Hi Geoff, You asked: > > Thanks to Esther's tip I started playing with NN4DB, and it seems to have > great potential. > > I wonder though if others have discovered a better technique for using the > keyboard utility bar? After enabling it and substituting "unpronounceable" > for more meaningful names (i.e. "undo", "redo", etc), only three or four > active items are visible at a time. I can expose them via the three finger > flick gesture and realize that its possible to reorder them so as to place > the most commonly used ones on top, but am wondering if there is a way to > expose more of them at a time? Even with the one character names it did not > appear that there were more than four keys visible at a time in the keyboard > utility bar. >
Glad you found the Nebulous Notes (for Dropbox) app of interest, and I'm going to abbreviate this as NN4D (your unofficial short form) or NN in my description. To recap, this is an iOS text editor app that you can use for note taking and/or coding, and which also lets you sync your notes with a Dropbox account. It's possible to use NN4D just to store notes locally on a single iOS device, but it's most useful to use in combination with a Dropbox account, and sync your notes between multiple devices and your computer. It's a universal app that can be used with iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, and will also work in either landscape or portrait mode for each device. You can also open or save Dropbox files from or to any folder in your Dropbox. This means that syncing and saving the file is not automatic, since there isn't a designated Dropbox folder that is used as there is in many note-taking apps that work with Dropbox, such as Elements. And this app is also popular with low vi sion users, because you can select font size and type, and also text color and background color in the settings menu for the app. First, let me point out that you can use the Keyboard Utility Bar that can be turned on under "Settings" to add any keys that you use frequently on the top line of the keyboard. So, if you didn't want to use macros for undo and redo, inserting the current date or time, forward delete, or for selecting or moving the insertion point around the document, you could simply customize your utilities by substituting any regular key that you use frequently in the "Text to insert" text field and also in the "Alias" text field when you edit your macro definition by flicking right to the "compose, button" and double tapping. In this usage, you could put a row of number keys or an "@" for email addresses into the top row. If you want to use the existing macros, the "find" macro that is the third of the default keyboard utility bar keys is actually taking up about the space of 4 keys, so moving this down in the list will give you more keys showing on utility bar. There's no text field alias for this macro, so you can only change its position or remove it. You can also abbreviate the aliases for the keys for moving your insertion point left and right by a word or character to be "lw","rw","lc", and "rc". However, in the latest versions of NN4D, the "find" macro can be used in combination with the "select" macro and the movement keys. The problem with trying to use "find" functions in apps for text notes is that, in general, the word(s) you try to find are simply highlighted, which doesn't help VoiceOver users. In NN4D, using the "find" macro also highlights the result and doesn't announce anything, but if you use the movement keys to move by a word or character, it will move your insertion point to the new location. Also, because there is a "select" function key in the Keyboard Utility Bar, and VoiceOver does announce selected text, as well as text that you move over with your insertion point, you can first use the find key on the Keyboard Utility Bar (VO will say "search field, is editing") and double tap or double tap and hold, then type in your search term. The "return" key turns into a "search" key and highlights your searched item, which still doesn't get announced. H owever, if you move a character to the left and then a word to the right with the utility keys, VoiceOver will announce the word as the insertion point moves over it. It will also announce text if you double tap the "select" button and then double tap keys to move by character or words to the right or left, or the keys to move up or down. Experimenting with this requires rearranging your keys so that the find, select, and movement keys are all displayed and next to each other, and I still find the focus to be a little unstable. The issue is whether my commands work on the keyboard key for "find" or in the main text field -- I don't want to type in a search term into the keyboard utility bar and find that I've been typing these terms into my note, instead! So I do a double tap and hold in the find key's text field. The find searches are not case sensitive, but the search term you type remains in the text box and has to be cleared out if you want to do a new search on a diffe rent word. I think this can be useful, but I'll have to play around with it. My guess is that most users will get a productivity boost by simply using a subset of keys like undo and redo, tab, and movement keys, and specific characters keys that they add. Another thing you can do is use NN4D in either landscape or portrait mode, and get more keys displayed in landscape mode. On the iPad, where I use this app in landscape mode, the keyboard utility bar keys just span two pages that I can scroll through with a three finger flick to right or left. I use TextExpander, which is supported by NN4D, so TextExpander itself has snippet definitions for macros like date and time you can load, and I don't need to use these keys. (Instead, I type "date" and "time" with an extra "d" or "t" at the start of the word, and hear the whoosh when TextExpander replaces the text with the date or time in my chosen format.) If you add other macros, they'll go to the beginning of your list of default macros for the Utility Bar keys. It may help people to have the default list of keyboard utility bar key functions when you turn this on (written out as words for the macros, icons, and characters): undo redo find (VoiceOver announces a "search field" on the keyboard) date tab select left word right word left character right character left brace right brace equals less than greater than star plus per cent up down top bottom I ended up experimenting with this more than I thought I would. There's a definition for a variable size tab in the extra definitions, as well. Under the list of "Reference Macros" that you can add to your "Active Macros" definitions there is a "tab(2)" key with a "$tab(2)" macro definition. If you add the definition to your "Active Macros" by navigating to the "Reference Macros" list and flicking to "tab(2)" then flicking right to the "cell add BTN" button and double tapping to add the key, you can edit the entry with the "compose" button, and change the number in the macro definition from "2" to any number of spaces you want for your tab spacing in the "Text to insert" text field, then change the "Alias" text field label to match. (Or leave it as "tab(2)", or remove the parentheses, if you only need this as a reminder that this is your alternate tab key definition.) There's also an extensive Help document that you can access from "Settings" that gives more details about the app. Nebulous Notes also supports Markdown editing, which is a way of generating HTML code through simple text mark up when passed through an app that supports this mark up. For example, instead of typing the code for a heading level three, you might simply type three hash marks (also known as the number sign or pound sign or "#") before and after the text for a heading, and similarly indicate emphasized text by surrounding text with either underscore or asterisk characters. NN4D will let you preview what the Markdown text will look like, but you still need to use another app works with web pages that will load your Markdown text as HTML. HTH. Cheers, Esther > Best regards. > Geoff > <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> > > To reply to this post, please address your message to > [email protected] > > You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at > either the list's own dedicated web archive: > <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> > or at the public Mail Archive: > <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. > Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: > <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> > > The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and > worm-free! > > Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting > the list website at: > <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. 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