Quick Tip: Use Spotlight (Mac)

Jeremy on May 13th, 2010

For long-term mac users, this may seem ridiculous. For those converts from the PC universe, be prepared to have your world rocked.  Spotlight is Apple’s search feature built into OSX, and if you’ve converted from a PC throw all ideas about how search on large file systems works out of the window.

Without going into mega-geeky details, the way that the Mac formats hard disks allows for incredibly quick search (instantaneous in comparison to the PC).  Just click your little magnifying glass at the top right of your screen, type what you’re looking for an voila; (in 1-2 seconds) it’s there!  Emails, applications, text files, images… everything!

And here’s the best part: it searches the contents of files as well as filenames!  There are lots of other tools that seek to improve on spotlight.  I’ve tried them, but keep coming back to spotlight because it is so solid, and it’s on every mac at which I sit down.

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Share Tasks with Remember the Milk

Jeremy on March 26th, 2010

I, like many in our field, have ADD. That makes assigning, completing and following up on tasks an adventure with our team. It is common for us to be in a car on the way to Starbucks or walking down the hall when we remember an essential task we need to do, or we need someone else to do.   Until now, we have had no solution outside of everyone carrying a pad of paper around with us at all times to remedy this situation.

Fortunately, we found Remember the Milk and production is up something eight percent.  Remember the Milk is basically a todo list system that is stored online.  What caught our eye was its ability to create lists that are shared with each other.  Once shared, we can each put tasks on everyone’s list.

It does all the standard stuff like priorities, due dates, and notes, but it also has fields for an estimate on the time it should take, location for the task, and tags.

However, none of these are the reasons we went with this over another service.  The reason we chose Remember the Milk is because of the sheer volume of ways in which you can access the information.  It has an iPhone app (like everyone else), but it also has an Android app and a way to sync it with your Blackberry or Windows Mobile device.  Want it to appear in Gmail?  They have a gadget.  Want to access it offline?  They have gears integration.  It also interfaces with Jott, twitter and a ton of stuff I’ve never heard of .

Its interface is not always transparent, but is easy to navigate after a couple of minutes fooling around with it.  For us it’s a great solution. It’s free for the basic account and $25 for the pro account which adds a couple of features and the ability to download the phone apps.  Worth every penny.

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Quick Tip: Find What You Are Looking For

Jeremy on November 9th, 2009

Have you ever remembered reading something in one of your books, and maybe even remembered which book, but had no idea which of the couple hundred pages housed the beloved content?  Don’t try the index or thumbing through the pages, simply go to books.google.com.  There you can search within books to find where the content lies.

This works best when you have the book because many of the selections indexed by Google Books do not have full previews; however, the limited preview is more than enough to put you on the right page.

If your book is not available on Google Books, make sure you stop by amazon.com.  Most books that have the small “look inside” logo over the cover image will provide a similar search to help you find what you are looking for.

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Quick Tip: Find Alternative Applications

Jeremy on September 26th, 2009

Have you ever needed to get something accomplished, known the application you needed, but been short of the cash needed to buy said necessary app?  Lament no longer, AlternativeTo is here!  A quick surf over to the simple website gives you more options than you need.  Looking for a cheaper Photoshop?  Why not try Gimp, Pixelmator, Photoshop Elements, Acorn, Pixel…  you get the point.  Not only is it a great place to find alternative software, but its homepage allows you to browse by OS and number of views, likes, recent, or no alternatives.  Hopefully this will save you some cash and make your search for the right app a bit shorter.  Check it out: www.alternativeto.net

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Quick Tip: Turn Your Macbook into a Kindle For Free

Jeremy on August 23rd, 2009

Ever have a long document and wish you could simply turn your macbook on its side and use it like a kindle to read the book/document? All you need is to download the Display Rotation Menu from Mage Software.  It adds a menu bar item that allows you to rotate your Mac Laptop and use it as if it were an ebook reader only without the several hundred dollars to Amazon or Sony.  It doesn’t work on all mac laptops because of graphics card limitations, but they have the short list of which somewhat current models are omitted.

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Quick Tip: Download Youtube Easily

Jeremy on June 27th, 2009

This is not the first time we have talked about this subject.  Brandon wrote an excellent article on it.  There are several tools, but none quite as easy as pwnyoutube.com.  It does not require you to download any software or even copy a url.  Simply add “pwn” before “youtube.com” in the url of the youtube video you are viewing and that takes you to a pwnyoutube site where you can right click and “save target as” for the .flv file and even the higher quality .mp4 file where available.

If you are looking for a good video illustration to use in an upcoming talk, try this blast from the past:

Consume Me (DC Talk)

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Quick Tip: Google Text Message Translation, etc.

Jeremy on March 10th, 2009

Did you know you can text message Google for translations, flight status, addresses, stocks, movies, directions, math, and a lot more? You simply send a properly formatted text message to 46645 and it replies almost instantly with the info you requested. By properly formatted I mean generally you start with a command and then type the information you need. One of my favorite command is translation. Take a look at how that works:

I texted:
“Translate English to Spanish: I love you”

and it replied with:
“Translation
‘i love you’ in English means ‘te amo’ in Spanish.”

Pretty great! And super handy!  For a list of commands and other information you can click here, but that list is by no means exhaustive.   Just by playing with it I have discovered that it will do simple math like: “(2+2+8+4)/4″ returns the answer of 4.  Leave a comment for other “unlisted” commands you know or discover!

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