BlogJet: Changing the BlogJet This! Template

BlogJet, my somewhat undocumented XP blog editing tool, has a simple template model that’s quite easy to customize.

BlogJet - Blog - Tip: Changing BlogJet This! Template

... If you want to change the template, find C:\Program Files\BlogJet\Data\Templates\blogthis.htm file and edit it. Here are a few variables that you can use:

{$ .URL $} - page URL
{$ .Title $} - page title
{$ .Text $} - selected text
...

It was easy to edit the default (which I disliked) to produce what I routinely do. Now if they’d port it to OS X …

PS. I finally noticed the the BlogJet default dictionary is UK based! No wonder I’ve been getting some “odd” spelling corrections. It took me years to change from my native Canadian spelling to US spelling, and now an odd tech twist is forcing a reversion …

iLife 06 Hot Tips

For example:

Sometimes photos look better in a particular context when "flipped" horizontally... e.g., have your two kids face each other on a two up photo page. It seems few people know about the contextual menu option that allows you to do this easily. Simply cntrl+click on a photo in a book, card, or calendar and select "Mirror Image."

Great TUAW post.

Flock: A purpose-build mozilla based browser

Flock is interesting. It's a "web 2.0" application built around the firefox/mozilla rendering engine. Open source. Tied to a variety of blogging services, photo sharing, etc. It bugs me that they're hiding their business model, I assume it's somehow tied to selling integration into other services.

There are versions for OS X and XP, including built-in blogging tools that cover Blogger. I'm going to try it on OS X for Blogger work. It has lots of memory leaks and performance bugs (like Firefox) though, so I'm mostly intereted in the version that will come out with the Firefox 2.0 engine.

(PS. Blogger is agan in crisis mode - posts failing, etc. Wow. Blogger is a living advertisement for the downside of web apps.)

Fujitsu SCANSNAP FI-511 for Mac

I've never seen a product get 15 five star reviews over the course of more than a year. I'm tempted to buy it just to find something to complain about. It includes Adobe Acrobat Standard in the price.

Very impressive scanner. I wonder how it would do with a stack of 4x6 prints? I wouldn't expect any prizes, but I'm curious. This post was very interesting -- only one I could find. It sounds like me. A high speed scan of lots of prints, then f/u with a high quality negative scan of the good ones.

Update 10/1/06: I eventually figured out the problem with the ScanSnap. It needs an attached computer. What I want is a scanner that sends the image to a file share, no computer required. I'd like a web interface to configure it. Wireless of course.

Adding a keyboard shortcut to an OS X Service

[I did this post to solve a problem, but it turned out there were far better solutions. So I cleaned it up a bit and moved it here, because the techniques may have other uses.]

Suppose you want to assign a shortut key to a Service item. For example, the OS X 10.3 and 10.4 -- "speech service". Select a word or phrase, choose 'Speak' and the machine speaks. Cool.

Here's how to do it.

This service is available in all Cocoa apps, such as Nisus Writer Express and Safari (but not Firefox -- it's not Cocoa ... yet). Alas, it's tedious to invoke. You have to select text, go to the menu item, etc.

But could I assign this service a shortcut? Google was again my best friend, it found Mac Modding Shortcuts, a tutorial on how to assign keyboard shortcuts to menu items (Cocoa apps only methinks). I didn't know if this would work for services, which are not really part of an application menu, but it does (with one glitch).

You can read the tutorial, or if you're brave you can find the OS X System Preferences, select Keyboard, then select Shortcuts then select Applications, add a shortcut as per the picture below. (You'll probably need the full tutorial really, this is kind of obscure. For example, you have to quite Safari before you do this assignment.) Note these shortcuts are user specific, they don't apply to all users on a machine.

The first time I did this I missed that the 'Menu Title' isn't a name I'm giving the shortcut, it's the EXACT verbiage used in the menu. I guess this utility uses a text matching rule to find what to invoke. I assigned Option-S to the shortcut. I did it only for Safari.

One bug is that it doesn't work the first time on you use it after launching Safari. You have to speak something using the menu method before the shortcut works. Tiger doesn't have this bug, but you still need to exit Safari before creating the shortcut.

OmniPlan for OS X -- coming ...

OmniPlan Coming Soon! The beta is Wednesday. Our family is interested, especially if there's iCal integration. More soon. I added their blog my bloglines.

Creating a lightweight OS X 10.3 screen reader

The trick is to assign a keyboard shortcut to the OS X 10.3 (or 10.4) speech service. Now when I highlight a work and type Option-S in Safari, OS X speaks it. Even works on my old iBook running 10.3. Of course Tiger users might try VoiceOver, but it's pretty heavy duty. The method for keyboard assignment is pretty kludgy, but easy after you do one.