With Hilton Lipschitz's professional letterhead written in Markdown (and processed through Marked), that's another blow to Microsoft Word.

While Markdown replacing Word/bloated word processors is probably a pipe dream, I can still dream — right?

➔ Hiltmon

While I don't normally post Windows related programs (i.e. not apps), Prepros is a very handy utility for assisting with front-end development.

While the concept isn't new (as seen with Codekit and Hammer for Mac), Prepros processes several languages (Haml, Coffeescript, Less, Markdown, Sass, and even Jade) into their web standard equivalents (HTML, JavaScript, CSS). In fact, it is very similar to the aforementioned Mac utilities in both function and ease.

In my day job, I am responsible for several seemingly unrelated projects and areas. One of which is developing internal websites and webapps. Working in a Windows environment, it is a bit of a downer not to have my favorite Mac apps at my disposal, but at least I have Prepros.

➔ Prepros

Dr. Drang tells his tale of moving his scripts from ~/bin to ~/Dropbox/bin. Like Dr. Drang, I understand that it can be done, and is probably the more efficient way of making sure scripts sync — but I don't know why I don't do it.

Even after reading his post, I still don't feel right. The funny thing is that I already have all my scripts in Dropbox — but would then copy them over to my ~/.bin folder¹. At work, I have no problems adding all sorts of weird directories to my PATH, but not so much for *nix/OS X.

So I'll attempt to copy things over, whether directly or symbolically.

➔ And now it's all this

Along with the new version of OmniOutliner for iPad, The Omni Group has released their document syncing app, OmniPresence.

As with all of the other apps produced by The Omni Group, the desktop client is Mac Only. While you can opt to have OmniPresence hosted on The Omni Group's servers, you can also install the service on any server that supports WebDAV along with an Apache installation.

Thinking of it as a Dropbox alternative, you are now only limited to what clients support the service and the space available on the server. What will be interesting to see is if/what 3rd-party iOS developers will implement this service into their apps.

➔ The Omni Group

King Sidharth (awesome name) goes over the cons of using Arial and Helvetica in web designs. This actually makes a lot of sense as to why any of the designs I created never looked as great as my mockups in Illustrator.

➔ 64notes

In his ever-so-useful notebook section, Sean Korzdorfer documents his Due.app workflow and use case. In there, Sean goes through everything from why he uses Due, specific cases in which he uses the app, as well as some handy tips (turn off alert sounds on the iPad — genius).

I've been thinking about dumbing down my reminders system for a while now — switching from Due to the default Reminders app. But Sean's notebook entry was the proverbial frying-pan-to-the-head in making me remember how powerful Due is.

➔ Sean Korzdorfer

Charlie Sorrel shows off a pretty neat workaround for adding notes to Dropbox via the iOS Notification Center "Tweetbox". A few downfalls I see are:

1. Depends on a couple middlemen (Twitter, IFTTT)
2. The tweetbox doesn't save progress (e.g. If you momentarily hide Notification Center, the text you entered will disappear).

Other than that, I'd consider trying this method out if only I didn't love using Notification Center for tweeting without opening Tweetbot.

➔ Cult of Mac

Walker is a Kickstarter funded task management app for iOS. Claimed to be the "smartest productivity app", the app does looks pretty clean.

While I don't plan on getting this app, the features that are listed on their website make it appear to be a more-assisted/less-complex OmniFocus. Might be nice for those intimidated by the complexity of OmniFocus — that or are turned off by OmniFocus's price.

➔ Walker

I am not quite sure how this went unnoticed or unpublished (considering that the last update was in April of this year), but Launch Center Pro has recently published TaskPaper's URL scheme — which is similar to Writeroom's.

• Launch TaskPaper
  • taskpaper://
• Open List
  • taskpaper://open/[list name]
• New Named List (Using predefined name)
  • taskpaper://new/[list name]?body=[text]
• New Dated List (TaskPaper autogenerates a name based on time and date)
  • taskpaper://create?body=[text]
• Search Lists
  • taskpaper://search/[query]

I've added placeholders for the data, so these URLs have to be customized for your needs.

While Drafts already does an excellent job with Dropbox actions, assuming you keep your TaskPaper files in Dropbox, these would be useful for Launch Center Pro (which you can automatically generate the URL from within the app), or to use with chaining URLs. However, since there doesn't appear to be x-callback-url support in TaskPaper, the chain would stop there.

To finish the week off with more TaskPaper goodness, TaskBadges is a free app in the Mac App Store that will add badges to the icon of your TaskPaper file depending on how many tasks you have unfinished. From the app, you just point to the file(s) that you want it to monitor and it will attach a badge to it. They even have support for Todo.txt and bracket-style todos if you're that kind of person.

One thing you can do with this is have Drafts (for iOS) append to a TaskPaper file (Sean Korzdorfer has a nice action that does this). TaskBadges will then update the badge for that file. Not sure what I'd use that for, but it's nice knowing that I have a

➔ Mac App Store