Rhoneisms

Merlin Mann’s Email Fu is Strong.

I doubted at first that I would be able to make it a whole week without using Safari. In fact, the very reason I chose to this this project as the first one in my “A Week With” series is that I knew it would be one of the toughest to do. Despite this, I managed to use Firefox for the whole week without ever launching Safari. So, now that the week is over how did things go? I really like Firefox! It took a little configuration to get things just right but now that I have it the way I want it I do not see myself going back. As a matter of fact, I have even removed Safari from my Dock and put Firefox in it’s place.
The first thing I had to do was import all of my bookmarks from Safari. There are quite a few bookmark exporting tools out there for Safari so this was not an issue. I simply imported that bookmark file into the Firefox bookmark manager and, with a little reorganization soon had both my toolbar bookmarks and bookmark menu items in the proper place. I will make the comment that the Firefox bookmark manager leaves a lot to be desired (especially the ability to move items around). If you are constantly futzing with your bookmarks then Safari definitely has a leg up on Firefox.
Next, I had to improve that god-awful PC like interface. The buttons and widgets all look like they were designed for Windows 95. Thankfully, one of the other features of Firefox is the support for themes that allow you to change the look of the browser. There are hundreds of themes available. I chose one called Safarish that was recommended by a great article on Mac OS X Hints that tells you how to make Firefox more “Mac Like”. This was much better.
The other powerful feature of Firefox is it’s support for plugins and extensions. These allow the user to add features and functionality to Firefox. For instance, Sage is an integrated RSS reader that is leaps and bounds over the new Safari RSS features in Mac OS X:Tiger. Another, called Down Them All allows you to download every linked item on a page. useful if you go to a page with several files you need to download. This will do it with one click. Because Firefox is open source there are literally hundreds of people writing things like this.
The biggest feature of Firefox for me though is speed. It is markedly faster than Safari and that is saying a lot because Safari is pretty fast. What is better it that you can make it even faster by modifying a few lines in the config file. After doing this pages load so fast you barely even notice them doing so. As a matter of fact, the config files hold many secrets worth looking into.
All in all, I am very happy with Firefox as my default browser now. This weeks experiment was well worth all of the effort and was a rousing success!
Now I wonder what crazy idea I will come up with next week. Tune in on Monday to find out.

I promise that I will get back to another topic soon but this was just too good not to post. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has taken theFAQ regarding their acquisition of Macromedia and spelled it out for us simple people who can’t read between the lines. Check it out here.

In coming up with the idea for my first “Week With” experiment, I wanted to try something that I knew would really affect my computing life. What better than to use a different web browser. Since I use my web browser more than any other single application on a daily basis, I knew that using a different one would have an impact worth writing about.
I have used Safari as my default browser pretty much since the day it was released. I love Safari. I am very used to it, it’s keyboard commands, the way it renders pages, the handful of tweaks that exist for it. I have tried to use other browsers, even Firefox when Gmail would not work with Safari, but I quickly run back to the safety and comfort of my beloved Apple supplied security blanket.
So, why even think about change and why Firefox? Well, first of all because of the buzz. So many people I know and people I read on the web sing it’s praises, even over Safari. They praise it’s speed, it’s security, the fact that it is open source and therefore has literally thousands of developers and is easy to write plug-ins for that extend it’s functionality. Secondly, since I am forced to use both a PC and a Mac at work and since Firefox is the only sensible (see: fast, safe and secure) solution on the PC, I would like to try using the same browser on both platforms for all of the obvious reasons. Lastly, I figured that since I am so tied to Safari and use my web browser so much it would make for an interesting experiment to see how I do using something else for a week.
Tune in on Friday to see my report on how things went.

First, an apology. I have done a horrible job with keeping up with my Monday Mac Tweak. Part of the reason for that is not only a lack of time but also running out of cool tweaks to post about. Therefore, I have decided to temporarily suspend my Mac Tweak series so that I may introduce another regular series that may end up doing a better job of keeping up with it’s spirit.
New series, I dub thee: A Week With…
I am sure by the title alone you can begin to get the idea. I will spend a whole week trying out a new thing. In most cases it will be software but it could be something else. Maybe a new piece of hardware or a new web based application or website. I all cases it will be something i am genuinely interested in trying and/or have been thinking about trying but have not gotten around to yet I will then tell you about how that week went and what the future holds. I will announce the item on Monday and tell you a little bit about it. Then, on Friday (or sometime during the weekend if Friday gets busy), I will post my experience. Make sense? Therefore, tune in on Monday to see what crazy thing I am doing first.

My initial reaction to news of this merger was one of shock. The news has so many ramifications on the publishing industry, both traditional and web, that it is almost mind-boggling. I think part of the reason for my previous lack of direction on this matter has been that I am not quite sure how I feel about it.  
On one hand, these are the two most dominant creative software forces in the publishing and pre-press and web content creation industries. While there were certainly areas where they overlapped and were competitors (Dreamweaver vs. Go Live or Illustrator vs. Freehand for instance) more often they really do have two different audiences. Adobe has always been more focussed on the traditional publishing industry (Illustrator for design, Photoshop for graphics editing, InDesign for page layout and Postscript for printing) whereas Macromedia has been more focused on the Web and Multimedia (Dreamweaver for Web Editing, Flash for media rich web content, etc.). Therefore, the combined strength of these two should benefit users greatly by allowing them to produce more seamless integration between these two areas which means more flexibility for the designers and end users they serve.
On the other hand, this merger creates what essentially will be the Microsoft of publishing and media creation. Adobe will have a monopoly over the design world. One company will control the software used for the content of almost everything we read and see and output to both traditional print media and the web. Like Microsoft, having one company with that much power can’t and probably wont be a good thing.
To sum it all up, I have very mixed feelings. From a technological standpoint this will mean very exiting possibilities for those who use any of these software products. I just wish it did not come at the expense of competition.

Evan Williams discusses running your company on web apps.
Key Quote:

“The improved efficiency of having these apps available, and not having to install and maintain servers for them is huge. At Pyra, we wrote our own discussion board at one time (not that there weren’t other available) and, later, I wrote a support management tool, because I couldn’t find anything like Kayako (or Neotonic — which Google bought and took off the market). And I was dying for email management, like FogBugz has.”

As I mentioned last week, this is becoming not only possible but increasingly attractive; especially to small groups in disparate locations.

Here are a few random items on notes and note taking that are worth checking out:
Michael Hyatt has an short but excellent article on his method for taking notes on Working Smart called Recovering The Lost Art of Note Taking. There are some excellent ideas here.
There is a great post on 43 Folders praising the power of Post Its™ and some ideas about how to use them. If further interested, read this article from Rake Magazine about their long and fabled history.
Looking for a good Mac tool to drop little text snippets from almost any application for pasting and or saving? Look no further than Sidenote. It takes the form of a little drawer that hides on the side of your screen and hides away when not needed. It will even capture images and rich text.

I thought it was a late April Fools joke at first but it is in fact true.

OK, I must admit, when I first installed Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and used it for the first couple of days I was fairly underwhelmed. Sure, some of the new features were cool and all but some of the most touted ones simply left me wanting more. The new Mail application for instance, why can’t I change the background color for the new mailbox “drawer” and why can’t I choose which side it lives on? Why do I have to press a button to bring my Dashboard widgets to the front. Why can’t they live permanently on my desktop like Konfabulator widgets do? I mean, if you are going to “borrow” elements of a great idea, why not “borrow” the useful ones.
Thing is, most of the cool features are little tweaks done here and there. The annotation feature in Preview for instance. Yet another step towards never using the painfully slow Adobe Reader ever again. That makes double for the inline PDF viewing now added to Safari.
You want more? Well Apple has posted a nice page detailing more than 200 new features in Tiger. Read this if you install Tiger and wonder what you got for your hard earned cash.