Everyone wants to know how to do something.  Sometimes it’s learning a new skill, and sometimes enhancing something you already know.  Whatever that is, there seems to be one good way to do so.

Go and do it.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is to be thrown into the situation and you having to just learn it.  Think swimming.  You can talk about it all day, learn strokes on paper, practice breathing, but until you actually get tossed into the deep end, it’s all head knowledge.  Once you have to tread water, it becomes learned (or you learn you can’t swim!).

Here’s another thing.  You can’t learn something if you never do it to begin with.  You can’t learn the guitar having never picked one up.  You can’t learn to write if you never put pen to paper.

So here’s some encouragement for you, and some friendly pressure: go do something if you want to learn how.  You’ll never know unless you try.

So, what do you want to learn?

[ Image by SNAKPhotography ]

Two great apps that I’ve found recently are iSlayer’s iStat programs.

These little apps are basically a window into your Mac’s inner workings.

The iStat Pro is a dashboard widget that displays all sorts of good information about how your Mac is running.  Anything from RAM usage, to Drive stats, to temperature of components, to fan speed are all at your disposal.  The units are dragable to any most any order you’d like.  Also the skin has a few different colors so you can change to taste.

The iStat Menus contain the exact same information but in your OS X menubar.  The advantage over iStat Pro is the always available visual readouts.  (Yes, that one click to open the dashboard makes a difference!)  You can customize the individual icons to contain more or less visual info and you can (by the order in which you activate them) dictate their position in the menubar.  Also, the colors can be tweaked.

They work well together too.  I use the menus for “critical” – or at least what I call critical – info.  RAM, drives, network usage, and CPU usage are all just a glance away.  I can then open up the widget for other info – like temps, fan speed, uptime, and power stats – that I don’t need in front of me.

In any case, these apps are small and fairly light, and can help troubleshoot if you need some quick info.  (Example: Why is my fan always running!  Oh!  It’s some malfunctioning program!  I’ll fix that!)  Hopefully, you can find good uses for these two programs!

Do you have any apps to recommend?

For those of you trying to create groups in Twitter on the Tweetie Mac app, I found a solution.

It’s almost a little too simple, and isn’t the cleanest thing around, but it gets the job done.

So the solution?  Use the search.  Here’s how.

In the search bar, type in “from:username” of the person you want to see tweets from.  A search will pop up with anything they’ve tweeted.  Cool.  If you’d like multiple users, type in “from:username OR from:othername OR …” until you’ve got all that you need.  Make sure you favorite the search to come back to it.  Then, you have a TweetDeck or Seesmic style group you can come back to.

One problem with this method is in getting more than 4 or 5 users in a group.  You’d be typing forever, and if you wanted to change it, you’d have to type in all over again.  For a small group of tweeters, this works slick.

This does work in Seesmic, and I assume it works in TweetDeck (though I haven’t tried), and I’m sure it works in any client that uses Twitter search.  In Seesmic, I’m using it to keep track of my family because I miss about 70% of their tweets.  This way I can still catch theirs.

Hope you find it useful.  Any other group ideas for Tweetie?

In the last few weeks, I have been trying to improve my cluttered Mac environment.  My dock had gotten quite full, and to make room I’d have to make the dock so small I wouldn’t be able to read any of it.  And, I’ve been doing a lot of developing WordPress lately so I’d been trying to use OS X’s Spaces to help.  So, after chatting with my brother about our organization skills, I came up with a few tricks I thought I’d share.

Uber Spaces

Mac OS X’s Spaces is a great organizational tool.  Apps can be confined to a single space so that your view isn’t cluttered with 10 open programs each with 3-5 windows each.  Cool idea.

Well, take that to the logical ultimate.  16 spaces each with its own app focus.

Each space has a “theme” that governs what should appear in the space.  For example, I have individual spaces for my browsers, my social media apps, my chat apps, and my music apps.  I have the spaces set up for only those apps, as well.  So, when I click on Seesmic in my dock, it jumps to the social media space, keeping my browser separate.  It keeps everything in a logical place.

Alias Folder

My dock was organized by topic, mostly.  Firefox and Safari are next to each other, and OpenOffice and the iWork apps are close together as well.  The issue was that I began to aquire too many apps that I wanted quick access to.  Hence the shrinking dock problem.

Solution?  Make alias folders.  I now have a folder entitled “Aliases” in my Applications folder that has a bunch of aliases I made of the apps I wanted quick access to.  I organized them into subfolders (such as “Social Apps” for Seesmic and Tweetie, and “Office” for my office apps) and dragged the subfolders into the right side of my dock.

Now, I have quick access to my apps – which are all organized into folders – without eating a bunch of space on my dock.

The Looking Glass

Still one problem remained.  I use the internet for half of my computer use now, like Gmail, Google Reader, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.  So, my spaces plan goes out the window.

The answer is Prism.  This plugin for Firefox (also available as a stand alone app) can create “apps” for individual web pages.  For example, I saved Facebook as one app, Gmail as another app, and FriendFeed as another.  That way, I can group Facebook, FriendFeed, and Seesmic all in one space without having to use Firefox.

You can set it up for any webpage you want.  I have my Google apps under prism as well, so my Google Reader is separate from Firefox.

All of these help keep the workspace manageable.  And I hope you find these useful!

What kind of tips, tricks, or apps do you use to help out your workspace?