Alex Lindsay

MBW: New iMacs; iLife & iWork '08; .Mac; Anti-picks; and Merlin's dirty little secret

Merlin — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:38:03 -0400

MacBreak Weekly 52: Ten Cents A Dance

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

We take a look at Apple’s new iMacs, and iLife and iWork 08…

Of course, when I chose iCal as my anti-pick, I said it with love. Much love.

iCal and me are like family. Except in this case, I’m the Dad and iCal is the at-risk kid whose grades keep dropping and who always forgets to take the trash to the curb. Damned kid.

Tough love? You bet. But, still: love.

Also, in unrelated news, I quietly outed myself as a new iPhone owner. So there you go. My dirty little secret, revealed.

”MBW: New iMacs; iLife & iWork '08; .Mac; Anti-picks; and Merlin's dirty little secret” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 10, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak coverage of Macworld

Merlin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:03:04 -0500

MacBreak

Check back throughout the week for MacBreak’s ongoing coverage of Macworld 2007 in San Francisco.

MacBreak Macworld 2007: Keynote Rundown - In this ﬁrst segment, Leo, Alex, and I review the major announcements of the keynote, including, of course, the iPhone and Apple TV

”MacBreak coverage of Macworld” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 09, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak Weekly taping tonight at 21st Amendment

Merlin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 07:12:50 -0500

Upcoming.org: MacBreak Weekly Live @ 21st Amendment at 21st Amendment (Tuesday, January 9, 2007)

Directions to 21A, from Moscone Center

Just a reminder that tonight’s live taping of MacBreak Weekly takes place at 21st Amendment starting at 6pm. If you’re planning to come to the taping, my advice is to get there early, because we’re anticipating a capacity audience (that’s a big reason everyone agreed it was better not to do this event at the Apple Store on Steve Day).

Leo, Alex, Scott, and I will be discussing today’s announcements and may even have some guests.

A propos of nothing, I will also take this opportunity to remind Mr. Bourne of his (often repeated) promise to buy everyone on MBW an iPhone on the day that they come out. Just saying.

If you come out tonight or see me on the Macworld show ﬂoor with MacBreak today, please say hi and introduce yourself.

”MacBreak Weekly taping tonight at 21st Amendment” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 09, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak Weekly 12: “Smokin’”

Merlin — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:10:24 -0400

MacBreak Weekly 12: Smokin’

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

Apple updates the MacBook Pro, and Scott buys one. No wonder they’ve got such a great bottom line. And our application picks including Disco and Tangerine.

Running time: 1:03:36

Download MP3 ﬁle

”MacBreak Weekly 12: “Smokin’”” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 24, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming

Merlin — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:26:23 -0400

If it wasn’t apparent from my pathetic cry for help the other day, even I – one of your more theoretically productive persons in North America – struggle with what to call things.

Tags, ﬁles, and – dear Lord – the innumerable assets associated with making web sites, graphics, audio, and video projects; it’s all a hopeless jumble unless you have some kind of mature system in place for what you call your stuff and its various iterations. Of course, if you’re like me – and I hope that you are not – you still have lots of things on your desktop with names like “thing-2 finalFinal! v3 (with new changes) 05b.psd”.

For prior art, I still treasure this Jurassic thread on What Do I Know where people share their thoughts on this age-old problem, but, frankly I haven’t seen many good resources out there on best practices for naming.

Anyhow, during a recent MacBreak shoot, I noticed that Alex and his team seem to have a pretty ﬂy system for naming the video ﬁles that eventually get turned into their big-time IPTV shows. Thus, I turned to Pixel Corps’ Research Division Lead, Ben Durbin (co-star of Phone Guy #5) for insight and sane help. And, brother, did he ever give it to me (see below the cut for Ben’s detailed awesomeness).

But, just so I don’t lose you, do give me your best tips in comments: What are your favorite current conventions for naming ﬁles? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than ﬁle names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff?

Ben shares how Pixel Corps does it, video style:

We’re still settling into best practices that are shared amongst all the teams, but here are some themes:

File names are a set of ﬁelds separated by underscores. We share ﬁles on linux servers, so while manageable, we consider spaces in ﬁlenames to be lowercase b bad.

If it’s an established or long-term project, we try to keep the codes for the various ﬁelds to three letters. This allows for more ﬁelds without having the ﬁle names get too long.

If it’s not an established project, we favor readability (longer ﬁeld names) and consistency. Even if your ﬁeld data are arbitrarily chosen, as long as you’re naming things consistently, you can always use batch renaming to convert a given ﬁeld into a code later.

When possible, the ﬁelds are arranged left to right from general to speciﬁc.

Files that may have iterations get a three-digit, padded iteration number as their ﬁnal ﬁeld.

Even when we use folder structures with multiple subfolders, the project code ﬁelds stays as a preﬁx of all ﬁles, so that if ﬁles get misplaced, they’re still easily ﬁndable (example: all post ﬁles for a MacBreak episode will start with “mbk_eps_episodeNumber_” regardless of where they sit in the folder structure).

Caveats:

As you’ve probably noticed, the problem with ﬁle names in general is that they only give you a single “view” and aren’t applicable to other ways in which you might want to see/sort the ﬁles in other contexts. Advanced users can get all grep-daddy with it, but they’re in the minority. At best, ﬁle naming structures are a “good enough” solution that works well most of the time if you don’t have a more robust metadata system in place.

The problem with metadata systems, of course is that they tend to either be proprietary or only applicable to certain ﬁle types. Are we going to use annotations on all of our Quicktime movies? Create some custom xml format that gets parsed by a proprietary app? Structured Spotlight comments? The check-in comments of a versioning system like Subversion? The lack of a good, widely-accepted metadata framework that is spoken by all OSes and/or that can be embedded into most ﬁle types lead many people to resort to ﬁle naming structures and leave it at that.

Dang. Thanks for that, Ben!

To repeat:

What are your favorite current conventions for naming ﬁles? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than ﬁle names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff?

”Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak Weekly: "Look What They Done To My Boy"

Merlin — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:07:10 -0400

MacBreak Weekly 10: Look What They Done To My Boy

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

New Mac ads, why does Adobe hate Intel, and iTunes TV store woes…

Running time: 54:15

Links to some of the stuff I mentioned in the podcast:

Vara Software : Videocue
AppleJack 1.4.2 (semi-broken on Intel Macs)
Daring Fireball: Software Update Tips and Voodoo (and Mr. Zeldman’s Mac OS X safe update tip)
John Hodgman (and his sublime book and audiobook)
Yars’ Revenge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Godfather (1972)
YouTube - Phone Guy: Still on the Ground (my inaugural Videocue video)

”MacBreak Weekly: "Look What They Done To My Boy"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 10, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Merlin on MacBreak Weekly: Wax On, Wax Off

Merlin — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 23:11:39 -0400

MacBreak Weekly 8: Wax On, Wax Off

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

Get a better night’s sleep with today’s show. We talk about Apple’s podcast grab, Aperture 1.5, 802.11n in iMacs, Cingular and the iPhone, and Core 2 MacBooks.

Running time: 01:14:00

In which Alex is still on about the notional iPhone (and its current-day antecedents), Leo loves his lumber-swinging MacPro, Scott is completely full of beans, and everyone rags me mercilessly about my fondness for new age nap software.

Show note: that site for making one barcoded discount-club card to rule them all? Via Lifehacker comments, check out Just One Club Card. Haven’t tried it myself, but it looks promising.

[ Download MP3 ﬁle for “MBW 8: Wax On, Wax Off” ]

”Merlin on MacBreak Weekly: Wax On, Wax Off” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 26, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"