Review - Incase Sling Pack

One relic of my Dell days is my laptop case. It actually is very nice. It is sturdy, holds plenty of computer gadgets and is built like a Sherman Tank. It even has wheels! Unfortunately, it is also nearly as heavy as a Sherman tank. That is fine for my PC days when I just used my laptop for work but now I use it for so much more. I'm carting it along to family gatherings, the apple store, and a variety of other places and I wanted something lighter.

Well fortunately my kids got the hint and for Father's day I received a brand spanking new InCase Sling Pack laptop case designed for the 17" MacBook Pro. I'm very happy with this case.

The fit and finish of the case is very nice. It is constructed of a heavy black nylon material. The actual laptop cradle inside the top loading bag fits my MacBook Pro and has two sheets of dense, but not particularly thick, padding to cushion my MacBook. The laptop fits into it perfectly and does not slide around at all. One feature I really like is the way it suspends the laptop cradle inside the bag so there is a gap between the bottom of the bag and the cradle. I'm actually considering putting some additional foam in that gap but maybe I'm just a little bit crazy. It is clear they thought a lot about the design of this bag specifically in relation to the Apple laptops.

In addition to holding the laptop, the Sling Pack also has numerous zippered compartments and pockets to hold everything you need to run your machine and just a bit more. In my Sling Pack, I'm currently carrying my laptop, two western digital passport drives, a magazine, about a half inch of work related paper, a mouse, the power unit and a variety of other necessary and not-so-necessary plugs and adapters. There is still room to spare. It even has a hidden pocket in the back which is nice for quick access to documents like plane tickets. There is also a nice little padded pocket on the strap that is perfect for holding a digital camera or iPod. It even has a little rubber grommeted hole for your earphones

The strap is wide and padded and includes a quick release clip that frankly scares me a bit. I don't want this bag popping off accidently. It also has a nice rubber and nylon handle to carry it from top the top when not over your back.

You can get this bag from Apple for $70 and it only comes in black. I can't get over how light this bag is in comparison to my other case. I use it most of the time now. There still are occasions where the "Tank" is needed but generally, this Sling Pack is my primary case. I am pleased to recommend this bag to anyone looking for a sling bag for their Apple laptop.

One Crow, Slightly Burnt

Well after all my yacking about sticking with Treo I got sucked into the iDay hype and ended up buying an iPhone. I've spent a few hours with it now and love it. It doesn't do anything particularly new, it just does everything much prettier and easier. I'll probably do a more thorough review for Surfbits but for now I'm having too much fun.

MacSparky Music - Round Midnight

For as long as I can remember, I've always had a fascination with Jazz music. Throughout High School and College I played piano and saxaphone with numerous bands and even did studio work before falling into law school. It is a standing joke around my house that when everyone was listening to Duran Duran, I was listening to Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. I first heard Thelonious Monk when I was about 12 but my piano teacher wouldn't let me play his music. Well it took me nearly 30 years but here I am stickin' it to the man. This was done in one take so there are a few funky notes but ... ummm ... those are correct .. it is Monk after all. Enjoy friends.

Download 'Round Midnight

Moving to OmniFocus

While I've been a member of the OmniFocus "Sneaky Peek" for some time now I hadn't really embraced it yet. This is a result of the fact that things have been very busy lately and I've got such a smooth workflow with iGTD that I, frankly, wasn't all that motivated. I then began a series of email correspondence with Robin Trew, who is, by they way, much smarter than I. Rob put together an amazing apple script that yanked about 250 tasks out of iGTD and dropped them into OmniFocus in as much time as it took me to brew and consume a cup of green tea.

Rob having saved me the tedium of transferring data, I began playing in earnest with OmniFocus a few days ago and it looks like I'm not going back to iGTD. I'm not taking anything away from iGTD which is a very good application (and free!). Indeed, with Quicksilver triggers and other features I think iGTD is, in several ways, superior to the current OmniFocus alpha I'm working on. However, after a few days usage I can already see the writing on the wall. Frankly I'm willing to have a little less efficient input in exchange for other benefits in OmniFocus. Specifically, I find the ease of use in moving and copying task groups, the better data management, the ease of use in designating projects with concurrent or subsequent tasks and the general fit and finish of the program have me hooked. Rob also explained the data security in OmniFocus is better. Being that I was an arts major and I still leave cheese out at nights just in case there IS a little mouse inside my Mac on a wheel, I'm simply going to paste Rob's explanation here.

"The iGTD approach of storing everything in a single binary (SQLite) file does introduce a slight vulnerability - a binary file can be quite hard to retrieve things from if it gets corrupted. Omnifocus also uses SQL internally, but it stores everything on disk as a cloud of (gzipped) XML files - one for each transaction, which is inherently rather robust. (Regular backups are streamed out as single XML files, which, like the small transaction files, become human-readable as soon as you gunzip them in the Terminal).

There is a more lucid and authoritative account here."

So it looks like I'll be talking more about OmniFocus and less about iGTD. Unless, of course, OmniFocus is not up to the task and then you will hear all the gory details right here. For those iGTD faithful I say stick with it. If it weren't for OmniFocus, I certainly would. I don't think questions as to which tool you use to accomplish your productivity is really, at the end of the day, all that important. The question is whether you actually are productive.

Screencast 1 - Text Append in Quicksilver

I'm happy to post my first screencast. It took me about 5 minutes to record it and about 5 hours to figure out the fancy graphics for the entry. At least it gave me an excuse to learn to use Motion.

This screencast is about how to use Quicksilver to append text files. This is a trick I use frequently so check it out.

I also linked some other great quicksilver tutorials here.

 You can Download it Directly Right Here

or better yet subscribe in the iTunes store

Review - Path Finder

You can hear the below review in MacReview Cast #113.

My experience with Path Finder is an interesting one. When I first switched to my Mac, a friend told me to forget about the Apple Finder and use Path Finder. Well I downloaded it when my Mac was shiny new and it didn't grab me. I used it a few times but found myself going back to the less intimidating Apple Finder.

Well I know quite a bit more about OS X now than I did during that failed trial and decided to give it another go. Now I can't imagine ever working without it.

Path Finder is the Swiss Army Knife of file management tools. When you first open the application there is a group of six windows that are fully customizable. You can display a variety of data from your running applications, file and folder histories, volumes, selection paths, information, permissions, attributes, console, and even a terminal window. The binary view makes me laugh but hey, it must be useful to somebody. With so much variety you can make Path Finder can change to suit your needs rather than forcing you to change to meet the application's needs as is so often the case.

In the main display window it has a Path Navigator that visually tells you where you are and where you have been as you drill down. Like the Apple Finder, Path Finder supports all standard view modes including list, icon, and hierarchical. Also, control clicking on an item in Path Finder gives me a lot more options than I am used too. Of course you can do the normal file management tasks like copying and moving but you can also email, compress, create a disk image, open in terminal and a variety of other options.

This program is very feature rich. So much so that in the week I've been using it I won't pretend to say I'm familiar with them all so I'm going to focus on a few that really grabbed me.

The customizable bookmark bar is very nice. Taking a page from Safari and other web browsers, Path Finder has a bar of common file locations across the top of the screen with drop down menus. It has the usual suspects built in: Documents, Music, Movies and the likes. But you can also create your own custom drop downs like "downloads" or anything else you need frequently.

Another great feature is the Drop Stack. When I open a finder window it is usually to work on several files. With the Drop Stack it gives me a place to temporarily drop files while I'm navigating through multiple menus. Once I've assembled everything I need to work on in my drop stack, its all in one place and easy to get too. This just doesn't mean moving and copying. I can also burn and compress items straight out of the Drop Stack.

Like Forklift and Leopard's Finder, Pathfinder has an excellent preview pane that handles most image and HTML files and even quicktime movie files. I set one of the larger panes for preview and it is very helpful when moving or cleaning image files.

Using the "File History" setting, Pathfinder keeps a running tally of my most recently accessed files. This is nice as I'm going through my day if I am working on several projects.

Path Finder also brings some extra muscle to searching your Mac. I've found Spotlight to be very good at ferreting out lost files but occasionally something will get misplaced into a location that Spotlight doesn't look. Path Finder has its own separate "Fast Search" engine that will search the entire system.

You can't beat Path Finder for compression. A version of the StuffIt compression engine is built right in. When sharing with your PC friends, it also allows for ZIP compression.

Another nice feature is the application window. By holding down command-F8 you open up an attractive window that displays icons for all of your applications. This is great when I need to open an application but forgot its name.

Did I mention it has a built in console window, text editor, and easily allows you to see hidden files?

Looking at the preferences you will see that Path Finder is even more adaptable giving you control over the entire look and feel of the application.

Reflecting on the way I manage files I must give a nod to Quicksilver. Once you get accustomed to Quicksilver, you can't really beat it for down and dirty file management. With just a little practice, you can move, copy, and trash files as quickly as it takes to open Finder or one of its replacements. I really use Path Finder and Forklift on file management tasks that take some heavy lifting.

Path Finder is my finder replacement. It is robust and bends to fit my needs. I would give Forklift the advantage for FTP but generally found Path Finder more useful for the way I compute. I will be keeping both programs and I am certain I will be using them both. If you are looking for just one, you should download and give each one a week or two on your machine to see what fits you better. Like Forklift, Path Finder also has a free trial period. If you get hooked, it will run you $34.95.

My Treo iPhone

Well as the cool-aid logo implies, I do like my Apple gadgets. Unfortunately, the iPhone is not one of the gadgets I'll be able to use. My office is on Verizon and my office calendar system will only sync with Pocket PC or the Palm OS (for now at least). So it appears I am out of the running for that tempting iPhone.

But of course technolust can breed a bit of creativity. I did a search at PalmGear for OS X and found a few apps that make my Treo "almost" feel like an iPhone. There are a variety of launchers and other fancy pants add ons but the two that I ended up using are Font Smoother and Icons Plus. Using these two apps I have been able to set my Palm system font to the Mac Lucida Font (or something Very close) and I've replaced the blocky Palm icons with the OS X set. For instance, Snapper mail now has an Apple Mail icon.

Now granted these cheap parlor tricks don't give me the functionality or user experience of an iPhone, (Don't EVER try to surf the web on a Treo BTW) but still it makes me smile and when I show it to other geeks they freak out a bit which is entertainment in its own right.

By the way, does anyone else wish Apple will make an iPhone without the phone? Kind of a souped up iPod with all those nice tricks and perhaps a WiFi receiver to surf the web when in range? If they do, sign me up!

Using My Moleskine and My Teeth

I've been using the low tech Moleskine method for tracking to do items when away from my Mac a few weeks now and can report I'm very pleased with it. I read a few of the forums at iGTD and the Missing Sync and it still appears there is a certain degree of black magic involved with getting a reliable sync between the Treo and iGTD. You could spend hours on it and you still seem to risk data corruption with every sync. I just keep the Moleskine in my pocket and when I'm away from my Mac and something occurs to me that needs to get done, I jot a quick note. At least once a day I go through that list and, if it is an easy task, I just do it. Othewise, it goes into the iGTD jumble. At that point it gets crossed off the moleskine list and I'm done with it. I also keep a miniaturized print out of the iGTD database in my Moleskine pocket. Granted this would be nice to do electronically but until it gets just as easy and MUCH more reliable. I'm sticking with this system. Someone who saw me using it said, "Hey Dave ... You are a geek why aren't you putting that in you Treo." While granted I am a Geek, I also just want to get these things done. Whatever works. It reminds me of something an incredible woodworker, Sam Maloof, once told me when I was taking a class from him. "Use whatever tool works best. If it is easier to use a saw, use as saw .. If it is easier to use your teeth, use your teeth."

MacSparky Music - Over the Moon

Okay ... I must admit ... I still love E.T. I think I like it so much because that WAS my childhood. The bicycles, the D&D, the late nights with friends, the whole thing (excepting the alien ... wink). So I've been working on playing my favorite melody from the movie and got a somewhat passable version recorded over the weekend. I am going to try and do this with more orchestra instruments later but for now I was just happy to get to the end on the piano. Enjoy.

 Over The Moon

WWDC Revisited and Shots

I sat down over the weekend and watched the keynote video. I also read a lot more of the reviews and media coverage of the keynote and have thought a bit more about it. I think the pundits (myself included) are missing the point. Granted most of the people reading this Blog have already figured out how to make a download folder or discovered great Tiger Applications like Path Finder to give us much of the promised future Leopard features. However, there are many Mac users, my daughter and wife among them, who will not do any of that stuff until Apple hands it to them, through OS X, on a silver platter.  At that point we geeky folks will figure out some new hack to make it even more functional.

The other thing that occurred to me is that the next time Steve Jobs gives a keynote, I'm going to have a drinking game where you take a shot every time he says the word "cool".