Tag: software

Tags, Revisted

April 26th, 2012 · · text No comments - Tags: , , , ,

Pathfinder

I wrote a little while ago about OpenMeta tags and some software to implement them. I continue to be a believer in tagging. At every opportunity, I reduced the number of folders I use and consolidate as many files as I can into one folder and then tag them, sparingly. Over tagging files can be just as bad as having too many folders. Here’s an example of overtagging:

For a while, I was tagging work documents as ‘work’ and ‘COMPANYNAME’. It was overkill. I should know that anything that is tagged with my employer’s name is work. I shouldn’t need to tag those documents as ‘work’ too. Those files are already in a ‘Work’ folder in Dropbox.

Two updates to applications I had tried in the past came out last week and their new inclusion of OpenMeta tagging support has gotten me back into them. The first is Path Finder 6. I tried Path Finder out in 2007, I think, and while I liked it’s extra abilities over the Finder, it wasn’t ready to be a replacement for the Finder. Path Finder’s come a long way, and I think you can safely leave Finder behind. What I essentially do is run both in tandem, and I redirect all “Reveal in Finder” commands to reveal in Path Finder and Path Finder lets you hide the Finder’s dock icon. Finder can run in the background for Time Machine and you can use Path Finder exclusively. It’s pretty seamless.

Path Finder 6 also adds the ability to work with OpenMeta tags. You can edit the tags for any file, but Path Finder has these nifty “tag groups” you can set up and then every time you apply a “tag group”, Path Finder adds multiple tags that you’ve already assigned to that “tag group”. I still use Tags.app because of the ability to tag anything, anywhere rather quickly and Tags.app has a great search feature and tag browser that Path Finder doesn’t.

Oh, one more bad ass thing. Path Finder 6 can queue file transfers! No more grinding hard drives to a halt when you initiate multiple transfers at the same time.

The other piece of software is the new version of the MailTags add-on for Mail.app. MailTags now adds OpenMeta tags so the emails you tag with MailTags show up in Tags.app’s tag browser. I guess tagging emails is a natural extension of my newfound love of tagging files. Adding tags like ‘@action’, ‘@followup’ and ‘@waiting’ have made it easy to create Smart Mailboxes that help me get to certain types of mail quickly. I have a Smart Mailbox called “Priority Mail” that contains flagged messages, ‘@action’ and ‘@followup’. I check this once in the morning and I can quickly see what needs to be acted on or processed in some way.

Overall, I’m really happy with my tagging setup. I keep everything in Dropbox, my MailTags tags sync through iCloud’s IMAP system (or at least they appear to be) and I’m taking advantage of Smart Mailboxes and Spotlight Saved Searches to keep everything at my fingertips.

To Defrag or Not to Defrag…

August 23rd, 2011 · · text No comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

Idefrag2 ss1

Do you need to defrag?

Well, it depends. Do you have an SSD? If so, no, you don’t. You’re not going to benefit from defragging. Do you have a regular spinning disk drive? Then yes, you’ll probably benefit from defragging. Contrary to what most Mac zealots will tell you, OS X doesn’t do all the defragging you need on the fly. If you write and delete lots of big files (videos?), you’re going to have a lot of fragmentation. I ran iDefrag and immediately found my 2009 MacBook Pro to have serious amounts of fragmentation. And it made sense, I download and delete large video files everyday. This creates huge holes in the table on the disk and thus it makes it harder for the OS to find the files I need even when doing simple tasks. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it contributes to the MacBook running hotter when playing HD video as well. Probably hurts gaming performance as well.

So you need to defrag…

So we’ve established you need to defrag. Is defragging going to help your two year old Mac that has put its HDD through the ringer with writing and deleting huge files? Well, it could…but you’d have to wait a very long time to defrag it. I ran iDefrag and let it run over night, and it only made its way through 3% of my drive. I don’t think it’s because iDefrag isn’t able to defrag quickly, but during the analysis iDefrag did on my drive it said my drive was over 90% fragmented. I eventually gave up on the idea of defragging the drive and came to the conclusion that backing up, formatting the drive and starting clean was my best option. At 90% fragmentation, it’s hopeless. Defragging would take days, it would be quite taxing on the drive, and after two years, I’d like to start fresh. My theory is, if you do periodical defrags on a freshly created OS X install, the defrags would go much faster and wouldn’t allow the drive to become as fragmented as mine did.

iDefrag has a few different modes of defragging. The more thorough the defrag process, the longer it takes. The biggest selling point that got me interested in iDefrag was its ability to defrag without a boot disk. Sadly, this isn’t currently possible under Lion. iDefrag works with Lion, but you’ll have to create a boot disk (which is easily created from within the app itself). Coriolis Systems, developer of iDefrag (as well as iPartition), have encountered a few problems due to Lion, and they said on their blog that they intend to issue fixes as soon as possible. These sorts of utilities are always going to have problems with major OS updates. Thankfully, you can still use iDefrag with Lion, you’ll just have to use a boot disk. You can download a demo here.

Would You Like a Mint?

June 7th, 2011 · · text No comments - Tags: ,

Mint, I Love You

I have bitched and complained about Shaun Inman a lot. A lot. A great deal of it’s been unfair. I complained about Fever’s iPhone interface. It’s still not great. I made fun of Mimeoverse. Which still looks boring to me. But I’ve always wanted to try Mint. Mint is a stat tracking package that you host on your own server. I wanted to try it out first when I was doing Pixelsnatch on Squarespace. Since I wasn’t running the site on my own server though, I couldn’t install and run Mint. Now that I’ve moved over all my sites except for Kernel Panic to WordPress installs, I can finally use Mint. I decided to use it first on this site.

I love Mint. I like it better than any stat tracker I’ve ever used. It’s lightweight, the peppers (extensions) allow third-parties to create add-ons for Mint, and the interface for the iPhone (unlike the terrible Fever UI) is beautiful and offers almost all the same functionality of the desktop browser UI. The default pepper includes basic tracking like visits and referrers. You can then download and add other things like the iPhone UI, user agents, window size of visitors, locations, RSS feed tracking, and downloads. I’m not sure why the non-default peppers that are maintained by Shaun Inman himself aren’t just included in the default install of Mint. It seems like all the default peppers could be in there from the start and turned on by the user, but I guess he didn’t want to add anything that the user might not use. It’s added hassle to the initial setup, but it’s not that big of a deal.

Should You Have a Mint?

If you have a self-hosted Web site, I recommend checking out Mint’s Web site at the very least. Play with the live demo and see what you think. It’s a little pricey at $30 a license, but it’s very pretty and very useful. I wish there was bulk licensing deals, because I’d love to use Mint on all four of my sites, but $120 for stat tracking on sites I don’t actually make money on is a big dollar amount. That said, I’m very happy that I bought it for this site and urge everyone with their own sites to check it out.

Say Bye Bye To Ugly Text Editors with Byword for OS X

May 26th, 2011 · · text No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

Byword05

I love TextMate. It’s a powerful text editor. The bundles available for TM let you do all sorts of things you never thought possible with it. It has great Markdown support, which is a complete necessity as far as I’m concerned, and the blogging bundle lets me post to my WordPress blogs without leaving the text editor. It’s not the most full-featured blogging set-up available, but it’s pretty darn good. What I don’t like about TextMate is how it feels when I’m writing longer stuff. The only way I can put it is: TextMate has no soul. It’s going to sound a tad silly, I know, but TextMate, while it’s very awesome, is better suited for coding and editing short snippets of text. I don’t know why I think this way. For a long time I used Hog Bay Software’s Writeroom for all my writing. It may seem hard to believe if you started following me from Kernel Panic, but a few years ago, I was a software review-writing machine for Smoking Apples. The desire to constantly write about software kind of went away, and was replaced by the far easier outlet that podcasting is. I find it much easier to talk about tech topics than write about them. At a certain point, the non-stop chatter about if a UI is pretty gets tiresome.

Back to the reason I’m writing this here piece though. I wanted to write about Byword for OS X. Byword is a streamlined Writeroom. It’s main draws are its aesthetics and simplicity. It’s all black and white. No color, whatsoever. It’s got a light theme and a dark theme. It’s got a couple preset font choices (you can edit the font if you want to though). It does plain text and rich text. You can get a Markdown preview as well, thanks to the latest update. It’s a little bit of a problem that you can’t choose any extensions other than .txt and .rtf though. I had gotten into the habit of naming all my Markdown files .mdown or .md, but it’s not a deal-breaker. It also has a separate option for “New Document” and “New Markdown Document”. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is. The Markdown preview can be used no matter which you’ve chosen.

Screen shot 2011 05 26 at 2 22 48 PM

The last little cool thing that Byword can do is “focus” on text. Like iA’s Writer for iPad, Byword can focus on one to nine lines of text or on entire paragraphs. Anything above or below the “focus” area is still visible, just grayed out.

If you wanna buy Byword and help out the site at the same time, buy the app from the Mac App Store for $9.99.

Creating a Personal Wiki on Mac and iOS

May 17th, 2011 · · text One comment - Tags: , , ,

I’ve had this desire to build a wiki over the last couple of months. I suppose it’s a part of my desire to have a mostly text-based database of everything. A wiki seemed like a more open way of cataloging information, as opposed to something like Evernote. As much as I like Simplenote, it’s no good for creating media rich documents, the notes don’t have inherent links to each other, and sharing info from Simplenote is a pain in the ass. So I started looking into building my own wiki. Not necessarily about just me, but I thought that something others could access might offer some sort of value to people who read my blog, follow me on Twitter or listen to my podcasts.

Then I came across Mac and iOS apps that help you build personal wikis. They don’t offer quite the same kind of openness that a real “wiki-style ” wiki offers. They backup to Dropbox, but there’s no easily accessible URL that people can visit. The two I tried were VoodooPad for Mac and VoodooPad for iOS and Trunk Notes for iOS. (VoodooPad is made by the same guys who make Acorn for Mac.) Both apps strive to make building a wiki easy and they do a good job of it, but if your goal is building a publicly accessible wiki, they aren’t gonna fulfill your needs. However, if you want something just for yourself that’s easily editable, they might just work.

Review Backlog

March 18th, 2011 · · text No comments - Tags: , ,

I’m finally starting to work through the back log of software reviews I said I’d do for Smoking Apples. I’ve been sitting on some of these reviews and write-ups for months. I guess I’ve been preoccupied with my own creations (podcasts) over the last six months, and have found it difficult to work on things for someone else. Especially since the overall flow of content over there has been much slower than a couple years ago. When I first started doing tech reviews and editorials, there was a competitive environment on SA. Lots of people were writing about Apple stuff, the writers were a buzz on Twitter and it was exciting. I was getting attention on the Internet for the first time ever, and the majority of the response I was receiving was positive. (There was negative feedback as well though!)

I guess everyone’s been moving on to their own things. I’ve been doing a couple podcasts for a while now. Editing those things takes up the hours during the week that I used to dedicate to writing about software and the like. There are only so many hours in the day, and if you’re busy making podcasts, that time’s gotta come from somewhere.

That said, I’m finally writing some. I posted a thing about TextExpander 3 yesterday on this blog but I found it difficult to write a long entry. I love TextExpander, but I can’t find the energy to get worked up about software the way I used to. Same goes for games. When I started Pixelsnatch, I was really excited about writing about games. That faded over time. I still love video games, but not only do I not want to write about them anymore, I don’t even really read about them anymore. Instead, I look to Twitter or the much smaller number of game podcasts that I still listen to to give me info on new interesting games. I’ve been playing these things for long enough that I just instinctively know what I’m gonna like after just hearing about it on a podcast for a couple minutes. The quality of “games journalism” feels like college kids in a remedial English course (probably not far removed from such a setting), but they’re amiable enough that people can stand them more than they can stand me, and they give them writing jobs.

TextExpander 3 Is The Smartest Software On My Mac

March 17th, 2011 · · text No comments - Tags: , , , ,

TextExpander is possibly the most useful piece of software I’ve ever used. I love Launchbar and Hazel, but nothing compares to TextExpander in terms of sheer power. There are so many email addresses, URLs, usernames and Markdown snippets that I would have to type over and over in the course of a single day that TextExpander probably saves me 15 minutes worth of extra typing every day. (Okay, maybe not 15, but this stuff adds up fast.) I’m looking at my statistics that TextExpander provides now, and it says that in the few months I’ve been using it, I’ve expanded 393 snippets, I’ve saved 5,242 characters and saved 0.22 hours at WPM.

0AA9ABDE C76B 4C90 A2CB 6BDC3A75C03C

I know it does’t sound like a whole lot, but that’s because I’m still not really using TE to its full potential. I mostly use it for things like mmail into my email address or iidont into http://idontknowifyouknowthis.com. At the same time, you could create a snippet like:

Dear (insert customer name here),

Thank you for your order of . We greatly appreciate your continued support and look forward to serving you in the future as well.

Sincerely,

(Your Name Here)

And you could trigger this with tthanks. I think you can see the value in this. Much in the same way that Hazel saves you time by helping you do actions that you do all the time automatically and easily, TE takes all those repetitive typing tasks and shrinks them down to just a couple characters.

I really love the way TE3 handles syncing and backup. You’ve been able to sync over MobileMe for a while, but now they support Dropbox as well for folks who don’t want to pay the Apple sync tax. It also backs up your snippets locally, and you can tell it how often to back up, and how many backups to limit itself to. I was about to create a Hazel action to clean up the backups but then I noticed that TE3 is smart enough to do that all by itself!

TE3 came out last year, but I didn’t pick it up until the end of the year, and I meant to write about it sooner than now. With the 3.0 release, TE is now a real application and not just a system preference. I’ve found it to be much faster now. You can download a demo of TextExpander 3 or purchase a license for $34.95 here.

Hazel is how I keep my desk(top) clean.

February 22nd, 2011 · · text No comments - Tags: , , , ,

Screen shot 2011 02 22 at 2 21 10 PM

Let me count the ways

Hazel is one of those apps that you never even knew you wanted, let alone would love, until someone else tells you about it. I first heard about Hazel a few years ago from an episode of MacBreak Weekly with Merlin Mann. I downloaded it, didn’t get its value at first glance, and then promptly dismissed it and trashed it. I wonder, now, at how much more productive and organized I could’ve been if I had been using Hazel these past three years. Hazel is one of the most useful applications you’ll ever use and here’s why.

Delete apps completely

When you trash an application, there’s always a trail of support files lingering around on your hard drive afterwards. With Hazel running, all those support files and plists get trashed along with the application. AppTrap is a free utility that does the same thing but Hazel tends to be faster at finding those files, however. And Hazel gives you a lot of control over your trash can. You can have Hazel auto-empty the trash after a user-determined period of time or when the trash has a certain amount of data in it. You can even have it auto delete files that exceed the trash can’s new limit. Did I mention it can securely empty the trash too?

Screen shot 2011 02 22 at 2 13 57 PM

Meat and Potatoes

The real reason to use Hazel though is what it does with folders. This is also why you might not get how awesome Hazel is either. Hazel will monitor folders, be it your Downloads, Desktop or anything else. You can set up a list of rules (any or all) and then an action to do done to files that meet those criteria. It sounds arcane for sure, so I’ll give you an example that I actually picked up from Mac Power Users.

Let’s say you use Omnifocus. Omnifocus likes to create a backup or two of its database everyday. After a few months of use, these backups, if you’re managing a lot of projects and tasks, will start taking up a lot of space. This can be a waste, especially if you’re using an Air with limited drive capacity. So with Hazel, you can monitor the folder where all those backups get stored and set up a rule that says to take all the backups that were created more than a month or two weeks or however long ago and trash them. Or copy them to Dropbox. Whatever. So everyday, Hazel gets rid of these old Omnifocus backups for me and keeps my hard disk from filling up with files I’m never gonna use again.

Screen shot 2011 02 22 at 2 13 28 PM

Want another good example? I download a bunch of crap. Any file in my ‘Downloads’ folder that hasn’t been opened in 24 hours get a red label attached to it so it stands out and maybe I’ll act on it. Or how about all those files that pile up on my desktop? I’ve got a rule that takes any file on the desktop that hasn’t been modified in 48 hours and moves it to a folder on the desktop called ‘Inbox’. Some call that folder ‘Review’, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, but it clears the clutter off the desktop and then when you do your daily or weekly GTD review, you’ve got all the things you need to check on in one folder. It’s kept my desktop and head clear.

No complaints here

I’m usually a bitchy guy when it comes to software, but Hazel has left me complaint-free for once. I’ve had a couple “folder monitor” crashes on my MacBook Pro but my MacBook Air (which has a fresh OS install unlike the Pro) has had no issues at all. There’s a 14-day free trial and it’s $21.95 for a license. Buy it here.