Monthly Archives: February 2009

Please hold…

“Don’t post unless you add more value than the attention you consume”
– Tim Ferris in How to use Twitter …

I’m back in Wellington after spending most of February overseas.

I took the opportunity while I was away to neglect my inbox, which was great, but I have some catching up to do.

I will get back to writing again shortly.  That is, as soon as I think I can satisfy the rule above, which I think is excellent advice.

For now, this cartoon from Jessica Hagy:

Puttering can get old.

Btw, does it still count as a holiday when you don’t have a job?

Previous posts with cartoons by Jessica:

OSX for Windows Refugees

Macbook in Trash

If you’re a Windows refugee and Santa bought you a new MacBook or iMac, then you might be feeling a bit duped by now.

When I first switched to using a Mac I really struggled for the first month or so. Prior to that I’d been a Windows user for getting onto 10 years (gulp!) and during that time had become a power user. Now all of a sudden I felt like I had been dropped blindfolded into an unfamiliar place without a map.

Watching somebody who is not a confident computer user playing with OSX for the first time is amazing. Things work, everything is where they expect and nothing gets in the way.  They land on their feet.

But, for somebody who is an experienced Windows user, it can be a little intimidating and frustrating. There is a dip to go through, and you have a lot of old habits to break, but once you come out the other side it’s a beautiful place. :-)

I thought I’d share some of the things that helped me …

Keyboard Shortcuts

I eventually realised one of the main reasons for my frustration: none of my keyboard shortcuts worked any more … not even Alt-F4 to close applications … so I was forced to use the mouse a lot more than I was used to.

As Phil pointed out, in this situation you really need a fanboy to show you “all the secret five fingered key commands, hidden settings and special software that makes working with a Mac tolerable”

Your chief weapons are fear and surprise … and the “command” key (this is the key with the Apple logo either side of the space bar).

These three shortcuts work in pretty much all applications:
  • Command-Q = Quit the current application
  • Command-W = Close the current window
  • Command-` = Toggle between windows within the current application
    You’ll find the “`” key next to the “1″ key in the top-left of the keyboard
This last one is especially useful if you use Mail.app for your email.
Some others that are specific to mail:
  • Command-N = Create a new message
  • Command-Shift-N = Get new mail
  • Command-Shift-D = Send current message
  • Command-Option-F = Search (very handy – see below)

Here are a couple of other keyboard shortcuts that I’ve stumbled upon since then, which (as far as I can tell) are not widely known. The first two apply to text fields within all Cocoa applications:

  1. Escape or Shift-F5 to display an auto-complete spell checker (from Dave5).
  2. Option-F8 to insert a stylised bullet point – discovered completely by accident (try holding down option and typing random characters, you’ll be amazed what you can find)
  3. In Excel: Command-T to toggle a cell reference to be permanent – e.g. C8 to $C$8 – this one dove me crazy for quite a while!
  4. In Firefox: Command-L to jump to the URL and Command-K to jump to the search box – for some reason the search shortcut doesn’t seem to work in Safari?

I’m sure there must be heaps more that I haven’t found yet.

What secret keyboard shortcuts do you use all the time?

Feel free to share your discoveries in the comments below.

Applications

One of the things that continues to surprise me about OSX is the number of quality third-party apps that are available. These are usually pretty cheap, and generally really well built.

Typically they just do one simple job, but do it well.

Here is a quick list from my applications folder, roughly in order of usage:

  • Yojimbo – Simple note keeping app.
  • Things – Simple to-do list app.
  • Quicksilver – Hard to explain in one short sentence, but I’m much slower without it.
  • RescueTime – Data entry-less time monitoring.
  • TextMate – Text editor which is as powerful as you want it to be.
  • 1Password – Cross-browser password manager (also syncs to iPhone).
  • VLC – Media player which can handle more-or-less any format, including streaming audio/video.
  • Pixelmator – Photoshop-lite – nice for quickly editing photos etc.
  • VMWare Fusion – Virtual Machine, run Windows and Linux apps in OSX.
  • VectorDesigner – Simple vector design file editor (great for quick mock-ups)
  • StuffIt Expander – Zip utility.
  • Switch – Audio converter.
  • Paparazzi – Web page screen-shot taker.
  • AppFresh – Scans apps and tells you when a newer version is available.
  • Transmission – BitTorrent client.
  • Handbreak – DVD utility.
  • Scribbles – Nice-n-simple drawing app for kids.

Two others from my downloads folder that I haven’t played with myself (yet), but which come recommended by others:

I have both iWork and Microsoft Office.  I find I use Excel more than Numbers, Keynote more than PowerPoint and Pages and Word hardly at all.  I used Entourage when I was working at Xero, but thankfully no longer.

I also know others who are fans of OpenOffice, which also seems to work nicely on OSX.

fluid-apps-in-dockAlso, as I’ve mentioned previously I’m a fan of using Fluid to create site-specific browser based apps.  I currently have five Fluid apps in my dock, each with a sexy icon:

Note: If you look closely you’ll see I’ve moved my dock on the left hand side of the screen.  I figure that screen are wider than they are taller, and web pages and documents run top to bottom, so there is generally more free space on the sides than at the bottom.

Finally, if you’re into Media Center type apps, then have a play with:

What applications do you use the most?

For those who have recently switched, do you find you spend more on apps now than when you were a Windows user?

Unfortunately since my switch to OSX I’ve done very little coding, but I’d also be interested to hear what tools people use and can recommend I check out.

Your suggestions for other things I should try are welcome, as always.

UPDATE 20-Feb:

Jean from SmileOnMyMac has been in touch to let me know about their Mac Switcher Bundle, which includes two of the apps I mentioned above (1Password and TextExpander) as well as another I didn’t know about previously (Witch) which looks like it solves the window/app switching problem.

She has also kindly offered a free copy of this bundle for me to give away to a lucky reader.  I thought that I’d give it to the best comment on this post.  Just add your best tip now to be in to win!

Advanced Search

I don’t bother with an elaborate directory structure.

For my emails, I just have a single local folder, called “Keep” which contains all of the messages I choose to hold on to for whatever reason.

I’ve been using more-or-less the same approach ever since I’ve been using email (and I’m not as young now as I used to be then!) so I have a lot of emails.

I rely on search to make it all work.

The search within the default Mail app which is part of OSX is pretty good (even though my email accounts these days are all Gmail of one form or another, I still prefer to use Mail as my email client – how about you?)

As mentioned above, the Command-Option-F keyboard shortcut jumps you straight into the search field.

From there I tend to use the name of the other person and a single keyword. Generally this will quickly uncover the message I’m after.

But, where a more detailed search is required there are a couple of tricks that you might find useful …

Firstly, you can narrow search results using prefixes:

  • “email:” will search for a specific email address
  • “from:” and “to:” will search for a specific sender or recipient
  • “subject:” will search for a word in the subject field only

These work in the search built into Mail and also in Spotlight.

Similarly, within Spotlight you can use “kind:” to limit the results to a specific type of file (e.g. “mail” or “word” or “pdf”).

See: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071121105941992

Secondly, you can use the “Smart Mailboxes” feature in Mail to give you a more detailed advanced search.

Just create a new smart mailbox and call it “Advanced Search”. Then whenever you want to run a search with multiple criteria you can just double click on it and it will open up the standard filter options screen.

See: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071115193741157

Finally, unrelated to email, but nonetheless a nifty little time saving feature built into Spotlight: type an equation as a search and the top item displayed will be the result:

All good.

What other advanced search tricks do you use?

Others?

I hope that helps?  But, what else am I forgetting?

I’m interested to hear any other suggestions that long-time OSX users might have for the newly converted!

Photo Credits: Schlock, by -nathan

Two Small Email Improvements

On the surface email seems like a mature application, without any obvious ways to make it better.

At least that’s what everybody thought until Gmail came along, with a bunch of excellent innovations: threaded conversations, automated archiving and labels rather than a folder structure, etc, etc.

So, what would you do to improve email even further?

Here are two simple ideas that would make email much better for me:

1. Hide until

This would simply allow me to “hide” a selected message until some date in the future.  Then on that date the message would re-appear in my inbox.

I try and keep my inbox empty.  In practice, that means at any given time my inbox contains a handful of messages which need a response.  It would be nicer, where I’m waiting on somebody else, or need to respond, but not straight away, to be able to get that message out of the list temporarily.

This seems like it would be pretty easy to implement.

2. Auto-scan for forgotten attachments

This would scan each message when I click “send” and if the body of the message includes the words “see attached” or something similar and there is nothing attached, it would stop and confirm that I didn’t forget to actually attach the document.

If I had a dollar for each time I had to follow-up with a “doh – actually attached this time” message …

Likewise this doesn’t seem that hard (famous last words, those!)

What do you think?

Would those be useful to you too?

Perhaps they already exist?

What other little ideas do you have for improving email and some of the other tools you use everyday?

Related:

Swimming vs. Athletics [Guest Post]

This is a guest post written by my brother Brad, who has his own blog about nutrition and sport at kitchenpt.com. Enjoy!

When Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals at the Beijing Olympics he broke 7 world records.  The only event he missed out on was the 100m Butterfly – he was too slow by just 0.18 of a second and only broke the Olympic Record. To achieve all of this he had to swim 17 races in 9 days.

Compare this to Usain Bolt who ran in only 9 events (he did not run in the heats of the relay) over 8 days, winning 3 golds and breaking 3 world records in athletics.

It seems there is no competition between these athletes: Phelps is clearly superior. Or is he…?

How was Phelps able to win so many events, and more importantly overcome the cumulative fatigue that heats and semi-finals in all those events bring? Was it simply because swimming is lower impact than running, and therefore swimmers can compete in more events?

Recently an extraordinary number of swimming world records have been broken. It seems at every major competition you would be unlucky to win and not break the world record. As an example of how quickly swimming records are coming down, in one of Phelps’ events (the 4x100m), the first 6 places all broke the world record for the event (as it stood prior to the Olympics). Imagine swimming faster than anybody ever has in your event, at the Olympics, and finishing in sixth place. Sixth for goodness sake!

In Beijing there were 25 world records broken in 15 events in the pool.  And, on the track, just 5 world records broken in 5 events. So why are so many world records in swimming being broken recently?

It turns out there are lots of reasons:

Many swimmers and commentators cite the new swim wear as the primary reason. But can it all be explained by a pair of togs?

What about drugs? Why are drug cheats virtually unheard of in swimming? Can you ever name a swimmer being stripped of a medal and kicked out of any major competition in the world?

I think there are other factors at play that can at least partly explain why Phelps (and swimming in general) achieved “greater” success than athletics.

The first part is the recent evolution of the sport as we currently know it.  As an example of how far swimming had to grow, before 1936 swimmers did not use the tumble-turn between lengths nor begin races on starting blocks, and before 1976 swimmers at the Olympics participated without goggles!

It seems that athletics has evolved further earlier due to its relative simplicity. This has allowed swimming to appear to be moving forwards at a faster rate, whereas in fact the case may simply be that it had further to move.

The second reason is accessibility to pools and competition. There is no doubt track and field athletes compete against a far greater number of people who have tried their hand at their sport. Think of yourself and everyone you know: How many times would have you raced someone over the playground at school or at the beach with friends? Compare that with the number of times you have raced those same people in backstroke or butterfly.

What about the number of events? There are 47 athletics events at the Olympics, and only 34 swimming events. So on the face of it swimmers have a slight disadvantage when it comes to winning medals. However, it is the similarity of the events that gives swimmers the advantage (more on this shortly).

On top of Phelps’ undoubted phenomenal talent, it was Phelps’ versatility, and the ability of his team members, that saw him capture so many golds:

  • Three of his golds came from medley events: Individual Medley (200m and 400m), and Medley Relay;
  • Two more came from team relays: The Freestyle Relay (4x100m and 4x200m);
  • His other three golds came in individual events: Butterfly (100m and 200m) and Freestyle (200m).

Bolt’s world records by comparison came in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay. So on individual performances the score seems to be Phelps 3 vs Bolt 2.

However, between swimming and athletics there seems to be some disproportion in events.  For example, I see no logical reason why inferior methods of getting from point A to point B are included in major competitions other than:

  1. “That’s the way we have always done it”, and/or
  2. Sponsorship/TV ($$$)

Specifically backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly make as much sense as running backwards, 1-leg hopping, and racing on all fours have in athletics. And before you dismiss these “sports” as outrageous, you may be interested to know that the record for the 100m run backwards is 13.6 seconds, and for the marathon 3:43.39 – times not to be scoffed at! If I were the world record holders of these events (which I am not before you cry conspiracy theory) I would feel hard done by when there are backstrokers, breaststrokers and butterfly swimmers who are enjoying the benefits of inclusion and recognition far beyond what these “Retro-Runners” ever will.

And so, given that Bolt was not allowed to compete in the 100m backwards running, hopping, or ‘all-fours’ events we should discount Phelps’ golds in the butterfly. And this now gives us a fair comparison of achievement at the Beijing Olympics:

  • Phelps: 1 gold, 1 world record vs Bolt: 2 golds, 2 world records.

There we have it, Bolt is the better athlete.

And for those that are interested: The 4x100m Retro Running world record being broken.

 

Comments from Rowan:

In case it isn’t obvious, Brad is more of a runner than a swimmer!  

Here are some more posts from his excellent blog that I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of years:

Also, if you’re interested in writing a guest post here about something you’re interested in or working on please feel free to get in touch.  My email address is on the right hand sidebar.