What's it all about, Alfie?

On the heels of the Notarize Node Client, we took the time to create a Node Client for the PostGrid service - where they will use regular Postal Delivery for PDFs, and HTML pages, and we needed that at The Shop. It was easy enough to build on the previous client, and just update the different domain elements, and handle the data interfaces. Not bad at all.

One thing I did have a few issues with was the handling of the Form Data for the posts to the service. There were endpoints that could accept application/json data, and some that required multipart MIME data from a FormData element. Thankfully, I'd had to work with this for some additions we made to the HelloSign Node Client, but that was a lot easier because the basic client was written by the HelloSign engineers, and we just had to add the ability to post PDF documents provided as Buffer objects.

In all, it wasn't all that bad, and now I have a core TypeScript library for building almost any client for a restful service with either JSON or Form Data. That's a nice place to be. 🙂

Back in June, I wrote to the folks at Smile, about an issue I was having with PDFpenPro 13.0.1 on my laptop. It was annoying because I could copy and paste some Form Fields to a document, but then when I tried to save it, it'd lock-up, and go non-responsive to Finder as well as the "spinning beachball". It was very repeatable, but depended on the file. Some had this issue - some didn't.

They were able to reproduce this issue, and said they'd get on it. I was thrilled that it would soon be resolved, as it was a great PDF authoring tool for Forms and Text Tags - which I've been doing a lot for a project at The Shop.

Then I read that Smile was selling PDFpenPro and PDFpen for iOS/iPadOS to Nitro, and I got a little concerned that the bug report, and corresponding fix, might be falling through the cracks. So today I sent an email asking for a status on the issue, and we'll see what they happen to say. I really do hope they fix this crashing bug because other than that, PDFpenPro is an excellent tool.

UPDATE: they wrote back, and for the time being, support for PDFpen(Pro) is being handled by the Smile folks, and Jeff at Smile mentioned that it was still an open issue, and that he'd pass along my question about a status. We will see.

This morning I was thinking about the move to the upcoming M1/M2 MacBook Pros that are supposed to be coming out later this year, and I decided it was time to move off my old screen capture and annotation tool, Annotate, and move to something that's: 1) Supported... 2) Going to be built for Apple Silicon. And when I read a review about CleanShot and SnagIt, I decided to look into both - SnagIt first.

The reviewer had it right - SnagIt has way more than what I need, and the increased feature set means complexity that I just don't need. Annotate was great... simple, easy, it did all I needed. SnagIt is just too much. But CleanShot is right what I was looking for!

I needed something to make nice screen shots - both area and window-based. I also wanted to be able to draw arrows from the head to the tail, as several of the screen annotations I've used had used that, and my arrows are so much more precise because of it. Also, I wanted to have the white-outlined text so that it was easy to read - regardless of the image below.

CleanShot does all of those. It's just exactly what I was looking for. So I got the basic app, with the 1GB of storage, and we'll see how it goes. If I want to get more updates in a year, then I'll renew then. But I didn't need the "Pro" features like unlimited storage, and I really don't want to pay a monthly fee for software like this - it's not critical to what I do.

So here we go... and we'll see how this works out. I have high hopes. 🙂

This morning I saw a tweet that a new version of Sublime Text 4 is out - and given the few little issues I've seen, I was quick to upgrade and see what the release notes said. What I read was that there were significant speed improvements, along with improvements in the OpenGL rendering, and several fixes in the specifics of the UI rendering. There was only one Mac-specific issue, and that was related to the Dark/Light scheme, which is fine, but doesn't worry me.

When I started using it, I was pleased to see that I didn't see any of the problems I'd seen before, and the editor seemed zippy - so what's not to like? 🙂 I have a new TypeScript project I'm about to start, so we'll see how it handles that load as well.