Viewing posts with the tag Productivity

iStat Menus and iStat Pro

October 17, 2009 | Productivity | Technology

islayer

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.

istat4

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.

istat2They 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?

Twitter Groups in Tweetie (or Anywhere)

August 17, 2009 | Productivity | Technology

tweetiegroup1

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. [Continue reading...]

3 Productivity Tips for Your Mac

August 1, 2009 | Life | Productivity

dock

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

spacesMac 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. [Continue reading...]

How Do You Consume Online Media?

June 10, 2009 | Marketing | Technology

gooreader

With all the means to get news, blog posts, and almost anything else on the web, which tools do you use?  How efficient are they?  Could they work better?

I was inspired by this post to think about my subscription practices, and I’ve found they could use some work.  For my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader.  I love it.  But the number of articles per day has grown beyond what I can read everyday.  What the above article suggested was to use email subscriptions for your must-read feeds.  This would act as a filter and let you spend less time checking your feed reader.  Cool.

So, my mind is taking that idea one step further.  I find that for the few sites I frequent daily, I end up just checking their actual website.  Why?  Well, I comment on the posts.  To do that, I have to be on their site.  So why go through the RSS middleman?  I did subscribe by email to these sites to see if it helped me at all.  I think it has, at least a little.

I’ve found that I will probably end up with three categories of “feeds.”

  1. A-list feeds that I just go to their site, but will also have some subscription to alert me (probably email and/or Twitter),
  2. A-list feeds that I really like, but I don’t generally comment on or frequent the site, so I’ll get an email subscription,
  3. Other feeds that I like enough to subscribe too, but that I just consume.

Of course, the feeds are always in flux.  If I really start liking a feed in the third category, I’ll jump it somewhere above.

So what’s your way?  Any cool tools you use to make it easier?

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