Mac OS X

Slate Magazine on the market for "Zenware"

wood.tang — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:21:16 -0500

Sort of an add-on to the New York Times piece Merlin linked the other day about Scrivener and its cohort of new writing applications, Jeffrey MacIntyre at Slate coins a new term for programs that eschew the familiar, bloated twiddliness of Microsoft Office for simplicity:

There's an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed traffic calming to our massively expanding desktops. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware.

The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you're used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you'll benefit most from their absence.

MacIntyre's word processor of choice is WriteRoom, but he also includes desktop managers like Spaces, Spirited Away, and various interface tweaks in the zenware category.

I'm a Scrivener fan, and like everyone who's dealt with the auto-formatting, self-correcting madness of Word out of sheer necessity for all these years, the most drastic change I noticed when I started using it was that it let me jump right in and start writing. This may have been my own form of procrastination, but I always had this little ritual with Word every time I started a new document: set the margins, adjust the font, fill the headers and footers, etc. You still have to do this with Scrivener and its ilk, but the trick is that it's done after the fact, when you're finished writing and you're ready to export for printing or emailing. It's an artful dodge; Scrivener didn't remove or try to automate the necessity of formatting, it just shifted its timing to a place more conducive to the writing process. "Zenware" is a little too cutesy; that's just smart.

”Slate Magazine on the market for "Zenware"” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps

Merlin — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:57:38 -0500

An Interface of One’s Own

I was delighted to see my favorite OS X writing app, Scrivener, turn up in today's "The Medium" column of the New York Times Magazine. I reviewed Scrivener about a year ago, and still use it whenever I have to research, plan, and draft anything more complicated than a blog post. In fact, as luck would have it, I was actually working on my upcoming Macworld talk in Scrivener when I took a break to read the paper and saw this article. Kismet or something.

Columnist, Virginia Heffernan, notes the app's beloved full-screen capability:

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

High fives to other great apps mentioned in the article, including Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer. Slightly lower fives go to Microsoft Word, which, once again, takes its usual drubbing as The Application Everyone Wants To Get Away From™. Poor Microsoft Word, the mascara-smeared Gloria Swanson of word processors.

In the year since I wrote my own review of Scrivener, I still find myself relying heavily on it for housing the research, braindumps, and very early draft shapes of most longer pieces I do. Falling somewhere between OmniOutliner, DevonTHINK, and the aforementioned WriteRoom, Scrivener is still, in my opinion, the go-to app for all-in-one research and writing.

As ever, YMMV. This app is absolutely not for everyone (especially if you don't have the need for lots of complicated research and organizational hooks), but if you struggle to find a writing environment that maps to the way your own writing brain operates, I still highly recommend checking out the free Scrivener download.

”NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 06, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Sciral Consistency update: Remember flexible tasks

gordonmeyer — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:35:23 -0500

Sometimes surprises come from unexpected places. (Um, I guess that’s part of why they’re surprising.) Case in point, yesterday I opened Sciral Consistency as I’ve done several times a day for the last five years. This time, however, something happened that hasn't occurred since sometime in 2005. A notification window announced that a new version of the application was available for downloading.

I seriously thought that it must be an error. I had just moved all my files to a different computer and perhaps a bit or date stamp got munged,. But, no, there really is a new version. I, and some other Consistency users, thought the application had been abandoned, but now there’s a shiny new Universal Binary version. (There’s also a new version of Windows users.) It’s like Christmas before Thanksgiving! But in a good way.

If you’re not familiar with Consistency, it’s a useful way to keep track of re-occuring tasks that need to be done regularly (or, ahem, consistently) but not on a firm schedule. For example, Consistency reminds me that I need to water the house plants every 3 to 5 days, clean the Ionic Breeze air filters approximately once a week, and that my dog, Scooter, needs his nails trimmed approximately monthly. For more on using Consistency, see Merlin’s post from 2004 and a related post at my blog.

”Sciral Consistency update: Remember flexible tasks” was written by Gordon Meyer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

An Ass Pocket of iCal

wood.tang — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:56:51 -0400

A few posts back, I professed my love for paper. That affection runs deep already, but I stumbled onto a trick this week that makes me lust after the power of a sheet of 8.5" x 11" even more.

As I'm wont to do, I returned to the Lucky Charms, marshmallowy goodness of iCal recently to organize my stuff. I know it isn't perfect, but it's my comfort zone, and after flogging myself publicly over my tendency to switch systems, I decided to stick with the ol' July 17 icon for better or for worse.

In my paper post, I mentioned that I like to jot down a few tasks at the beginning of each day, to focus my energy. It's not GTD orthodoxy, but with a job like mine, I have to make a plan of attack or else it will be lost in a pile of board books and Legos. Normally this does the trick, but on days when I have lots of reminders, or appointments with accompanying notes, it can be tedious copying this all down. So one day this week, when I was in a hurry out the door, I decided to print out an agenda from iCal.

Maybe I'm a dope for never experimenting with this, but have you seen what you can do with iCal's print dialog? Merlin has written about this before, but the ability to pick and choose which calendars to print, restricting the view to a day, a week, a month, or my favorite, a simple list, just made me reaffirm my vows with iCal. Here's what I do (in Tiger, mind you, so Leopard early-adopters may have to adjust accordingly ... I'm upgrading this weekend, promise):

I keep my Next Actions/To-Do's in separate calendars, and set tickler reminders as all-day events in the calendar. Each morning, I set a due date of that day for the items I'd theoretically like to tackle by EOB, and sort my calendars by due date so they float to the top of the list.
Next, I pop open the print dialog ("File > Print" or "Cmd-P"). I select "List" from the "View:" dropdown, then make sure all the right calendars/contexts are selected. I also check every other option except "Black and White", because I'm accustomed to the various colors I assigned to my calendars as visual reminders (if this doesn't matter to you, check that box and save yourself some ink).
Finally, I fold it up in quarters and put it in my back pocket. Throughout the day I can cross things off and use the white space as an inbox. Then, at the end of the day, I reconcile everything with the mothership. On days when I'm going to the gym, I even print my workout routine checklist on the backside to really feel the burn.

Maybe this isn't rocket science, and iPhone and mobile sync bandits may scoff at the manual approach. Personally, I hate printers too, but this little trick has given my sad little Canon i960 new life.

”An Ass Pocket of iCal” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 01, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

TaskPaper 1.0 adds new features (and "fiddling" isn't one of them)

Merlin — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:49:12 -0400

Hog Bay Software's TaskPaper was recently released in a completed 1.0 version (previously), and if you're the sort of person who casts about for a simple way to manage projects and tasks from a Mac, this just may be your app.

But, even more significantly, if you're not looking for a simple action management system -- if you're that particularly pathetic sort of character who's convinced that features like tagging, syncing, collaboration, graph paper generation, and the introduction of an onboard artisanal breadmaker are all that stands between you and getting your stuff done -- well, you may need TaskPaper more than anybody. Because, friends, TaskPaper is just about fiddle-proof, and, frankly, I know a lot of people who could benefit from that today.

Here's what a simple document looks like in TaskPaper:

There's your projects, there's your tasks, there's your contexts, and there's your ability to see what you've ticked off. THAT, as John Hodgman might say, IS ALL.

So, first off and best off, TaskPaper is just text. Although documents created with TaskPaper will have the ".taskpaper" suffix, you'll find that you can open and edit the file with TextEdit, TextMate, or any other garden variety text app. Here's what my test document looks like when opened in TextMate:

I like the clarity and simplicity of the document's formatting, and how it virtually negates the ability to fiddle. Actually, on first glance, the magic of TaskPaper may look familiar to people who have used syntaxes like Chairman Gruber's peerless Markdown. I mean it really is just endlessly portable and mungeable text; it's TaskPaper's li'l engine that turns that formatting into the hooks that let you "do stuff" like view by context or project, and so on. This latest cut adds tabs for doing this neato functional stuff, and I have to say it's really appealing. The approach is similar to OmniFocus -- but even more obsessively concerned with keeping the system focused solely on completing tasks (rather than grooming and feeding them for months while they grow long hair and learn how to drive a stick).

Yes: absolutely -- TaskPaper will be way too simple for a lot of people's needs (including mine). But, if you're so overwhelmed with "flexibility" that you're getting close to throwing in the towel on an electronic system and are considering going back to paper, (while I'd never be one to stand in your way) you might want to give TaskPaper a whirl. If you love text and could benefit from the portability of a simple electronic document, it's definitely worth looking at.

TaskPaper is free to try, and it'll only set you back $18.95 if you decide to buy a copy. Download 'er now.

”TaskPaper 1.0 adds new features (and "fiddling" isn't one of them)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 24, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Clippings intelligently convert "stuff" into OmniFocus tasks

Merlin — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:13:29 -0400

[Disclosure: I'm a volunteer contributor on the development of the OmniFocus app]

You could be forgiven for being exhausted by my harangues about the importance of putting actions into their own special place outside of email, web sites, or other action-bearing media ("Email is just a series of tubes," Senator Ted Stevens, might one day say).

In fact, liberating actions from the email in which they arrived and putting them into a system that you trust is arguably the most important tenet of Inbox Zero. But it's also advice that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads: "OK, big shot, so where do I put this new task, and how exactly is it supposed to get there?"

Well, I'm happy to say that recent sneaky peaks of OmniFocus now have a pretty neat way to help with this problem. It's called "Clippings," and if you're familiar with the similar feature in OmniOutliner, you can imagine how it might work in the context of a task-tracking app and the complementary apps whose contents you want to direct to it.

Alongside the recently-added Perspectives, this is a feature that is making me very happy right now.

Once lightly configured, via the OF Preferences, Clippings allow you to select text and images from inside most OS X applications and send it to the OF QuickEntry box, where it gets munged into an inbox task automagically.

My favorite way to use this right now is inside Mail.app and alongside Scott Morrison's wonderful MailTags plugin.

Let's say I get a message from my client, Thorstenson Finlandson, containing some bit of work that he wants me to do.

See how I selected some of the text? Now I select "[Mail] > Services > OmniFocus: Send to Inbox" (n.b.: you can also define a system-wide key command for this in OF Preferences). And, waa-lah, the selection gets sent to my OF QuickEntry box.

Note that the message Subject is the default name of the task, the selection is added as a "Note," and (this is huge) the sender's email address is added as a link, as well as an URL that points me back to the original message (thanks for that one, MailTags!).

Since Thorstenson thoughtfully used an awesome subject line, I'll need only a bit of light editing and the addition of a few task details to turn this into a real thing.

I hit "Save" and I'm good to go. Back in OmniFocus, I'm ready to get to work:

All that note stuff I added is safely shunted away in its currently-hidden field, but I can bring it up any time by selecting the task row and hitting "CMD-[apostrophe]" or by clicking the "Expand Note" icon on the far right.

Happily, this works right out of the box in many other popular OS X apps (I'll go out on a limb and guess that it works in most Cocoa apps that play nice with OS X Services; feel free to correct me). But this already feels like a really healthy, Quicksilver-like habit to me. I love a) that it's super-fast, and b) that I keep that wonderful link back to the item the task came from. Disco.

Could I do things like this inside a Single Heavyweight Application? Yes, probably. But, personally, that's not my gig. I love Mail.app for email, Safari for web browsing, NetNewsWire for feed reading, and so on. I've chosen a series of super-sharp paring knives over one monstrous Swiss Army Knife, because, frankly, that's just how Daddy rolls.

I love how Clippings capitalizes on standard OS X technologies to lightly glue things together for me, regardless of my app preference. Personally, I don't need a massive robot to try and do a bunch of thinking for me; I just need a few very simple tools that shorten my path from cognition to completion.

Anyhow, as you can see, I'm a little giddy about this and wanted to share it with you guys. If you're in on the sneaky peak, be sure to give Clippings a spin (along with the hugely useful Perspectives). If I may say, my OmniGroup friends are doing a swell job on what feels to me like a very solid and non-fiddly app.

Rumor

A little bird tells me that a certain fast-talking new OmniGroup employee with hip glasses and a buzz cut may soon have a new OmniFocus screencast for you. Watch this space later this week for details.

[Again with the disclosure: I'm a volunteer contributor on the development of the OmniFocus app]

”Clippings intelligently convert "stuff" into OmniFocus tasks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 15, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book

Merlin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:26:27 -0400

This morning, like a lot of other people, I was locked out of using my PayPal debit card while the site (and apparently its glass-jawed transaction processing network) took a total dirtnap. So it goes. That’s only indirectly the point of this post (although I did kind of feel like opening a “Can of Cory” on The Pal).

Point is, my pal dansays left a great comment on my whiny Flickr post laying out why he's put all the customer service numbers of products and sites he uses right into his Apple Address Book. Great advice that I'll be taking this weekend:

The number syncs to my iPhone, so it's handy when I need it.

I have a record of the number, should the website decide to, ahem, "streamline" their customer service department by removing all traces of their phone number from their website and forcing all communications through email. This happened to me just last week.

I have a central place to keep all notes related to customer service conversations. Whenever resolving disputes, I switch into hyper-documentation mode. Who I talked with, when I talked with them, and what they promised me.

Smart fella, that Dan. 1 and 2 may seem obvious, but 3 is super-clever. If you've ever had to throw down with a dopey company, you know the importance of the paper trail. I really like the idea of having that with me on my Mac and on my iPhone.

”Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Becoming a tagging kung-fu master

Ian Beck — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:28:24 -0400

You’ve heard the hype about tagging. You’ve seen people flocking to sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, where they jump head-first into a pulsing mass of disjointed tags, possibly never to be heard from again. And you’ve wondered: how exactly is tagging worthwhile again?

Any idiot can tag, but you want tags that are useful rather than a disorganized mess. This is not an unreasonable desire, and by completing three simple steps before you start tagging, you too can become a tagging kung-fu master. (Or, if you want more intellectual cred, explicate your personal taxonomy.)

Whether you are tagging in a private, public, or collaborative system, consistency is the byword when tagging. Without a consistent pattern you won’t know what tags to assign items, what tags to search for to find items, or what items you’ll likely get while browsing your tags. The following three steps will help you create a consistent pattern to follow. Even if you’ve been tagging for a while, you may find these steps helpful to refine your knowledge of your own tagging habits and practices. (Please note, however, that these steps are focused on developing a personal tagging system; to optimize your tagging for collaborative use you would need to develop your system somewhat differently.)

Step 1: Know what

Are you tagging PDFs in Yep, notes in Notae, characters in Avenir, or photos in iPhoto ‘08? Whether you’re tagging in one program or several, you need to make a list of the general types of different items that you want to tag.

Tagging many different kinds of items does not make planning a tagging system much more complicated, but because you’ll tag different kinds of items differently you definitely need to think about what you’re going to tag.

Step 2: Know when

Part of knowing your target is knowing what kind of metadata is already available to you (through, say, Spotlight or the Finder) and not duplicating that metadata in your tags. For instance, every file in Mac OS X has a date created and date modified attached to it. As a result, tagging your files with a date is typically a silly idea. Tagging Word documents “word” is also redundant; the system knows which documents are Word documents and finding all of them is only a saved search away. Before you proceed to the third step, you need to make sure you know what information about your target you already have available. You don’t have to write it down if you don’t want to; just be aware.

Although there may be some situations in which you want to tag an item with every possible tag you can think of, most of the time you will want to keep your tags succinct and well-targeted, which means avoiding redundancy. Tags may be extremely flexible but they are the least efficient kind of metadata in some ways because they have no indication what they are marking. When you search the “date modified” field, you know exactly what you’re finding. An “05-31-2007” tag, on the other hand, could be any number of things.

Step 3: Pick your attributes

This is the heart of a consistent tagging system, and can be summed up in a single question: how do you think about the item you are tagging? For instance, when you are filing or searching for a photo, what do you think of? The location of the photo? The subject or people in the photo? The event taking place when you took the photo? Something else entirely?

Write out a list of the attributes that you think of when thinking of your target items. Ideally, you should make this a brainstormed list that includes every attribute you can possibly think of that you might want to tag. As you make the list for your different target items, star the attributes that spring immediately to mind.

Once you have a list, go through it to weed out the attributes that are covered by the item’s non-tag metadata. Then go through it again and pick out what attributes you want to use for tagging. Try to keep it a short, specific list focused on the attributes that sprang immediately to mind. You should also add attributes that didn’t spring immediately to mind, but that you want to make a habit of tagging anyway because they will be useful.

When you have this list of attributes, you are ready to tag. You should probably put your list of attributes somewhere visible, for example a Post-It by your computer or a virtual sticky note on-screen, at least until you’ve either memorized them or developed good tagging habits.

When you’re tagging, try to consistently attach a tag for every one of the attributes that you’ve selected. The more often you can hit all of them, the easier it will be for you to find files later. Additionally, knowing what attributes you are tagging makes coming up with specific tags much easier. Rather than sitting worrying over every photograph you can quickly attach a location, person, and event (or whatever attributes you decide on). Ideally, your attributes and tags should fit into the following sentence: “This [item]’s [attribute] is [tag].” For example, “this photo’s location is New York.”

The specific tags that you use will doubtless shift over time and circumstance, but the attributes that you are tagging should remain much more stable. By defining a standardized set of attributes for each kind of item that you are tagging and only deviating when necessary (or when the way you think about a given type of item begins to change), you will be able to create a consistent tagging system that helps you find items quickly because it matches the way you think.

And more importantly, you will have taken your first steps on the road to becoming a full tagging kung-fu master. Or developing a stream-lined personal taxonomy. Whichever works for you.

”Becoming a tagging kung-fu master” was written by Ian Beck for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

How do you describe Quicksilver?

Merlin — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:43:36 -0400

Acting without doing SOUNDS good, but... (Ask MetaFilter)

I really liked this AskMe question about Quicksilver, since it's one that comes up a lot for folks who don't get as enthused about the app as I (and many of you) do:

Everywhere I go on the internet, Mac users rave about Quicksilver. I've downloaded it a couple times, and I sort of get that it COULD be really useful, but I am not sure how...

So what am I missing with Quicksilver? I see so many other people who get a lot of use out of it, and I am sure I can fit it in somewhere, too, but I just can't seem to figure it out....

Here's a portion of how I responded in comments:

Quicksilver provides access to almost any kind of stuff in your Mac's and your world -- contact information, bookmarks, files, Applications, system settings, and pretty much anything else -- and it lets you leap to any of these things by typing a few letters of the name (NB: Spotlight is more about contents and QS is more about names; they're complementary, not competing). So, that's the neato, Day 0 stuff.

But the big sexy comes with how QS understands the potential verbal relationships between any of those objects, then gives you a single keyboard interface for making amazing things happen...

I'll admit that it always makes me realize what a fanboy I am whenever I try to explain Quicksilver, but, truthfully, it is kind of challenging.

How do you describe Quicksilver to folks who don’t get all the fuss? How do you relate the sexiness?

”How do you describe Quicksilver?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 30, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Quicksilver proxies for fast, easy printing

Merlin — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 06:29:53 -0400

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.

Select the files that you wish to print by Command clicking them.
Invoke Quicksilver (by default, ?–SPACE)
Type the name of your printer until QS displays its name e.g. “Lexmark”
Hit the TAB key to select the next pane.
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”.’
>
Hit TAB to select the next pane.
Type “current” until QS displays ‘Current Selection’.
Hit ENTER.
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.

Click To Play

Finally, don't miss Robert's tutorial on setting up proxies if this topic is new to you.

”Quicksilver proxies for fast, easy printing” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"