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A helper for Connections-style word games

Connections is a New York Times word game that's played with 16 words on a four-by-four grid; the objective is to correctly group four words into four sets, where the words in each set share some characteristic. Sometimes that's an easy thing to identify (colors), sometimes it's much tougher (dog breeds with first letter changed).

To play, you click on four words then click Submit to see if you got the grouping right. The way my brain works, though, I wanted to arrange the words visually first, as that makes it easier for me to process the relationships between the words. So I "created" (more on that below) a simple HTML/JS page to do just that:

Note that this is not a clone of the Connections game! It has absolutely no knowledge of the game, its rules, or which words belong where. It's not a game in any way, it's just a tool to help you rearrange words in a grid. I open it in a window next to the actual Connections puzzle, drag words around until I like what I see, then play the game for real in the other window.

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A much-improved special character palette

A while back, I created a pop-up character palette using Keyboard Maestro to allow easy insertion of the Mac's special characters (like , ⌘, ⌥, etc.). While this worked fine, I discovered a few major shortcomings:

  • I couldn't create more than one character without calling up the palette again.
  • I had to decide in advance if I wanted HTML entities or the actual characters.
  • Two palettes (HTML or character) meant two keyboard shortcuts to remember.
  • Adding characters to the palette was a real pain, because they had to be done twice.
  • I was out of digits for shortcuts, so I was going to have to change the palette structure.
  • It was slow: From calling up the palette to identifying which icon I wanted to use to selecting that icon, and then doing it all again for a second character was just really slow.

I set out to fix all of these issues, thinking I could use Keyboard Maestro's Custom HTML Prompt action, as I did for my iTunes song info window. And, in the end, that's what I used for the new-and-improved character palette:

This doesn't have to be used just for Mac special characters, of course. You could make yourself a customized pop-up for emoji, math symbols, whatever…

Read on for the how-to and download, if you'd like to put this to use…

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Got tables? Use TablesGenerator.com

Whether writing here or on Macworld, I often find myself relying on tables to convey lots of data points in an easy-to-read manner. As examples, check out the tables in my Nintendo add-ons pricing rant, or in my analysis on the cost of LED lighting. (Or even in my mother-of-all-tables post on OS X release dates.)

Tables play a key role in all of those articles…but creating tables in HTML (or even Markdown) is, quite simply, a pain in the butt. The syntax is simple enough, but structuring complex tables with some entries spanning multiple rows and/or columns can be time consuming.

Often, too, my work starts in Excel, and it seems like a lot of redundant effort to take Excel's table-based layout and recreate it in an HTML-based table layout. (Excel has an export to HTML function, but the HTML it builds is heavily styled and needs a lot of editing.)

Enter TablesGenerator, an amazing tool for creating tables. Not just HTML tables, but pure text tables, LaTeX tables, and even MediaWiki tables (whatever those might be).

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