I've seen a lot of people talk about Alfred in the past year. I don't use it — apart from a quick download/launch/delete I have no experience at all with it. Not because it isn't a great tool, but simply because I already have a better option in my tool belt. But whenever I see someone writing or tweeting about it, I wonder why more folks don't give LaunchBar [http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html] a try. So many of us started out with Quicksilver. But, until quite recently…
Ever since Liz Danzico offered a separate version of her site in the latter hours, titled The Evening Edition [http://bobulate.com/post/1216102383/evening-edition], I've wanted to do the same on my own blog. A new design and a move to a new CMS was the perfect opportunity. I had no idea how to achieve this, but the solution was just a touch of javascript. There are a number of ways to attack this, but I went simple and created three separate CSS files. One for the global stuff, layout and all t…
Aaron Mahnke shared some thoughts [http://www.aaronmahnke.com/post/3702200164] on how the Internet and social media have improved our relationships, rather than causing people to become increasingly isolated. I'm giving his piece a large dose of summarization in saying that, but it's the essence of what I took away the post. > But then something happened. People started to question technology. They started pushing it in a new direction. And for all the snake oil salesmen and plethora of “gurus…
If you're an OmniFocus user, you need to give two [http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2011/03/14/Omnifocus-what-now-p1/] posts [http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2011/03/15/Omnifocus-what-now-p2/] from J. Eddie Smith IV a read. He's sharing his setup and usage of the application, but the real essence of his message is that OmniFocus is just a tool. And like any tool, it's usage is only as good as the execution of the one yielding the tool. I know that OmniFocus has a lot of power that I'm no…
It’s been interesting to see so many different approaches to improving Finder in OS X. There have been complete separate apps [http://cocoatech.com/] to give additional functionality, as well as utilities [http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/] that add features to Finder itself. Nothing has ever stuck for me, and I’ve learned to live with a combination of Finder and LaunchBar to do most things. Lately though, in the spirit of Minimal Mac [http://minimalmac.com/], I’ve taken to using Transmit [http…
The title of this post reflects my state mind and current relationship with Time Machine. But first, a few thoughts on backups in general. Go back a generation and backing up involved a rearview mirror in your vehicle. Today it denotes the need for an overall strategy to preserve the memories that are dearest to you, as well as archiving your business if you have one. And since we — or, I — like to focus on the life of a creative professional, that’s where my mind goes when I think about backin…
When it comes to Twitter, 2010 personally left me with a bad taste in my mouth. When the company purchased Loren Brichter's atebits [http://www.atebits.com/] — and programming skills — I was probably affected more than most people because of our ads in Tweetie for Mac. Other 3rd party Twitter client developers aside. I could certainly understand Loren's decision and hold no hard feelings towards him. But the few communications I had with the team at Twitter left me wishing there was a little mo…
Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a decent amount of discussion on the subject of Tumblr [http://tumblr.com/], Posterous [http://posterous.com/] and the rise of the micro-blog. Without recapping all the details, the general feeling of many is this: these services make it so easy to post that the quality of the content produced by the users of these services is very low. And with the rise of blogs like “f*&%yeahwelshcorgis [http://fuckyeahwelshcorgis.tumblr.com/]”, many would agree.…