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.  read more »

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.  read more »

I’m sure many of you are already aware and using Anxiety and the same goes for OmniFocus so I won’t go there.

Last night I found that these two apps just go together like wine and cheese. Whatever you do in Anxiety can be synced with OmniFocus through iCal as a bridge since they both sync with iCal. I love OmniFocus but have wanted some sort of a HUD for it so I don’t have to switch back and forth between my work and action list.  read more »

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.  read more »

OK, this is a bit embarrassing, but I really need to get some work done, and somehow it just doesn’t work: suddenly, my mac seems to have become a huge playground. You wouldn’t believe how easily I’m distracted. I feel like I can’t use Word for longer than 10 minutes, I just HAVE to check emails, surf the net, read 43folders, and what have you. Really, it’s awful.  read more »

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.  read more »

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:  read more »

Hello all!

I’ve been searching high and low for a way to create a rule in Entourage that would print just an attachment in an email. for instance, Agendas sent by staff etc.

I can’t find one. The work around I’ve attempted is to have attachments sent directly to a folder on my hard drive. Now I’m searching for an Applescript that will print any “new” document that’s just been added to that folder.

I can’t find one. As you can see, it’s driving me a bit crazy. Any ideas would be apprecieated. Thanks in advance!

I've just come across Slipbox, a freeware freeform notetaking tool. Looks a bit like a combination of Notational Velocity and Devonthink. Seems interesting but a bit confusing. It also seems like it would need to be filled with content before one could judge the function and helpfulness of its "associative" search capacity -- so I'm wondering if any forum readers have used it and could comment on that.

http://markusguhe.net/slipbox/