Jonathan Sterling

As a bit of background, my family switched from Comcast to Qwest for a few reasons. The first is the fact that Comcast is expensive and evil. The second is that our Interblags were always cutting out on us when we needed them most. We noticed no speed difference at all in the switch from cable to DSL, and have noticed in fact that Qwest is consistently fast, whereas Comcast was inconsistent.

Today, I found that my Internet wasn’t working. I took the usual steps (restart modem, router, repeat). None of this worked. I called Qwest support, and after a bit of voice-automated hoop jumping, I spoke to a nice lady who resolved my problems quickly, simply and kindly.

It is that kind of service that makes me glad to be a Qwest customer.

Today in Accounting, we had a sub who was probably in his sixties (I suppose that this isn’t really old), and he basically spent most of the period showing off his Macbook Air and slideshows and stuff. This leads me to wonder, if someone that old can be enthusiastic about cool gadgets, why can’t so many people in their forties?

Staying current is the best way to ensure that you never become obsolete.

WordPress for iPhone is a really great way to post to your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod touch. In fact, I am posting to this blog right now from school on my iPod touch.

The user interface is elegant, clean and snappy. Here is a screenshot:

In case you have been living under a rock for the past two years, Flock is a browser based on Mozilla Firefox whose purpose is to integrate all of you social activities under one roof (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, Digg, &c.). For more information, go to their website. Flock has always been, I think, visually attractive, at least on Windows and Linux. That was because the two platforms are from the start, not that visually attractive at all (though, Linux can be customised to look and feel quite nice, if a bit unstable at times). I have never really liked the look of Flock on the Mac. Until now, that is:

The Flock 2 web browser looks great on the Mac. Note the nice unified, but white title-bar. Just what I need in a heavily gray, dark OS. I know that it is XUL, but it even feels more native than Firefox 3 on Mac OS does; perhaps it is because they don't try to make a terrible imitation/mockery of a real Cocoa application.

It works just fine and the performance is nice. If you are looking for an alternative to Firefox, but still want to be using XUL and have extensions, it seems like Flock is the way to go. Download.

Aside from the constant crashing, misbehaviour with Spaces, &c., the most annoying thing about Microsoft Office 2008 is the fact that it places an identities folder in my Documents directory called “Microsoft User Data”.

The main reason I don’t like this is that I am very organised, and like to have my Documents folder exactly as I like it. Having another folder in it that I did not create, wherein I do not store my documents, is really quite an eyesore and ruins the beauty of my organisation system.

I went searching for a way to hide the folder (apparently, you can’t really get rid of it without losing all your Microsoft preferences and data or something; why on Earth they didn’t just put it in the Library folder like everyone else is beyond me!). I was hoping that there would be some sort of flag I could tick in order to make it hidden, either in Finder or in Terminal. The closest thing I found was on Mac OS X Hints:

/Developer/Tools/./SetFile -a V Microsoft User Data

(To use this, you must have Developer Tools installed on your Mac; but who doesn’t?) I tried this, but I suspected it would not work, because of the spaces in the name of the folder. I’m used to command-lines, especially unix ones, so I knew to modify it to the following:

/Developer/Tools/./SetFile -a V Microsoft\ User\ Data

That way, it counts the spaces as part of the name of the directory. Needless to say, this command must be run with your Terminal inside your Documents folder.

If, for some odd reason, you want to access this folder, you can still get into it from the Terminal, or from Finder using the Go to Folder menu item.

Hopefully this helped. In the meanwhile, I wish Numbers would get support for trendlines and better charts! That is the only thing keeping me using Microsoft Office. For everything else, I can use Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Mail, iCal, and most importantly, XeTeX. I have no use for Word, Powerpoint and Entourage.

The GTD and to-do list programs that are getting a lot of attention these days are Things (Cultured Code) or OmniFocus (The Omni Group). But what about Mail.app and iCal?

Before I actually discuss Mail.app and iCal, I’d like to talk about what I like and don’t like about Things and OmniFocus. First of all, Things is a really beautiful app, and probably my favourite above all in the area of third-party GTD software.

Things from C.C. is a beautiful and easy way to manage your tasks, complete with tags.

My experience with Things has really been quite positive, and if it weren’t in expiring beta, I might even use it. Synchronisation with iCal is a really nice feature too. But, as I said, I won’t use it because I can’t afford software on my computer to suddenly expire. If I were able to buy it right now, I would, but they don’t let you purchase until the application is actually released for real.

Another popular application is OmniFocus, which is the spawn of The Omni Group and Kinkless GTD (a set of macros for OmniOutliner). I tried it out, and was thoroughly unimpressed. The program was not nearly as user-friendly as Things, and all the parts of it seemed to be very distracting to my taste. So, I deleted it.

OmniFocus is an outline-based GTD app for OS X that failed to be awesome. The outline layout doesn't really work for me. I like things to be more free-form.

There are some other programmes that are so terrible, I won’t even show screenshots of them (ahem, iGTD, ahem).

Finally, there is iCal and all the extensions thereof. iCal in itself doesn’t provide a really nice way to organise tasks. It also ticks me off a little bit that they took away the tasks drawer and replaced it with a sidebar. I agree that the use of drawers can be excessive, but in the case where there is a sidebar already on one side, I think if any more sidebars are needed, they should be drawers. Two sidebars looks silly. Also, if the “sidebar” is collapsable, it should be a drawer. That is my opinion.

Though iCal doesn’t make tasks very fun, there are some really great apps that dig into the Leopard Calendar Store. One is Mail.app (yes, I know that it is silly to say the “dot app” bit, but they named it so ambiguously!). To Dos in Mail Notes are very useful. I can make a very freeform note about anything, and then tag certain pieces as tasks, add due dates, priorities, specify which calendar whither they are to go, &c. It doesn’t support keywords or tags or anything of the like, but I just use “@blog”, “@home”, &c. Then, so I can take my tasks all over my computer, I use the excellent heads-up-display (HUD) app, Anxiety, which uses the Leopard Calendar Store. It is really quite perfect for me.

Anxiety is an awesome task manager that plugs into iCal. It is free and unobtrusive. For the record, this screenshot does NOT contain my to-do list. I do not use Block Buster, know anyone named Sammy or Carina, and I most definitely don't go out looking for tans.

The only thing I am missing is synchronisation with my iPod touch. The fact that I cannot synchronise iCal tasks to Calendar on my iPod is one of the most retarded things I could ever come up with. Great job, Uncle Steve.

Conclusions:

If you aren’t afraid of your software expiring, and after that you don’t mind paying for it, I would suggest that you use Things. It is definitely the most polished. If you are like me (paranoid about expirations, very stingy), I would stick with Mail.app Notes and To Dos, and get something along the lines of Anxiety.

If you are here looking for my awesome podcast on Latin and all that good stuff, you have been victimised by the idiocy of free file hosting. For, I was about to listen to an old episode when to my surprise, I found that my files had been deleted by Satan, or as some call him FileFreak.com.

Thus, all that great work is lost to society forever. Sorry about that.