Mac

I recently had the pleasure to sit down with David Allen, Merlin Mann, and Eric Mack in the studio to record a panel discussion on technology and productivity. If you’re signed up to GTD^® Connect, you can hear the complete discussion wherein we touch on a very wide range of topics sure to delight GTD fans and geeks alike.

GTD is a workflow methodology that has basically gotten me to where I am today profesionally. So, naturally, I have a keen investment in supporting the Mac community in implementing GTD. I also happen to work for the inventor of GTD. Thanks to David for blogging about this, and for giving me the opportunity to share some of my own insights about using the GTD methodology with a Mac.

Using the free Gnu Privacy Guard and a USB thumb drive (which are often given away in promotionals and should be available for under $10 in small storage capacities), you can implement a strong (AES) encryption system to protect sensitive files on your computer. The process divides the means to decrypting sensitive data into three distinct components:

• the encrypted file(s) - on your computer
  
• the private key needed to decrypt the files - on your thumbdrive
  
• the password required in combination with the private key to decrypt files - in your head
  

The process is simple and affords a great degree of security to your encrypted files, because all three components must be assembled to decrypt the data — a difficult task for a laptop thief or even a nosey coworker to accomplish, especially if you remove your thumb drive from your computer when you are not using it.

Net_Monitor now supports the latest release of Net_Growl (announced yesterday). Growl is an attractive global notification and alert system for OS X. Versions 0.7 and above support remote messaging via UDP, which makes this yet another useful way to receive alerts from the Net_Monitor package about the status of many common services it can monitor. The Net_Monitor_Alert_Growl class is currently available via cvs for your perusal. This and Net_Monitor_Alert_Jabber should be part of the next packaged release of Net_Monitor. For those of you that can’t wait, just pop either of these files into the Net/Monitor/Alert subdirectory of your Pear installation, and Growl or Jabber away.

Sometimes, the little things in life can be so rewarding. Like not having to toggle between applications to skip a song in my playlist. I wrote three lines of AppleScript:

tell application "iTunes"

	next track

end tell

compiled them as an application called ‘skip’, and popped them in my Applications folder. After a catalog refresh, I can now invoke Quicksilver, type ‘sk’ (it auto-completes to ‘skip’), hit enter, and move to the next song. All without having to leave the application I live most of my life in … vi.

If you’ve been wondering, like me, when podcasting would hit mainstream, today was definitely a milestone in that direction. Apple announced tight integration with podcasts in their latest (free!) version of iTunes. This means no more third-party software import-into-iTunes hassle. This could be just the boost to make podcasting a truly household word, rather than (up to now) the secret domain of hipsters and geeks. It looks like now even the BBC is starting to podcast.

If you use a Mac but haven’t heard of Quicksilver yet, you’re wasting clicks and keystrokes. It is the equivalent of ActiveWords in the Windows world, but with a host of community-contributed plugins and a deep framework for customization.

In fact, I used this framework to remedy something that was bothering me once I became better acquainted with Quicksilver: lack of browser-independent web searches. If you have been frustrated by not being able to use a browser other than Safari, OmniWeb, or Internet Explorer to display the results of Quicksilver Google searches, check out the AppleScript at the end of this article.

It’s been a week since Apple announced it will start using Intel chips. And, frankly, it’s come about twenty one years too late. But now that Apple is going to provide the most robust, powerful operating system in the world on the most ubiquitous hardware platform in the world, where does that leave Linux?

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

-Margaret Mead

For awhile now, I have been using the open source libgaim-based Adium alongside Defaultware’s shareware Proteus. While both offer connectivity to all the major instant messaging services, it is clear that Adium has won out on my desktop — and not just because it is free. In fact, there are a number of instances where freeware outstripped commercial/shareware offerings and open source has outstripped proprietary systems, and not for ideological reasons — but because the features, functionality and, yes, robustness has proved superior in my book to commercial alternatives. Perhaps this is a microcosm of how the “revolution” will look: a slow, steady progression, desktop by desktop, with programs like Firefox and Audacity leading the snail’s pace “charge”.