Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Omni Group have been working on this app for a very long time, and in the new year it will finally be for sale. Right now you can download a beta version that’s very stable, and newer versions are being released almost every day.

I’ve always been a fan of outliners, ever since I could collapse and expand lists in the built in MessagePad stationery, so I’ve tried my share of the current spate of super-outliners, otherwise known as GTD apps.

GTD comes from Getting Things Done, David Allen’s book on managing your things to do. My super condensed version of his theory states that if you have somewhere where you can write down (or enter) all of the nagging things on your mind (things to do – things you’d like to do or ponder), then you can free your cluttered brain for other things. Once you’ve assembled all these tasks you can group them into contexts, such as: At Work; At Home; Online; Running Errands etc.

When you find yourself say, at home or, running errands, you filter and handle those tasks related to that context — or if you want to get fancy you also filter just the next steps from more complex projects.

This is just a small part of GTD, but essentially the meatiest part, and OmniFocus handles this part of GTD very well indeed.

It does take a little getting used to, especially the issues of deciding whether to be working within the Planning or Context environments. After a couple of days it all falls into place though; one of its great strengths is that you can tinker endlessly with your naming conventions, views etc. without breaking anything. You’re never “locking yourself in.”

Give it a try. Organizing your chores can be fun!

The Omni Group - OmniFocus

Here is the scenario: you have a six CD audio book that you rip into iTunes. You then select all the tracks in the resulting enormous Album in iTunes and choose to Remember Position in each track, and you set the combined play count to zero.

You make a Smart Playlist for listening to the book, similar to the configuration shown above; each time you re-visit this playlist it picks up where you left off, and only shows the remaining unheard tracks. All fine and good.

But, the problem is that you also want to take the book with you, but the iPod that you use only has a limited capacity. Here’s the trick:

You can make a second Smart Playlist that refers to the first. This one is limited by size to whatever you can spare (in this case, 50MB). Now you set up your iPod to sync with the second Playlist.

When you’re at your Mac you can listen to either; they will automatically update each other. Why have two at all though? Why not just create the second 50MB Playlist? Well, the short Playlist is the slice off the top of the pile of files still to be heard; the long Playlist is the whole pile, which gives you more of a sense of how far there is to go.

Playlists can’t easily be duplicated or copied and then modified, but by using new Playlists that refer to existing ones you can make refined choices based on existing criteria.

You may have heard the stories concerning an ASUS exec letting slip that there’s an Apple tablet in the works. This may or may not be true; I’m sure that they’re constantly developing (say, eighty percent production ready) gadgets of all kinds.

Apple’s quest to put us at ease with technology
By Alice Rawsthorn
International Herald Tribune

…Ive is lucky in that advances in technology have accelerated throughout his career. Having already had new polymers and composite materials to play with, and pioneered the transition from cathode ray tubes to flat panel displays in desktops, he is now excited by the possibility of replacing hard drives with smaller, more robust flash memory in laptops. “When everything is new, it’s a huge amount of work because you have to validate the most rudimentary assumptions,” he said. “Otherwise you can go a long way down the development path only to find that the product doesn’t work.”…

All very tantalizing. What would an Apple tablet really be like?

If we look at past Steve keynotes when he’s introducing an entirely new product, step one is pointing out what’s wrong with what’s already out there. If Steve where introducing Apple’s Tablet he would first show how the current crop use clunky pens (Ours uses your fingers, just like the iPhone, and also just like the iPhone – it uses the familiar iPhone keyboard and gorgeous glossy real glass display).

He will show how the current crop use tiny scroll bars that are hard to point to, and then show iPhone-style flick and pinch scrolling and Coverflow and QuickLook for file management. The display will be seven inches; just big enough to make a great book reader and web browser, and just small enough to mean you’ll always take it with you…

Ok, so what’s the killer app?

One might be how you could carry it around the house all day on a single charge, accessing your internet connection; viewing shared files on your network; controlling your Apple TV. One might be that your wireless keyboard talks to it, for serious editing. Or, that it would work as a great additional input device when back at your Mac…

Trouble is, none of the above is really a one sentence – gotta have this – compelling justification for the great unwashed to buy the thing. People who use current tablets either like the scribble with a pen modality that Apple would never condone because the whole idea is just too “ugly”, or they like the twist and fold versatility of the more complex models; definitely a non-starter.

So, no. My take is that the Apple Tablet is still just a research project. I would buy one (”You paid how much for that Newton?!?”), but unless this device which will be regarded as a consumer product and not a “computer,” talks just as easily to PCs as to Macs, and does something amazing that folks didn’t realize they craved until now, then next year’s Macworld will be about new studio displays.

And perhaps the 11 inch flash-based MacBook Svelte.

Apple Tablet “confirmed” by Asus? - Engadget

Here’s one of those situations that takes a lot of time to explain, a little time to set up, and the blink of an eye to implement.

Step 1.

Use Sogudi to create a very short name for a website that you regularly visit. An example might be assigning NY to the New York Times site. To recap how Sogudi works, once you have assigned such a shortcut it’s simply a case of typing NY, followed by a space, in the address bar – then hitting return to go to the site.

Step 2.

In Butler, make a new Keystrokes Smart Item and in the Keys section: Press the Command key as well as L, followed by a delay (from the + menu) of 0.5 seconds. Follow that with the keys N and Y and then hit Return. You now have a little macro that opens the address bar ready for entry, waits a moment, types in NY and hits Return.

Step 3.

Go to the Triggers tab and give it a simple trigger like Opt-N. When you assign the trigger, make sure it’s only valid in Safari.

So, you’re in Safari looking at, whatever, when you decide you want to check up on the New York Times site; Opt-N and BOOM, you’re on your way.

A second here, a second there. It all adds up.

A cool web-based graphics toy. I think..
 

VectorMagic

A new Apple reseller opened a shop in my local shopping mall. Unlike most of the department stores that sell Apple products here, this one was modeled loosely on proper American Apple Stores. The fittings were pristine and elegant, the sales people were friendly and not pushy, and best of all — I could play with the products as much as I liked.

So this was my first real hands-on look at the iPod Touch. It was almost uncanny; I’d read so much about it, and the similar iPhone, and seen so many demo movies, that when I did get to play it was being re-united with an old friend.

I tapped and swiped and pinched my way around the interface and found that, just as Andy Ihnatko had said, it all seemed so totally seamless – and obvious. I appear to have a lot of luck with hand held devices: the keyboard worked like a charm for me. I hammered away two-thumbed in the Notes section of a contact, completing a whole paragraph before glancing up at my handiwork.

There were only two errors. Incredible.

That’s it: I’m officially in love. It’s that “Seeing the 128k original Mac for the first time and realizing that this is the future” moment all over again.

Today I downloaded NeoOffice which, in short, is Open Office after it’s been extensively modified to fit right into the Mac environment. I already have an earlier copy of Open Office. It worked in a sense, but I could never get past the fact that here was an application running on my Mac that looked like it was channeling Windows 3.0.

NeoOffice fixes that. It’s not quite Cocoa quality, but it’s close enough. What really got me excited though, are a few features that it has, that take me back to my days with Office on the PC. I used Word so much that over time I trained it to auto-correct and auto-complete an enormous number of words and phrases that I tended to use over and over.

I didn’t care about 80 percent of what Word could do – just the remaining 20 percent that was those automation tools; I even hid all of the toolbars and rulers, leaving Word looking more like Notepad (but with nicer fonts).

Now I’ve jumped right into doing the same with NeoOffice. It’s every bit as useful to me as Word once was, if not more so, and it’s free.

I am one happy chappie!

NeoOffice 2.2.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

Have you ever gone to send the URL of a webpage to a colleague via email, only to find that the URL that you paste into the message is about 150 characters long? Sometimes the URL wraps to the next line in their email client, and when they click the link it’s broken. Sometimes the URL gets passed around until it loses it’s initial meaning; someone looks at it and thinks, “Where in hell is this going to take me?”

To resolve those problems there are several free online services that offer shorter URLs that link to the original. Most however, like tiny URL will generate short addresses but those addresses tend to have rather cryptic names.

The beauty of Notlong is that you can prepend your own name to the shortened address that it creates. Use it with your own hosted URL and it’s like having your own domain name, only with .notlong.com instead of simply .com. What’s more it’s permanent and free!

It took me all of five seconds to get mactipslog.notlong.com as a shortened URL for this site.

Notlong is also great for creating your own easily remembered name for a site that you just might like to access while you’re on the run.

At the Notlong site you can also grab a bookmarklet for your browser that enables you to simply click when you’re viewing a site with a long name — a window pops up with a field where you enter your preferred short name. If it’s available you are given the name, along with a secret address where you can manage the name, track the number of people who navigate via the shortened URL etc.

Go to Notlong

 
I know, it has nothing to do with Macs, but, Wow!
 

NASA: Spacewalk will have ‘higher risk than usual’ - USATODAY.com

 
Spooky flashback time. Above is Leopard’s icon for a connected PC.

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