Aint that special

I was quick to complain about the iPhones lack of note syncing. I’m still hopeful that Apple will come through with a patch to implement it.

In the meantime I think I have pretty good work around. If you don’t have an IMAP email account (like .Mac) then you can skip this post.

When I want to make a note, I just create a draft email. I leave the recipient address blank but add a subject title. I can then type away (I’m writing this post using the method now). When I’m done I hit “Cancel” and the iPhone asks if I want to save the draft. Once it is saved, the iPhone syncs the drafts with my IMAP email account which syncs with all of my computers. Now I have my mobile notes anywhere. It’s a lot like just sending yourself an email message, but I find that it is less messy since I don’t have to sift through my entire inbox to find my notes.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhoto, Organization, Productivity, Tip, Trick, Web

I tend to listen to Podcasts (one of the best is MacBreak Weekly) while I work. But when my wife starts talking to me from the other room, I have to stop what I’m doing to navigate to iTunes just to click Pause. It finally reached a level of annoyance that made me fired up Script Editor and throw together a little script to do it for me. This is just about as simple an Apple Script as you can get:

tell application “iTunes”

playpause

end tell

Now, just save it as an application and bind it to some key you’re not using. I used one of the buttons on my Wacom Tablet. One key press and the podcast will either pause or play depending upon its current state.

It’s so great that Apple included a little hook for the Pause/Play function. This is yet another great feature of OSX. If something’s missing that you really want it to do, chances are that a short Apple Script or Automator Action can remedy the situation.

I think this little trick will hold me over until that new keyboard sees the light of day.

Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleScript, Mac, Programming, iTunes, Tip

The quickest way to reduce office clutter is to get rid of paper. The stuff spreads onto every available flat surface and into every open container in the office. New paper is delivered to my house everyday by the mailman whether I want it or not. Even if you opt-out of junk mail, you are still going to get credit card offers from companies that you have a business relationship with. There’s almost no way to stop your own bank from sending these “exclusive offers” to you every day.

What you need is a trusted routine. Mine is to Scan and Shred. Here’s what works for me: everyday when I get home I collect all of the mail, fliers, advertisements and papers into a large box near the entry to my office (which for me is at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor). When I head up to the office, I take the pile with me. I’ve got a great scanner and a small shredder and almost no paper clutter.

The scanner I use is a Fujitsu Scansnap . They make several models, but if you use a Mac then you need to get the Mac model (S500M). This is the real work horse of my routine. The Scansnap converts 36 pages per minute into PDF files. That’s right, I said 36 pages per minute (about one per second). Technically it can scan 18 double sided sheets per minute. Another time saver with the model is that you can set it up to really skip any user interaction. With a press of the scan button a stack of sheets are quickly scanned and PDF files are saved directly to a pre-defined location. Personally I scan the files into Preview so that I can save them with a descriptive file name and practical tags. Here is a typical work flow:

1. Open all of my utility bills.
2. load them all into the Scansnap (even thought they are different sizes)
3. hit the scan button.
4. open more mail for another 30 seconds while the documents are scanned.
5. Do a “Save as” for each open file in Preview while adding tags with Default Folder X (I’ll talk about this at some later time)
6. Shred all of the paper immediately.

I shred immediately for two reasons. The first is that I don’t have to worry about the can collectors that throw my garbage all over the street. My neighbor recently found all of his old mail in a shopping cart behind the local gas station. I’m sure there was more than enough personal info in that pile to cause him some concern.

The second reason to shred immediately is for the commitment. Once it is in the shredder it will never come back out to be filed in a shoe-box or stacked on a desk. It’s gone and life goes on. I tried to separate the scan action from the discard action, but I just ended up creating new piles next to my computer.

I really can not say enough about the Scansnap. Before dropping the rather sizable chunk of cash on the S500M, I had an HP all-in-one. It was passable, but from start to finish, a single scan took me about 7 minutes. That’s ONE side of ONE sheet. It made me feel like Sisyphys. I scan virtually anything that is worth keeping, but here is what I don’t shred:

1. Car registration (you should keep it in your car)
2. Legal documents (obvious)
3. Receipts for large purchase items (needed for rebates, service and resale)
4. Original packing slips for purchases over $100 (needed for many rebates and returns)
5. Manuals that I can not immediately download (I’ll talk about this next)

I haven’t reached Nirvana yet, but I am certainly on my way out of Purgatory (wow, mixed religious metaphors).

Technorati Tags: Organization, Productivity, Tip

In pursuit of perfect harmony in my home office, I’ve undertaken the GTD (Getting Things Done by David Allen) process coupled with reducing clutter. This post is about the clutter.

Clutter is a funny kind of affliction. You don’t seem to notice it until you are way in over your head. During the past 4 years I have moved three times. Each time I tried to rid myself of piles of clutter. But 4 years later I looked around and found that it had multiplied many times over. I’ve recently identified the root cause. If you create storage for anything, you are allowing it to become part of your family. It sets up house and begins breeding other non-essential clutter.

Maybe it is a natural response to the excesses of the 80’s and 90’s but it’s now trending to down-size your life. You can find user groups and blog posts all over the Internet. This is another one. The next few posts will all be related to streamlining your life and work environment. More specifically, how Apple fits with this philosophy. This blog is about all things Mac, so of course any implementation of GTD or streamlining will involve the Apple Mac.

Technorati Tags: Organization, Productivity, GTD

If you’ve been following along with this blog, then you know I love Apple’s Aperture application. I upgraded from iPhoto shortly after I started using my first DSLR camera (the Nikon D80). Aperture is pretty straight forward to use. It’s elegant and intuiative, but there are many different workflow options when managing a large photo library. I started by reading through the Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5 (Apple Pro Training) which is a wonderful reference. It has some gorgeous color images on every single page. Detailed descriptions of the various tools and nice step by step instructions. It is well worth the price for both beginning and intermediate amateur photographers. It even comes with a DVD that contains all the images for the lessons and examples shown throughout the book.

After working with this book for a couple of months I was really working more efficiently in Aperture and taking advantage of some very cool features. But I still felt like I was missing out on some features that the professionals over at Inside Aperture took for granted. After some Google searching I came across Aperture 1.5 Beyond the Basics and bought it off Amazon. It was kind of pricey but I knew Derrick Story and Scott Bourne would not do a bad job. I regularly listen to the iLifeZone podcast and it is usually chock full of good tips. I was not wrong. The DVD is essentially a stand alone application with a simple user interface. You can watch an entire chapter at once, or just a single lesson. The video quality is very high and professionally produced as well. The best feature is that the material is completely un-biased. It is not certified or sponsored by Apple in any way, so you get the truth about what works and what does not. Click on a topic in the list shown and a video pops open and starts playing. You are even given the option to run in windowed or full screen mode. This publisher really gets it.

The training DVD helped so much, that I went over to Lynda.com (the publisher) to check out some of their other training products. WOW!! They have a lot of great stuff. On-line training videos as well as “ship to your home” DVD training is available through the site. They already have an Adobe CS3 training package available.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, iPhoto, Mac, Nikon, Photography, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip

Yes, the Finder could be better. I think many of us are hoping that the next OS release brings tabbed finder views and a simple way to deal with moving and viewing files. But until that day comes, there is Pathfinder by Cocoatech (PF4). It’s been touted on 43Folders a couple of times, here and here. Cocoatech have produced a quality product that feels right at home on my desktop. It takes some practice to get used to it though, so I’ll outline some cool features here.

The dropstack is a temporary holding place for files. Think of it as a more useful and forgiving command-select. You just drop files in the square and it keeps track of all of them. Then when you are ready to manipulate the files, you can easily grab each or all of them. YOu can even ctrl-click the stack to compress, burn, or email the lot. I use this for organizing my directories. I just browse through a bunch of folders throwing misplaced files in the dropstack. When I’m ready I just switch to the folder I want them in and unload them all.

There are a huge number of options when working with files. The contextual menu for a single file allows you to do almost anything with it. Pathfinder not only gives you the option to copy the path of a file but it gives you the option of copying the UNIX, HFS, Terminal, URL, or name as a path. Honestly, it’s more than I have use for, but I’m sure some uber power user out there would love this feature.

As far as file paths go, PF4 has multiple optional drawer that you can setup to display the curent file path. As shown below, I also like to keep a folder histroy displayed so I don’t have to keep back tracking to folders that I use regularly. You know, those folders that are good enough for favorites, but you might make a desktop alias to.

The last feature I want to mention is the optional Running Processes tab. It’s kind of like having a mini-dock attached to the window. You can kill a process, switch to an application or bring up a contextual menu with loads more options, such as launching another instance of the application as root.

These are the kind of features that only a dedicated and Apple Fanboy would think about including. I bet the developers at Cocoatech all love their macs and started making great software that they wanted to use. I, for one, am grateful that the mac community is made by companies like Cocoatech

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip, Trick

Today I had the need to print out a calendar for my wife. She needed a blank printout to write a schedule to hang on her wall. My first thought was “I think there is a template in Apple’s iWork Pages that could do this.” Well, that was a poor assumption. No such luck. I went to the iWork community site to find a template but nothing was really useful.

Then it hit me! I have iCal. Right there under the file menu I chose print, fully expecting to just get a bland printout of my current view. That’s not the Apple way though. You get a nice print preview and preference panel that allows some great print options. You can select the number of months to print, along with which calendar events to include. Black and white or color? No problem. Even mini-months are included. This is a wonderful surprise built right into iCal.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Software, Tip, Trick

Thanks to Apple’s aggressive release cycle, many Mac owners have a couple of different machines sitting at home. My particular setup is a Mac Pro in the study and an older 17″ Powerbook in the living room. You would think that this would be ideal. I have a powerful workstation for Aperture and a nice portable for couch surfing. But, eventually you realize that there is a fly in the ointment. Many items only exist on one machine or the other. Apple’s “Sync” utility does work great with a dot mac account. But their Backup application just doesn’t work very well. Sure, all of my bookmarks, contacts, and keychains are all in sync between the two machines, but it just doesn’t handle large data backups very well. Today I was just thinking, “wouldn’t it be great if I could do the same with all of my other documents?” Then I suddenly realized I own the must have application Chronosync by Econ technologies. This application is one of those little gems that just works well.

What it does

It can synchronize two directions, archive deleted files, and even email a log file to you when it’s all done. I’ve been using it for about a year now for nightly backups to an external drive and it works great. As the name implies, Chronosync has a built in scheduler that will run any script at a predetermined time. It only syncs files that have been modified, so it saves time and drive space.

How to do it

Here’s a brief breakdown of how to setup Chronosync to keep two machines up to date. There are some particular caveats that I will emphasize to keep from screwing up either machine.

Mount the remote machine (in this case it is my laptop). The first time you run the script, choose “Left to Right” sync. I am starting with the idea that my desktop has all of the master documents and I want to do an initial sync to replicate everything to my laptop. After the intial sync, you’ll want to setup two way syncing to keep both machines identical. The instructions that follow will outline bidirectional syncing since it is slightly more complicated.

I find it easier to use a series of Chronosync scripts to sync specific items rather than just doing a sync of the two home folders. While my Mac Pro has 750GB of drive space, my poor Powerbook only has 120GB (upgraded myself). I don’t want to run out of space on my portable. Also, the iPhoto and iTunes libraries are handled very sepcifically. I only sync those one way (from the desktop to the laptop). Make sure to read the Macworld article about using multiple libraries.

I create a new Chronosync script and set the left source as my “documents” folder on  my desktop and the right source as the documents folder on my laptop. Now choose “options” so that Chronosync can auto-mount the remote machine when it is time for the scheduled backup to occur.

Choose bidirectional sync and check the “Synchronize Deletions” box. I save deletions to an archive which I will go through and remove periodically. This is a nice safe guard to prevent accidental deletions on both machines.

We’re going to be pretty general with the sync triggers. If any of these attributes are different between two files, Chronosync will copy the new version. See the image below for the specific settings I use

Chronosync has many individual settings for each sync. I will just briefly outline my settings in the images below. In Error handling, I set “Ignore extended attributes and access control errors.”

Setup the email notification so that any errors are identified.

I don’t bother with the rule based sync because I want to capture all changed files.

That’s it

Just go try Chronosync. It’s a great application that gets the job done. It has just enough complexity to solve most archival needs but not so much that it is impossible to get anything done.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Productivity, Review, Security, Software

Here’s a quick Automator script to pull all of the image links in the frontmost Safari window into iPhoto. I use this when I stumble across a web page with great photos I want to add to my gallery.

Notice that what this script does is download to the desktop and then import to iPhoto. After completion, it deletes the originals from the desktop. This way I am sure to get the full resolution images rather than the lower resolution web thumb nails

Technorati Tags: Apple, Automator, iPhoto, Mac, Productivity, Programming, Tip, Trick

I love the system utility Onyx. I’ve tried most of the others, including MacJanitor and Cocktail, but Onyx has always done a good job and has a great feel to it. Now I’m aware that most of them are simply running a series of unix maintenance commands to repair permissions, clear cache files and update catalogs. But I still find them easier to use than the Unix commands.

I am now an Applejack user. What is Applejack? Well, it’s the uber disk repair script. While it does require a restart into Single user mode, it repairs way more than just the permissions. Too much to list here, but check out the link I provided. One of the big features is repairing bad bits on a drive. If you feel like your mac has been crashing more often than it should, the disk could be corrupted. Applejack will take care of that. It also cleans up virtual memory catalog structures.

Be careful though, Single user mode is quite powerful. I would recommend reading up on it before you try it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip

Simplicity is the Apple way. Sometimes that comes with a shorter feature list. Apple’s Mail is a good example. Even your grandmother could use it with little or no help, but that is partly because it has so few features. Just try to get granny to have a go around with MS Entourage. Luckily, there are more than a few Mail users out there that have cobbled together some of the most asked for features in the form of add-ons and Scripts.

There’s a nice repository of add ons for Apple Mail that catalogs some older additions and scripts as well as a more up to date list at Hawkwings that is more comprehensive.

There’s not many that I have found useful for Mail but the Google Maps plugin and GoogleFill for reverse address lookup are both handy additions for Address Book.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Applescript, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Tip

Here’s a simple use for Quicksilver. Create a new trigger with the first pane set to your music library. Set the second pane to “Search Contents” and now you can load any song while working in any application. Shouldn’t iTunes come with this feature built in?

Update:

Another way to do this is with the iTunes plugin for Quicksilver. Invoke QS and start typing “iTunes”, then right arrow in to see a list available options like browsing artists, tracks, genre etc. This is a pretty nice interface as well.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Quicksilver, Tip, Trick

If you’re not using keyboard shortcuts and tricks, you are wasting precious time that could be better spent on YouTube. Here’s a couple of my most used keyboard shortcuts for the mac.

Safari Specific shortcuts

to switch between tabs in Safari

to jump to the search field in Safari

command and ‘+’ or ‘-’ to change the size of text in Safari

General tricks

Hold down the ctrl key while scrolling the wheel/ball on your mouse to zoom your display in and out (I wish my PC had this)

to lookup a word in the built in dictionary

cmd and tab to bring up the application switcher

Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Mac, OSX, Tip, Trick

Remember back when Steve Jobs introduced us all to Spotlight. He did a demo that seemed like magic. He typed in a word and Spotlight found audio, video, photo and text documents related to that word. I was amazed and rushed to get Tiger installed on my mac. What a let down when I realize that this only works if you have tagged your files with Spotlight comments. That can be tedious to do. Normally you have to select the file, get info on it, then type in the tags and close the info box. With some basic Quicksilver skills, you can automate this process. Here is the documentation for the Tagging plugin of QS.

The only modification to this tutorial is to select some files to tag and then invoke Quicksilver. You can do this by navigating in the finder and selecting the files you want tag. Invoke Quicksilver (ctrl-space) and hit that super secret key combo cmd-g to bring them all into Quicksilver. I’m pretty sure that this is the fastest and easiest way to add Spotlight comments.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Quicksilver

A previous post showed how to use Apple’s Automator to create a workflow for taking a screenshot and sending it to iPhoto. Wouldn’t it be great if you could associate a hotkey to run this work flow? Enter Quicksilver.

First you must setup QS to catalog your Scripts folder. Go to the catalog preferences for QS and select Custom on the left side panel.

Now you can create a new Folder scanner. QS does not scan your entire hard disk as a default. Personally this can be good and bad. Speed of searching is greatly increased with a smaller catalog, but you may miss finding things that are not in the documents or application folders.

After you’ve created a new File and Folder Scanner, examine the info for this new catalog. Set the path to include ~/Library/Scripts and set the depth to infinite. Now you can access any scripts or Automator workflows that are in your script menu. While running scripts from within Quicksilver can really be a boon to your productivity, the exciting opportunity is assign Triggers within QS. Triggers are just like Quickeys (I loved it in the old OS 7-9 days) but who needs another application running when Quicksilver is such a Swiss Army Knife.

Go to the Triggers preference in QS and select Custom Triggers. And a new trigger and name it something descriptive. You’ll get the standard QS interface. Select your script or workflow in the first pane and “Execute Workflow” in the second. Save the trigger.

Get info on this new trigger. Edit the Hot Key setting. I’ve chosen something easy to use and remember (and that doesn’t conflict with any other Hot Key). What’s even nicer is that QS allows you to choose which application have access to this new Hot key trigger. This is convenient if an application already uses that particular key combination or if you only want the shortcut available under certain circumstances.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Automator, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Quicksilver, Software

I use a lot of Applescript when I use my Mac. I’ve learned quite a bit about the language over the years. Needless to say that it makes me a little snobby about using Automator. For the most part, I hate automator because it is so limited. What it has is pretty much all you get to do. However, once in awhile I gain an added appreciation for its simplicity. Here is an Automator “script” that takes a screenshot and then places the screen shot in my blog photos library within iPhoto. I’m sure if I worked long enough I could have come up with an Applescript to do it, but Automator allowed me to do it in about 10 seconds of work. Here it is (and yes, I used this automator “script” to take the screenshot)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Programming, Automator, Software