Another app I’ve started using more this week is DragonDrop. This simple utility shot up in the App Store rankings after John Gruber praised it on Daring Fireball, but it really is useful enough to be worth the $4.99 it costs. Once you’ve got the app installed and running, just drag anything – an image, text, part of a website – and shake your mouse, or drop it on the DragonDrop icon in the menubar. The content is then held there, so you can switch to another app to drop it in. It works across full-screen apps in Lion, and while it’s a tad hard to activate with a Magic Trackpad, dragging in a circle brings it up pretty easy. Or dropping it on the menubar icon.

Come to think of it, it’s like Cloud.app or Droplr for moving files between apps!

I already knew the iPad’s keyboard had much more to it than meets the eye, and have used tap-and-hold to insert special characters as long as I’ve had an iPad. Most of the tricks in this article aren’t new to me, but sliding up on the dash and period keys? Wow. That’s totally new, and I had no idea those options were in there. Great stuff.

Via Ben Brooks

I got started with Photoshop using Photoshop Elements, and honestly, for most people, it’s got most of the features you’ll need. The one tool I use daily, Photoshop’s crop and scale tool, is almost good enough to be worth the purchase price of Photoshop Elements. It’s even, amazingly, has Content Aware Fill, one of the most hyped features of Photoshop CS5.

Photoshop Elements is already a great deal, but Adobe has a today-only 50% sale on Elements that makes it an even better deal at just $50. Or, you can get Photoshop and Premiere Elements together for just $75, which is great if you need a more advanced movie editor, especially if you’re using a PC.

Update: Deal’s over now. Even at normal price, though, Photoshop Elements is always a great deal, especially compared to full-blown Photoshop!

I started my writing life in Word ’97 in Windows ’95, and couldn’t have been happier with it. That feeling was slowly over time, as I grew increasingly frustrated with Word’s oddities. I then started out blogging using Windows Live Writer, which quickly taught me how much junk WYSIWYG editors throw into your writing. Today, almost everything I write is written in a plain text editor, preferably iA Writer, but really, anything that saves in plain text will work. I can always add formatting for printing when I need it, in Pages, InDesign, or even Word. But most everything I write is published online or send via email, and Word is about the worst thing you could possibly use for that.

It’s refreshing to see others come to the same conclusions. People have use Word and word processors for everything written on computers for way too long, and it’s definitely time to get back to just writing plain text. It works way better for way more things than most people would think. You really don’t need a word processor for everything, and if you’re writing online, you definitely should never be using a word processor to write your initial drafts.

Seriously: use plain text. It works everywhere, in any platform, and you’ll always be able to open your files. You can easily switch text editors, publish your writing anywhere, and always add more formatting later if you need. It’s just better. There’s no reason to treat everything you write as a document in Word. You simply don’t need to.