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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

productivity

Non-linear Scheduling

Muji Chronotebook Non-linear Day Planner
Photo from the Muji Web site

LifeHacker points to the yet-to-be-released Muji Chronotebook Non-linear Day Planner, which provides an interesting way to plan your day. Gone are the normal grids and standard sequence of hours and dates. They have been replaced by pages that display “time on an axis, like an analog clock.” One page is dedicated to the morning and the other to the evening. So you add your events to the AM or PM page, writing your “plans like spokes on a bicycle wheel.”

I don’t think it would work for me (I’m not a heavy user of day planners anyway), but I really love that they are forging a different solution to the problem of planning one’s schedule.

Sandy Twitters

Sweet, I Want Sandy, which I’ve covered previously supports interactions via Twitter! This makes it even easier to quickly capture something that should be remembered later. While the supported options are a subset of Sandy’s full capabilities, all of the major needs are covered. Plus, they’ve spent some brain cycles thinking about how to make the process as easy as possible, including a single letter Twitter name (‘s’) and short hand for common commands like remind/remember (‘r’), lookup (‘l’) and update (‘u’).

Damn, the folks at Values of n just keep rolling out cool ideas!

I Want Sandy

I’ve used e-mail as a pseudo-reminder service for about as long as I’ve had an electronic address.; sending myself a quick note is efficient and highly effective for remembering to bring something into the office the next day or reminding myself about an event. But this system isn’t very effective for racking ideas and appointments that are more than a day out, as the messages get lost amidst their neighbors in my inbox. Calendar systems are great, but I don’t tend to use them as my schedule isn’t chock-full of events, and they aren’t suited to capturing non-event informatio. My GTD app of choice is great for keeping track of project tasks, but I don’t use it for time-based reminders, and it doesn’t run on my work PC (this may change with the release of the Web-based version).

So, I have several useful apps and processes, but none of them makes it easy for me to remember events, ideas or keep track of miscellaneous bits of data.

I Want Sandy IllustrationEnter Sandy, my new “personal email assistant”. Whether I e-mail her directly (via an unique address), or CC her on a reply to someone else, she captures the vital information and makes it easy to find when I need it, whether it’s an appointment reminder, contact information, to-do items or a random bit of info.

The E-mail I Send to Sandy

Building atop my ingrained habits of sending messages to myself, Sandy takes my e-mails, transforming them into To Do lists, appointments (which are easily imported into my calendar) and timely reminders. for example, here’s a message I sent to Sandy the other night:

Remember to check ATC Support message on Thursday at 8am
Remind me to get off the computer in 30 minutes

This message contains two tasks. The first is to remind me to check up on a support message that I left on behalf of a client earlier. I’ll receive the e-mail on Thursday at 8 in the morning. The second is set for half an hour from when I sent the message telling me to log off and go do other things.

Sandy’s Got it Covered

Like every good communicator, Sandy makes sure she’s got everything down, sending a confirmation, with links to each entry she has added (the URLs won’t work for you – just me):

Hello, alex!

I scheduled these:

#1 Thu, 10/25 8:00am Check ATC Support message
– email reminder at 7:45am
– http://iwantsandy.com/100177

#2 Wed, 10/24/2007 9:23pm Get off the computer
– email reminder at 9:23pm
– http://iwantsandy.com/100178

Yours truly,

Sandy

Sandy’s Nudges Me

At the appointed time, Sandy drops me a line via e-mail or a message to my phone. Simple, friendly and effective. Plus you can subscribe to the calendar if you want to include the events in Apple’s iCal or Google Calendar. Here is the e-mail reminder she sent me:

Hola, alex!

Psssst! Here’s your reminder:

————————————————-
#1 8:00am Check ATC Support message
– email reminder at 7:45am
– http://iwantsandy.com/100177
————————————————-

To snooze this reminder until you get home, reply with: remind me this evening

Best,

Sandy

That’s pretty damn cool. Sandy’s deep – after learning about her advanced skills, I realized this is a concept that should have been delivered a very long time ago – it’s that obvious. That isn’t to say Sandy is simple, quite the opposite. Creating a system that is easy for a human to interact with via text without jumping through hoops is actually rather complex, even with a paired down set of commands. The folks at values of n did an amazing job recognizing this need and delivering a beautiful experience.

A Reminder – QuickSilver Style

So, I ran across a little QuickSilver tip which may be old news for the QS power users, but was new to me: QuickSilver is a a great timer for reminders. So, say you need to call someone in 30 minutes, but you don’t want to have to keep monitoring the clock as you are working on a project, writing e-mails etc. You could use a dashboard widget, or a kitchen timer, but why not use QuickSilver? It’s pretty damned easy:

  1. Open QuickSilver (cmd-space) and type a period (.) to open the QS text box
  2. Type your message (Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation) and hit the tab key to move to the commands pane
  3. The first option is to display as large text, make sure its highlighted and hit ctrl-enterto save that command to be used in conjunction with the next command:
  4. Choose ‘Run after Delay’ or ‘Run at Time’
  5. To have your message appear on screen in half an hour, type ’30m’ (30 minutes) in the box and hit enter.

It take about five seconds to do, and in half an hour, you’ll see a large box reminding you to “Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation”. Give it a shot, it’s a very useful feature! You can of course use other time options, seconds, hours etc.

Thanks to David Hayes for publishing the tip on his site, where I stumbled across it.

My OS X Software Setup

It’s been about 13 months since I detailed various OS X apps and software packages that had caught my eye as I transitioned from Windows to OS X, so I believe it is time to review that list and expand upon it. I would definitely appreciate your recommendations of other applications to check out , and am also more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

I will add detail where I can, with the goal of publishing this post quickly and expanding upon it over time. I may make this a series if it grows long and/or detailed enough to warrant it.

Pre-installed / Part of OS X

Every Mac comes pre-installed with some amazing software, and I highly encourage you to check it out. Here are some of those apps that I use regularly.

Mail.app

MAil is surprisingly powerful as I noted when I made the switch from Thunderbird. I haven’t looked back since.
Cost: Free

iTunes

Simply the best music player on any platform. If you haven’t played with Smart Playlists you are missing out on one of the most important features.
Cost: Free

iCal

The built in calendar application is as simple or feature-rich as you want it to be. It interacts with the address book and many applications.
Cost: Free

The Keychain & Keychain Access

There is no need for a separate password manager as you can easily tap into the one that the system uses. Even better, you can secure other sensitive data such as credit card numbers, PINs or important notes.Check out this great walk-through to see the power of the Keychain. The important thing is to set up separate keychains with unique passwords to ensure that logging in, which will unlock the system keychain, doesn’t unlock the keychain you use to store other sensitive data. Using separate passwords will also ensure that if someone manages to get access to your machine in a logged-in state, or learns of your password, they are unable to get to other sensitive information.
Cost: Free

Address Book

The address Book is an unsung hero of the OS, as it unifies all of your contact information across applications, ensuring they all have and use the same data. It also ensures that your contacts are searchable.
Cost: Free

iChat

I don’t use iChat too often, preferring Adium’s capabilities for day-to-day instant messaging, but every so often its great to kick start a video chat with someone. IT is super-simple to initiate and works surprisingly well. This must be a wonderful tool for independents and small firms that do not have a single office.
Cost: Free

The Console

The console is an invaluable tool for developers of all stripes, and for the power user trying to track down a system problem. It can be found in the Utilities directory within the Applications folder.
Cost: Free

Boot Camp

This is solely for Intel-based Macs. Boot Camp lets you boot straight into Windows. Beautiful! That said, I’ve opted to erase the Boot Camp Windows partition, preferring to use Parallels, which runs within OS X. As I don’t need to run any powerful Windows-only apps, and I don’t run any Windows games, I found that I just wasn’t using the functionality.

General

Quicksilver

This is a must-have for anyone doing more than checking e-mail and browsing the Web. Quicksilver make it simple and fast to search for anything on your system and then do something with it, or to it. For example, I can keep things as simple as typing the letter ‘m’, which pulls up a quick search of anything on my drive with that letter in it (don’t worry, Quicksilver is smart, and prioritizes the list), which brings up Mail.app as the first result. I simply hit enter and my e-mail program is launched. Two seconds and done, without having to move my hands to the mouse. For a more interesting example, I can type a period, which brings up a text box in which I write a note. I can then hit the tab key to decide what I want to do – I can have the system automatically create a text document with the note, send it to my To Do list application, or display it on screen in a large font, so I can see it across the room. I can also use it to look up contact info without opening the Address Book. This really should be built into OS X.

Cost: Free

The Optimized Build of Firefox, a.k.a. Bon Echo

Cost: Free

Growl

This is another great utility that should be built into OS X. Growl isn’t actually used directly, instead it provides a platform for “applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you’re already in.” It allows you as the user to customize the presentation and ensures the notices are consistent across all applications. Examples of usage are download notifications from Firefox and FTP clients, Twitter update notices and information about the song that just started playing in iTunes.
Cost: Free

Witch

Witch provides a granular alternative to the CMD-Tab combination of application switching, making it easier to shift to different windows within the same app or access minimized windows. It has other window-manipulation abilities too, though I haven’t tested them as of yet.
Cost: Free

Actiontastic

While I have read Getting Things Done, I haven’t gotten into the whole GTD habits as deeply as so many others, but I have picked up some tips that make life a lot easier. I now follow the core practices for my basic project management and to-do lists and lucked out when I found Actionatastic, a great GTD app that works well for me and works seamlessly with QuickSilver and iCal. This will be even cooler when actionatr debuts, providing the capability to modify the tasks on-line and synced up with Actiontastic.
Cost: Free

iTerm

I like iTerm over the built in Terminal as it has a tabbed interface which is invaluable in Web Development.
Cost: Free

Parallels Desktop

Parallels is simply amazing, and with each new release impresses me even further. Not only can you run another operating system (or multiple) within a window of OS X, you can eliminate the window altogether, eliminating the separation. This is great when I’m debugging a problem between browsers, as I can run copies of IE 6 and IE 7 right next to Safari and Firefox for OS X. For those folks in an environment that requires Windows-only apps, it is a perfect compromise.
Cost: $80

Adium

The best instant messaging client on any platform. I really wish it was available on Windows as I would drop Trillian for it in a second.
Cost: Free

NetNewsWire

NNW is a great RSS reader, though I tend to use the Web version far more than the desktop version as I can access it from anywhere. Luckily, the purchase of NetNewsWire guaranteed that the two are synced up.
Cost: $30

Twitterific

For those who use Twitter, this little app makes life much easier. With its integrated Growl support and ability to set the time between updates, you can see what your friends are up to whenever they post an update.
Cost: Free

iBackup

What a great backup application! I use it to run regular backups of my system. It allows me to choose what I want backed up, and it only copies files and directories that have been modified since the last backup. I’ve set up two tasks – the normal backup that ensures I always have a copy of my files on an external drive, and a rolling archive that takes a copy of the backup and creates a snapshot, allowing me to keep older versions of files around.
Cost: Free

PandoraBoy

As I discussed on my post Pandora on My Box, this is a great little app that brings the joy of Pandora out of the browser, encapsulating it in a small app.

Web Development & Design

TextMate

A powerful text and code editor that continues to reveal more features and capabilities as I use it. as their site puts it, “TextMate is not an IDE but by using its powerful snippets, macros, and unique scoping system, it can often provide features that even a language specific IDE lacks. It has enough project management features to keep most users happy, but is otherwise kept lightweight with a clean and minimalistic GUI.” Depending on how you like to work, TextMate may not be your cup of tea – it is purely a text editor, do not expect the ability to drag pictures around or resize DIV with your mouse. If you prefer a more visual interface, check out Panic’s Coda, which recently debuted and looks amazing.
Cost:

Headdress

Headdress makes it simple to work with virtual hosts on your Mac, which is invaluable when you are developing sites locally prior to pushing them to production. With Headdress you do not need to worry about file paths changing when you upload, as each site is treated separately, accessible through separate URLs (using port numbers). I used the demo version of Headdress for quite a while as I was only working on two sites at the time. Then I started to dig into other code branches and realized that the convenience that the app brings to my life was well worth the small amount of cash, so I bought it. Not only is this a great app, the guys at Twinsparc are genuinely good folks.
Cost: Free for two sites, $15 for unlimited

MAMP

MAMP is a handy package that allows you to effortlessly install Apache, Mysql and PHP on your Mac and start the servers with just a click of a button. It doesn’t screw with the built-in functionality that ships with OS X. This is an indispensable tool for PHP Web Development.
Cost: Free

Locomotive

Locomotive provides a super-simple way to install a Ruby on Rails development environment. It eliminated a lot of stress I experienced compared to the first time I set up RoR on my box and had to resolve all of the configuration hoo-hah. If you are interested in Ruby on Rails, download this app, it will make life much much much easier.
Cost: Free

Adobe Creative Suite

I currently run CS2, though I beta tested Photoshop CS 3 and was blown away by its performance on my MacBook Pro (the CS2 apps were never compiled for the Intel-based Macs, so they run slower than they should). The new palette system was a major step up for those of us on laptops.
Cost: Ranges depending on the apps/package you choose

Yummy FTP

I tried out a bunch of FTP apps early on, and as I wrote in my post about Yummy FTP, the app is “fast and has a wealth of features, including FTP Aliases with Autorouting to make it easy to upload files without opening a connection to the server and then navigating to the proper location. Sweet! The smooth integration with other apps (like TextMate for remote editing) and the command line are just a couple of other features worth the price. Yet, even with all of the functionality it packs, Yummy FTP feels good to use – unlike so many apps from my Windows past.”
Cost: $25

The Console

Yes, this is a repeat, but I want to ensure you see it if you’re a developer. The Console provides a handy way to keep an eye on your log files as you are writing/debugging server-side code. It works with all of the different log files you may deal with (Ruby on Rails, PHP, Apache etc.) I open it automatically when I start working on PHP or Ruby code.
Cost: Free

Subversion

I use Subversion for version control in my local development environment, and it has saved my butt a couple of times already!
Cost: Free

svnX

I use svnX to interact with Subversion instead of relying on the command line.
Cost: Free

FontExplorer X

This free font manager from the fine folks at Linotype, is much more powerful than the built-in FontBook and unlike the expensive font packages (hello Extensis), hasn’t given Sarah, nor I any problems.
Cost: Free

CocoaMySQL

A great MySQL database manager.
Cost: Free

Widgets

It took me a while to discover the usefulness of Apple’s Dashboard and the widgets it contains, but once I found a few of the truly useful little apps I was hooked. They stay out of the way but are available at a key-press. Please note, these are not all of the widgets that I’ve installed, just the ones I find useful. Also, I do not run most of these all of the time as each Widget takes up a bit of processing power, so I’ve indicated my “always on” widgets by making them bold.

  • Airport Radar is a “free and convenient tool for quickly scanning the area for AirPort and other wireless networks.”
  • App Update automatically checks for “updates to your installed software. It supports Apple’s software directory, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. It will present you with a tidy link list of all the updates found, enabling you to read release-notes and download the the updates quickly and painlessly.”
  • Calculator
  • Calendaer
  • Capture is a great tool for snapping screen shots.
  • ColorBurn displays “a new color palette every day, along with the hexadecimal color values for web designers and developers.”
  • ColourMod is a handy color chooser, which works with and convert between Hex, RGB, CMYK, and HSV values.
  • Corporate Ipsum “is a Lorem Ipsum generator Peter Gibbons might use in a TPS Report…if he were a graphic designer and had a need for a Lorem Ipsum generator.”
  • CSS Tweak provides “CSS optimization with the drop of a file.”
  • Dashalytics “offers quick access to Google Analytics statistics.”
  • Dashflix / Dashflix Mini provide a view into your Netflix queue – the only difference is the size of the widget.
  • Delivery Status provides an “all-in-one delivery tracker”for those of us who can’t wait for oru packages to arrive. “The status will update automatically for you, and even count down the days! It also works with Growl to give you pop-up message, email notifications, and more, whenever your package status changes.””
  • Dine-O-Matic is a “fun Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that randomly selects a place to eat out when you just can’t make up your mind.”
  • Gamer Card let’s you see “your XBOX Live Gamer Card”
  • Gas “delivers information from GasPriceWatch.com in order to provide you with the most up to date gas prices available.”
  • Image Shackle
  • iStat Pro is “the ultimate system monitoring widget, consisting of nine sections which can be shown or hidden.”
  • Kuler displays “color themes from kuler (kuler.adobe.com), an online application where members explore, create, and share color harmonies.”
  • MAMP Control makes it easy to “start and stop the Apache and MySQL server provided with MAMP. Also you can switch the PHP versions”
  • Minutes is a “countdown timer widget featuring simple interface, polished graphics and many functionalities”, including iTunes integration
  • Photo Drop let’s you “[d]rop or paste a photo, resize & trim it, and export to another application or widget directly by mouse dragging with outstanding 8 effects. You can also take a screenshot of windows behind Photo Drop (excluding your scattered desktop).”‘
  • SeeSS “is a quick and handy reference sheet for 140 CSS (1, 2 & 3) properties (proprietary extensions are not included). Each property includes information on its inheritance, CSS compliancy, Safari support, all values (including defaults), some examples and an extensive description.”
  • Stop Dashboard “allows you to stop the Dashboard. All running widgets will be removed from memory. Re-enable the Dashboard via F12.”
  • Symbol Caddy keeps “HTML entity codes at your fingertips. Just click the symbol to have the HTML code copied to your clipboard.”
  • Type Cast “allows you to quickly move through font families, styles and sizes using only your keyboard. In addition, Type Cast offers helpful information such as font type, family and can even reveal font files in the Finder.”
  • Unit Converter
  • Weather
  • Web Monitor “[m]onitors your servers or any other web site. The widget checks the response time periodically with a HTTP HEAD request ” I discovered this as I was writing this post, so I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks very useful!’

Apps that I Don’t Use, But Have Good Reputations

There are so many applications out there that it is hard to try every one that I hear about, plus there are certain apps that that app grabs you and there isn’t a desire to check out the others. So, here is a list of software that I’ve heard good things about, but do not have personal experience with, or that I have tried but opted for a different package (you’ll see some great freeware apps in here that I ultimately passed up for an application that I paid for). Give ’em a shot if you have a chance.

  • Fugu – FTP utility [Free]
  • Cyberduck – FTP utility [Free]
  • Coda – Web development package [$]
  • Open Office – A multi-platform, open source office suite. [Free]
  • Delicious Library – This program harnesses a Web cam (in this case, the built-in iSight) as a barcode scanner. Simply point the camera “at the barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item’s cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.” I’ve wanted to play with this for quite a long time! [$]
  • VirtueDesktops – virtual desktop manager. [Free]

Handy Tips and Hacks for Working in OS X

Here is a list of good things to know in order to improve your workflow and/or enjoyment of the world o’ Mac.

Web Sites

Important Note

All prices listed are accurate at the time of writing, so don’t be surprised if they’re different by the time you hit their sites.