OSXCon | Merlin Mann

Danny and I had a great time doing our talk yesterday at O’Reilly’s OSXCon. Met a bunch of great people and enjoyed the chance to hang with like-minded nerds. I love that people want to show me their squirrely productivity setups. Time management pr0n! Totally into it.

Our time for the session just flew by, so we didn’t have the time we would have liked to spend with all the apps. If you were there (or just like to play with OS X apps), here are links to all the things we talked about (or planned to talk about). If I left anything off or you have any questions, feel free to leave comments.

Thanks to Derrick and Vee for all their hard work, and thanks to everyone who showed up, asked questions, and just said hi. Stay in touch.

• TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X - Text editor with interesting shell integration
• Daring Fireball: Markdown - Turn structured txt into valid XHTML
  • HumaneText.service - Txt to HTML and back again, as an OS X Service
• Quicksilver - Application launcher and much more
• nondeterministic . net : hack : fiwt - Incremental search for Safari pages
• michael-mccracken.net - [i-search] - Incremental search in many Cocoa text fields
• Notational Velocity - Sexy note-taking and incremental search in one nerd-friendly app
• Welcome to Flying Meat Software, home of VoodooPad - Wiki comes to your Mac’s desktop
• PithHelmet - Filter ads, apply styles, and protect your privacy, per-site
• Welcome to Growl! - Notification program lets you know what’s happening under the bonnet
• Tynsoe projects - [GeekTool] - Make your Desktop look like “The Matrix” with notifications, photos, and shell output
• Safari Enhancer - Flip on the debug menu and more
• Bonus - Here’s the modest “hamburger helper” html file I use as a snippet in TextMate

Also—since a bunch of folks had asked—the Finder replacement app you saw in the demos is Path Finder. It’s a terrific, super-functional app that adds tons of features to speed up your work flow.

Hello,

I am new to this forum, but have been listening to merlin and reading for a long time. I will get right to the problem.

My data is a mess. I have a 500gb external drive bulging at the seams with duplicate files and folders. The problem occurred because my wife and I both backup to this drive. We now have our own folders full of the same files(mostly music). Now bear with me. I hope this doesn't get too complicated.

At the moment I have a drive that looks similar to this

z:\my music\joe smith\track a, b, c, d etc.

z:\her music\joe smith\track a

I often end up using my Desktop as a parking lot for current files. Not exactly an inbox, but given how easy it is to hit CMD-D in a dialog box, it’s where a lot of tmp files, exported jpgs, and assorted stuff naturally ends up. Still, I find it distratcting when too much stuff accumulates there, so I also keep a “Junk” folder on the desktop.

My Analog GTD Whitepaper

I want to put up a Web site that offers a portfolio of my writing samples, along with a blog, and probably other professional stuff that escapes me at the moment.

What do people recommend for setting up a site like this? Would you use a CMS? If so, which one?

If anyone can offer any examples of good writing portfolio Web sites, please let me know. Thanks!

Robyn

Ideal bag for mobile lifestyle

• Macworld: Feature: I will be smarter about how I handle e-mail - Tips on more secure email, handily graded by "Security" and "Hassle."
• Coding Horror: A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins - This makes so much more sense to me when explained with Venn diagrams. I want Venn diagrams for everything.
• TTB #25 - 09/16/07 at The Teen Tech Buzz - In which I am interviewed by my teen pals, Aaron and Austen (each of whom are younger than several coffee mugs that I regularly use)
• Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Hand-code Smart Folders - "So this hint is intended to share some info about how to modify the 'code' in the saved search to get what you want." I wish I could hand-code something to make Spotlight's UI work better for me. (Did I say that out loud?)
• The Office Collar: Mind Your Own Business - Geekologie - Maybe I spend too much time in the internet's less savory neighborhoods, but this really has the feel of "pony play" [PNSFW] to me. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Offices can get pretty boring. Here, have a carrot, Ol' Paint.
• 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks - I'd make #42 "'Writing' naught but Digg-y list posts whose headline starts with a numeral and is followed by a plural noun." Heck, I'd probably go ahead and just add that one reason eight more times -- I mean, you know: so you can make it a nice, round, super-useful "50." Yes, that might help countless blogs not to "probably suck."

WEB + iPhone + GTD or iPhone Notes

An Interview with Merlin Mann at Like It Matters

Wow, I completely forgot about this. One day, when my pal Brian was in town, we hit Tu Lan and hung out for an hour or so talking about all kinds of stuff related to 43F, productivity, and how to blow lots of time trying too hard to be productive.

Given the noise level at the restaurant, I'm amazed he could transcribe the conversation, but here you go. Considering I was high on vietnamese food, there's actually some pretty good bits in there: