PDFpen tip: Saving Red Ink

Philip Blog, PDFpen Tips

I’m a college English instructor, and I now use PDFpen to mark my essays. I’ve added some of the common English correction marks to the Scribbles palette of my Library and just drag them over to where they’re needed in the student’s essay. I’ve found that by taking time to make my marks more legible, the Scribbles are much more readable than my own on paper copies. Too, the students now have permanent digital copies of all their written work which they can still print if they wish. It’s easier for me and students are much happier, too. And think of all the red ink I’ve saved, not to mention paper! The other editing tools with PDFpen are also very useful. Using PDFpen to grade college papers


PDFpen and the iPhone

Philip Blog, PDFpen, PDFpen Tips

It was a fairly painless experience. My buddy Edward and I went over to Pioneer Place mall in downtown Portland at around 2 pm, and we were about 80th in line. What stunned me is that within a half an hour of the store opening at 6 pm, we had our iPhones and were out the door. The Apple Store was quick! A few more photos are posted on Flickr. So far, I think the iPhone is really neat! The activation via iTunes was a model of user-friendliness. Everything works pretty much as advertised. What would really make it great is some excellent third-party software programs. grin


TextExpander: Survey says…

Philip Blog, TextExpander

TextExpander survey! I expected that–we know you love TextExpander and have lots of opinions on how it can be even more useful. We’ve pulled together an excellent list of new features we’re going to work on. Of course the list is top secret, but I can tell you that as a TextExpander user myself, I am very excited about TextExpander 2. I can share some interesting tidbits about TextExpander users. Most of you have modest size libraries (42% said they had less than 50 snippets) and have so far expanded fewer than 1000 snippets (60%). But there are power users: 10% have more than 250 snippets and 9% have expanded 5000+ snippets. The most commonly-used snippets were “words or short phrases” (63% use them “a lot”), followed by “personal info” (49%) and “email signatures” (44%). 72% of you have your snippets expand automatically rather than using a delimiter character. Whenever I create a user survey about current features, I always include the option “I did not know I could do that.” I don’t want people to say they’ve “never” used a feature when the truth is they don’t even know about it. Based on the response to this survey, we have to do a better job getting out the word on some of TextExpander’s most useful features, including: support for rich text formatting, images, and built-in macros like date, time, cursor positioning, etc. (Date was by far the most used built-in macro with 61% reporting using it, nested snippets was the least used at 9%.) So look for even more tip emails, FAQs and tutorials when TextExpander 2 is launched. No survey is complete without a question about user satisfaction. And we’re happy to learn that TextExpander users are generally a satisfied bunch. 93% of you described yourselves as “very satisfied” or “satisfied.” Here’s to winning over the other 7% with TextExpander 2!


My Widget

Philip Blog, News

If you live in Portland, and are dying for some inexpensive tasteful Swedish home furnishings, this is your widget. IKEA is finally opening here July 25; no more 3 hour drive to Seattle just to get some bookshelves. Download the widget from my personal site. This was way easier than I thought it would be. I Google’d “dashboard countdown widget how-to” and found this cool site called HowTube.com which just happened to feature a tutorial for creating a countdown widget for (what else?) the iPhone. The key is an Apple Developer tool called Dashcode. Download it, and the world of widgets is yours. It’s got my creative juices flowing. Specifically, what would make a cool SmileOnMyMac widget? Any ideas? Love to hear them in the comments.