It’s a chilly Sunday afternoon as I write this. Need I say we’re having spritzes? I’m going to grill chicken thighs pretty soon. We have two episodes of From? to watch later.
MacBook Neo
Rhonda got the Citrus MacBook Neo; it was delivered on Thursday. I set it up for her but I got to play with it a bit, too. Some thoughts:
Trackpad feels fine. Rhonda really liked it after using it at work on Friday.
The bezels are much larger than the Air and Pro, but they are not so large that I think they’d bother me.
The Keyboard is tight and crisp. I miss the backlighting for sure and I’d pay more for it as an option or in the form of another model. But it’s a great feeling keyboard..
The Citrus theme in the OS looks great.
Helium Browser
When Mac OS X first came out, I was an early adopter, and especially keen to find applications that used the new Cocoa layer (as opposed to Carbonized applications) where possible. The first web browsers that came out for the Mac at that time included Internet Explorer and OmniWeb, both of which I used extensively.
There can’t be a more stark contrast between the two applications, and the companies that made them. In the case of Internet Explorer, we had a Carbonized application from a company with a small but popular suite of applications that made their mark on the Mac and the original Mac OS operating system. OmniGroup, on the other hand, was a small company who followed NeXTSTEP over to Apple, and provided applications that ran only on Mac OS X using Cocoa.
Other browsers were available in the early Mac OS X days, too, including Netscape and Mozilla, using the Gecko engine. Camino emerged and quickly became my primary browser: it was fast, with a clean interface, and basic feature set. It was perfect for my needs, and I used it until Safari came out. Like OmniWeb, Camino was a Cocoa application.
I’m still primarily a Safari user, but I do need Chrome for a few things, including our Google-based system at work. Google Meet on Chrome is a much better experience than Safari, for example.
But I’ve kept up the search for something with Chrome’s reliability and prominence in the market, which leads to a good user experience on sites and services where Safari doesn’t.
Nicholas Magand recently featured Helium on his blog, describing it thus:
Earlier this year, I gave Helium Browser a try: a newish, smartly named, Chromium-based browser, aimed at being light, fast, and stripped of all Google surveillance technologies. The trial was a success, and, after switching back to Safari for a fair fight, I realised that Helium was the most efficient browser to use for work.
I’m hoping for a Camino-like experience in a Chromium-based browser.
Expanding with Keyboard Maestro
I’ve been a lifelong TextExpander user, but something about Typinator drew me in after TextExpander grew to be less Mac-like (Electron!) in becoming multi-platform. Typinator does exactly what I need it to do, which isn’t much, because I don’t write as much as I used to, and my writing is less boilerplate-dependent. I still have a handful of snippets that I use all the time, though, and while macOS’s keyboard expansions are pretty good, I don’t prefer them to a dedicated utility. I like Typinator’s integration with PopChar, too.
While Typinator was a good price when I got it from Bundlehunt, the newest update would require me to buy several upgrade licenses or a subscription, (the latter of which I did). But now I’m running up against the licensing limit imposed on machines, which I’d be able to remedy by purchasing a more generous plan. Considering my modest usage and the cheap annual subscription I’m grandfathered into with TextExpander, I don’t know if Typinator makes a lot of sense for me.
I figured this would be a good time to try Keyboard Maestro’s text expansion features; I’ve had the storied multi-purpose utility on my Mac for a while, but I haven’t used it much save for a couple of things. So I plugged most of my most used snippets in and… it’s great!
One thing I got excited about, but was quickly schooled on, was using the expansions group as a palette. I learned about the conflict palette from David Sparks, and I like this feature a lot. I have one global shortcut that calls up a couple of palettes, so when I type ctrl-backtick, I get a conflict palette with a list to choose from. I had my snippets showing up on that palette, and I really liked this option. (Here’s a good Dr. Drang article on the MPU podcast I linked to.)
But setting up a palette causes the expansions not to work in the normal way; similarly, you can’t search for an expansion user the Trigger Macro by Name function. So that didn’t work out after all. But the old way, where I type things like “ddate” to get today’s date? Works perfectly. And it handles date math, too.
Pretty exciting!