Google docs: now in Safari
.31.1 | No Comments »
January 31st, 2008 by Alex
I just discovered that Google Docs finally work in the Safari web browser. (Up until now, Mac users had to access their Google Docs via Safari.) I think we may have the iPhone to thank for this; all those iPhone users wanted mobile access to their documents! I wonder what else the iPhone will finally bring to the Mac platform.
If you're not using Google Docs, this is a great time to start! Google Docs let you create, edit, store and share documents and spreadsheets; the word processor feels very much like Microsoft Word, and the spreadsheet editor like Excel, so you'll be right at home. But unlike the desktop versions of those apps, Google Docs let you collaborate with your colleagues. Here are some of the ways we've used Google docs and spreadsheets in our work:
- as part of a strategic planning process: brainstorming results in rows, participants in columns, with each participant marking their favorite ideas
- manage our docket of clients and projects (one client per row, one week per column; each week we insert a new column and add notes, current status, and upcoming actions and status
- capacity planning: clients and projects in rows, weeks/months in columns, to track upcoming hours required
- document creation: one person drafts in word and uploads, others fill in their details/examples
Tales of a Mac media server
.20.10 | No Comments »
October 20th, 2006 by Alex
Earlier this year we purchased a 32″, HD-ready Philips LCD TV. So when our DVD player died a few months ago, we found ourselves staring at the PC input on the back of the TV and wondering whether our next DVD player should in fact be a computer.
About eight weeks ago we bit the bullet and bought a Mac Mini as a home media server. We’ve been delighted with the results, so I thought it was time to share the details of our set up, the ways in which it’s changed our entire relationship to the information age, and our remaining wishlist.
The hardware:
Mac mini 1.66 GHZ Intel Core Due with 2 GB of SDRAM
Ministack 465 GB hard drive
Apple Bluetooth keyboard
Logitech cordless optical mouse (replacing a Macally Blueooth Mouse Jr that wouldn’t track)
Series 2 Tivo with 300 GB hard drive upgrade from Weaknees [UPDATE: Our hard drive — and thus our Tivo — is toast, just under a year from purchase. Weaknees only warranties for 6 months so we’re looking for alternate vendors before replacing the Tivo drive.]
Motorola HD digital tuner
Yamaha stereo receiver
The software:
Mac OS X 10.4.8
Parallels (for PC virtualization)
Windows XP Home edition
Tivo2Go
Mac the Ripper (for ripping DVDs)
Bits on Wheels (for downloading BitTorrents)
Earth-shaking ways we use our new server, starting with the most fundamentally life transforming:
- DVD archiving: We have quite a collection of kids DVDs. Make that scratched DVDs. As any parent of toddlers can attest, the value of that Dora the Explorer collection is seriously challenged by a toddler’s interest in laying dirty hands on each and every disc. Now we use Mac the Ripper to copy our daughter’s favorite DVDs to our massive external hard drive, and keep the originals safe on a high shelf. Our daughter can watch whatever DVD she wants whenever she wants, and all we have to do is play it back on the computer (by using the Mac’s built-in DVD player and selecting “Open DVD media”…then navigating to the DVD we want on the hard drive, selecting its Video_TS file, clicking “choose”, and then choosing “Play” from the DVD Player menu.)
- TV downloads: For a long time it seemed we’d been excluded from the joys of BitTorrent by our ISP’s throttling BitTorrent packets. Maybe we’ve become more patient, or maybe our ISP has relaxed: BitTorent has finally become viable. And with the computer hooked up directly to the TV, we can easily watch any shows that we’ve forgotten to Tivo. Most crucial use case: downloading HD BitTorrents of Battlestar Galactica, which is not yet shown in HD in Canada.
- DVD timeshifting: Notwithstanding Blockbuster’s “no late fees” policy, we’re able to incur a decent number of restocking fees before we get around to returning the movies that we’d hoped to watch weeks ago (another hazard of life with toddlers: no movie time!) Now we rip a DVD as soon as we rent it, and watch it when we have a chance (before we delete it — just for the benefit of our MPAA buddies).
- Audio landscaping: I’ve always wanted to be one of those people with mood music playing whenever my friends are over. Now we’ve consolidated all our MP3s and iTunes playlists on one server, and can easily choose to listen to any of our playlists, which play back through the stereo.
- Video landscaping: Instead of having our photos scattered across multiple hard drives, we keep our camera’s USB cable hooked up to the Mini. All new photos get loaded onto the Mini, but we keep sharing turned on (within iPhoto preferences) and iPhoto running so that we can still access the main iPhoto library from each of our laptops. We use System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver to set an iPhoto album as our screen saver, and set a “hot corner” so that we can activate the screen saver by moving our mouse to a corner of the screen. Once we’ve chosen a playlist for our audio landscape, we activate the hot corner and enjoy an on-screen slideshow of our favorite photos.
- Long-term Tivo programming storage: As Mac users, we were locked out of the joys of Tivo2Go, Tivo’s option for dumping Tivo-recorded programs to a PC. Thanks to the combo of Parallels and Windows XP Home we are now part of the Tivo2Go universe! We haven’t actually watched any of the programs we’ve dumped — this will require us to figure out how to move stuff off the virtual PC and onto the main folder for our Mac so that we can play back the programs. Or we could download the premium version of Tivo2Go to get decryption capacity on the PC side.
What’s next:
A series 3, HD-compatible Tivo with another massive Weaknees hard drive. Sure, we could download all those HD shows with Bittorrent — but we like the ease and control of having a Tivo.
Everything I needed to know about community engagement I learned from Flying Meat
.14.10 | 1 Comment »
October 14th, 2005 by Alex
Flying Meat is the software company behind VooDooPad, my latest favorite application ever. VooDooPad is one of those transformational technologies that do one small but crucial thing so incredibly way that they change the whole way you work.
In this case, what VooDooPad does is to give you one place to put all your notes — all those random files that are currently scatterred across your computer as Word files, stickies, Outlook/Entourage notes, text files, draft emails, draft blog posts, etc. That’s if you’re like me — the old me, I mean, pre-VDP.
Now all my notes are in one place: a single VooDooPad document that lets me create a new page for every random thought, to-do list, set of questions, document in progress, telephone call, chunk of code I need to hold onto, idea for an article, etc etc. I have categories for all my projects so I can assign each page to the right category or categories, and find it again easily. Wiki-style hyperlinks mean my pages can link to related pages, and that I can find those related pages using the “backlinks” feature. Awesome search means anything that doesn’t jump out at me from backlinks or categories is still easy to find.
But as much as I love VooDooPad, I think I may love Flying Meat even more. As far as I can tell, Flying Meat consists of August “Gus” Mueller, a software developer who could teach public participation types a thing or two about community engagement. Here’s what I’ve learned from Gus:
Ask for input. VooDooPad has a “report a bug/feature request” option built into its help menu, and on its website. That means that whenever you think to look for more information, you’ll be prompted to give feedback at the same time.
Let the public set the agenda. VooDooPad’s bug reporting interface doesn’t force you into a box that corresponds to their work process instead of yours. It’s just a message box that lets you type in an email, and (optionally) note whether it’s a bug or suggestion.
Responsiveness encourages communication. When I filed my first feature request, I got an e-mail from Gus just a few hours later. That personal and informative response made me feel like my input was heard and valued, and has encouraged t has encouraged me to provide further input, and created what I hope is a virtuous circle (or from Gus’s perspective, spam.)
Information fuels commitment. When Gus responded to my e-mail, he didn’t just thank me for my ideas — he actually provided some more information about the software to help it work better for me. By providing me with some value (in the form of a use tip) in return for my input, Gus has motivated me to continue participating in his user community by providing further feedback.
Transparency counts. As incisive and useful as my input may be, Gus hasn’t just taken it all with a thank you and you’ll see it in the next upgrade. By sharing his reservations about some of my suggestions he’s increased his credibility, and my interest in further communication.
Names count. Would I have sent an e-mail to PersonalNoteWiki or McWiki or YourNotesInc? Who knows. But there’s something about a company called “Flying Meat” that screams open doors and open minds. And of course, flying meat.
This is your brain in binary
.21.8 | 2 Comments »
August 21st, 2005 by Alex
As part of my ongoing quest to find a Mac counterpart to the Personal Brain (thanks to Jerry Michalski for ruining my life with his software demo) — and as part of my re-evaluation of all my productivity apps in the wake of my Treo purchase — I have been playing with a bunch of new tools. The one that has most quickly insinuated itself into my workflow is VoodooPad, a very simple little tool that solves that eternal problem: what to do with all those little random notes, thoughts and jots that aren’t to-dos, calendar items, or full-fledged documents?
VoodooPad is basically just a wiki for your personal computer, but its very straightforward interface makes it ideal for keeping all your notes in one place, and creating links and categories (a.k.a. tags) that help you organize and retrieve your work. I now keep VoodooPad running all the time and use it for any note or work-in-progress, ranging from project tracking to incipient blog posts to early document drafts to to-do lists. Because VoodooPad offers wiki-style automatic link creation (but doesn’t require that your links be in CamelCase form), it’s very easy to create a new page for every new topic or idea, no matter how small, while preserving its relationship to other ideas/topics/pages; I also use categories as a way of tagging and retrieving all related pages. I’ve created categories for each project I’m working on, and since VoodooPad lets you assign multiple categories to the same page, I’ve assigned pages with code snippets both to the category for my current web project (where the code originated) and to a category called Drupal (since I might want to re-use code in a future project).
One of the intriguing things about VoodooPad is its open API; I’ve been wondering whether it might be possible to create a plug-in that would generate visual maps for link relationships within a Voodoopad document. If so, that would come pretty close to full Brain functionality.
But until that moment arrives, I still find myself searching for something even more Brain-like, which is why I was interested to see David Heinemeier Hansson — part of the 37 Signals team — describe his vision for their much-lauded Backpack tool:
It’s the product I tried to create through a mesh of outlines, email inboxes, post-it notes, The Brain, and a gazillion other systems under the sun.
This has me poking around Backpack again, as I have periodically since it launched. But I’ve yet to start using it, partly because I’m nervous about having big chunks of my life accessible only if I’ve got an Internet connection (yeah, that’s most of the time, but it’s not all the time) and partly because I’m not really clear on how it’s going to make me taller, smarter, or more beloved by small children and animals.
I was intrigued to find Christopher Wimmer’s post on engadgeted.net » a few suggestions on how to improve backpack, in which he talked about his own curiosity about how he’d integrate Backpack and VoodooPad. I’m hoping he may soon offer some insights about Backpack versus (or alongside) VoodooPad, now that he’s become an enthusiastic Backpack user. Does Christopher (or anyone else) have tips on how to make Backpack play nicely on VoodooPad, advice on which things I should use Backpack for and which things I should use VoodooPad for, or a compelling argument about why I should give up one in favour of the other?
The perfect note app for a post-Entourage world
.8.8 | 4 Comments »
August 8th, 2005 by Alex
The extremely fabulous Leda Dederich asked me about how I’d handle tasks and notes after my switch from Entourage to Apple apps.
I was worried about losing “Tasks” too. Turns out they’re built into iCal! So no worries there.
Re: Notes, it’s a little more complicated. Anil Bawa says he decided to use Apple’s Stickies — like virtual postit notes — but I have a feeling I can do better. I’m thinking about using TiddlyWiki, a mini-wiki that has many devoted users and which I figure could be used on the Treo too, and with a little work, kept in sync. What I’m really going is something like the PersonalBrain software that Jerry Michalski told me about; it’s kind of like a wiki-mindmapping hybrid. But (argh!) it’s Windows only. Lucid Fried Eggs purports to be an open source effort to give a Brain to the rest of us, but I’m not sure it’s under active development anymore.
What I really want is something like a wiki — something that has a database backend and a mindmap-style GUI front end, with unlimited tags/keywords that can attach to every item so that you can navigate keyword-to-keyword, and with (of course!) outbound RSS feeds for each tag as well as for the whole enchilada. So, kind of a little more than Entourage’s built-in notes feature. It just seems stupid to use Word to take notes, when these flat-text files just keep my thoughts locked away and make them hard to find.
The other tool that Boris Mann points me to is OD4Contact. Since Boris’ offhand post re: buying an unlocked Treo is what tipped me over the Treo-purchase abyss, I’m inclined to follow-up on any tool that he tells me actually will make my life easier. I’m downloading it now — report to follow.
All Treo, some of the time
.3.8 | 4 Comments »
August 3rd, 2005 by Alex
Well my Treo-ification is now well underway, which is to say that I’ve been immersed in the ever-exciting challenges of how to reorganize my life to be more Treo-friendly. (Oops — I meant to say, figure out how to use the Treo to live my previous life more efficiently.)
Here’s some of what I’ve figured out so far:
GPRS without a net:
Actually, you can’t just take an unlocked phone out of the box and go wild. Gotta figure out your carrier settings, which isn’t 100% easy. Here are the current settings for Fido.
PIMing:
Up until now I’ve been an Entourage user. (That’s what you Windows users call “Outlook”.) I have a recurring event in Entourage that reminds me to reconsider using Entourage every three months. Today, when the bell went off, I wondered whether the Treo might make the ultimate case for switching from Entourage to Apple’s own iCal/Address Book/Mail combination. (Note to developers: giving your software generic names like “Mail” and “Address book” makes it very very hard for nice people like me to find out about your software using the Google method.)
My mind was more or less made up for me by the fact that Entourage appears not to synch with the Treo 650, period. Cruised enough user groups to conclude that my problems were the norm and not the exception. But was it worth giving up the joys of all-in-one mail/task/calendar/contact integration?
Today’s documentation award goes to Anil Bawa for his blog post on
Switching away from Entourage which tells you everything you need to know about how and why to switch. Why: inter-application integration among the various Apple apps is actually more flexible than integration across Entourage features. How: just drag and drop your Entourage contacts into the Address Book; and in iCal and Mail, use the built-in import features and select the “import from Entourage” options.
Not only did Anil convince me that the switch would be quick, easy and useful, but his blog post was also the first place I found anyone saying that YES you can get date from Entourage to the Apple apps. With all the scripts and software out there, promoting their ability to effect this transformation, I had just about concluded that it would require special software before discovering Anil’s post. So thanks, Anil.
Of course I’m hoping that the Apple apps (including built-in handheld synchronization via iSynch) won’t be my complete long-term solution. The nice people over at Airset tell me that they’ll have iCal to Airset sync soon, at which point Airset may become my automatic way of keeping Treo and Mac in sync.
E-mail and messaging
Mark Surman told me that I had to switch from POP to IMAP if my Treo was going to work for me, so I spent last night clearing through a terrifying accumulation of e-mail before making the switch. (Greets to the 39 people who got overdue e-mails from me between 9:30 and 11:00 pm last night.) Now I’m ready to give up POP — which pulls mail onto my computer — and switch to IMAP — which leaves my email on the server, so it can be read by my laptop or my Treo.
But since I am but a lone woman in the high seas of the Internet, I have no IMAP service in place. After a little poking around, I settled on Runbox — again, a Mark recommendation — who offer hosted IMAP service for $29.95/year. That includes hosting my own domain, so my alex_at_alexandrasamuel_dot_com address still works; it’s just now an IMAP account over at Runbox. Note to world (and Runbox): if you’re redirecting your own domain’s email to work via Runbox, it takes a few minutes for e-mail hosting to switch over; possibly longer. Meanwhile your e-mails will bounce. Maybe Runbox could change its bounce message to alert people to the possibility that the email address they’re trying might in fact work again in a few minutes. Meanwhile, I advise making the switch during off-hours.
As for the challenge of reading e-mail on my Treo, I’ve decided to go with Chattermail over Snappermail or Versamail, thanks in large part to a helpful article at Boston College. They came down on the side of Snappermail but that was because Chattermail was still in beta at the time.
I will install Chattermail tomorrow — once I’ve got this whole Entourage switch wrapped up — at which point I’ll also try to get up and running on Mumbu as my IM client. MyTreo had a great article on different IM options that pointed me in that direction.
I’m hoping to resist any further software problem-solving for the next couple of days. But you can keep track of the Treo resources I’m uncovering by watching my Treo links on del.icio.us.
Your dream job: Representative Apple
.10.6 | 1 Comment »
June 10th, 2005 by Alex
If you love politics and you love Apple, have I found the job for you: Manager of Congressional Relations for Apple. That’s right, Apple is looking for a [wo]man in DC to schmooze and hobnob on behalf of the Maciverse. Let’s hope they get somebody great!
The art and science of bookmarks
.10.12 | No Comments »
December 10th, 2004 by Alex
Like anyone whose work not only uses the Internet, but actually concerns the Internet itself, I am really dependent on bookmark management to keep track of my work and resources. As a Mac user I’ve recently returned to using URL Manager Pro, a client-side tool that does a very nice job of organizing bookmarks in a flexible, accessible, annotateable form. While that addresses my own bookmark management needs, it doesn’t provide a way of sharing my bookmarks with colleagues and collaborators.
For that job, I’m exploring a new tool: del.icio.us, which bills itself as a social bookmarks manager. Andy Budd has a nice explanation of its virtues.
Part of the appeal of the social bookmarking idea is that it’s not just a productivity app; it actually has some value added for those of us working in the field of online collaboration and cooperation. Social bookmarking is still relatively new, so I’ve yet to hear of anyone using it as a civic engagement or collaboration tool. But it won’t be long.