5 posts tagged “productivity”
As someone who must constantly battle with myself to maintain focus on my work, it highly annoys me to have lots of applications open when I am only actually working in two or three. I wish that there was a way to say "Keep this application open but mute it and hide it from the tab switcher until I care about it again".
- iTunes which downloads podcasts periodically, some of which (due to the publisher's ignorance — NPR Hourly news I'm looking at you) will be missed if iTunes doesn't catch them before the next comes out.
- NetNewsWire which downloads RSS feeds, some of which have the same problem as the above for the exact same reason.
- Colloquy (IRC client) which I use periodically throughout the day by reading back over the log since my last check and responding. If you're not in channel, you have no log to catch up on and respond to. This is an example of an app that I sometimes want to be completely silent and other times to alert me when my name is written in channel (i.e. someone beckoning me)
- Billings.app which keeps track of the time I spend working on client projects. While I'm technically using this, I only interact with it periodically when I switch tasks, start or stop working.
- Skitch which I use to take screenshots. While I could just open this when I need it, that's a lot more keystrokes than just Command-5
- Desktop Folder X which adds nifty and important features to the open/save dialogs in Mac OS X
- Hardware Growler which posts notifications via Growl for hardware status changes (i.e. internet connectivity, disk issues, peripheral connections, etc.
- Last.fm which scrobbles anything you're listening to in iTunes to Last.fm
- MenuCalendarClock iCal which replaces the dock date and time with a much more useful version
- QuickSilver which, while being indispensible, is never, EVER accessed via the task switcher.
- The Finder which I don't need or use since I use PathFinder but which is opened every now and then by applications which are poorly coded and circumvent the standard API call which PathFinder intercepts. The worst way is the only way to kill the finder again is to stop and restart PathFinder.
As an Apple fanboy and lover of online productivity and information tools, I feel like I really should love MobileMe. However, I can't quite understand what it would offer me. Let's look at the tools I currently use:
- Online calendar - gCal with iCal and SMS integration
- Online email - All accounts are run through Gmail so I can already manage my email via the web or via IMAP using Apple Mail on iPhone/Mac
- Contacts - While I can use gmail (sort of, the contact features kinda suck) I mostly use my Address Book synched between my Mac and iPhone
- Photo sharing - I am a happy Flickr Pro user. I also have tons of blogs including this one and even my old photo gallery if I wanted to revive it
- Document sharing/storage - For any and all file sharing, I have a multitude of web servers (e.g. jayallen.org, endevver.com, etc). What's more, I use the Air Sharing iPhone app which singlehandedly renders thumb drives obsolete
- "Over the air" syncing - Since I pretty much always have my laptop with me, syncing with my iPhone is trivial.
Those of you who are into that sort of thing probably already knew about (and love) the Subversion bundle for TextMate[1]. I've been using it for ages and its truly wonderful in terms of productivity and seamless integration. However, the one thing that always bothered me is that there are some times when I just want to check the Subversion status of a particular directory or perhaps check in a single file without opening up the whole thing in TextMate. Usually, I switch to iTerm, and "svn stat PATH" (or whatever) right from there.
But no more...
I just now found out that PathFinder (which is also one of those "change the way you work" apps that I use and love) has SVN integration built right in! All you have to do is navigate to a directory that is under svn control, hit Control-Command-S and voilá!
Holy CRAP that's awesome... One less reason to go to Terminal and, it seems, to develop a Subversion GUI client for the Mac...
[1] - If you do development on Mac OS X and aren't already using either TextMate or Subversion or both, get thee to Google now. It will change the way you work permanently and for the better.
From Jason and Merlin, three links with great pertinence to all of us:
- Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
- Convincing Management That Context Switching Is a Bad Idea
- 43f Podcast: David Allen on interruptions
In the last 10 years or so, this theme has dominated my life and it has been a rare luxury when I get to spend more than 20 uninterrupted minutes focused on a single thing, outside of sleeping, of course. I wonder what that's doing to my brain...
And this entry has led to the infrequent changing of the blog banner. Huzzah!
Windoze users, you can move along. Nothing to see here...
For those of you Mac-heads using Safari as your default browser (which, sadly at this time is not fully supported here), you may find it onerous to always open Firefox before going to the Comet posting screen. Using a little Applescript makes the whole thing much easier.
I would attach it, but I haven't yet figured out how to upload anything other than photos, books, music and movies (clearly, I need to read the help section :-).
Luckily, it's pretty darn simple:
property target_URL : "http://www.notcomet.com/compose"
tell application "Firefox"
activate
Get URL target_URL
end tell
Open "/Applications/Script Editor", copy and paste that in and save it (as run-only if you like). Then, you can either keep that in a handy place (desktop? F11 for Expose?) or, if you're a real power user, activate that with a Quicksilver trigger. Yeah, baby!
