A few months ago I switched from Mac to Windows. The reason was work. At Memonic we develop a consumer application which should work well for non-geeks and average consumers. But a while ago I noticed that at our office every single one of us was either on Mac or Linux. While you can test Windows apps well enough using VMWare that just didn’t happen in practive — not least because of the heavy memory tax of running Mac and Windows side to side. ...
Back when I did some Ruby on Rails development I was a big fan of autotest. With it I could stay in my editor while the project test suite got executed with every change. Setup Now that I’m working in Python I was looking for something similar and I was successful. You’ll need the following: Mac OS X Growl nose nosegrowl tdaemon Then you can execute tdaemon like this in your project directory: ...
In a previous article I gave an introduction to GTD. In this post I’ll describe how I actually implemented that system using the fabulous DEVONthink. DEVONthink Pro First a word of introduction. If you don’t use DEVONthink yet, I recommend you to try out specific tools like iGTD or kgtd first. They may be better suited to implementing a basic GTD system. I went with DEVONthink because all my reference material is already in there and so putting in my actions and projects into the same system makes sense. Additionally I don’t mind some custom hacking and customization which definitely is necessary with DEVONthink. ...
About two weeks ago I did a slight adjustment to my mail reading approach. So far it has served me really well and thus I’d like to document it. The basic approach is that I want a clean inbox. My inbox it should only include known good mail. This is opposite to the traditional approach which is to have mails in the inbox which are not known to be bad. A slight but important difference. ...
I’ve been using DEVONthink Pro for writing notes and cataloging my know-how for a year now. I’m trying to copy news I read and want to keep there. Using the internal web browser of DEVONthink it’s possible to copy web sites as rich text into DEVONthink. But it’s a hassle to copy first the web site link into DEVONthink, then open it, and from there create the rich text note. So I’ve always wanted to do that from Safari directly. ...
As a web developer I often have to find out the exact color that the designer gave me to implement. I always used to do that with opening the image in the Gimp and then using the color picker. Now I find that OS X actually comes pre-installed with a tool for that: Digital Color Meter. It’s in your Utilities folder and allows you to find out the color of anything on the screen. ...
I’m quite picky about my photo management. The thing I’m most picky about is my folder structure as I want to be able to live independent of a single photo management application. So far iPhoto did not allow me to keep my own structure and still use it. But that became possible with version 6 of iPhoto and as it came pre-installed on my MacBook Pro I’m now using it. Today I spent a short while to get it nicely integrated into my workflow. Without my strict folder naming requirements I could just set iPhoto to download my photos automatically and import them whenever I connect my camera. To move them into my own structure it’s a little bit more work - but not much. ...
TextMate offers an SQL bundle. That bundle can also be used to query MySQL and PostgreSQL databases directly from TextMate. The configuration for the database access is done though environment variables. Specifically the following ones in the case of PostgreSQL: PGHOST: Database host PGPORT: Postgres port (usually the default of 5432 just works) PGUSER: User name PGDATABASE: Database to run queries on TM_DB_SERVER: Tells TextMate to use PostgreSQL. You can either set up these environment variables in the TextMate settings or - much more helpful - per project. In the project drawer deselect all files (by clicking on an empty spot) and then open the properties. There you can add project-specific environment variables. ...
I reported a few days ago, that I was trying out DEVONthink. I have also had a look at Tinderbox. But after looking at the price ($192 per year) I was not very motivated to have a deep look. A quick look I took and it didn’t seem to provide what I’m looking for. Meanwhile I imported most of the articles from my personal Wiki into DEVONthink and I also had a look at the export function. While it’s not a world-class export function, it’s reasonable. It can spit out a file hierarchy with all the RTF, PDF, etc. files in it (but the links are not preserved). It’s also capable of exporting as a Web site where all the links will be preserved and the RTF pages are converted to (ugly) HTML. All in all I am very impressed. It’s indexing capabilities are great and it also integrates very nicely with the Web. I especially like the features of clipping text directly from Web sites. If you open a Web site in DEVONthink (or DEVONagent) you can add the whole page or a selection to the database as a rich text document. I currently use that mainly to add clippings from Wikipedia or The Economist. I guess I’ll report some of my tips for using DEVONthink in the future. Meanwhile I’m waiting until it presents me with a “buy now!!!” message and will most probably purchase it then. Correction: Tinderbox costs $192 to buy for the first time and comes with one year of free updates (that’s where my $192/year came from). But the update “only” costs $90. Update: As you can see in the following picture, there is already quite a lot of stuff in my database. ...