Merlin shares his kGTD setup:
“While I‚Äôm not prepared to do a major sales presentation, I am happy to oblige the folks who wanted to see how I‚Äôve set mine up. Also gives you a little window into my current contexts (as well as my atrocious personal habits).”
I can also vouch for kGTD - if you have a Mac and you are with your Mac most of the day, its the best!
Working Smart reminds us to get rid of apps we never use:
“Unfortunately, after a year of using my Mac‚Äîand loving it!‚Äîit looks like I have almost 150 apps installed on my PowerBook. This is way too much clutter. I need to simplify my life‚Äîand regain some much-needed hard disk space.So I created a ‚ÄúDeath Row‚Äù folder. I then moved any program I haven’t used in a while to this folder. I plan to sequester the files for the next 30 days.”
Altho I’ve never quite been able to get into Quicksilver (over Launchbar), 43Folders has this note about Quicksilver‚Äôs Append which does sound awesome:
“To review, for you new kids, Quicksilver, when properly configured (more on that in a minute), will let you add a line of text to any text file on your Mac. As long as it‚Äôs included in a QS catalog someplace, you‚Äôre a few fast keystrokes away from capturing your brilliant but ephemeral idea without stopping what you‚Äôre doing. This is huge, in practice, believe me.”
The science of interruptions looks at a recent study where participants were given a 42-inch screen as opposed to. a 15-inch one.
One veteran researcher claimed he has “never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user’s productivity.” On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.
No more need to put off buying the 30‚Äù Apple Cinema display… haha!
Altho in general I consider Apples .Mac service to be highly overpriced and woefully inadequate it does have one feature that works so well I can’t live without it. If you have more than one Mac, the .Mac service will automatically sync key data from any apps that support it. This includes your Safari bookmarks, your Address Book entries, Mail accounts, and even your NetNewsWire RSS Feeds.
This means I can go from one Mac to another seamlessly but it also means I have to be faithful to .Mac aware apps, and Firefox is not that. Now there is a Bookmark Synchronizer extension for Firefox. It doesn’t sync your bookmarks to the .Mac server but it does send them (as an XML file) to any ftp or WebDAV sever.
ProphecyBoy has some doubts on how well the new Palm Stores will do compared to the wildly (and always packed with people) Apple stores:
“And, of course, there’s the design. A lot of the Apple store philosophy is that if people can actually see an iPod and an iMac, touch it, they might fall in love. And I can attest to that power: I’m writing this on an iMac G5 right now (a celebrity iMac, I might add - my computer used to sit in the Big Brother 6 house), and every time one of my coworkers with a black Dell box walks past my desk, I hear an “I love your new monitor!” And then…”What?!? That’s the computer?!?” Heh. This is a product that’s been on the market for almost a year, and that sits in an Apple store a quarter mile from my desk. I, personally, have gotten people in that store. And they don’t come out of it thinking about computers or electronics the same way. This is how I know Apple is only beginning to gain market share.
43Folders tips us off to MailTemplate which is a great program if you ever need to send a lot of emails that are almost, but not quite, the same:
“One of my must-have Mac tools has been MailTemplate which gives you a huge amount of flexibility in creating template/boilerplate responses to frequent email messages. Frankly, I use about 30 or so templates that cover 80% of my repeat mail issues, and I simply couldn‚Äôt get through the day without it.”
Stark Raving Calm is selling his tablet PC in exchange for an Apple Powerbook:
“Despite its immaturity as a platform, the tablet is perfect for many users: managers, students, medical professionals, artists. Anyone who moves around a lot, and needs to jot things down literally on the go, would be very happy with a Tablet PC. That‚Äôs not what I‚Äôm looking for anymore. I want to write, and I want a machine that gets out of the way and lets me write.”
Lately I’ve been struggling with finding a way to efficiently manage screen space on my Mac. I dearly love Mac OS X, but it chews up screen space and it’s normal to have lots and lots of super useful apps on the go at once which means that you don’t see or can’t find most of them at any given time.
I’ve tried using a virtual desktop to give me multiple desktops and although that has some promise, the ones I’ve tried have been a bit slow and I still found that I’d have one app on Desktop A and another app on Desktop B and it would take a flurry of clicks and drags to accomplish even simple tasks.
Next I took some time to make sure I was using the built in capabilities of the Mac OS X task switcher properly. (Which leads me to realize that OS X has tons of built in features that Apple doesn’t mention to users anywhere! I suppose this is part of their keeping it simple philosophy, but if you want to be a power user you certainly have to go looking to find all the secret sauces).
By pressing Command-Tab a floating transparent window pops up showing the icons of all the running apps. You can change between running apps and even quit apps by pressing Q or hide them by pressing H when they are selected. Pressing Command-backtick will move the selection in reverse (as will Command-Shift-Tab, but cmon! Three keys at once! Puh-lease!).
Very handy and built into the OS so you can be using one app full screen, say Mail, and then just Command-Tab to another app without ever lifting your hands from the keyboard.
However it doesn’t let you choose which window you want from that app and in some cases that means you then need to use Command-Backtick to cycle through them. All of this takes only a few seconds of course, but the real price is the psychic time - that feeling of, “arrrrgh - this is overwhelming with all these frickin windows…..”
Next I tried an application called Witch. Witch is very similar to Command-Tab except it lets you cycle through the windows of each app as shown here:
This includes windows that are minimized to the dock. This is a nice improvement over plain Command-Tab but my desktop still looks like a window explosion. This is all very personal of course, as some people don’t mind piles of overlapping windows, but I find it drives me to distraction.
So what had I learned so far? I was going to be running a lot of different apps at once all of them with a lot of different windows and I needed a way to keep my desktop looking clean and organized and be able to switch between apps/windows easily and be able to drag/drop between apps and it had to be beautiful and elegant and have killed no pandas in the making of it, etcetera…..
So I kept looking.
I think I may have found a solution in fact. Stay tuned for that in Part 2 of this post coming soon.