YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – It’s August. So it shouldn’t be surprised for you to hear that it’s scorching hot in this Tokyo-Yokohoma metropolitan area during the daytime. Yet, it’s been quite cool at dawn for the past several days.

Well, I’m ready to annouce a new software release. It’s the second and the third software release of the month. Yes, I’m releasing two software titles, one for macOS and the other for iPad. The desktop version is called Scrapboard 4.

The history of Scrapboard series goes back by almost 12 years. The original idea is to have the user paste notes and pictures on a multi-page virtual bulletin board just like the door of a refrigerator at every household. This version now supports six different layer types: Text, Picture, SF Symbol, Appointment, Web, Map. Scrapboard 4 works along with its iOS counterpart (Scrapboard Cloud 4) so that you can share projects between different devices and OSes. As far as this application is concerned, you cannot just share projects with iPads but also with other Macs provided that they all share the same iCloud account.

Previously, the last version Scrapboard was just a multi-page virtual bulletin board. Scrapboard 4 goes one step further. Now, you can create multiple projects locally, each of which is a multi-page virtual bulletin board. In order to share a local project between devices, all you have to do is select one in the project list and then click on the Push button. If you want to fetch projects from other devices, simply click on the Fetch button, and Scrapboard 4 will pull all existing projects under your current iCloud account and download them for you. Furthermore, you can subscribe to project changes made by other devices. And you will receive a notification every time you push a project on a different Mac or on an iPad.

Speaking of different types of layers, the followings are their brief descriptions.

1. Text: It’s a note layer where you can select a font family, a text size, a text color and a background color.
2. Picture: You can select a picture from your disk or from Photos Library.
3. SF Symbol: This layer type displays a symbol. You need to use SF Symbol.app, which is freely distributed by Apple, Inc., to get symbol names.
4. Appointment: You select the day of the month and the time of an appointment. And Scrapboard 4 will count down the remaining time until an event takes place. You have options of receiving or not receiving a notification.
5. Web: You can show the web content corresponding to the URL you specify.
6. Map: It’s used to show the map of the GPS coordinates you specify. And you can run a search with a landmark name to get coordinates.

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YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – The scorching summer is on hold for the past few days. The highest temperature is expected to be 30° C today in the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. That’s not terribly bad, is it?

These days, I often go to a free website for checking English sentences for spelling and grammar mistakes. I don’t have a problem to see on-site ads. But there are a few things that I definitely don’t like.

1. If you end a sentence with two white space characters, they will correct it with one white space character.
2. In the English grammar, use of a comma is followed by one white space character. But they place this white space character before the comma.
3. If you have ‘And’ at the beginning of a sentence, they’ll remove it.

If you are a typewriter generation, you know that each English sentence must be followed by two white space characters, not one. For me, that’s not something that I could compromise. But they’ll correct it without user options, and I find it quite disturbing.

So I’ve decided to develop a new desktop application free of this unnecessary grammar correction. Well, if you are ready to hear it, this new release is called Textriptor.

Textriptor is a desktop application that allows you correct your sentences spelling and grammar-wise. It’s powered by LanguageTool, an open-source, AI-powered writing assistant. Textriptor displays your original text string under the left pane. You click on the toolbar button, and it will then show the correction result under the right pane. Furthermore, Textriptor will highlight corrected words in different colors. If a word is highlighted in red, that means it’s a spelling correction. Currently, Textriptor supports nearly two dozen languages including English, French, and Spanish. Note that use of this application requires Internet connection.

The spelling and grammar correction performance of Textriptor is up to LanguageTool. It definitely doesn’t do an exceptional job. We may offer an add-on feature for use of GPT-5.5 API, which should increase Textriptor drastically. But this add-on will not be available as free distribution. Somebody has to pay the bill, and it will not be us. And it won’t be cheap. One rough idea is a non-consumable (one-time payment) IAP with some limitations like 10 calls max per hour. Another path is a non-consumable IAP with Use Your Own Key expansion for about $4.99 where you need to use your own ChatGPT key. If you are interested in this add-on, let us know with a comment below.   Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – When my hard disk drive died on the 14th of July, 2026, I wasn’t prepared for the consequences of lost files. There were several hundred SwiftUI sample projects that could never be replaced on top of another few hundred Xcode projects. Although I was eventually able to recover a majority of files from it using its two brother HD at the end of the month, I’m convinced more than ever that I need to regularly back up files. And I know what I need. I need a desktop application that lets me accumulate files to back up so that I can regularly save them in a separate storage system. Well, I actually had a desktop project like that 16 or 17 years ago. So here comes HomeSync 2, which I submitted to Mac App Store a while ago.

HomeSync 2 lets you create multiple groups to house files and folders that you need to back up with the click of a button. Select a group and then just drag and drop files and folders onto the application window. Now, all you have to do is just click on the Backup toolbar button.

You have options of saving the selected backup group as a plain folder containing files and folders or a Zip archive. Additionally, you have options of protecting or not protecting a Zip archive with a password.

HomeSync 2 isn’t a regular file backup application. You can reserve seats for unknown files that don’t exist yet but you want to include in the future. When they are available, you can just replace these reserved seats with actual file items. So these reserved seats remind you that you need to include important files before clicking on the Backup button.  Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – I have been using a Silicon Power Stream S03 USB 3.2 1TB, an external 2.5-inch external hard disk drive for probably a decade or longer. To my dismay, my Mac mini stopped reading data from this HD on the 14th of this month. I have it store all my Xcode projects and sample Xcode projects. That really hurts. Is the data all gone? I thought it was. Wait, it’s one of the twin brothers. I have another HD from Silicon Power that I purchased right at the same time. So what if I take the HD out of the dead external device and put that HD in the good guy? A major issue was how do I crack-open these external HD cases? I’ve searched the Interent, but there are no videos or tutorials.  Continue reading →