I’m going to be attending the following tech conferences in the Bay area soon:

• Google IO — May 27-28. I’ve never been to a Google conference, so this should be an experience.
• WWDC ‘09 — June 8-12. Looking forward to touching base with my fellow indie Mac developers, now that I can truly count myself among their ranks. Something tells me this is going to be more about iPhone though.
• CommunityOne — June 1-3. Sun’s free conference about…why you should use Sun. I’ll probably be here only part of the time, depending on how good the food is and whether or not it is free as well.

If you’re reading this and coming to any of these and would like to meet up, drop a line!

French Mac magazine Vous et Votre Mac has reviewed ShoveBox in their latest issue and awarded it 4/5 stars.

For those who can read French, you can read their review here.

I’m going to be a guest on the nationally-syndicated talk radio show Computer America. I’ll be chatting with host Craig Crossman about ShoveBox and more starting at 11PM EST on Monday, May 18th.

UPDATE: An MP3 of the hour I was on is available.

Earlier today, Apple released a Mac OS X 10.5.7 update that caused some syncing problems for ShoveBox users.

Version 1.7.3 of ShoveBox is out, fixing this. As always, it is a free upgrade. You can download the new version here or through the auto-update feature.

EDIT: For the geeks out there, I’ve documented the changes that Apple made.

Macworld has reviewed ShoveBox Mobile and awarded it 4/5 mice!

In particular, they liked its interface:

"ShoveBox Mobile’s interface is simple and elegant…It is able to get the job done easily without any distractions or clutter. Little things like being able to convert rich text to plain text for on-the-go editing make using ShoveBox Mobile a pleasant experience…If you are in the market for a content organization system, ShoveBox is undoubtedly a strong and viable product."

A small correction to one criticism in the review, however: to choose the folder that you save a new note to, just navigate to that folder and tap the capture button in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen.

Here’s a tip for ShoveBox-using developers out there.

I’m a fan of the “Midnight” color scheme in Xcode, finding it easier on the eyes. It looks like this:

Naturally, I eat my own dogfood and use ShoveBox to store pieces of code that I may want to refer back to or use in another project.

Unfortunately, when I drag it into ShoveBox, it looks like this:

Yuck! Xcode seems to copy the foreground color of the text, but not the background.

I’m sure other users have had this problem, so I thought I’d share an easy way to fix it:

1. Open Xcode’s Preferences dialog.
2. Select the “Fonts & Colors” section.
3. Uncheck the “Copy colors and fonts” checkbox.

Now ShoveBox will see the text as plaintext and format it in the font of your choosing (using the default font set in the preferences).

ShoveBox 1.7.2 is out, fixing a bug where registered users saw a trial expiration dialog.

You can download the update here or through the auto-update feature.

ShoveBox 1.7.1 is out, fixing several issues with syncing and with the "Save PDF to ShoveBox" option in Print dialogs.

You can download the update here or through the auto-update feature.

Since 1.0, ShoveBox has had a bookmarklet that lets you import pages into it by clicking a link in your browser.

This is not a very well-known feature because it’s only made apparent in the help files included with the program, which, naturally, nobody has much reason to read unless they’re having a problem. So I thought I’d shed more light on this feature here.

What’s a bookmarklet? A bookmarklet is a little piece of JavaScript that you bookmark as if it were webpage. you can use to invoke some useful functionality on the current page. The Wikipedia page on the topic explains more.

Installing the Bookmarklet

Install the bookmarklet by dragging the link below to your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Shove This ⇐ Drag this link!

How to Use It

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll see a little button in your desktop browser’s toolbar like this:

And if you’ve got iTunes configured to sync bookmarks over to your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can use the very same bookmarklet from within the iPhone version of Safari if you’ve got ShoveBox Mobile installed.

PhoneFinger v1.1.1 is released, fixing a crash that occurred on newer MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads, and fixing a bug with the smudges “feature.”

A special thanks goes to the folks at NSCoder Night in San Francisco for helping me troubleshoot the problem.