MailScripts Gets an Update

I know I just blogged on this recently, but MailScripts got an update giving it even more Leopard bells and whistles. Check it out.

Public Speaking Tips

I have been lucky in that public speaking has never bothered me. In a lot of ways, I'm more comfortable with 50 people than one. But that is a discussion for another day. The Public Speaking Blog recently posted an excellent list of 250 public speaking tips. While I'm usually not all that excited about "lists", this one is worth a read.

There were a couple I particularly liked . . .

The more you prepare, the less nervous you get.

So true. One of my favorite "tricks" here is the commute. I have given more opening and closing statements in traffic than I can count. You can know in your head exactly what you are going to say but until you go through the process of getting the words out of your lips a few times, you are not ready.

Tell a story, make a point.

Amen!

Start strong (always).

Look at ONE person at a time when you are delivering your speech.

I once had a juror tell me that she never trusted the other lawyer in a case because he never looked her in the eye. Not once in a two week trial! How is that possible?

Anyway, you can read the entire list right here.

OmniFocus iPhone Dreams

Ethan Schoonover, one of the Omni folks writes ...

For what it’s worth, we at Omni are all very interested in getting OmniFocus content on the iPhone (The Omni Group is pretty much 99% iPhone users, so we have a dog in this fight). Rest well assured that as soon as we have options for doing this in a way that allows reasonable functionality, we’ll be on it.

It just warms my heart. I've played with their sync system through Leopard Mail and some of the ingenious scripts that turn your Omnifocus list into a Safari bookmarklet that lets you see your tasks. Neither solution really blows my hair back though. Hopefully the Omni wizards will come up with something fantastic ... soon.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving friends. There is an excellent article on the history channel website all about Thanksgiving. I plan on spending the day watching football and sleeping off turkey.

Default Folder X is Getting all Spotty

I have been corresponding with Jon over at StClairSoft.com about the upcoming release of Default Folder X version 4. There is no secret about just how much I have come to rely upon this application. I've been running the beta of version 4.0 for the last week and can report that when it releases in December, you won't be disappointed.

The additions to your save and open dialogue box now look ... well... more "leopardy". Even more important, however, is the quicklook style box below that previews whatever image, document, or file you are contemplating opening. It doesn't allow you to page through documents. Apparently Apple has not opened that particular part of quicklook to the development community. The upgrade price will cost $14.95 but free fro those people who bought Default Folder X after June 1.

Weighing in on Electronic Book Readers

There is a lot of hubbub on the internet lately about these document reader devices. Sony has one and now Amazaon is pushing its "Kindle" which also is supposed to do the trick. The idea behind them is to replace your books with an electronic device that displays as well as the printed page. So you can be sitting on your couch or in a coffee shop and read newspapers, blogs, books, or anything else that strikes your fancy. In principle, I think this is a great idea. However, I don't think the existing products are there yet. Let me explain.

I like books. I like their heft. I like the texture of the paper under my fingers. I like rifling through a book with my thumb to find a particular passage. But when I read a book, I don't just "read" it. For me it is a more interactive process. I put checks in margins, underline passages, dog ear pages, draw lines and arrows in the margin, and tear pages out of magazines. I even sometimes argue with the author in the margin. This is usually with non-fiction reading but I've been known to rant with fictional characters as well. That is right, I am a librarian's worst nightmare.

When looking at these new readers I realized there are a few things that just have to be in place before it could be useful to me:

1. The display must be friendly to the eyes. Really!

Screen technology is improving every day. But if I am going to spend three hours reading a screen, it needs to be perfect. I saw the Sony reader in a store and it actually looked pretty nice. For 10 minutes. I don't know how it would feel after hours.

2. Universal Access - PDF

I added the letters "PDF" during the edit of this story. Because I can think of no other way to pull this off. Any system that requires me to wait on Amazon, Apple, Sony or any other corporate gang is not going to cut it. Whether I am reading a 1903 legal decision or an article on recent changes to Applescript, I want it in my electronic reader. Furthermore, I'm not sure I like the idea of everything having to be text. With the PDF format, you can have unique formatting, styles, and pretty pictures to boot.

Using PDF's would also help solve the problem of dicey book DRM. As it stands with Amazon's reader, you pay $400 for the device, then $10 for a book, then $15 for a newspaper subscription. It is in a format that can only be read on that machine. Who is to say there will be anything that can read that file five years. On the other hand, I am looking forward to passing on my copy of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus" to my daughter when she graduates high school. It is well worn, well annotated, and DRM free. Good luck with that one Amazon.

3. Annotation Must Be Supported

Without annotation, I think this would be nothing more than a toy for me. Fun for reading fiction but useless for "work". I am open to ideas on this annotation but doubt anything can beat my current analog system consisting of a few pencils. This technology exists on current tablet based computers but that is really not good enough. The pixelation is horrendous and clunky.

4. It Must Be User Friendly

I've promised myself I will no longer purchase consumer electronics that look like they were designed by a monkey. Call this my Apple bias but it is not. I just like things that work well and were designed with idea of accommodating me more than some manufacturing equipment in Taiwan. The Sony reader looks stylish enough but it falls apart when it comes to features. The Amazon Kindle just strikes me as ugly. It reminds me more of my old Atari 800 computer more than anything designed in the 21st century.

The things that I don't need in a reader are a bunch of internet bolt on applications. No email or productivity applications. Wifi would be nice for obtaining content but I am not even convinced I would need a browser. At least not a browser in the traditional sense. I would prefer a simple way to wirelessly sync content and annotation.

As the technology gets smaller and cheaper we may find that the idea of a reader is simply a passing fancy. The 2007 equivalent of the personal jet pack. If anyone gets tablet computing right it could easily include these features with a few more. The advantage of a reader would, hopefully, be a lower price but with the increasing use of flash ram and better electronics, we may just leap frog the digital reader entirely and use tablet.

So there you have it. Could a device like this exist in the near future? Sure. Does it exist? No. So it looks like I will just have to continue abusing books. For now.

Holy Toledo! Another GTD Application

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water . . .

So I spent my $30 and licensed OmniFocus over the weekend. Of course today the MacSparky radar picked up yet another task management application brewing for the Mac, Things. This application takes a different spin on task management abandoning the more traditional field approach of OmniFocus for a Tag focussed indexing system. There is a very good screencast demonstrating it right here. I'm intrigued by this different approach and I will be following up with this application to see how people use it. That being said, I really like OmniFocus. It is the first task application I have ever used that really tames my crazy lists of tasks. Whether it is writing a trial brief or cleaning the fish pond, OmniFocus is my master.

Deleting Forward on Mac Laptops

One issue that baffled me when I first bought my MacBook Pro was the delete key. The delete key on the Mac laptops deletes backward as opposed to windows machines where it deletes forward. There is no forward delete button on Apple laptops. It took me a few weeks to figure out that if I hold the Function key and press delete, then it deletes forward. Apparently I was not the only person confused by this. Apple posted a small video on this issue right here.

New Link - The Mac Attack

For some time now I have been corresponding with my friend, Steve Stanger, over at the "Mac Attack" podcast. Steve is a Mac guru and has probably forgotten more about the nuts and bolts of these little machines than I'll ever learn. Even more important, he is a very nice person and a pleasure to listen to. He has that rare ability to instruct without talking down to you. I am going to start making occasional contributions to Steve's show. If you haven't already, you should head over and subscribe.

Leopard Renaming Tweak

One of the little improvements in Leopard that hasn't got much press but still makes me grin is renaming files with extensions. In Tiger when you hit enter to rename a file in the finder, the entire name was highlighted, including the extension. When renaming you were forced to go through the additional four keystrokes of the period and file extension. (i.e. ".pdf") In Leopard the OS does not highlight the period and file type extension. It just highlights the name. This makes the process faster and prevents the problem that occurred when I would previously make a mistake on the extension and cause all sorts of problems when I went to access the file in the expected application.

This is not a huge feature but it sure is nice.