Getting stuff into Editorial

Editorial is the new text editor on the block that has all the kids talking. Its two main features that set it apart from the other N markdown editors available on the iPad are a) Inline preview of markdown, in a very pretty format, and b) the thing is fully Python scriptable. A compendium of workflows shows all the cool stuff you can do with built in workflow components and Python scripting.

One issue with apps like this is getting docs in there in the first place. Many apps, Editorial included, can access a Dropbox account, and will by default set up their own directory in /Apps/. So one has a choice of manually moving documents to and from that directory, or making one’s entire working directory available to the app. This latter is overkill, so I was looking for an easy way to get stuff into and out of Editorial. The solution is to stick the following bash code into an automator service. When run on a file, it will move that file into the Editorial Dropbox directory, and create a placeholder file with extension “edi” in it’s place. Running the script on the “.edi” file will move the document back to its home (and delete the edi placeholder).

xpath=${1%/*} 
xbase=${1##*/}
xfext=${xbase##*.}
xpref=${xbase%.*}

editorialDir="/Your/Editorial/Dropbox/Directory"

if [ "$xfext" == "edi" ]
then
    echo "here!"
    targName=`less $1`
    mv $editorialDir/$targName $xpath
    rm $1
else
    if [  -a $editorialDir/$xbase ]
    then
        COUNTER=2
        while [  -a $editorialDir/$xpref$COUNTER.$xfext ]; do
            let COUNTER=COUNTER+1
        done
        targName=$xbase$COUNTER.$xfext
    fi
    mv $1 $editorialDir/$targName
    echo "$xpref$COUNTER.$xfext" > $xpath/$xpref.edi
fi

Google Nexus 4

So recently I lost my iPhone 4 on the way back to the office from lunch. Two things of note:

1. I had location services turned on on the iPhone, and could use the “Find my iPhone” feature to track it down. I managed to work out roughly where it was, to within 20–30 metres or so, but the location kept jumping around, indicating the phone was inside (or inside a drain) and couldn’t use GPS. This turns out to actually not be that helpful—I asked around various shops/businesses (including where I bought lunch) but without having a good idea about the precise building or room, there’s not much you can do. One feature I unfortunately did end up using was the remote wipe; I’ve lost a phone, but don’t have to worry about nefarious use of personal information.

2. To replace the iPhone—which had been carrying along nicely, no complaints—I bought a Nexus 4. This turns out to be pretty full of features, and nearly half the price of an iPhone 5 (yes, I could have bought an iPhone 4 or 4S, but, y’know…). Some impressions:

   a. The phone itself is pretty solid, and really light compared to previous smartphones I’ve owned. It’s a slippery sucker though, and seems to willitself off tables and armchairs.

   b. I had an Android phone a few years back, and although I thought it was good, it didn’t have the same level of polish as iOS. This version (Jelly Bean) actually looks nice, and I’d forgotten how cool it is to use things like widgets. I totally understand the benefits of Apple’s walled garden, but it’s nice to be able to do your own digging. The one glaring exception is the gmail app—on iOS the recent-ish update to the gmail app is beautiful to look at, and the Android version is just plain old ugly in comparison.

   c. I seemed to encounter the issues with buggy wi-fi that have been bugging others. Wi-fi at work was fine, but the connection at home kept dropping. I came close to just returning the damned phone as I wasn’t able to reliably download apps, but in the end installed a third party app that brought the issue under control.

   d. One new feature in Android is Google Now. This allows you to do voice searches and commands, and also brings up useful information (e.g., appointments, flight details) by intelligently working out when you’ll need them. So far I’ve only ever been told about the weather and upcoming calendar appointments, so I lead a dull life (most plausible) and/or Google needs to mine my data deeper (also plausible, and somewhat disturbing).

   e. I don’t have a constant mobile data connection. Whether this is to do with poor coverage from Virgin or a hardware/software fault I don’t know, but it is something I miss from the iPhone on O2.

dropboxdiff

This is awesome:

http://blog.vicshih.com/2011/09/dropboxdiff-chrome-extension.html

New ipad = lush paper reviews

One nice feature of the new iPad (iPad 3.0, whatever) is that it has voice dictation built in. This isn't Siri, but simply a mechanism for talking loudly and unnaturally to the iPad and getting back a text transcription of what you said. This makes reviewing a breeze. I tend to mark up PDF's on the iPad with comments, and the voice transcription gets around using the software keyboard which, though OK, isn't really ideal for typing more than a few words.

Major minor annoyances

Some people have issues with the fancy new appearance of the Google products that's been rolled out over past 6 months or so. I don't actually, but in the process it seems Google have also been shaping the profile of their products and services.

One manifestation of this is in the drop-down box under "More" when you run a search. One option under that menu I used to use extensively was Google Scholar, which would take the search term you just used and use it to search Google Scholar. Now, you click on "More", go down to the bottom of the long list of options to select "Even More", and then get taken to a web page which has Google Scholar there somewhere, just keep looking. Click on Scholar, and oh, by the way, you've lost your original search term.

This might be a symptom of the larger number of services that Google offers, but seems crazy for two reasons:

a) Some of the options in the menu bar or the "more" menu itself show up in the side bar after you've run a search anyway; redundant! Why not put Google Scholar over on the left there buddy?
b) It's not clear why there isn't space for Scholar, but there is for options like "Finance" and "Books".

I find it hard to believe, but maybe this shows that academic users are in the minority. Some have implied that this is all about commercialisation, and others wondering whether this is the end for Scholar altogether (I doubt it, given Google seems to have some interest in research and academic collaboration).

Anyway, a solution is to forego Google altogether. I've been using DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and it's pretty neat. The results it returns are nice and clean, it's attitude to privacy is refreshing (it allows users some), and most importantly it allows specifying particular web sites to search using a bang (!) character. So Google Scholar is !gsc and can be entered on the fly, and once used is easily accessible in a drop down box for future searches.

Long-term, the question is what happens with offerings like Google Scholar, and whether alternatives like Microsoft Academic Search become more appealing.

GeekTool

Just found a neat tool for OS X called GeekTool. It installs an item in the preferences pane that allows you to show all kinds of geeky stuff (CPU load, memory usage etc.) on your desktop. People have done some pretty cool things with it, but my use is more mundane: just checking that all my hg autosync processes are up and running.

Switching between Scrivener and Bibdesk

For the past 8 years or so, I've used LaTeX almost exclusively to write my (academic) papers. Once it is up and running it takes care of the nitty gritty of formatting and referencing, meaning you can focus more on the writing. For several of those 8 years I've been on a mac, and finding the combination of TeXShop and BibDesk pretty darn awesome. BibDesk is a reference manager for the Mac that stores its database in BibTeX format (a standard bibliographical format used by LaTeX). TeXShop is an editing program built for editing LaTeX files; these are plain text and could be edited in any old text editor, but TeXShop provides nice LaTeX syntax highlighting and a fairly useful macro system (and is less busy than other editors I've looked at).

Having said that, TeXShop is pretty ugly to work in sometimes when there are lots of comments and insertions around and things start to get messy. So recently I've been using Scrivener to write my papers and similar documents. Scrivener is basically a lovely looking writing environment that let's you make comments separate from the doc (a la Word), and has some nifty features for managing project-related files and snippets (great for collecting random thoughts you want to put in a paper somewhere at a later date...but not just now!). It doesn't do LaTeX natively, but I've got a pretty smooth system converting to LaTeX via multimarkdown (more on that another time). One thing I miss about TeXShop is the ability to quickly search for BibDesk references inside the editor. We can't do this (at least while it isn't scriptable), but the next best thing is to set up some shortcuts to switch between the apps. My setup is as follows:

* In Scrivener, I have BibDesk set as my bibliography manager (under Preferences > General). This does little more than switch to BibDesk when I press command-Y.

* I have a little applescript in BibDesk that it is triggered by the same command-Y key combination. It will take the references currently highlighted in BibDesk and copy them to Scrivener. The applescript is as follows:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "c" using {command down}
tell application "Scrivener"
activatetell application "System Events" to keystroke "v" using {command down}
end tell

* All this will do is copy whatever BibDesk usually copies into Scrivener. We want to copy the references over in multimarkdown's referencing format, and can do this using templates in BibDesk; see  here for a discussion and examples. Mine looks like this:

[#<$publications.citeKey.@componentsJoinedByComma/>][]

So when I press command-Y in BibDesk (having selected a few references) I get something like [#Estes55;][] back in the Scrivener doc. It's a bit slow and clunky but does the job. Also, I'm not really an Applescript programmer, so there may be a more sensible way to do this.