Software Shout-out: Hazel

I’ve been trolling the internet again finally getting something done. I’ve posted before about GTD personal productivity book by David Allen. While investigating that I’ve come across a couple of productivity sites.

43Folders – Merlin Mann productivity tips.

Kinkless creative productivity – Ethan Schoonover

Ethan did a series of screencasts entitled “Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop” – the series describes among other things how to remove your desktop clutter. And how to improve your workflow. Some of the suggestions I’m already doing others I hadn’t thought about. Take a few moments to review the 5 steps Ethan has included a screencast describing each step. I found it well worth the time.

Here is why I’m really excited. In part 5 he mentions a piece of software Hazel. First it is a preference pane. It is easy to install. All you have to do is to double-click. Now Hazel monitors folders and then does what you tell to do. I currently have all my downloads go to a folder. Once I’ve installed the software or looked at the download I move the item to the Offloads folder. When my offloads folders gets a couple of gigabytes I offload it to a DVD disk. Now what has me excited is that now I can have Hazel do that automatically. I like to have that done behind the scenes. I can see a lot of uses for this software. At work I often just drop documents on my desktop. Well this would clean my desktop up completely. I do a lot of Filemaker Pro work and I usually drop temporary databases there while I’m working on them. This would be great to get them moved off to the file server for storage when I’m done. This software has got me excited. Take a look at it.

GTD – Getting things done

Personal Productivity – by David Allen. David Allen has created a personal productivity system. I’ve started reading his book to learn more about it. I’ve tried Stephen Covey’s productivity process and I didn’t stay with it. I’ve started to hear a buzz about GTD. There are several software pages available right now and at least one on the way. What I’ve read so far seems very do able. I’m a little excited.

One thing that I have learned about these different productivity systems is that they have to work the way you work. By that I mean the system needs to refine your style not necessarily create a whole new style. A system that refines your style of work you are more likely to stay with than a system that completely redefines how you do things.

Software Links -

Midnight Inbox

Kinkless GTD

iGTD

Update – (5-25-07) – Since I wrote this blog post I’ve started using iGTD, it is a freeware application that is simple to use and doesn’t get in the way of the GTD process. It also has a Quicksilver plug-in so that you can add items to GTD while your working in other applications.

Omnigroup is also creating a GTD application called Omnifocus. It is currently is alpha. The Omnigroup website site has a screencast demoing the application. Take a look at it. I found it helpful.

GTD – Getting things done

Personal Productivity – by David Allen. David Allen has created a personal productivity system. I’ve started reading his book to learn more about it. I’ve tried Stephen Covey’s productivity process and I didn’t stay with it. I’ve started to hear a buzz about GTD. There are several software pages available right now and at least one on the way. What I’ve read so far seems very do able. I’m a little excited.

One thing that I have learned about these different productivity systems is that they have to work the way you work. By that I mean the system needs to refine your style not necessarily create a whole new style. A system that refines your style of work you are more likely to stay with than a system that completely redefines how you do things.

Software Links -

Midnight Inbox

Kinkless GTD

MacWorld 2007

Well, MacWorld is over the big announcements were the iPhone, Apple TV, Airport Extreme – a new base station with 802.11n, and a name change for our favorite computer company, Apple Computer is now Apple Inc.

iPhone – I want one, sort of. From what I’ve seen of the keynote and read on the internet. I agree the iPhone has the possibility of revolutionizing the cell phone industry. The iPhone is what I want a phone to be. Commentary predicts that Apple will also release less expensive versions of the phone like they have with the iPod line. I hope this happens as things are now the iPhone is too expensive for me. Also, I want to be able to purchase an unlocked phone so that I can use it with my current service T-mobile. All that said when do I get mine.

Apple TV – The iTV is finally released in its final form. The only surprise here was the include 802.11n wireless networks. Apple also announced that the latest round of computers with the Core 2 Duo chips have the 802.11n chip sets in them. Also announced was a new version of the Airport extreme base station that is also has 802.11n networking.

Missing in action – Leopard – no mention of the new version of the operating system. I was expecting at least something even if it was a minor mention of the new release. With Vista due out to the public at the end of the month. I figured that Apple would at least do something. Maybe we will see a special announcement before February. Also missing was any mention of iLife 07 or iWork 07. Overall I think MacWorld 2007 was a great success. I look forward to see what Apple has in store for us in the future.

Basecamp Project Management Software

As a freelance computer consultant, I’m always on the look out for new software, web services or other programs that might help my clients. I came across a new company called 37 signals. Who offer some WEB 2.0 services via their web site. The services include:

Basecamp: Project Management and Collaboration

Campfire: Real Time group Chat

Backpack - Information organizer and calendar

My day job manager voiced the need for some basic process tracking. Not necessarily, project tracking. We already use Microsoft Project for IT projects, but we had a couple of problems using MS Project in this situation, first not everyone that would need to be involved has MS Project loaded on their computer. Second some of the collaborators are offsite and wouldn’t be able to access the project. I had run across Basecamp when I was looking into the programing language Ruby. At that point at really didn’t have any interest in their services. I didn’t see where I could use it for my freelance consulting. I don’t do a lot of project type work. It has been mostly technical support type work. Well that has changed I signed up for a free account. This gives you most of the features and the ability to track one project. That is when the excitement started to build. The software was easy to use and there were only a few situations were we had to tailor how we do things to how Basecamp works. I can see using this in a variety of situations. One as a demo tool. Another to create projects as part of my work. Another possibility would be for a teaching aid. Basecamp manages your project by tracking milestones, and to dos, discussions, and by having the ability to upload files that you will need to share. Writeboard which are sort of like electronic whitebaords. You also can have unlimited client/users sign in and have access to your projects.

Details about accounts: One item that I like about the setup is that you can try it for free. You get most of the features, and the ability to see how the software/service might work for you. More expensive accounts allow you to track time against tasks and connect to the site securely. I also like the fact that it is a pay as you go. Only use what you need. Also there are some third party software that extend the functionality of the Basecamp product. And for Macintosh users there are dashboard widgets that will link to your dashboard projects.

I would recommend that you check out Basecamp and see if might meet your needs.

Basecamp

Running a business on a Mac

I’m a software junkie, I’m constantly downloading and trying new software. While I am not running a business from my Mac I’ve always wondered how convenient it would be to run a business using only Apple products. My software lineup that I am thinking of is: Mail, iCal, Pages, Keynote, Address Book, iLife suite. I’m purposely not include Apple’s professional software because it is specialized to a specific type of business. Here is my example; Suppose that I am going to start up a typing service. This typing service will mainly focus on typing up term papers for local college students. Now, that is a business with no special needs. Now I know that I could purchase extra software to enhance my business but can I get by with just what Apple provides and how easy is it to run a business on only Apple.

I guess it comes down to how many small/medium business owners run just with Apple software?

I guess this comes from the idea that I should be able to use whatever software package that I feel best meets the needs of my business. I shouldn’t be forced to use a software package because everyone else does. Sharing Microsoft Word files would be one example. Now, I’m a technical person and I can figure out how to convert this file to that file and so forth but I help a lot of people that either don’t care or just want to be able to double click a document (word processing or otherwise) and then just be able to edit the document. They don’t want to have to figure out how to import that powerpoint presentation into keynote so that they can make changes. My wife often says, I don’t care how it works just make it happen. I have to believe that my wife isn’t the only person out there with that feeling. While, Apple’s products are intuitive and easy to use, if the user has to constantly figure out how to import documents they receive, they will end up changing what software they use to what the masses are using.

Leopard — My Thoughts.

I have some questions about some of the new features in Leopard.

Time Machine is one feature I have a lot of questions about. I’m currently using a MacBook Pro with an 80GB drive in it. I only have 13.5GB of free disk space left. I can’t afford to keep lots of information in Time Machine to revert back to if I need to. Also, will this information be compressed or is Apple just including the changed information, not the entire file.

Also, I had a friend that had her laptop hard drive crash. Of course she had no backup and besides replacing the drive she had the cost of recovering the data. The only Mac configuration that can include multiple hard drives when you purchase it is the Mac Pro. So what are all the other Mac users going to do if their hard drives crash. Now if I use that as one possible scenario, Time Machine isn’t going to help me in this situation either. The keynote at WWDC 06 mentioned that Time Machine was going to help us backup our data so that we don’t lose critical items. Great idea but there has to be a way for time machine to backup the data to a different location. One of my guesses is that TM will be able to backup to .Mac accounts. That is wonderful with one gotcha! With the current drive space allocation for the standard account ($99/year) you only get 1 Gig of disk space. I figure that I would use that up just for TM files in about a week or so. Hopefully Apple has thought of some of these situations and is planning accordingly.

Spaces is another feature that I am looking forward to. My questions here are: Can I assign keyboard shortcuts to switch to different virtual screens? can I set the number of screens that I have access. The quicktime movie on Apple’s website shows only 4 screens, can I have more or less than 4?

The updates to Mail and iCal look promising also. Overall I think Leopard is going to be a solid update. Apple’s implementation of Time Machine and Spaces will determine if those features become great or ‘just another’ feature. Both of the features have lots of potential. I hope Apple takes advantage of that potential.

MacBook Pro

I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a couple of month now. So far I don’t have any major complaints. Now I don’t feel that everything is perfect but overall I’m glad I purchased it. It is a major change over my Powerbook G4 550mhz machine that I had before.

One of my problems is with Universal applications. I have a few that have not been upgraded to Universal Apps and it does cause a problem. I wouldn’t trade the performance for not having a problem with the universal apps. I’ve discovered that my problems could be related to using Unsanity.com’s Application Enhancer. They have just release another beta and my powerpc apps seem to behave much better. To me it is just a part of upgrading to a new architecture powerpc –> intel. Apple has done a wonderful job of the migration. I’ve been using Macs long enough to have gone through a couple of these. This time it is virtually painless.

The best part of the MacBook Pro is that now I have a computer powerful enough to run new software. Garageband, Aperture, … before with my old Powerbook I had to watch from the side lines.