Zvi Biener

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Academic Tools Posts

  1. Searching BibDesk with Alfred
    06/07/2016   alfredbibdeskacademic tools

    If you use [Alfred](https://www.alfredapp.com/) (see [here](/blog/everything-in-its-place "Alfred Post")) and [BibDesk](https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/ "Optional Title3") (see [here](blog/bibliographies "Bibdesk Post")), you might find the following useful. The script below uses Alfred's "Workflow" feature. It provides a set of commands to search bibliographical entries directly from Alfred, and execute a variety of actions related to citing, opening PDFs, narrowing searches, etc. Read More
  2. Find Everything with Alfred
    06/06/2016   alfredacademic tools

    Alfred is like Mac's Spotlight on steroids. Its an application launcher, an emailer, an iTunes controller, a weather report, a search tool, and much more. It finds things on your computer, but it also makes *doing* things on your computer much quicker. Read More
  3. Keeping Track of Documents and Bibliographies
    12/02/2015   bibdeskacademic tools

    Bibliographies for small projects are easy. But they are complicated and time-consuming for larger projects. You should use a bibliography manager. Like BibDesk. It is open-source and easy Read More
  4. Author's Text vs. Reader's Text, Part 2
    11/21/2015   scriveneracademic tools

    This post is about the feature of Scrivener I use most frequently. It is the ability to separate the author's text from the reader's text on a sentence-by-sentence level. The basic idea is that Scrivener allows you to specify chunks of text as "Annotations" and then control whether those annotations show up in the final, reader's copy. In order to use this... Read More
  5. Author's Text vs. Reader's Text, Part I
    10/27/2015   scriveneracademic tools

    One of the greatest benefits of Scrivener is the ability differentiate between the text the author sees and the text the reader sees. In programs like Word and Pages, this can only be done by using the "comments" mechanism. Comments, however, can only (easily) handle a subset of the kinds of texts an author may wish to hide, and are not good for more than a few sentences. Scrivener is more sophisticated, without being more complicated. Read More
  6. Scrivener is Awesome (And So Can You!)
    10/07/2015   scriveneracademic tools

    Scrivener is worth every penny. In fact, it's the only piece of software I suggest students buy. Everything else I use is open-source. In this post, I'll list *why* I use Scrivener. In later posts, I'll provide more detailed instructions. Read More
  7. Use a Three-Ring Binder
    10/06/2015   academic tools

    Paper works. Paper in a three-ring binder works harder. Read More
  8. Introduction: Tech Tools for Students
    10/05/2015   academic tools

    Some academics have a "system" they use to keep track of research, writing, feedback, revisions, etc. Students can spend years figuring out what a good "system" is, partly because academics are bad at sharing, After some conversation with students, I decided to devote some posts to my "system." I recommend cherry-picking parts that make sense to you. Read More