Maybe you already know about OmniWeb's shortcut feature, by which you can type something like google RPS in the location field to go straight to the Google search results for RPS. You can set up more shortcuts by putting your cursor in a search field at any site and clicking the little magnifying glass that appears at the bottom of the window.
One such keyword that comes with OmniWeb is *; it appends www. and .com to what you type. So if you type worldrps it takes you to www.worldrps.com. That's handy, but I wanted it to do something even smarter. I changed that shortcut's URL to this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%@&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky
Now when I enter anything that's not a URL, I end up at Google's best match for what I typed. This is super-handy when I know the site I want to visit, but I can't remember the URL. Like, who can remember that the Subversion manual is at svnbook.red-bean.com? Well, now I just type subversion book in the location field and bam, I'm there.
Of course, this shortcut works best when you know there is a single definitive site about the thing you're looking for. Give it a try today.
Martin Jaggi brought up a good point on the OmniGraffle mailing list: it would be nice to resize objects in OmniGraffle as if they were an image, not a set of objects. LinkBack makes this possible.
Say you have a nice bunch of objects in OmniGraffle you'd like to scale while having the text, stroke width, corner radii, and such scale along with them:
If you just select them all and Shift-drag the corner handle, the lines stay the same width, the corner radii stay the same, and the font size stays the same; not quite what you want:
But! If you instead select them and choose Copy As PDF from the Edit menu, you can paste a representation of all the objects as a single object:
Then you can scale the PDF like a normal image; everything scales with it:
Here's the cool part: because the PDF contains LinkBack data, you can double-click it to open an OmniGraffle window with your original objects! Edit them however you like, and when you hit Save, the PDF version updates!
Some people have expressed… concern over OmniDazzle's price, saying that $14.95 is too much to ask for a cursor locator. Well, I want them to know…
Here you see the Scribble plug-in at work. I use Cutout to highlight stuff for screenshots, Zoom to check fine details on interface elements, and Focal Point to avoid distractions while I'm writing in OmniOutliner.
In fact, I think Focal Point is my favorite part of OmniDazzle. Here's how I have it set up while I'm working in OmniOutliner:
No border, and a low-transparency dark background color. This way I don't see 16 applications across 30 inches of Cinema Display, shining in my face, while I'm trying to concentrate on writing.
Of course, if you've lost your cursor, there are free ways to find it. There are also free web browsers, free outliners, and free graphics applications. But price isn't the only variable involved; we believe in the idea, yeah, we thrive on the idea that it's worth paying money for something really, really cool.
