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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
