note: this was originally posted on nonjo.com

MailMate

I’ve been around the horn on email clients on the Mac over the years, from Entourage to Outlook to Mail to AirMail. Whatever it was that everyone hated about Apple Mail was lost on me, because it was close to perfect. I’ve written about how I figured out how to (mostly) stay on top of email in a previous post, and Mail was really the only client that worked for me. (You can create smart searches in GMail but it doesn’t work the way I, or anyone who wanted to follow my method, need it to). In short, I focus on email sent only to me and in the last 24 to 48 hours. I make every attempt to whack away at all other email (distribution list email, etc) within 24 hours. Yes, stuff slips through. But it relieves the cognitive burden of seeing a full inbox every time you look at email. (Mail for iOS also supports a Today view, and recently AirMail for iOS added one as well.)

MailMate’s demo period is very generous–30 days (that’s 30 days of use, not 30 calendar days, mind you). You have to fiddle with it a bit to get Gmail to work correctly (my school district uses it across the district) if you want to preserve the inbox vs. archived mail scheme that Google employs, but it’s not difficult to do. Furthermore, it supports Smart Searches à la Mail and even offers some powerful suggestions for other Smart Searches.

MailMate Smart Searches

MailMate supports a number of other features that make it worth looking at. It has a plug-in system so that you can send messages right to OmniFocus and DEVONthink, for example, and supports hopping into your favorite text editor to craft longer messages. (This is how I rediscovered MailMate and decided to give it a try–I was looking for a way to recreate the experience of using HogBay Software’s QuickCursor. There are a host of views supported as well, including a unique correspondance view. But really, I wanted a complete absence of visual clutter… think plain text, no email previews: just a stark list of your messages with data in columns, as little or as much as you want.

MailMate’s Austerity

In the realm of email clients, MailMate is kind of expensive, but if your needs are largely solipsistic and you have to handle volume–and you like a sparse layout–it’s very much worth the price. And if you like to hack, it’s probably the only game in town.

MailMate Plugins for OmniFocus and DEVONthink

If there’s a downside here, it’s that I can’t use InfoClick with MailMate. The search features are more robust in MailMate than Mail, so I probably don’t need InfoClick. Behold:

MailMate Search Modifiers

So the string “f tgod A xls” reveals any email from my boss that has an attachment with “xls” in the filename. That’s pretty powerful, and a good example of how I would use InfoClick.

Bartender

I started using Purple Safari shortly after it came out and the long appelation in Mac OS X’s menu bar meant that a number of menu bar items were obscured… and not necessarily the ones that I would have chosen to obscure. Bartender gives you a menu bar item into which you can store menu bar items that you don’t necessarily need to see all the time. I like to keep wifi, time, and battery visible all the time; clicking on the Bartender icon reveals Dropbox, Google Drive, OmniSync Serivces, MailMate’s unread count, 1Password, volume, BetterSnapTool, Airplay, Bumpr, Script Menu, Bluetooth, Time Machine, and Spotlight. For example, I’d never click on the Spotlight icon; I’d invoke it using the keyboard. With Dropbox, I just need to see if it’s online or not. It’s not something I interact with generally, but it’s helpful to see if there’s a network issue.

Bartender: Menu Bar Tidied Up

Bartender: Menu Bar Expanded

Bumpr

Bumpr does one thing: when you click on a URL, you can choose the browser that handles the URL. This works by changing Bumpr to your default web browser. It also handles mailto links.

I’m primarly a Safari user, but there are some applications, and links to documents and spreadsheets at work, that are better accessed using Chrome. Furthermore, I like to be logged into my work account in Chrome, and my personal Gmail account on Safari.

Clicking on URLs in Safari won’t invoke Bumpr, only links from outside of the browser. This is smart because obviously it would get old if you were selecting a browser every time you tried to follow a link.Bumpr optionally allows you to set a default choice as well, and only prompts you to choose if you hold down the shift key.

I first discovered Choosy for the purpose of selecting a browser, and while it’s perfectly serviceable, Bumpr looks a little better.

Bumpr in Action

For most of my purposes, I start in 1Password and click on a link. I hold down the Shift key and choose the browser I want to use for the site… It’s an extra step but there are some services that don’t do Safari; I no longer have to copy/paste links in Chrome.

Scrivener

So much as been written about this app that it isn’t instructive for me to say much about it. I will say, though, that I was always curious about the application, but I always approached it like a word processor. And it is decidedly not a word processor. Yes, you write in Scrivener, but it is the organizational features that make it worth learning if you have long-form writing to do.

I wrote recently about how I took some classes online during the 2017-18 school year. I was in the position of having to download scholarly journal articles, incorporate them into a written work, and use APA format to document the citations.

For the first class, I would create a new Scrivener document and then discrete sections for each 1,000-word project:

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Description and analysis
• Body of Paper
• References

I had to compile the papers into Word documents (ugh) for submission. Scrivener was in ways overkill for these projects, as the sections weren’t very long. What I did like, though, was the ability to print journal articles to the Scrivener projects. So having a PDF of an article in a Safari window could be sent to the “Research” folder in the active Scrivener project. This made it easy to keep the research together with the project, rather than in a folder or in DEVONthink, where I’d have to look for them later. It wasn’t the only way to get the papers done, but it was a good way for me to work, and I used the first class to understand this curious app I’d heard so much about. It was a learning experience for sure.

Saving Reference Materials into Scrivener

The second class, which focused on school law, required me to write legal briefs… and lots of them. Briefs are exactly that–brief–and I had to follow a standard format for each one:

• Facts
• Procedure
• Issue
• Ruling
• Analysis

One brief would not require Scrivener’s services. But weeks four and five saw me writing 10 and 11 briefs, respectively, and I ended up writing over 40. My strategy this time was different; I collected all of the briefs by unit (each week was a new unit) in one Scrivener file, and used Scrivener’s powerful Compile feature to create a discrete Word document for each unit. Compile was possibly the most confusing feature initially, but eminently worth understanding due to the power it gave you when shaking a project down into something to share.

So the structure of the “School Law Legal Briefs” file (one file to rule them all) looked like this:

• Unit 1:
  • Brief 1:
    • Facts
    • Procedure
    • Issue
    • Ruling
    • Analysis
  • Brief 2:
    • Facts
    • Procedure
    • Issue
    • Ruling
    • Analysis
  • References
• Unit 2:
  • repeat…

The Anatomy of a Brief

Subsequent units could be compiled into a Word doc that only included the work unique to that unit, and I could obscure or reveal as much of the previous weeks’ work as I needed. At the ending of the course, I had one project, not eight. It was a project that could have simply been done in Word or Nisus Writer Pro or Pages or Mellel or… you get the idea. But as with email, being able to restrict your focus to that which you are working on in the moment is cognitively liberating.

There’s one more thing that I will say about Scrivener: if you are a person who gets a kick of preparing something in one format, and then seeing how it comes out in another format, you would very much like Scrivener. What do I mean? For example, if you enjoy that moment when you render your code from HTML or Markdown to see if it looks how you thought it would, you know what I’m talking about. If you use a text editor and LaTexwrite in LaTex, you also know what I mean. I’m sure some people hate that feeling. But it gasses me. And that’s what Compile is like in Scrivener.

Apps that I wrote about before and continue to use:

• gSuite: we use Google services at work. The sharing features and ubiquity of your files is hard to beat. And you can use any email client you want, mostly.
• DEVONthink: if it doesn’t go into OmniFocus or Google Drive, it goes into DEVONthink.
• TextExpander 5: I sprung for the subscription after TextExpander 5 started randomly crashing on me. I’m not inclined to call it a conspiracy but I don’t know if Smile was paying much attention to version 5 much.* It’s probably not worth the subscription cost for how I use it but it’s the only expansion utility that developers seem to support in iOS. My reliance has waned over the years as I do less overall writing.
• OmniFocusOmniFocus: Still the king of GTD for me. I want to buy the new version of Things (I did get the iOS version) so that I can compare, but version OmniFocus 3’s switch to tags from contexts, and allowing for multiple tags per action item, solves the only real gripe I had with OmniFocus.
• Bear: I still use this all the time for taking notes and other reference material. I struggle sometimes with deciding if something should go into DEVONthink or Bear, but it is often the first place I go when I need to type. Should Drafts ever offer an Mac OS version, though, there will be trouble.
• Pixelmator: My go-to for editing images. I like Acorn too.
• BBEdit: Also often the place I go to start writing. I will invoke BBEdit in LaunchBar if it’s not already running and start writing. I don’t code but I like the speed and general unfussiness associated with using BBEdit. What’s more portable than a .txt file?
• BetterSnapTool: I don’t know if Apple will ever admit that Aero Snap is cool, but it is.
• 1Password: I downloaded the version 7 beta and decided to go for the subscription. I like the online version of the app as a backup in the event that all of my devices went up in a puff of dust. I also don’t ever want to change password managers unless something really compels me.
• Launchbar: Stalwart. I don’t use many of the features but the clipboard history just saved my bacon the other day, and other features (calculator expecially) just delight me.

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• I like AgileBits’ offering of both standalone and subscription versions of 1Password, and I think TextExpander could offer something like that. The major feature that accompanied TextExpander’s subscription switchover–team snippits–are not useful to me at all. It’s the same app, only way more expensive.