rooSwitch - Shuffle Your Settings Around

When you're testing a new version of an application (or just being a little paranoid), it can be a pain to deal with protecting your "real" data from being corrupted or overwritten. While something like SuperDuper is priceless for backing up a drive to a disk image, you want something that's not only lighter in weight, but that is smart enough to deal just with the settings associated with a single program. That's where roobaSoft's rooSwitch comes in.

rooSwitch's smarts come in being able to recognize which Preferences, Application Support folders, and related files belong to an app's settings (but, not -- it should be noted -- its documents), so that you can then backup, switch, and restore a group of settings whenever you need to. This can be quite a lifesaver.

Recent remaindered links you might enjoy:

• The best time to post to MeFi is between 2 and 3 EST. | MetaFilter - Great MeFi post on the best times to do certain stuff: to buy, to eat, to travel -- even when to give birth.
• The Doorknob Condition ensures privacy - Geekologie - Clever design puts your need for privacy into stark functional terms.
• Nelson's Weblog: tech / iphone / switches - "You can measure the disaster of cell phone UI by how many button presses it takes to silence the damn ringer."
• Getting Things Done, in Emacs - Emacs implementation of GTD [via Anarchaia]
• Parents' stress and sleep deprivation can be a danger to children - "Always place something in the backseat...that requires you to open the back door every time you park." (scroll down) Life-saving life hacks in the sidebar for a tragic story.
• michael-mccracken.net » Processing Email - "[If] you’re really just tracking bugs, use a bug tracker. If you’re coordinating things in real time, use IMs or IRC." True dat, Michael. (and c.f.)
• ATPM 13.03 - Review: ScanSnap S500m - Ed's review of the ScanSnap for OS X is thorough and includes great workflow tips.
• Roo Reynolds: Merlin Mann’s tech talk - Roo Reynolds has written up a detailed set of notes based on my Inbox Zero talk. Thanks, Roo!

Inbox Zero Tech Talk
7/23/2007
00:58:38

During the Q&A portion of my Inbox Zero presentation at Google the other day, an audience member stumped me with a question about how to manage action around mailing list distributions (the question starts at about 48:22).

He said he frequently receives email requests and questions that are also distributed to the other 20 people on his team. He describes a "waiting game" in which team members hang back to see if other people will respond first -- at least partly out of not wanting to duplicate effort or flood the sender. I thought it was a really intriguing question, although I said (and still believe) that distributed email would not personally be my first choice to handle this kind of communication.

Well, based on the reaction in the room that day, I gathered that this is a common dilemma for Googlers. Funny thing is that, since the video went up, I've received a lot of email from people outside the Googleplex who share the same problem -- a few of whom were aghast that I wasn't aware what a huge pain this is for knowledge workers. And to an extent, I'll admit those folks were mostly right.

TED | Talks | Jennifer Lin: Magical improv from 14-year-old pianist (video)

This video from the 2004 TED Conference is extraordinary for a few reasons. First, the prepared performances by then-14-year-old composer and pianist Jennifer Lin are lovely and technically very accomplished. And -- wow -- the improvisation she creates on the spot (16:45) is really something.

But, I also wanted to draw your attention to her thoughts on creativity and flow -- discussing how she tries to beat distraction and gain focus in both drawing and composition. Her discussion starts around 13:31, but do stick around after for her improv based upon randomly chosen notes.

[via Metafilter]

creativepro.com - Getting Design Done

Interesting article here by our old pal, Keith Robinson, introducing GTD to creative types. This is a fascinating topic for me, particularly since I sometimes find it difficult to "crank widgets" when it comes to anything creative.

Keith's an old hand with this stuff, so it's not surprising that he's developed his own tweaks for Getting Creativity Done. Here's a novel idea:

Create a creative time and space for yourself. Make sure it's free of distraction and get into the habit of going there as often as you can. When there, pull out your @creative lists and get to work. I find this is a great way to tackle smaller creative problems. It's how I come up with -- and get started on -- most of my writing. This article is a result of my @creative time.

That's an interesting way to think about contexts. Ordinarily, you'd think of contexts as representing access to a certain kind of tool or as a physical or temporal limitation, whereas Keith is using it almost like a project.

This is challenging stuff that my buddy, Ethan, and I end up talking about all the time. We both agree that you can use GTD to "clear the decks" for creative work -- to move aside all the mundane workaday tasks that might keep you from focusing on blocks of time for creative stuff. But we, like a lot of people, both struggle with how (or even whether) to put truly creative work into our GTD systems. What do you think?

How are you using GTD for creative work? What do projects and next actions look like for a painter, a screenwriter, or a dancer? What's your best trick for getting creative stuff done?

Recent remaindered links you might enjoy:

• The Telephone EXchange Name Project - This is the site I mentioned on MBW for finding your old-timey telephone exchange. Mine's "OVerland."
• Wii T-shirt - Chris's exploded isometric Wii "Tii" is the shirt I was wearing during the Google Talk. Always buys me tons of compliments.
• Popeyes Cajun Sparkle Recipe | Recipezaar - Now, here's something I can really use: how to emulate Popeye's Chicken's MSG-erriffic packets of flavor.
• Portfolios that get right to the point - Collection of great-looking portfolios that put the work on one glance-able page. The results are striking.
• What's new in the New Backpack - Additions include calendars and lovely enhancements to inter- and intra-page organization. Per-page feeds are smart as well.
• 43 Folders - AideRSS - Advertised as a way to find the best in RSS feeds, I'll be using this as a badass ego-surfing machine.

Google Tech Talk: Inbox Zero

This is the video for my Inbox Zero talk I presented in July of 2007 at Google.

Is Inbox Zero an idea that your company should learn about in person? You can invite me to speak to your organization, live and in-person.

Macworld Feature: Connect with the world

Macworld Magazine asked me to pick out a few of my Mac Gems, and I was happy to respond with four favorites.

Default Folder, for example, is a PreferencePane that I've used and loved since Christ was a corporal:

Default Folder X (****½)

You can tell Default Folder X is a classic because you start missing it the second you sit down at a Mac that doesn’t have it installed. It reduces the tedium of a handful of annoying dialog-box tasks, and it’s worth its price solely for the ability to set a per-program default location.

A reminder to any Googlers out there that I’ll be giving a Tech Talk on Inbox Zero today at 2:00 pm in the Seville room on the Mountain View campus.

Hope I’ll see you there. (And many thanks to Dick Wall for the hook-up!)

Faster Printing with Quicksilver

Mark Fisher shares terrific tips on how to use Quicksilver Proxies for faster printing:

Use this method when you want to print files that are on the Desktop or are all in the same folder.

>
1. Select the files that you wish to print by Command clicking them.
>
2. Invoke Quicksilver (by default, ?–SPACE)
>
3. Type the name of your printer until QS displays its name e.g. “Lexmark”
>
4. Hit the TAB key to select the next pane.
>
5. Type “open” and select “Open File”. >
   >
   • I recommend making “Open File” the default action for when you type “open”. You can do this by Ctrl clicking “Open File” and selecting ‘Set as Default for “OPEN”.’
   >
   >
>
6. Hit TAB to select the next pane.
>
7. Type “current” until QS displays ‘Current Selection’.
>
8. Hit ENTER.
>
9. Your files should start printing.
>

Also check out how to use the "comma trick" to print multiple files. Great stuff.

After the jump is the video for the episode of The Merlin Show where I talked about using proxies to access application menus.

Powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone

Chanpory points out that, in addition to the iPhone applications that are out there, you can also use bookmarklets inside of Safari to do your functional bidding when you're on the go. He's pulled together a few favorites, and here's a sampling:

5. List all links
Takes all links from the current page and lists them in a new window...

8. Wikipedia
Find an article on Wikipedia...

12. YubNub
This is my personal favorite. It let’s you rapidly access over 10,500 search services and tools via shortcut commands...

Treat your email more like Photoshop

My pal, Colleen, has written up a short, designer's take on handling email. She suggests you treat messages the way you'd handle Photoshop PSDs; streamline, automate, and fear not the rule nor template:

Once you’ve done enough of the same kind of work in Photoshop or Illustrator—say, resizing photos or creating a certain size of flyer—you devise ways of creating your templates quickly...

Apply the same principles to processing your inbox and you will vastly reduce the time you spend horsing around in your email client. There are as many “best practices” with email as there are organizational gurus, but the same principles generally apply:

1. Handle things once
2. Process all at once, at scheduled times
3. Clear your inbox, don’t use it as a holding bin

Right on. And as good a point as ever to re-point-out my beloved MailTemplate, which is still the easiest way I know of to create customizable boilerplate templates for Mail.app and Entourage.

Random Bonus: Here's some video (direct MOV download) of me interviewing the MailTemplate/MailTank guys at Macworld back in January.

In the latest episode of MacBreak Minutes (subscribe), I talked about a favorite PreferencePane of mine called LiteSwitch.

Opting Out: New Jersey Governor Rejects E-mail

David Shipley, author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, did an ATC commentary on NJ Gov. Jon Corzine's saying he's swearing off email. Shipley thinks it's a teachable moment that shouldn't be missed:

How about: writing better.

How about: a little more thought about what we are saying on email before hitting that send key?

How about trying all this...instead of giving up...?

Instead of quitting, why doesn't Governor Corzine turn this into a moment to teach us how to email better. Should New Jersey schools teach email the way they once taught typing and composition?

By the way, how we doing on that Richard Scarry Book of the Future?

Ten Things to Learn This School Year

I'm intrigued by this bit of advice from Guy Kawasaki on the stuff you don't learn in school (but should):

How to write a five-sentence email...Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

While exaggerated for effect, this strikes me as sound advice. And, in the context of a discussion about education, I'm reminded of the "hamburger essays" we used to have to write in school. Yeah, sure, there aren't many times in life where you have to sit down and write an actual 5-paragraph essay, but they sure did encourage you to think about structure, rhetoric, and arc. As ever, that bit of constraint gives you the focus needed to improve the quality of your presentation.

Man, in retrospect, I've sent a lot of emails that could and should have been whittled down to five sentences (if that). Emailarrhea.

MacBreak Weekly 48: The Next Big Thing

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, The Macalope

Variable pricing comes to iTunes, iPhone hacks, and where's the Mac?

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 48.

My pick for this week's MacBreak Weekly is Fly Gesture, which is a nifty little freeware app from Flying Meat's boy genius, Gus Mueller. Like it says on FG's home page:

I've recently added a 43 Folders job board, and I wanted our first post about it to feature family, so I asked some friends to post open positions in their organizations.

• Support Ninja - The Omni Group, Seattle, WA
• Marketing Manager - Adaptive Path, San Francisco, CA
• Intern / Indentured Servant - The Sound of Young America, Los Angeles, CA
• Designer - Grockit, Inc., Telecommute
• Chief Wiki Czar(ina) - 43 Folders, San Francisco, CA

We also carry jobs posted from selected other sites, so there's already plenty to browse. Want to be an iPhone Engineer at Apple? How about working for The Motley Fool? Maybe just make a quick $1,000.00 on a referral? Well, dig in.

And for the folks out there who need to put butts in Aerons, it's fast and easy to add your own organization's jobs to the board. Plus your job may be featured in posts here on the site highlighting the more interesting-looking positions that have been added. (Hint: Check the footer of posts in the 43f RSS feed for news about a substantial launch week discount -- ends 7/20, so act soonly)

Thanks for the interest everyone has expressed in us adding a job board -- whether you're looking or hiring, I hope you'll find it useful and vocationally satisfying.

Rule the Web (and Rule Your Email Inbox!)

Alex from the always-swell Neatorama has written up the bullets on his preferred method for keeping an email inbox at zero.

4. Have a Simple Filing System
Don’t overthink this: a complex folder with subfolder system is not what you need to remain organized. Obviously, your particular needs will dictate how many folders you have … but in my experience, you rarely, if ever, need subfolders.

5. Have a Follow Up Folder There will be times that I need to research an answer to a particular email or do something before I can reply. I let these emails sit in my inbox for a maximum of 1 day (gasp!), then they get put into a Follow Up Folder if I haven’t gotten around to them - and then I add an entry in my to-do list.

Good tips, and my only (seemingly omnipresent) comment is to underscore that need to empty all your baskets regularly. Hence, one benefit of keeping your email storage and action structure light is that you won't have to dash around to multiple places to see what's on your plate.

Jon Udell: The LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Generator

I covered this one back in the bronze age of 43 Folders, but I wanted to highlight the awesomeness again today for those who might not have seen it the first time around.

As described in September, 2004:

I still can’t get over how cool this is. Jon Udell’s little wizard [direct link] lets you generate a bookmarklet for requesting a library book—based on the Amazon page you’re currently viewing. It’s clearly a flawless lifehack.

You just need to know your library’s URL and which system your own city uses (which Jon makes simple by providing preview links to see which style your system seems to follow). San Francisco folks, use “http://sflib1.sfpl.org/” and leave the default system of “Innovative” selected.

At some point over the years, Jon's bookmarklet fell out of my favorites bar (J'accuse, Amazon Prime). But today I was able to recreate my bookmarklet in about ten seconds, and now Bobos in Paradise is en route to the Parkside Library.

To modernize the tip just a bit, I'll mention that this (and many other browser tasks involving entering passwords) gets so much easier with the amazing 1Passwd. In this case, you can tell the app to remember your library card number and PIN and autofill the library login page automagically.

MacBreak Weekly 47: That's Our Shooby!

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay

Universal challenges iTunes, iPhone hacks, and our software picks of the week...

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 47.

This time we did our usual weekly software picks, but I also got to choose our Audible.com audiobook of the week. Can you guess what it is?

Quick way to dispose of lots of stuff? | Ask MetaFilter

Wow, talk about good timing.

I've noticed in comments on this week's clutter posts that there's a lot of interest from you all in the away part of "throw away" -- people seem to have a lot of ideas on the most interesting, charitable, creative, and environmentally-responsible routes for converting your own trash into someone else's treasure.

So far we (and that AskMe thread) have covered:

Tomorrow is the Independence Day holiday here in the US, so a lot of folks reading this will have the day off from work. If my own clutter war is piquing your interest in improving your surroundings, tomorrow could be the occasion for you to put a few minutes toward making a dent in your own pile.

Here's some inspirational (and cautionary) links to get you started.

As noted by John Gruber and Living with Mac, the iPhone doesn't currently appear to have built-in support for "to-dos" -- even the modest task support that's built-in to OS X's iCal. :-(

While this is difficult for me to understand (I know it's something I'd expect in even a Gen 1 smart phone), it's cool to see that web- and Mac-based developers are stepping up to the plate in the absence.

A few of the apps I've seen so far (and in varying states of reality and vapor):