Step-by-Step Know-How for Macheads

Nobody seems to have time these days and many try to mitigate that by embracing to do lists, GTD, Blackberrys and other productivity thingamajiggers. But you know what? All these things don’t give you more time. Your day is as long (or short) as mine and everyone else’s and no productivity tool or method is going to change that.

Since I’m painfully aware of this problem and the generally short attention span we Web workers seem to have, I decided to try something radical. Rather than write a full-fledged written review, or produce a long-winded screencast, I tried to cram as much information into as little time as possible. I ended up with a just-the-facts review of TaskPaper 2 that’s just over a minute (ex intro and outro).

This might not be something for everyone. I had to cut some corners here and there to fit in what I thought would make up a good represenation of TaskPaper. And a one-minute video cannot possibly replace a detailed, in-depth and full-featured review. But if you’re looking for a concise, trimmed-down and snappy overview of what TaskPaper is about, this might just fit the bill. In fact, watching this screencast is even faster than downloading the app, installing it and trying it out yourself.

Click the image below to launch the video. And if you like what you see, there are some excellent, more comprehensive reviews of TaskPaper to be found on the Web. I recommend hopping over to Smoking Apples and TUAW.

If you enjoy these kind of review “shorties”, be sure to subscribe to my feed, as there are more one-minuters coming soon.

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There’s a collector in all (or most) of us. Us men at least. Probably goes back to the stone age or something when we hunted and collected to survive.

These days, with people sitting in offices rather than going out to hunt game, our desire to collect has found other avenues for manifesting itself. Some people collect stamps. Others collect art. And some people collect computers.

I own a handful of vintage Macs myself, but I wouldn’t consider myself a Mac collector. At least not anymore after I “met” Jeremy Mehrle in the video below. Jeremy has converted the basement of his house into what looks to be a pretty much complete museum of fully functional Apple computers. He has a Lisa, an Apple II, a dozen or so Mac Classics, iMacs, Performas and even a Twentieth Anniversary Mac. And they all work, too. They’re all neatly wired up, installed and ready to run whatever vintage software you manage to get your hands on.

And not only has he managed to assemble this impressive Mac collection, the environment he has built around them does them proper justice and looks a bit like an Apple Store inspired by the movie “2001: A Space Odysee.” The furnishings are mainly white, soft ceiling spots playing off the machines emphasizes their slick design. If Steve Jobs has a Mac collection, it probably looks something like this.

Watch the movie below and get ready to mop up the drool. Be duly warned, though. If you call yourself a Mac collector now, this guy will raise the bar for you, possibly to heights you will never achieve. It had me crying, I can assure you. Proceed with caution.

Jeremy’s website can be found at jeremymehrle.com and you can find photos of his Mac collection on Flickr.

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Macsteps maintains a watchlist of interesting, useful and popular software and keeps up to date with their development. Here’s the list of software updated in week 51, 2008.

• Perian 1.1.3
• BBEdit 9.1
• Pagico 3.2.1.107
• Camino 1.6.6
• Opera 9.6.3
• TaskPaper 2.1
• Hazel 2.2.4
• A Better Finder Rename 8.0.6
• Firefox 3.0.5
• LittleSnapper 1.0.1
• Cocktail 4.2.2
• Mactracker 5.0.6
• iPlayer Downloader 3.0
• EverNote 1.2.1
• PDFpen 4.0.3
• Pixelmator 1.3.2
• Mac Games Arcade 1.0
[Click here to view full list and details...]

The waiting is finally over. DEVONthink have released DEVONthink 2.0, the long-awatied successor to version 1.x. It’s still in beta, but release of the final version seems to be due sometime pretty early in 2009.

Version 2 introduces many features we’ve been eagerly awaiting:

• Open multiple databases at the same time
• Smart groups
• Global inbox (great for GTD)
• New “Sorter” for quickly adding and categorizing data
• Tabbed interface
• Support for more file formats
• Quick Look support
• Linking to documents in a DT database from the outside
• Modernized user interface

There’s more, but those are the biggies, according to the current release notes.

My personal and business stuff is scattered over several applications at the moment: EagleFiler for archiving emails, NoteBook and DEVONthink 1.x for notes and web clippings and some old stuff I was too lazy to move is still stored in Mori. If this upgrade proves worthy, I might take the leap and start using DEVONthink Pro Office for everything.

DEVONthink comes in the flavors Personal, Professional and Pro Office (compare the features here). Owners of DEVONthink 1.x can upgrade to version 2.0 at a special upgrade page.

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I don’t know about you, but my Mac is full of stuff. Files, PDFs, Word and Pages documents, Excel and Numbers spreadsheets, emails, notes, web clippings, movie files, images, outlines, databases and more. It’s incredible, but my main hard drive has about 350 GB of stuff on it and I only have a faint idea of what may be hiding deep down in the most distant crevices of my Mac.

And it gets more daily: Emails pop into my inbox, I download stuff from websites, I create new documents… if there’s one thing I can say for sure: the amount of data on my Mac is only going to grow over time, so I better start thinking about how to manage all this stuff more effectively.

With the number of files inhabiting my machine, managing them with the Finder in folder hierarchies is quickly becoming a hassle. Out of the box, Mac OS X just doesn’t have that many easily accessible ways of managing a large number of files. Tagging? Not really. You have the Spotlight comments field in the Get Info window, but that gets crammed quickly and there’s no way of browsing them either. Spotlight? It’s much more powerful than meets the eye, but using its query language isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

So I did some research, looking for apps that would help me manage my collection of data easily and efficiently. I found lots of apps that let you take notes (which is much better than keeping your notes in individual files), embed numerous types of files and search and tag your data. I looked for well-supported apps, since I’m going to be trusting them with my precious data and I wouldn’t want to end up in a tight spot with some important documents in a database of an app, who’s developer has moved on to greater things.

Here’s an overview of the apps I came up with after researching and filtering, in no particular order. [click to continue…]

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You read right: I’m recommending you not use antivirus software on your Mac. What may sound like a pretty crazy proposition at first - especially these days where Apple’s growing market share is starting to make the Mac more interesting for malware programmers - will make perfect sense once you really think about it. Suspend your scepticism for a moment and I’ll give you some arguments that will at least make you rethink installing antivirus software on your Mac. [click to continue…]

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I‘ll admit it: I’m no Photoshop expert. I know the basics and sometimes I manage to learn something from the plethora of online Photoshop tutorials, but in the end, I still consider myself to be a dabbler at best. Nevertheless, I still want the images on macsteps.com and my other sites to look at least a bit pretty. While I have managed to acquire the skills needed to make Photoshop do most of what I want, not everybody will want to put in the effort. This is where Picturesque comes in handy.
[click to continue…]

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Macsteps maintains a watchlist of interesting, useful and popular software and keeps up to date with their development. Here’s the list of software updated in week 50, 2008.

• MoneyWell 1.4
• VoodooPad 4.03
• Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1.3 (21)
• Screenium 1.0.7
• File Juicer 4.12
• Alarm Clock Pro 8.5.8
• Sandvox 1.5.3
• Coda 1.6.2
• VueScan 8.5
• TinkerTool 3.93
• ImageSmith 1.0.5
• iCompta 3.0.1
• MoneyWell 1.4.1
• Path Finder 5.04
• ForkLift 1.6
• Caffeine 1.0.4
• RadioShift 1.1.2
• Mailplane 2.0
• A Better Finder Rename 8.0.5
• DMG Canvas 1.0
• LittleSnapper 1.0
• StoryMill 3.2.1
• ControllerMate 4.3.9
• Pagico 3.2.1.106
• SubEthaEdit 3.2.1
• Integrity 3.1
• FileChute 4.1
• SimplyDisk 2.0.2
[Click here to view full list and details...]

People sometimes come up with ideas that are nothing short of ingenious. Sometimes these things appear to be “obvious” and “simple”, but often that’s exactly why they’re ingenious in the first place.

NumberKey by Balmuda Design fits into this category perfectly. This iPhone and iPod touch app with a desktop companion turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a numeric keypad for your MacBook. It connects via Wifi to your MacBook or MacBook Pro and serves up four different skins that match its design to either the new MacBooks or the MacBook White.

The iPhone app costs $1.99 and is available in the App Store. The desktop companion app named NumberKey Connect is available for free at Balmuda.com.

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