Quicksilver is hands down the mac application that I can’t live without. When I sit down at a computer, hit ctrl+space and nothing happens, it makes me sad on the inside. Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining its usefulness. It can launch programs, manipulate files, and run scripts for you with minimum effort. Once you get in the habit of using it, you’ll wonder how you did without. Ask my friend Dane whom I introduced to quicksilver.

Frank Uyeda AKA “FU” once pointed out to me that you can use spotlight to launch programs as well. While true, spotlight is slower, often finds more depth than you need, and only lets you open those files; with quicksilver you can act on those files.

To use quicksilver, you open it with a hotkey (ctrl+space by default), then select an action, and then select a target action if applicable all with a few keystrokes. You would be surprised how much faster it is than your mouse Here’s some examples:

Trashing a file:

opening a file with a specific application:

I should note here that you can set quicksilver to scan certain directories. I set it to scan my home directory so i can access anything in there with quicksilver.

Lots of applications also have quicksilver plugins so you can access their contents with quicksilver. Say you’re itching for a song in itunes. You don’t have to switch over to itunes and find it, you can just use quicksilver:

Quicksilver also learns, so it gets better at guessing what you’re trying to do. Firefox is my most opened application starting with f, so to launch it, I only have to hit ctrl+space to open quicksilver, type f, which selects firefox, and then hit enter to launch it.

This is really just the surface. Here are some more articles and tutorials about quicksilver. Try it out, you’ll like it.

Next, I’ll show you how quicksilver an growl fit into my every day music listening.

Growl is one of those handy little apps that I love, but can used for evil or for good. Growl is simply a notification system that pops up little messages you can read, and then fade away after a couple of seconds. Lots of mac applications support growl, like adium, cyberduck, firefox 3, but my favorite use for it is when listening to music (which I’ll post on later).

It’s also very customizable. There are a bunch of built in styles for notifications that you can change the appearance of. I mostly use this one, called “smoke”:

You can also choose different styles for different notifications coming from different programs form the preferences screen.. For example, I have notifications from important programs (like adium) at the top right of my screen so i see them. Less important ones I have slide up from the bottom. My brain has gotten used to it so much that I often miss/completely ignore the bottom ones, which is what I want so I don’t feel as interrupted. (That’s where I put my music notifications).

What I like best about growl is that I can get info without switching contexts. For example, If I’m typing an email and someone sends me an instant message, growl pops up a little notification with the message in it which I can read, decide if I want to respond immediately or not, and then either keep working, or decide to switch over and answer.

The evil in growl (for me) comes in the interruption. I used to use a plugin for Apple Mail called Growl Mail, which would pop up a notification when I received an email with the first couple lines of the email in there. Because of how I’m wired, as soon as I know about an email I start thinking about it and my response to it. In reality, there’s no email that needs my immediate attention. More urgent requests are instant messaged or phoned to me. Constantly seeing new emails roll in was really hurting my ability to focus on the task in front of me and be productive. I would start one task, receive an email which I couldn’t resist, stop working on my current task, and switch to responding to that email, work on that for a while, and then come back until another email came in. To be productive in higher level brain function tasks, you’ve got to focus. Since I’m often working on a task related to an email, shutting my email client off wasn’t the answer. Removing Growl Mail was.

The other side of that coin is sometimes you want to be interrupted. When I’m uploading a large file via ftp, I can go do something else, and then cyberduck will tell me when it’s done and I can take the next action. You get the idea.

LIfehacker also has an article on Growl with some pictures.

The bottom line: growl is awesome. Use it for apps when you want to be interrupted. Try it out and make it your own.

Whenever I touch someone else’s computer or talk to someone else about their mac, inevitably I say something like, oh, you don’t use _? And they often say something oh, I didn’t know about that, thanks! And then they say, have you tried _? and I say no, I should check that out.

So, I’m going to write a few posts about different mac apps I like and use, like growl and quicksilver, and then I’m going to show you how I use them together during my day like how I use those two with itunes to listen to music or do my taxes or make me toast. I’m all about leveraging technology to make my life easier. I’m going to tell you how I do it, and then you can tell me how you do it, and then we’ll all be happier. My mom will probably read them at least. She likes telling me I’m cool and not a nerd.

P.S. I’m only going to cover mac things. Three years ago I bought my first mac (I had ALWAYS used windoze before that) and I’ve never looked back, except for when I want to play warcraft II (and now there’s vmware for that). It just works best for me.

The driver has to work harder than anyone. He’s the first to show up and the last to leave. When his teammates are all out drinking beer, he’s up in his room studying pictures of turns. You see, a driver must remain 100% focused at all times. Not only is he responsible for knowing every inch of every course he races, he also responsible for the lives of the other three people in the sled. Do you want that responsibility?

- Cool Runnings

Read it again but put “leader” in place of “driver.” Leadership is like that I think, and it can be lonely. Sometimes you just want to have fun instead of having the responsibility. Which is why you have to want it.

I had a great weekend at Alpine camp both with some of the kids I met and the rest of the band, who were a lot of fun on top of being great musicians. The experience also was a good chance for some personal reflection, and I think I’ll touch on some of those topics in some upcoming posts.

We arrived Friday night and setup, ate dinner, and tried to rehearse a little bit before we went on. It was a little frustrating for me because we didn’t sound as good as I wanted with so little rehearsal and after it became clear a couple of songs needed to be removed :), but we made it through. The highlight of the night was a guy named Tim who came and shared his testimony through words and song of how he was abandoned by his parents, eventually fell into a life of drug dealing that landed him in prison, and wound up following Jesus. It was really cool to see the kids connect with Tim. The second night after zip lines and other camp shenanigans we had more worship and a nooma video titled luggage that spoke about dealing with the hurt in our lives. We ended that night just worshiping with the acoustic guitar for longer than I could think up songs to play because they didn’t want to stop.

It was also lot of fun to see how the responses of the kids changed so much over the short weekend. Here’s some of the feedback we received:

One camper wrote: I loved the video especially the part of forgiving people and I loved the music especially “nuttin but the blood of Gesus”

Another wrote: I liked the music it made me feel closer to God and even made me cry, I loved the weekend it was amazing and everyone was cool

Another wrote: I liked the video and the speaker and learned that I am not the only one that needs to learn about forgiveness before this weekend I thought I was the only one who have had bad things happen to me. Camping at Alpine was or is the best thing I have ever done.

Another wrote: I liked the speaker he told about his past and that is very hard to do, the video told the truth and everyone needs to see it. On a scale of 1-10 it was a 10 the best camp I have ever gone to.

It was really a blessing to hear how the kids were touched, and I made some new friends.

aaahahahahaha

I met my fundraising goal, thanks to some last minute checks. Thanks so much to everyone who gave. Camp is this weekend, so I’ll post on how it goes afterward, but I’m excited. The band has come together and it’s going to be greate. Here’s my original post in case you missed it about what I’m doing.

so, just for fun every now and then i go and look at how many people are visiting my blog. Tonight, I noticed something interesting:

Turns out if you google “jared iphone”, this post is the #1 result, and apparently people were googling “jared iphone” on july 14.

Hilarious.

Ever try to play a itunes song outside of itunes? Oh, you can’t. Ever want to send an itunes song to a friend to check out? Oh, you can’t. Ever want to convert a itunes song to mp3? Oh, you can’t. Ever want your audio in higher quality? Nope.

Amazon MP3. Still one click to buy and add to itunes. MP3 Format. 256 kbps. DRM Free. Oh, and cheaper than itunes.