser. From time to time I come across a website that doesn’t play well with Safari. When this happens I open the site in Chrome. Thanks to Alfred I have a very simple way to automate this. Whenever I come across a site that isn’t working well in Safari I hit ⌥⌘G and it takes the current Safari URL and loads it in Chrome.
You can also do the same thing using Keyboard Maestro if you’re a KM user. I wrote about how to do it here.
Web Finds are from my web surfing travels. You’ll find some unique, informative, and some of the coolest websites and apps that you may have never known existed.
This edition is all about insurance startups that want to change what you insure and how you insure it.
Enjoy!
Cover
Cover just about anything – cars, homes, pets, jewelry & electronics by photo.
Metromile: Pay-per-mile insurance
Metromile’s pay-per-mile insurance offering saves low-mileage drivers a ton of money.
Swyfft Homeowners Insurance
Swyfft, the insurance platform for the twenty-first century, has launched in Illinois and New Jersey this month and are growing fast with plans to expand to other states – including California, Texas, and Massachusetts over the coming year.
Previous Web Finds are here.
Ulysses, my favorite writing tool moved to a subscription model last week. When I first read the news I was stunned.
I purchased and started using Ulysses in August of 2016. I purchased both the Mac and iOs apps. That was a hefty $60 bucks out of my wallet. Now a year later I’m faced with an annual subscription.
Not Happy!
At first, I wasn’t sure what I would do. Dr. Drang’s blog post talking through subscription based apps, in particular, with regard to Ulysses, helped me make a decision.
Another disruption in the Apple universe today, as the text editor Ulysses went from being a regular paid app to a subscription app/service.
I don’t have a dog in this particular hunt. I don’t use Ulysses and didn’t plan to even before the pricing change. If I were a Ulysses user, I’d do my best to figure out what it’s worth to me—including the direct and (especially) indirect costs of switching to a new text editor—and try to make a rational decision based on the world as it exists now, not the world as it existed yesterday or the world as I wish it to be.
If I were interested in Ulysses but hadn’t yet given it a try, I might see the subscription service as a positive. Ulysses used to cost $45 for the Mac and $25 for iOS. Now I could give both versions a good, solid two-month trial for $10. If they don’t fit my way of working, I walk away $60 ahead and knowing exactly why I shouldn’t continue the subscription.
After reading Dr. Drang’s post here’s what I’ve decided to do. I downloaded the new app for my Mac and iPhone. As a previous user, I have 8 free months which I’m going to use up before committing to the subscription model. In the mean time, I’m going to try Byword and see if I can get along with it in place of Ulysses. My writing is simple. I write blog posts and publish to WordPress.com and Medium. If using Byword works I won’t need the Ulysses subscription.
TunnelBear has been my VPN service of choice for just over a year. I was excited to read that TunnelBear has undergone a public security audit by Germany-based penetration testing company Cure53. This gives confidence I’ve chosen the right VPN provider and that TunnelBear isn’t scraping and selling my browsing data.
TunnelBear Blog, 07 August 2017
Consumers and experts alike have good reason to question the security claims of the VPN industry. Over the last few years, many less reputable VPN companies have abused users’ trust by selling their bandwidth, their browsing data, offering poor security or even embedding malware.
Being within the industry, it’s been hard to watch. We knew TunnelBear was doing the right things. We were diligent about security. We deeply respected our users’ privacy. While we can’t restore trust in the industry, we realized we could go further in demonstrating to our customers why they can, and should, have trust in TunnelBear.
Today, we’d like to announce TunnelBear has completed the Consumer VPN industry’s first 3rd party, public security audit. Our auditor, Cure53, has published their findings on their website and we’re content with the results.
However, the recent crisis of trust in the VPN industry showed us we needed to break the silence and share Cure53’s findings publicly. Today we’re sharing a complete public audit which contains both the results from last year and the results from the current audit.
You can read the full report on Cure53’s website.
Have you ever accidentally closed a tab in Safari and wanted to get it back? I have. This usually happens when I’m doing research and have several tabs open at the same time. Sometimes I close one thinking I’m done with it and then realize I need it again. Other times I close one by accident.
Safari’s ⌘ + Z to the rescue. From Safari on the Mac, I can simply hit ⌘ + Z and the last closed browser tab or window will reopen. If I hit the ⌘ + Z keystroke again I can open the next most recently closed browser tab or window. If I do it 20 times, the 20 most recently closed browser tabs and windows will reopen.
I can also do it this way. From any active Safari browser window on the Mac, click and hold on the “+” plus button in the Safari tab bar and then select the tab to reopen from the drop down list of recently closed tabs.
Web Finds are from my web surfing travels. You’ll find some unique, informative, and some of the coolest websites and apps that you may have never known existed. Enjoy!
This edition of Web Finds features a selection of copy and paste clipboard managers. My favorite is Copied which I’ve written about here.
Paste
Paste is a smart cloud clipboard history and snippets manager for Mac. It keeps everything you’ve ever copied and lets you use your clipboard history whenever you need it from all your Macs. Paste recognizes and stores text, images, links, files and any other type of content and generates informative previews for easy browsing.
Copy’em Paste
Copy’em Paste for Mac is a simple-yet-powerful clipboard tool for dramatically speeding up your daily copy-and-paste workflow. It automatically keeps your copied text, images, links, screenshots, etc., and lets you recall/paste them anytime, right at your fingertips. Use it to copy items consecutively and then paste them (without the usual, back-and-forward copy/paste round trips), store favorite clippings permanently, take screenshots without clogging up your desktop, collect data for research, expedite pasting of clippings, transform pasted text, organize clippings into lists, and so on.
CloudClip
CloudClip syncs your clipboard between your Mac and your iOS devices. It’s the easiest way to transfer phone numbers, websites, addresses, and more.
Previous Web Finds are here
The other day I wrote about launching Mac apps with keyboard shortcuts using Keyboard Maestro. If you’re an Alfred user you can do the same thing with Alfred an workflow.
Here’s my workflow to launch Safari with the hotkey ⌥S. You’ll need the PowerPack to do this.
Step one is to create a new workflow.
Step two is to setup a trigger for the hotkey.
Step three is to add the Launch Apps action and drag in the application(s) you want to open. The easiest way to do this is to search for the application or file in Alfred and drag it directly from Alfred’s results into the action box.
Optionally, check the “Toggle visibility for apps” to tell Alfred to show/hide the app. Connect the action to the hotkey to quickly launch the app.
I prefer launching apps with Alfred for one main reason. I like the way the show/hide app functionality works in Alfred better than the way it does in Keyboard Maestro.
