I rolled up to New Brunswick to pick up Aaron Thursday afternoon, and we made it back home in very good time. His little Mini Cooper is a blast to drive, and feels solid on the turnpike at speed. How come no-one understands how to drive on multi-lane highways? I spend the whole ride up bobbing and weaving.

Winterfest 2025

The holiday software deals continue apace, and Winterfest is here again. Many of the stalwart apps are back this year, including Tinderbox, Scrivener, and BBEdit are there, along with some others I’ve been curious about. I’m test-driving Cotypist now.

Trickster for macOS

Speaking of Winterfest, Trickster was on sale, so I purchased a license. I’ve tried Trickster out before, and really liked the app. It’s kind of a Finder smart folder on steroids.

One of the features I discovered is that, when you invoke Trickster, with a click of the mouse, you can restrict the filter results to only show the application you’re working in. Sometimes, you want to see all of the files you’ve worked on in the last 24 hours, but you can restrict the filter to just Word docs, for example. I created a filter to show me all of the Bike and OmniOutliner files I’ve been working on.

I’d love to see support for Safari tabs in Trickster, although I don’t think that’s its intended use.

One critical limitation is that Trickster can’t help you with apps that store files within their own database. For example, you can’t see documents you’ve been working on in Ulysses, or notes in Notes, or maps in MindNode Next. You can see those applications, though.

And: Integrations with Hookmark and Launchbar!

The Week Between, or TWB25

I’ve adopted the naming scheme that I use at work to designate projects and reference materials to the Week Between, one of my favorite times of the year. For matters pertaining to the school year, I’ve been doing “SY26” for this fiscal year, and projections for the next year using SY27.

I like to list things to do for the week between, unsurprisingly, in various software pockets; OmniFocus is an obvious place for list making, but I started last year farting around with MindNode a bit, and I cracked open my plans from last year and updated. MindNode is very much a mind mapping tool, but the overlap between it an a classic outliner is significant; you could easily use it as one of the prettiest outliners around and never venture into mind map mode.

I find OmniFocus is a great place to get a list of things together as they come to mind, but then I use MindNode to organize the activities and ideas I have into specific days of the week. It’s not a hard and fast schedule, but it keeps me from letting the days laze by without any purpose. Not that those kinds of days aren’t rewarding, too.