wood.tang's blog

I Want Sandy is an email-based, automated personal assistant created by Rael Dornfest and values of n, makers of Stikkit. I’ve been messing around with her (in a totally platonic way) since Cory Doctorow mentioned it last week, and it’s really slick.

This may not count as a real find since it’s on the Google’s own support site, but this list of recommended IMAP client settings is interesting in that it differs from many of the Gmail IMAP how-to’s I’ve seen so far.

Regarding Sent mail:

Do NOT save sent messages on the server. If your client is sending mail through Gmail’s SMTP server, your sent messages will be automatically copied to the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder.

…and Junk folders:

In the few weeks since I wrote my first plea to trim the fat from your iTunes library, I’ve continued purging my own collection. On the first pass, I simply deleted the clearly objectionable stuff, things that I couldn’t understand what made me want to keep them in the first place. It was rather easy, and like I said, it slimmed my corpulent media collection by a third.

Now though, it’s getting down to brass tacks, and I’m making some hard decisions about what to keep. I don’t need to do this for disk space, mind you, but as I’ve been trying to do a better job of organizing all my music and video with smarter lists and ratings, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: even if I still think it’s good, I just have too much.

While most sensible Mac users were looking forward to cool new features in Leopard like Cover Flow, Quick Look, and Time Machine, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, itching to try out iCal and Mail.app’s new to-do list integration. I agree with Merlin’s approach to using a bunch of single-purpose applications that are very good at what they do instead of a bloated piece of do-everything-ware like Outlook–“a series of super-sharp paring knives over one monstrous Swiss Army Knife”–as he put it, but I looked forward to a little bit of teamwork between two of the applications I use the most. And boy, am I disappointed.

Since my days are set to the sleeping patterns of a toddler and the biorhythms of a dog, I have to squeeze my “work,” i.e. writing, interviews, blogging, etc, into naptime and the few hours after the boy goes to bed and before I collapse. I’m pretty good about getting the important, bill-paying stuff done, but unfortunately that means what suffers is Me Time, things like reading books or watching a ballgame on TV without a computer in my lap. When I just spent most of my day stressing out about what I wasn’t getting done because I was at the playground or reading Richard Scarry books 49 consecutive times, I can’t very well justify not doing my stuff when I’m back home and books are put away.

One day this week, the boy was at Grandma’s for the day, so I lined up a ton of things to knock out. Most of my afternoon was going to be spent dealing with some carpenters installing a cabinet in our house, so I also knew I had to get busy in the morning. As any time-constrained person knows, feeling squeezed is the best way to make yourself efficient, and I finished everything I needed to by lunch. Then, lo and behold, the furniture guys called and said they couldn’t make it, so I was faced with a free afternoon.

The good man in brown just delivered my family pack of Leopard, and I’m itchin’ to go a upgradin’ all through the house. I’m particularly anxious to try the new To-Do features in Mail and iCal, the two apps besides a browser that I spend most of my time in each day.

One thing that especially intrigues me, though, is the reported performance improvement in Spotlight. Like many of 43 Folders’ Mac users, I’d long given up on Spotlight in favor of Quicksilver. But on their latest Talk Show episode, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin raved about Spotlight’s improvement, to the point that Dan (I think) said he hasn’t reinstalled Quicksilver on Leopard yet.