Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Friday Favorite
What's free, flexible, easy-to-use but powerful and can handle a wide variety of file types? Our good friend, TextEdit, an app that ships with every Mac. TextEdit is, of course, a simple text editing tool like Notepad or WordPad on Windows. But there's a lot more to "simple text editing" that you might imagine, especially when TextEdit connects to services and other apps. I'm going to show you a few cool things you can do with TextEdit: create an inbox, use it as a development tool, or grab snippets of text on the go.First, you should know that TextEdit defaults to the .rtf format. If you're not familiar with it, RTF is "rich text" and, unlike the .txt files generated by something like NotePad, RTF includes formatting, like bold or italics or bullet lists. "Plain text" .txt files are pretty much just the basic ASCII characters and paragraph breaks. So what? Well, if you want things to look pretty, you'll stick with .rtf, a format which is easy to share across platforms. Side note: did you know TextEdit will open Word documents? It isn't perfect, but it works if you don't have Word on your machine. The older .txt format is better for coding or when you don't need or can't have formatting.
To create an inbox, I suggest the simpler .txt format. What I used to do was set up Quicksilver to easily append to an inbox.txt file, and I used GeekTool to pin that .txt file to my desktop. You could also use LaunchBar to append, and I'm sure there's a way to whip up an AppleScript, but I never bothered. Instead, when I ditched Quicksilver, I started keeping the text file in the Dock, and I just open it up to add items. All this is portable, indexed by Spotlight, and fully cross-platform compatible.
Next up: munging HTML with TextEdit, and grabbing snippets of text from any app and dropping them into a file.
Continue reading Friday Favorite: TextEdit
TUAWFriday Favorite: TextEdit originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The Shuffle's Mad Margins, AT&T's Separation Anxiety, and Visions of an $899 iMac
Conversation in the Apple-focused blogosphere is all over the map this week, but with Apple in the tech world's driver seat these days, wide-ranging activity is only to be expected. Out of dozens of news nuggets, here are three that create some interesting glimmers: iSuppli's teardown of Apple's diminutive iPod shuffle reveals a tidy profit margin; AT&T reportedly wants to keep its lock on the U.S. iPhone channel; and Apple is offering an $899 iMac -- but only to educational institutions.
Apple market share drops slightly in the past year
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Odds and ends, Apple Financial
Don't look now, but Apple's slow market share incline may have just turned into a slow decline. Not only does a new report by research and advisory company Gartner, Inc say that Apple's market share in the US slipped just a little bit over the past year (from 7.5% to 7.4%), but that as you can see above, there's a steep little decline from the 8% it was in the last quarter of 2008. The PC market overall is down as well, a 6.5% decline since the beginning of last year.
Does that mean it's time to sell the AAPL stock? Probably not -- as you can see from the graph, there's still been a nice steady growth in market share since 2006, and the current economy has all ships falling a little bit with the tide as it goes out. But it does mean that Apple might be having more trouble than they want breaking out into more of the market. If that is their goal anyway -- Gartner's report also notes that Apple's relatively higher ASP (Average Selling Price) "created challenges for it in the tough economy," but when have we ever known them to go cheap?
So Apple's not up in the short term, but who is? Well maybe Goldman Sachs is. But we don't entirely trust those guys. And in case you're wondering: none of this is actual financial advice, and none of it should be used to make any decisions that might lose you money. You've been warned.
[via TechMeme]
Does that mean it's time to sell the AAPL stock? Probably not -- as you can see from the graph, there's still been a nice steady growth in market share since 2006, and the current economy has all ships falling a little bit with the tide as it goes out. But it does mean that Apple might be having more trouble than they want breaking out into more of the market. If that is their goal anyway -- Gartner's report also notes that Apple's relatively higher ASP (Average Selling Price) "created challenges for it in the tough economy," but when have we ever known them to go cheap?
So Apple's not up in the short term, but who is? Well maybe Goldman Sachs is. But we don't entirely trust those guys. And in case you're wondering: none of this is actual financial advice, and none of it should be used to make any decisions that might lose you money. You've been warned.
[via TechMeme]
TUAWApple market share drops slightly in the past year originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Friday Favorite: TextEdit
Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Friday Favorite
What's free, flexible, easy-to-use but powerful and can handle a wide variety of file types? Our good friend, TextEdit, an app that ships with every Mac. TextEdit is, of course, a simple text editing tool like Notepad or WordPad on Windows. But there's a lot more to "simple text editing" that you might imagine, especially when TextEdit connects to services and other apps. I'm going to show you a few cool things you can do with TextEdit: create an inbox, use it as a development tool, or grab snippets of text on the go.First, you should know that TextEdit defaults to the .rtf format. If you're not familiar with it, RTF is "rich text" and, unlike the .txt files generated by something like NotePad, RTF includes formatting, like bold or italics or bullet lists. "Plain text" .txt files are pretty much just the basic ASCII characters and paragraph breaks. So what? Well, if you want things to look pretty, you'll stick with .rtf, a format which is easy to share across platforms. Side note: did you know TextEdit will open Word documents? It isn't perfect, but it works if you don't have Word on your machine. The older .txt format is better for coding or when you don't need or can't have formatting.
To create an inbox, I suggest the simpler .txt format. What I used to do was set up Quicksilver to easily append to an inbox.txt file, and I used GeekTool to pin that .txt file to my desktop. You could also use LaunchBar to append, and I'm sure there's a way to whip up an AppleScript, but I never bothered. Instead, when I ditched Quicksilver, I started keeping the text file in the Dock, and I just open it up to add items. All this is portable, indexed by Spotlight, and fully cross-platform compatible.
Next up: munging HTML with TextEdit, and grabbing snippets of text from any app and dropping them into a file.
Continue reading Friday Favorite: TextEdit
TUAWFriday Favorite: TextEdit originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The Shuffle's Mad Margins, AT&T's Separation Anxiety, and Visions of an $899 iMac
Conversation in the Apple-focused blogosphere is all over the map this week, but with Apple in the tech world's driver seat these days, wide-ranging activity is only to be expected. Out of dozens of news nuggets, here are three that create some interesting glimmers: iSuppli's teardown of Apple's diminutive iPod shuffle reveals a tidy profit margin; AT&T reportedly wants to keep its lock on the U.S. iPhone channel; and Apple is offering an $899 iMac -- but only to educational institutions.Apple market share drops slightly in the past year
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Odds and ends, Apple Financial
Don't look now, but Apple's slow market share incline may have just turned into a slow decline. Not only does a new report by research and advisory company Gartner, Inc say that Apple's market share in the US slipped just a little bit over the past year (from 7.5% to 7.4%), but that as you can see above, there's a steep little decline from the 8% it was in the last quarter of 2008. The PC market overall is down as well, a 6.5% decline since the beginning of last year.
Does that mean it's time to sell the AAPL stock? Probably not -- as you can see from the graph, there's still been a nice steady growth in market share since 2006, and the current economy has all ships falling a little bit with the tide as it goes out. But it does mean that Apple might be having more trouble than they want breaking out into more of the market. If that is their goal anyway -- Gartner's report also notes that Apple's relatively higher ASP (Average Selling Price) "created challenges for it in the tough economy," but when have we ever known them to go cheap?
So Apple's not up in the short term, but who is? Well maybe Goldman Sachs is. But we don't entirely trust those guys. And in case you're wondering: none of this is actual financial advice, and none of it should be used to make any decisions that might lose you money. You've been warned.
[via TechMeme]
Does that mean it's time to sell the AAPL stock? Probably not -- as you can see from the graph, there's still been a nice steady growth in market share since 2006, and the current economy has all ships falling a little bit with the tide as it goes out. But it does mean that Apple might be having more trouble than they want breaking out into more of the market. If that is their goal anyway -- Gartner's report also notes that Apple's relatively higher ASP (Average Selling Price) "created challenges for it in the tough economy," but when have we ever known them to go cheap?
So Apple's not up in the short term, but who is? Well maybe Goldman Sachs is. But we don't entirely trust those guys. And in case you're wondering: none of this is actual financial advice, and none of it should be used to make any decisions that might lose you money. You've been warned.
[via TechMeme]
TUAWApple market share drops slightly in the past year originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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