Been playing with Things today and I must say I’m impressed. I’d been using Journler to manage my to-do list but I must say it’s not well suited for it. Things seems muchmore focused on helping you organize all the stuff you need to get done, while Journler is more suited to organizing thoughts and data. If I were a student, Journler would rock my world. The only thing is I don’t know if I can bring myself to spend $50 on Things. It seems too much for me. $20 seems more appropriate…
Archive for the ‘Awesome Software’ Category
Things: My Latest GTD Fav App
January 29th, 2009 by adminAwesome OSX Software: AppFresh & iusethis.com
January 13th, 2009 by admin
I use AppFresh in conjunction with www.iusethis.com to manage my software and it’s really quite a treat. iusethis.com let’s you note the software that you use (not neccessarily the software you have installed - OSX comes with a lot of things I don’t really use) with a Digg-like interface. You just find the software you use and click “iusethis” and now it’s in your profile and the number of people using that software goes up by one.
This allows you to see the software that others are using, both the most popular and the “upcoming” stuff. It’s a great way to spend a few minutes looking for a new download to make your day easier.
Where things really shine though are with AppFresh. This desktop app scans your system for all your installed software and shows you a list of everything. It then checks to see which ones are out of date and can update them to the latest version for you. With a click of a button, all your installed software gets updated. But in addition to this great functionality, AppFresh integrates with iusethis, so that after it scans your system for apps you have installed, you can then quickly go down the list and mark the ones you actually use and it will update your profile on iusethis.com.
The two big benefits you get are the ability to see what software your friends are using and, this is key, when you move to another computer (say, a new laptop or something) you can install AppFresh and connect it with your iusethis account. AppFresh will then tell you all the software that you use that isn’t installed yet and then install it for you (assuming it’s free or shareware).
How cool is that?
Awesome OSX Software: Getting the Most Out of Dropbox With Soft Links
January 8th, 2009 by admin
One of my favorite free OSX apps is Dropbox (which also available for PCs and Linux). Dropbox is kind of an on-line backup solution that constantly uploads your files to an online account and then synchronizes the file with any other computer you have set up. This means if, say, you put a file in your dropbox folder within moments (depending on its size and the speed of your connection) it’s uploaded to your online storage and copied to any computers that you have dropbox installed on.
This is all great and fun and all, but where it really shines is with soft links. Soft links are aliases to directories and files on your computer so that to the operating system they look like they are in two places but it’s really the same file. Dropbox forces you to put any files you want synchronized with your online account into the Dropbox folder in your profile. But using soft links you can link to directories and files elsewhere so that they are synchronized even if they aren’t in that folder.
Let’s say you’re working on a term paper and you keep all your term papers in your Documents directory in a sub-directory called “papers” (~/Documents/papers/). You could link to the papers directory from your Dropbox folder and then all your papers are backed up constantly. If you accidentally delete it, or if you want to go back in time and get yesterday’s version, Dropbox lets you. But it also means that if you have a laptop or another computer with Dropbox installed on it, you could create the same soft link so that the same directory (~/Documents/papers/) exists on that computer. Now if you move from one computer ot the next your work is already there waiting for you.
You can even get creative and synchronize application data, so that all your preferences follow you, for example. I use a program called Journler to organize all my notes and to-do items. By soft linking the data directory into my Dropbox I can move to another computer (my laptop) and open Journler there and see what I was looking at on my Desktop machine. You could do this with your Downloads folder or even your iTunes library (if it’s not too big - Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage free, but more costs $$).
So, how do you create a soft link? I do it in the terminal like so:
cd ~/Dropbox ln -s ~/Documents/papers
The above example would create a link to papers. That’s all there is to it.