Wordius
Wordius
Jeff Porter
Freelance journalist, editor, and I enjoy experimenting on the web. But, above all, I am human.
Latest Posts
First, please humour me. Eight years ago my mum was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). She has dry macular, the untreatable type, and today only a glimmer of peripheral vision remains in her right eye. Mum can still...
This morning I enabled two-step verification on my Apple ID. It didn’t go as smoothly as I’d expected. The following is not a tutorial on how to set up two-step authentication for your Apple ID. If you want one of those, read ‘Protecting...
When I upgraded to Alfred 2, there were a number of things that didn’t transfer well from Alfred 1. My dictionary search was one of them. This morning I had a trawl around the web to find which online dictionary gave the best results....
Among the many things I discovered this morning was that my default browser, Safari, doesn’t allow direct access to OS X’s Color Picker. A quick search also revealed a surprising lack of colour-picker extensions for Safari. What’s more,...
When I left the UK for the French Alps last week, I went prepared: passports, EHIC cards, travel plugs… you name it … and maps – more maps than I imagine Alexander the Great used in his quest for world domination. I created and printed...
Love this sign-off on blogger David Sparks’ (@MacSparky) about page: I enjoy hearing from readers and listeners. Indeed, it warms the cockles of my heart. However, I am a lousy correspondent and for that I am sorry. I do sometimes reply,...
In the 14 years I’ve been skiing, there are two questions to which I’ve always wanted to know the answers: How fast? How far? Now I know. Ski Tracks’ app track screen During a week of skiing in France’s Le Grand Massif, iPhone app Ski...
When I posted ‘Harbingers of editorial change’ earlier this week, I hadn’t come across Nathan Kontny’s Draft. Draft, by Nathan Kontny Draft is a Markdown writing tool with the ability to share with an editor built into the interface....
The week is only half baked and already we’ve seen announcements for two new tools that promise long-term benefits for editors and writers. The creators of Editorially and CriticMarkup are attempting to untether editors and writers from...
I read a lot about Hazel before I even bought the app. My resistance eventually wore thin. So what is Hazel? According to Hazel’s developer, Noodlesoft: Hazel is a System Preference pane that works silently in the background,...
This detailed tutorial from developer Aral Balkan (@aral) explains how to create a website, starting with a simple plain text file and ending with a site hosted on Amazon S3. I’ve been trying my hand for a couple of years now, but I...
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve favoured my laptop to compose a tweet when my iPhone was already to hand, and all because I wanted to use a character or punctuation mark that wasn’t immediately obvious on the standard...
I’ve come across some clever apps in my time but nothing quite like Workflowy. The last time I was this impressed by an app was the day I installed Mr Reader, an RSS news reader, on my iPad. Workflowy Workflowy is a list-making app. Lest...
Okay, so the title of this post might not exactly ring true. But let’s assume I didn’t work in publishing, the reason a number of other apps – Adobe Design Premium, a good text editor, a browser, to name a few – are important in my great...
When I returned to keeping a diary last year, it was my first attempt at doing so using electronic means. It was also my first attempt at doing so in many years. The thought of all those lost years has spurred me on. There are countless...