I am new to the Mac, and therefore new to many programs and possibilities a markdown-centric workflow has or can have to it. Good thing it was Brett Terpstra’s Birthday recently. Thanks to Dr. Drang for linking to this post. There’s a ton of stuff that’s given away for free by Brett, but two things stood out to me and were pretty easy to implement in my workflow, too:

To make it short: Marked.app is the last markdown preview you’ll ever need, or care about. PDF, custom CSS, auto refresh, it’s all in there.

The Markdown Service Tools are nothing but pure gold. ‘Link Selection’ alone totally blows my mind. Note that you might want to tell Lion (and MoLo again) to show your User Library Folder. Update: It’s scary how well ‘Auto-link web search’ works. Recommended.

Belated best wishes, Brett!

P.S.: I’m using Byword for text editing right now, but the things above are totally independent from that choice. That’s the beauty of it. Add TextExpander to the mix, add some clever snippets (hat tip to Mr. Hackett for this one) and see if you can stand the awesomeness.

Update: The Marked Bonus Pack enables you to open the current document in Marked.app with a nifty shortcut. You want this.

There’s great important, frightening but also inspiring stuff in this. Don’t omit the questions at the end.

John Gruber gave great advise back in 2010. If you want to avoid the use of flash or going to a second browser (Chrome) for flash use, adding a shortcut that disguises Safari on OS X as mobile Safari comes in handy.

Note: In Lion the Menu Item’s name changed. It’s ‘Safari iOS 5.1 — iPad’ now. Besides that, Gruber’s piece is still accurate.

I was browsing this review on The Verge, and the video didn’t load. An experience inferior to browsing the same article on the iPad. Then, I remembered Gruber mentioning that situation and his workaround on an old episode of The Talk Show. Now, Shift+Cmd+M reloads the site and serves video without the need of Flash. That really should be the default. But since Android dropped Flash in 4.0, it’s even more obvious that we’re getting there.

The current generation of Atom and ION-powered Nettops deals with HD video material without breaking a sweat. Awesome (free) software has been around for a while, and works and looks better than ever before.
Cutting the cord and stopping to complain about bad TV program has never been that easy, really.

Here’s what you need/I recommend:

• Zotac ZBox ID41 ‘naked’
  • An almost empty and therefore highly customizable box. Comes with a VESA mount, so you can hide it behind your HDTV.
• Some RAM
  • DDR3 SO-DIMM, not sure about the clock speed, but 1066 MHz works
• Samsung 64GB SSD
  • This depends on your needs. An SSD obviously reduces noise, heat, bootup time and power consumption, but you’ll definitely need another (external) drive for all the movies. Since collections of movies and TV series tend to get bigger with time and internal storage is limited anyway, going with external storage seems plausible.
  • Not convinced? A ‘classic’ approach would have to use something like this.
• External storage
  • Plug in whatever floats your boat. Advise: The Zotac ZBox sports USB 3.0, you want that.

The first-choice components set you back about 480€ (went for 3TB external storage, though). I assume you already own an HDTV and an HDMI cable.

Put everything together (youtube helps), and then put XBMCbuntu on it. Here’s how you go about that.

XBMCbuntu comes with a GUI, so you can set up your WiFi and everything else pretty easily. I have to say that I had a few problems sharing files to a OS X machine, though. I then went with Ubuntu 12.04, installed XBMC the ‘old fashioned’ way and had no problems at all. Your mileage may vary.

I recommend the Aeon Nox Skin. If you’re new to XBMC, you should check out this guide on Lifehacker.