Macintosh

I use Spotlight comments for Finder items as a way to help tag files and folders for easier searching. In the past, I used an Automator workflow, saved as a Finder plug-in, to quickly and easily tag files and folders. Unfortunately, since the upgrade to Leopard, that workflow has stopped working. I even recreated the workflow entirely and it still doesn’t work. Has anyone else run into this kind of issue? If so, did you ever find a workaround?

Apple has just given me one more reason to possibly switch to an iPhone…

iPhone opens to Exchange e-mail

I’m currently using a Samsung BlackJack II, a Windows Mobile 6-based device with 3G connectivity. The e-mail functionality is great, but not having an easy way to keep my Address Book contacts in sync with my phone is a major hassle. It looks like using an iPhone would help address that.

Now all we need is 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) functionality and a price drop…OK, at least the first is an actual possibility.

In part 2 of my informal discussion about getting things done with my Mac, I mentioned that I needed a way to invoke an AppleScript from within NetNewsWire. I was already using Mail Act-On and an AppleScript to easily move information from Mail.app into OmniFocus, and had a similar AppleScript for NNW but no easy way to invoke it.

It wasn’t until late last night that I realized I already had a solution for the problem I’d been describing. I’d been searching for some way to quickly and easily invoke an AppleScript from within NetNewsWire—why not just use a Quicksilver Trigger?

I already use Quicksilver for tons of other things: accessing my Camino bookmarks (would love to be able to get to my Camino history…hint, hint); launching applications; getting information on a contact in the Address Book; even launching other scripts for various tasks. Why not leverage Quicksilver for this as well?

Just a few minutes later—the process only took a few minutes in the Quicksilver Preferences pane to configure the trigger—and I was quickly and easily moving information from NetNewsWire to OmniFocus.

Thank goodness for Quicksilver!

A short while ago I wrote about how I was trying a new way of getting things done on my Mac. Since I published that blog entry, I’ve made some progress on wrapping myself around some of the tools and addressing some of the shortcomings I’d found. Since there may be others out there facing the same situation, I thought it would be useful to share my experience here.

First, I moved back to OmniFocus. While I really liked the idea of “Areas” within Things, it just didn’t seem as robust as OF. Since my work life is no longer driven solely by finite projects that start and end at defined times (usually!), I’m using the projects within OF as areas of responsibility. For example, I’m responsible for creating reference architectures for the deployment of virtualization solutions, so “Reference Architectures” is one of my projects. Within that project, I’ll have any actions related to developing or designing reference architectures. This seemed to make the most sense to me and so far has worked well.

Oh, and kudos to the great folks at Omnigroup, who were nice enough to provide an extended trial license for OmniFocus. With something like this, where you are adjusting your own personal workflow and creating new habits, a 15 day trial just isn’t going to cut it. It was nice to see them recognize that.

The second major issue that I had was getting information into OmniFocus. Using these AppleScripts and these AppleScripts, I was able to cobble together a handy solution:

• I modified an AppleScript to use with Mail Act-On, so that I can quickly create OF actions from Mail.app. Since a lot of my actions are generated by e-mail, this allows me to quickly and easily add items to OF. This has helped me, for the first time in a very long time, to get my inbox to zero.
• I modified another AppleScript for use with NetNewsWire so that I can quickly create OF actions from NNW. If anyone has any insight on how to bind that script to a keystroke within NNW, that would be awesome. (I need something like Mail Act-On for the whole system.)
• I occasionally use the “Send to OmniFocus” script within Quicksilver as well. At some point I plan to update this script to include Growl support. Both of the scripts mentioned above—for both Mail and NetNewsWire—were hacked to include Growl support.

I don’t use the Clippings Service that much, although I may start using that more. It’s possible to assign a keystroke to that, right? I haven’t tried that yet; perhaps a combination of a keystroke for the Clippings Service along with my Mail Act-On rule and script will work even better.

The only area that I feel like I’m still not doing quite so well with is the idea of contexts. I feel like I’m still having problems defining useful contexts. So much of my time is spent at the computer, so I can’t really use a context like “Computer”. Some contexts make perfect sense; for example, I can’t work on the virtualization lab unless I’m in the virtualization lab. The other contexts, though, don’t seem quite so clear-cut. Any feedback from any “GTD’ers” out there is certainly welcome.

Moving forward, I’ll continue to tweak the AppleScripts that I’m using for getting information into OmniFocus, and I’ll be searching for an application like EagleFiler, Together, Yojimbo, or the like to help with storing and organizing information. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that to really be effective, I need an application like OmniFocus to help me track and work through my tasks, and an application to help me store, organize, and retrieve information. Again, I’m certainly open to any recommendations from readers.

I just received a note from VMware announcing the launch of the VMware Fusion Team blog, aka Team Fusion.  The RSS feed for Team Fusion is here.

If you are a Fusion fan, as I am, then it’s worthwhile to add this to your list of RSS feeds or favorite sites to visit.

As part of transitioning into my new role at ePlus, I’ve been having to change some of the ways that I track my responsibilities and outstanding tasks.  For many, many years I’ve been driven by customer-facing projects, and I centered my organization—document filing strategies, keywords, e-mail folders, tasks, etc.—around these projects.  It was pretty easy to know what needed to be done when you’re implementing a farm of ESX Servers, or installing a new storage area network.

Now, however, my role is not customer-facing, and my responsibilities and deliverables are—at first glance—not quite so clear cut.  In addition, the sphere of individuals with whom I am working has broadened.  So I find that my old way of doing things just isn’t effective any longer.

So I began casting about for a “new way” of doing things, something that might help me be more efficient (doing things right) and effective (doing the right things).  Of course, the whole “Getting Things Done,” or GTD, mantra popped up as I began looking for applications designed to help track tasks and responsibilities.  Not being a GTD expert, I decided to give it a semi-whirl and experiment with some of the applications based upon the GTD principles.  So far, it hasn’t gone so well.

<aside>It will probably be stated by more than a few readers who are GTD experts that giving it a “semi-whirl” is the root of the problems that I go on to describe below.  Many of the instructional articles I’ve read so far indicate that you have to use a trusted system that you can trust to capture all the things you need to do, or else you’ll worry about what you might have missed.  That’s all well and good, but what if you can’t find the trusted system that you need?</aside>

I started with OmniFocus.  Actually, that’s not true; I actually experimented with iGTD a while back and just couldn’t stand the UI quirks.  OmniFocus (hereafter just OF) is a great application, but I was having a really hard time reshaping my mind around how I was supposed to get data into OF.  I liked the Clippings support, especially from Mail (and MailTags), as most of my tasks are generated from an e-mail.  Something still didn’t feel quite right, though, so after a few days I removed the trial copy and decided to try Things.

Things is still in beta, and while I like some of the features about Things there are parts that don’t make any sense.  For example, what’s the point behind the “People” section of Things if it doesn’t do anything?  Why should I add team mates?  Sure, I can create actions that are linked/assigned to a team mate, but for what purpose?  I’m trying to organize myself, not my co-workers!  The interface is a bit odd, too, and lacks contextual menus.  Things also lacks one feature that OF had, which was Quicksilver integration.  Believe it or not, the Quicksilver integration makes it so much easier to get actions into the application without disrupting what you’re currently doing, and isn’t that all part of GTD and contexts?

Anyway, I’m still using Things but haven’t yet decided whether I’ll stick with it or try something new.  What is everyone else out there using?  Are there others in similar roles and what applications, processes, procedures, etc., do you use to help keep track of your various responsibilities, actions, and deliverables?  I’d love to hear everyone’s feedback.

In previous versions of Mac OS X, I could use this command to flush the DNS resolver cache:

lookupd -flushcache

However, in Mac OS X version 10.5 “Leopard,” this command no longer works!  I had an occasion today where I needed to flush the DNS resolver cache due to a configuration error in the lab.  Fortunately a quick Google search turned up this page, where I found that the correct command to use in Leopard is this one:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Works like a champ!

As I’m sure most of you have already seen elsewhere, VMware has released version 1.1.1 of VMware Fusion, their desktop virtualization solution for Mac OS X.  I’ve already downloaded and installed the update, which is free for registered owners.

I won’t rehash all the feature lists and new features and such, as I’m sure that plenty of other sites have already reported that in excruciating detail.

I’ve not had the opportunity to really put it through its paces—that will happen tomorrow at the office—but I am happy to report that suspending and resuming virtual machines is much, much faster with this new release.  Since that’s primarily how I work, this improvement in speed is a real benefit to me.  For others, who don’t use the suspend/resume functionality as much, it may not be as beneficial.

You can download the Fusion update from VMware’s web site.

So I upgraded my laptop this past weekend to Mac OS X version 10.5, aka “Leopard”. I’ve been reasonably pleased with the upgrade so far.

I keep most of my applications up to date, so I didn’t have too many applications that weren’t already Leopard compatible. That’s an advantage of being a slightly later adopter as opposed to being one of those guys waiting in line when the new OS was released. In addition, I gain the benefit of the Mac OS X 10.5.1 update, which addressed a number of issues with the initial Leopard release.

So far I’ve only run into a couple of issues, both of them very minor:

• Mail.app 3.1 complains about the self-signed SSL certificate that my hosting provider uses with IMAP-TLS and SMTP-TLS. This occurred with Tiger as well, but some instructions I’d seen before the upgrade indicated that I might be able to bypass those warnings by setting the certificate to “Always Trust”. This doesn’t seem to work. Admittedly, a very minor issue.
• My blogging application, ecto, was supposedly not Leopard compatible with the version I was using (version 2.4.2, Intel build). (I left the older version installed side-by-side with the newer version and the old version seems to run fine, though.) So I switched to a beta build of ecto3, which is a complete rewrite of the blogging application, and I’ve run into a few little issues there. Those are directly related to the ecto3 upgrade, though, and not necessarily to the Leopard upgrade itself.

One of the first “tweaks” I reached for was the tweak to return the menu bar to a more opaque status. There are a number of sites out there providing instructions; here’s the Terminal command I used:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
com.apple.WindowServer ‘EnvironmentVariables’
-dict ‘CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE’ 0.62

The command worked like a champ, and my menu bar was restored to some sense of normalcy. I initially also switched the Dock to a 2-D smoked glass look, but then switched back to the default 3-D appearance. I figured I’d give the new Dock appearance a chance before just banishing it to the ether.

I haven’t been back to the office or at a customer’s site since the upgrade, obviously, so I don’t have any feedback yet on interoperability with Windows-based networks, Kerberos support, etc. I do need to look up the information on Leopard’s built-in support for SSH keys, since I relied upon SSHKeyChain before the Leopard upgrade. If anyone has any pointers on that one, please let me know.

One huge missing piece so far are the Leopard-compatible versions of MailTags and Mail Act-On. I have the beta versions of both, but I’m a bit hesitant to use them—I don’t want to take any chances with my mail, if you know what I mean. Anyone out there using the beta versions of these on Leopard and have some feedback for me? Are they safe yet, or should I wait just a bit longer yet?

Spaces is pretty cool; it’s nice to have virtual desktops back with Mac OS X again. I’d used a pretty fair number of virtual desktop applications on my Mac, eventually settling on VirtueDesktops (then just called Virtue) and then discontinuing my use of virtual desktops after my Tiger upgrade. VirtueDesktops went through various stages of support and non-support during the Tiger upgrade and the migration to the Intel platform, eventually ending development due to the expected introduction of Spaces. While Spaces doesn’t have all the features that VirtueDesktops had, it is at least fully supported. In addition, the former developer of VirtueDesktops is working on something called Hyperspaces, which will—as the name suggests—extend Spaces to include features that VirtueDesktops used to have. In any case, Spaces seems to work fine so far.

I’ll post more information as I continue to get accustomed to Leopard; in the meantime, I’d love to hear any feedback from other Leopard users on your experiences. Feel free to put your feedback in the comments below!

There seem to be quite a few IT professionals out there that have chosen Mac OS X as their primary computing platform. While some of them may have environments that are predominantly UNIX or Linux-based—Macs seem to be particularly common in heavy Solaris environments—I would hazard to guess that a larger majority of them have Windows-based environments that they must support. As a result, a good Remote Desktop client for connecting to Windows-based servers is a valuable piece of software to have.

In search of that ideal Remote Desktop client, I’ve been through a pretty fair number of Remote Desktop clients and related software. While each of these clients has their own strengths and weaknesses, I have yet to find a Remote Desktop client that has what I’d really like to see.

Here’s my “wish list” for the perfect Remote Desktop Connection client:

• It’s an Aqua-native application with a Universal binary. Hey, I still have some old PowerPC-based Macs at home.
• It doesn’t interfere with Quicksilver.
• It supports multiple sessions in such a way that I can switch between these sessions as easily as I could switch between multiple browser windows, multiple Finder windows, or multiple Word documents. That means it should play well with the Dock (single icon on the dock with a pop-up listing all the windows/connections), Expose (Application Windows, or F10, should show all connections/windows, like it would for Safari, Mail, or Finder), and Spaces, if running on Leopard.
• Full Leopard compatibility, of course.
• Support for Mac OS shortcuts in the Windows session, so that I don’t have to remember Cmd-C in Mac OS versus Ctrl-C in Windows.

So far, I’ve tried just about every Remote Desktop client out there: Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection (including the new beta version), TSClientX, and CoRD. Am I missing any significant contenders?

If anyone would like to suggest a Remote Desktop client, feel free to cast your votes and voice your support in the comments below. Thanks!