Printing customer address labels from Organise

Following a recent survey to find out which feature(s) users were looking for in Organise, the small business app has gained label printing functionality.

The simplest way to use this is to select from your contacts list by choosing a category or typing a keyword in the search box. (Or just print them all).

The built-in report called 'Current customers' will list all customers for orders with an incomplete status.

For more advanced searches such as "Billing contacts for orders still unpaid" or "Billing contacts for orders placed within certain date range" it'll be necessary to use Reports and Organise's  special Report Builder tool. (I'm always happy to help with this).

Rather than attempt to offer a list of presets for label sizes and layouts, Organise has a few boxes for things like padding around the labels and page margins (and obviously the number of labels on the page). I've tried to keep this as simple as possible but being able to print onto any page of sticky labels.

For email campaigns, the new Announce app will send individual emails using Apples Mail app using a list of email address (and optionally names etc for merging). You can generate the mailing list from Organise using Reports, but in the near future I'm hoping to merge this functionality into Organise and make it simple to use.

The new version of Organise containing the label printing functionality is in testing but not released yet. If you'd like to test it, please contact support@peacockmedia.co.uk

Improvements to website spell-checking in Scrutiny

Scrutiny has had a website spelling / grammar check since version 5.4.6. The enhancements below are available in version 5.8 which will be available shortly.

1. You'll need to make sure that spelling is enabled for this site (Settings screen). It slows the scan a little, so this setting is off by default.

2. Also choose the language that you want to check this site against. The languages you can choose from are the ones installed on your system (System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > Spelling > Set up)

3. Then kick the scan off for Spelling.

Protip: Note that the blue box is part of the app; if you're a keyboard rather than a mouse person, up and down arrows select the options on this screen. Return hits the Go button for the selected option, left and right arrow keys navigate previous and next through these screens.

4. When the results are ready, You'll now see two tabs. By page is the old view listing your pages with a count for spelling / grammar problems. The new tab is By word.

Note that there are some useful buttons just above the view.

5. You can now 'Learn' words (ie add them to your user dictionary) without entering the spelling dialog. In fact you can select as many words as you like in this view (hold cmd key to select non-contiguous items) and then add them all to your user dictionary by pressing 'Learn All Selected.

(Scrutiny uses the system user dictionary for the language you've chosen to check against. So it'll ignore any words you've already 'learned' using other applications.)

6. You can expand any word to see which pages it appears on. 'Expand all' and 'Collapse all' buttons are just above the view.

7. The spelling dialog is accessible from this view. Double-click a url or use the context menu after clicking a url. (Double-clicking a word won't work here because the dialog needs to know a page in order to show your word in context). The box shows the word in context (with next and previous buttons), suggested corrections. It has buttons for 'Learn' and 'Visit this page'.

8. Context menus may speed things up. Depending whether you click a word or a url, you will see options to 'Learn', 'Remove without learning', 'Copy url', 'Visit' and 'Open spelling dialog'.

9. The old and new views can be exported as html or csv.

The view that you are looking at will be exported, and in the case of the By word view, the exported file will reflect rows being expanded or collapsed. If you want to show everything, remember to 'expand all' before you export.

Do me a favour, Mac App Store!

So I have to choose between English and UK English...?

I'm in England. England / English....  Please let's have English for those of us in England, and US English for those in the US.

I wish this were the least of my problems with the App Store.

Integrity Plus - free for the first week of Feb

A few weeks ago, Integrity Plus came out and quietly took its place between the free Integrity website link checker and much pricier Scrutiny. Read more about the background.

So, to now give it the launch that it deserved, for a limited time you'll be able to grab a licence for the new Integrity Plus for free.

Integrity is the best free link checker for Mac, fast, accurate, efficient but no-frills. Integrity Plus adds some frequently-requested features - the ability to manage the settings for multiple sites, and the XML Sitemap functionality (generate, export, ftp) and a few more benefits too.

The offer ran till 7 Feb 2015 and is now finished. But you still get a free, unrestricted trial of Integrity Plus and if you like it, the price is very modest.

Keyword density (keyword stuffing) in Scrutiny

We've all seen Matt Cutts talking on the subject and I'm sure we all get it - it's not about counting keywords but a good quality human-readable page.

Keyword checking is still a frequently-requested feature. If you're auditing a large site you don't have the luxury of reading each page aloud to a colleague as Matt suggests. That's where a website scanner that alerts you to potential problems is useful.

This feature is in Scrutiny version 5.7 due for release soon (may be released by the time you read this).

While it does its regular scan, Scrutiny can now check the text content of the page for keywords occurring above a threshold that you set in Preferences (default warn level 4%).

(Note that this feature slows the crawl a little, therefore you have the option to switch it on or off on a per-site basis from your Settings for that site).

When you see the SEO table (above) select 'High keyword density' from the Filter button. If there are pages shown, double-click each to see a full analysis (below)

Sreensleeves album art screensaver as a desktop

There is a way to make the Screensleeves screensaver as your desktop.

It's a terminal command,

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &

The animations all work smoothly. The screensaver you get will be the one you have set in System Prefs > Desktop and Screensaver, so make sure that's set to Screensleeves. The theme and settings will be as per your options there (including whether it shows a clock or not).

Protip: Make sure your music player of choice is already running and playing when you use that Terminal command. If you want to stop the 'desktop screensaver' you'll need to use Activity Monitor to find the 'ScreenSaver Engine' process and kill it.

Integrity Plus. Filling the gap.

Shiela calling Orson...

Today was a big day. Integrity Plus came out of testing and onto the web.

It fills the gap between Integrity and Scrutiny.

I'm very proud of Integrity. It's cost much blood, sweat and tears (well maybe not blood but definitely the other two). After 8 years it has a very good reputation and a huge number of users.

It's a big plus if any product looks clean and simple. If you have such a product, it's difficult to keep it that way. As a developer you have a steady stream of requests for more features, buttons, options, dialogs. I can tell you that if you simply respond to every request, you end up with a monstrosity that's complex and confusing (I'm talking from experience... one of my other apps, not Integrity).

Many of the Integrity enhancement requests went beyond link checking. "If it's holding lots of data about my pages, why shouldn't it be able to export an xml sitemap? Highlight some SEO problems? Validate the html as it goes along?"

Only a short way down this slippery slope I realised that I couldn't simply call it "The best free link checker for Mac" any more. It became "Well, it checks your links, and it does this, that and the other too".

That's when Scrutiny was born. Integrity was pared back to fit its simple tagline and Scrutiny became the app that did so much more.

As a credible competitor for commercial apps like Screaming Frog (and to help ensure its credibility as a competitor) Scrutiny's price has risen appropriately.

When you make developing into a full-time job, getting paid is very difficult. Charging even a very small amount for an app kills interest in it. Moving Integrity from free to just a pound reduced downloads from thousands to a handful. That's incredibly disappointing.

The facility for making donations has always existed. Some folks have been very generous, for which I'm very grateful, but those lovely, altruistic people are unfortunately few and far between.

So the renumeration for the time that's gone into Integrity and its ongoing support and development
has to come from converting people to a paid app. It's a very big step for users to move from a free app to one (however well-justified) costing $95.

So this is where Integrity Plus comes in. It offers some heavily-requested features (multiple sites, xml sitemap). And hopefully without affecting the simplicity of the interface. All for a relatively modest amount (currently set at $8).

Don't forget that as I write this, the New Year Scrutiny 50% offer is still running.

A comparison of the features of all three apps is here.

The new Integrity Plus is here

Shiela signing out. Nanu Nanu.