It was my pleasure to write about a recent experience with Apple Pay over at iMore. The convenience this payment service provides is not limited to the point-of-sale.
Category: Miscellaneous
Flare 2, our Mac app for photographers that was awarded Best of 2014, is currently half price as a part of the Mac App Store’s Amazing Photo + Video promotion.
In addition, the app was recently updated with German and Japanese localizations. The app continues to be a showcase for good design on Yosemite.
We also continue to add new effects using iCloud. I love using Flare Effects on iOS when I post photos to my Instagram account.
For all the latest info about this award-winning app, be sure to check out the Flare Tumblr.
Great things are happening to Twitterrific these days. My favorite feature is doing drafts, which can really help out when you need to do tech support on Twitter! The changes to muting/muffling are also welcome additions. We even gave you a new way to shoot yourself in the foot with regular expressions :-)
And contrary to common belief, I didn’t have anything to do with this besides being a beta tester. Sean Heber is heading up the development work these days, so if you love these changes as much as I do, be sure to let him know!
Robert Graham built a tool to analyze the traffic causing the DDoS attack on GitHub. He then used it to prove that the machine is “located on or near the Great Firewall of China”.
One has to wonder when politicians will take these virtual attacks as seriously as physical ones. As Robert points out, this attack is against a key part of the United States’ Internet infrastructure. What would we do if China took out all the Interstate highways leading into California?
I agree with Buzz Anderson: “Paste-with-styling is one of the worst software inventions of all time.” Every time I mention the workaround shown below, there are many retweets and favorites. Clearly, there are a lot of people that feel the same as Buzz and me.
The solution is surprisingly simple: make Paste and Match Style the default for pasting by mapping the menu item to the ⌘V keyboard shortcut:
These settings are available in the System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts panel. Count the number of clicks required to get to that screen and it should be clear why so many people don’t know about this trick. Another reason for the confusion is that “and Match Style” really means “Without Style”.
You’ll also note that that I have Paste & Match Style mapped. I use some older apps which have an ampersand in the menu item instead of the word “and”. Since app shortcuts work by matching text exactly, this duplicate is needed.
After you’ve made this change, you might find that the keyboard shortcut sometimes doesn’t work. The one that gets me the most is when I try to ⌘V in the “To:” field while composing a message in Mail. When you try to use the shortcut, you’ll hear a beep because the control doesn’t accept styled text and Paste and Match Style is disabled. When this happens, it’s easy enough to right-click and use the context menu or select Paste from the menu bar.
There are some apps where I do want a keyboard shortcut for pasting styled text. The screenshot above shows one: TextEdit. Most of the time I’ll rely on ⌘V to paste text without styling, but if I do want to keep the text’s attributes, ⇧⌘V is just a keystroke away.
If you’ve found this trick useful, be sure to share it. There are a lot of people who don’t know how simple it is to fix this little annoyance.