Colin Harman

I have done a lot of doodling and writing on paper without much purpose for pretty much my entire coherent life, yet none of it has been in any kind of consistent or single location. Ever. I’ve always kind of thought that a journal was more just a diary for boys, so I just wrote anywhere, but it was always a hot mess lacking organization.

Enter Day One. I have been using this app since the day it was released, and I can only scratch the surface in telling you how much it’s changed the way I record and reflect on my every day.

Having both Mac & iOS clients means that I’m rarely ever more than a few taps or clicks away from recording a moment. Having it be private and secure allows me to reflect honestly and think out loud without clouding my mind with the fear of someone stumbling onto my scrawlings.

In many ways it’s lessened what I tweet (and sadly, also cut into the amount I write here) because I often simply just want to savor a memory of a particular event or experience, but not necessarily broadcast it to the world. I love having it as a journal to record Maria and I’s memories together of the places we go, or the experiences we have that writing/sharing online just isn’t the proper platform for. Even just for personal ideas, or future endeavors, it’s a great place to save such things because it’s completely searchable.

This is only a very small facet of why I highly recommend Day One if you have any desire to create a written or photo journal of any kind. Day One and the fellows at Bloom have offered me a nearly resistance free writing habit that I couldn’t give up now.

I use Alfred to do a plethora of things on my mac, and while it works well as an application launcher, that’s merely the tip of the iceberg. I could go into a laundry list of things I use it for, but this particular post I’ll focus on Screen Sharing. I’ve used Screen Sharing a lot as a time saver for either technical support for friends, or to access other computers on my local network. It’s easy enough to go to that networked computer in Finder, click Screen Share, enter your password, and viola! However, doing that hundreds of times grew cumbersome. Knowing I wasn’t the first person to think of using AppleScripting to do this, I turned to the internets and found someone who’d beat me to it. Thankfully Alfred can also run those scripts from itself with a simple key command, so it was a matter of copy/paste, change computer name, and good to go.

However in Mountain Lion, they’ve changed something with the way that System Events calls windows, and suddenly all my (two-dozen or so Screen Share commands don’t work anymore. After some tinkering and trial & error I discovered this fix:

Turns out, if you call the application Screen Sharing twice, it will bring the dialog box back to front focus so it can allow System Events to run it’s magic and get you logged in. I’ve also added a bit at the end that runs after a 2-Second delay that turns it to a fullscreen instance so it’s able to run at maximum resolution. If you’ve got it setup properly in Alfred it should look something like this:

That’s it, I hope it was helpful, and again I’m by no means anything more than a tinkerer when it comes to this kind of stuff, so if you know of a better way, I’d love your insight.

➤ Update

Jeroen let me know in his comment of a way he’d made his AppleScripts work in Mountain Lion to get Screen Sharing working, and it got me thinking of ways that I could do this in a different way on a deeper level without having to do the login auth. I discovered you can actually cut out a ton of the rigamarole by doing the following:

Not sure why I hadn’t thought of it before, but you can use vnc:// almost anywhere in OS X to start a Screen Sharing session (you can even type it into Safari). This cuts out a ton of the lines from my original script, launches instantly without the dialog box, and I wouldn’t have thought of it without Jeroen‘s comment.

Thanks again man!

“Window Management” (the organization of multiple application windows on your desktop) can become a definite chore in OS X given the fact that it doesn’t really have anything built in to help you do so. However, creativity thrives where void and necessity meet head on so of course there are a plethora of third party apps that meet this need. We all know that the little green button at the top of all your windows is an erratic joke that never acts the same in any two apps, but we’ll just excuse that shortcoming for the time being. Now, here is where my method is a little ridiculous but I have yet to find a better solution. I wish I was telling you about the perfect app, but I haven’t discovered it, so instead I will tell you about the 3 (yes, three) that I use to manage windows each having their varying strong suite. The three I will talk about are Divvy, Cinch, & SizeWell.

Divvy:

Divvy, by Mizage, is a great app that uses a combination of the keyboard and mouse. According to their Website Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions. I use this one mostly on my MacPro with the two 27″ displays, simply because something like cinch which can only split or full screen the windows is a bit ridiculous. I mean, I like looking at a Web site super wide, but that’s also a lie.

When I need to have a half-a-dozen or so windows organized neatly, this is what I go to to quickly handle them all at once. You can setup keyboard location shortcuts (similar to those of SizeWell) but they’re not the most intuitive on setting up so I rarely use them. But when I’ve got a lot of various windows to organize all at once, I first turn to Divvy. You can see a demo video of it in action: here.

Available on the Mac App Store for $14 (but if you wait around the web for a while while you test out the trial, sites like AppSumo at times tend to run it as a special for around $6, just sayin’.

Cinch:

Cinch is quick little app by Irradiated Software who clearly found their inspiration from a little window management bit added to Windows 7. Cinch is described on their Web site as a simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as ‘hot zones’.

So, basically you just drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. It’s not the most advanced window management tool ever and is much less useful on a multi-screen setup, but for a laptop or anytime you need to view to items side by side, it’s perfect. You can see a quick demo of it’s simple but incredibly handy functionality: here.

I love supporting little apps like these because you know that Apple will soak up their idea into the next iteration of OS X, so thank them for the hours of time trying to get the exact half of your screen for that window with your mouse by buying their app on the Mac App Store for $7.

SizeWell

SizeWell is a little bit different than the other two I’ve mentioned because it addresses the uselessness of the “little green button” in OS X. Now it’s able to do that system wide by acting as a SIMBL plugin rather than being a standalone app. It is one I probably use the most since it is riddled with a laundry list of helpful keyboard commands for many common locations for windows. It also can handle zooming and the scaling of windows as well, and it’s one you definitely need to see in action to have a full grasp of it’s potential. Check out the demo: here.

Here’s the best part, this one’s free. It’s technically in Beta but has been in Beta for months and months now without many bugs or much revision either, so until they quit draggin’ their feet, enjoy! You can of course donate to their cause via PayPal on their promo page so be sure to help them out if you dig it.

I have an iPhone, and I have Flickr. The iPhone has a pretty dang good camera (in the phone camera world), and when coupled with a few extra apps to help with the processing and color correction, you can actually end up with some pretty interesting shots. It has forced me to start looking more meticulously at my surroundings, always keeping in mind that there could be something worth capturing. In the past I have used the excuse of lugging around my mediocre camera equipment as being too much of a hassle to be worth the shots I was able to capture with it.
However, now that I have my iPhone with me at all times, I really have no excuse to keep my eyes peeled for such photographic opportunities. It’s made me more aware of my surroundings, forced me to look for more creative angles, and has kept my mind-gears spinning even when I think it’s just sitting there idle. I plan to take at least one ‘iPhonotograph’ (I made this term up, because I’m a designer and I can do that) per day. I’m going to see how long I can keep it up. I have found a few apps to be really helpful in the processing of photos, which now I shall explain.

I have been using Camera Genius as my primary photo taking tool. It is, in my opinion, superior to the iPhone’s built in camera thanks to its “Thirds Rulers”, timer, picture stabilizer (helpful with dark or night shots), big button (full screen button for when your trying to take pictures with you in it), and in rare cases the zoom function can be handy.

For color correction, Mill Colour has some amazing features, and also some pretty great preset effects that prove to be a great place to start from in the editing process. The Mill Colour name has been seasoned with excellence over the years thanks to their stellar color correction techniques for photography and cinema.

CameraBag is another app that I have grown to love. Though it doesn’t have the flexibility of working outside of their presets, they too are a great starting place for some color correction options. There are options within the app to toggle whether or not you want the filter to add an authentic border to your photos that would match the development style/cropping of the particular filter preset.

For editing, I have had great success with PhotoForge. Some editing apps can only do a few things, some can seemingly do too much without keeping the interface understandable for the simple edits like cropping and rotation. Within the app you can actually do some pretty great things with color as well with the built-in curves, levels, contrast, and exposure adjustment features. It has been called “Photoshop for the iPhone”, and while that may be a bit of an exaggeration, it really does do a great job.

And lastly, of course, Flickr. This app didn’t exist for a long time, but it really has made the process of browsing and uploading to Flickr a breeze. You’d have to be a brain damaged moron to not be able to figure out their intuitive interface, and the functionality is effective for your simple tasks of flickr, but somewhat limited in comparison to the website itself. However, for uploading on the go, it’s a more than adequate setup.

That’s my process of photo capture and editing on the iPhone, and here are just a few examples of what will hopefully be a good size collection of photos taken.

My iPhonotography gallery on Flickr.

So I like lists. I love to-do lists. I can’t express the satisfaction I get when ticking off the little completed box on an item in my Things application. I use things everyday, multiple times a day and I’m not gonna lie, though it’s a little bit pricey on the surface, when coupled with it’s iPhone App, it’s worth every penny. It syncs over Wi-Fi using the bonjour protocol, so no matter where I am, I always know what I’ve got on my plate, what’s coming down the pipes, or even what I need to remember to get at the grocery store.

Things is a beautifully focused and amazingly intuitive task manager. Other task managers either oversimplify or are too difficult to use. Either way you are not getting stuff done. Things instead has the right balance between ease of use and powerful features.

I have tried other apps like this in the past, (Remember The Milk, Process, Curio, Omni, etc) but have never had the experience that I’ve had with Things by Cultured Code. It’s strange because you would think that with an application like this you would think that more is better, but in this case, less is more. It starts with the simplicity of interface design. They understand what it takes to make something minimalistic, but not lacking (that’s a tough balance). The demo is free for the Mac App, and can be downloaded here. I suggest giving it a go, you won’t regret it.

Also for the growing number of you out there that are using the iPhone as your handheld link to the world around you, the Things App for the iPhone & iPod Touch is the perfect companion (or standalone) for the desktop application. Though it’s functionality is somewhat limited in comparison to the Desktop app, it’s still a great standalone application for task management and as a GTD solution.

The interface is simple but effective, which should be expected but in many cases isn’t present in a plethora of apps. Things has received rave reviews and won a good number of awards, and even took home the best in show award at Mac World 2009.

As I’m sure you’ve already gathered, I highly recommend Things, it’s been nothing but the right solution for me since I started using it. Things, you have my vote and my everyday use.

Lastly, if you do plan on buying the iPhone app and the OSX Desktop application, there is a 20% off coupon code for the Desktop app in the “about section” of the iPhone App. Now that’s an even better deal.