I recently moved, and so I’ve been selling some things I don’t need on ebay. I noticed a cool feature today: Ebay will let you automatically donate a portion or all of the profit you make on your item to one of hundreds of non-profit organizations, and also give you a credit for seller fees. Check it out:

How cool is that? I’m donating my profits to invisible children, because they’re awesome.

Using growl, quicksilver, and itunes, I’ve got how I like to handle my music listening while I work down to a science.

First, controlling what’s playing. Quicksilver has these cool things called triggers. Triggers allow you to assign an action so a single key or key combination. The itunes plugin for quicksilver comes with a bunch of preset triggers, but skip forward, skip back, and play/pause are really my essentials. I picked three keys on my keyboard that I wasn’t using (F14, F15, F16) and assigned them to each of those actions, respectively. This way I can skip forward or backwards in the current playlist (almost always party shuffle) with a single keystroke, and without changing applications. This is especially great when itunes is open in a different space in leopard.

I also like to rate all my music and then use that rating for different playlists. The itunes plugin also comes with scripts for setting rating, so with 4 keystrokes (ctrl+space to bring up quicksilver, the number, and enter to apply) i can change the rating of the song without switching to itunes.

Last, growl comes with a nice little add-on called growltunes, which pops up a notification showing the album artwork, title, artist and rating when the song changes. I like the music video style because it stays at the bottom and isn’t distracting. Here’s what that looks like:

Sometimes I miss it, so I also assign one more trigger to show the playing track. This way if I’m listening to something new and like it, I can find out who it is, and then rate it, all with a couple quick keystrokes, and without changing applications.

That’s pretty much it, what do you think? How do you listen to music?

I just downloaded and installed itunes 8 last night, only to find that they removed two options that I rely on: disabling the links to the itunes store and hiding genre while browsing.

I don’t buy music from the itunes store, so why would i want to see three little arrows taking me to the store, esp to buy music I already have. I also completely disregard the genre tag of mp3’s. Partially because I have a hard time fitting music into genres anyway, and partly because its both subjective and irrelevant. What is one genre to me is another to someone else.

Thanks to these two macosxhints articles, you can have those options back and reject Apple’s imposing of store and genre on your music listening.

Shut down itunes, fire up the terminal, enter these commands, and restart itunes.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

done.

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.

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.

So I’ve installed the iphone 2.0 software (on my non 3G iphone, for now) and have some thoughts about the iphone apps and the app store.

I think that while the app store is going to be the defacto hub for distributing apps for the majority, it has some downs.

First, as the number of apps continue to grow, the app store just seems awkward for navigating and finding new apps. Also it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell the crap from the good, with the only aid being the marginally helpful user reviews. I think the blogosphere and word of mouth are going to play a huge role in the success of iphone apps. Seeing and hearing how an app has been useful for someone else is so much more credible when trying to decide what to invest time in installing and trying out.

Second, I have a hard time seeing myself paying for any iphone app, ever. The only exception is perhaps something that I’m already invested in. Are iPhone apps just supporting cast members? I vote yes for a couple reasons. I think the greatest value of a mobile app is the greater accessibility that comes with mobility, and it’s just not worth $10, especially when there are iphone web interfaces and even more so once the jailbreaked installers take off. Also, if I were a software developer, why would I want to limit my audience to only iphone customers? I think these factors are contributing to why you see many more “iphone versions” of apps and iphone interfaces for existing apps, than pure iphone-only apps. I’d put money on the iphone app market continuing in that direction.

I like having my twitter on my website. I use the standard supplied twitter javascript badge code to do this. One thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t create html links from the links in the tweet. So took a minute and made one that does.

Everybody stand back. I know regular expressions (although it’s just a baby one). It could also be improved to be much more flexible (https, not relinking already linked urls, etc), but it’s simple and working for my cases for now.

Here is the updated blogger.js file, just download it, upload it to your web space, and use it instead of http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js

Links in your twitter badge now are clickable. Neato.

Awesome.

vs

Goodbye vienna, hello netnewswire

I might be way late to the game, but here’s why I switched:

While both apps are free and have good user interfaces, NetNewsWire syncs my news and blog feeds with an online account (also free), so once I read something at work, on my phone, or on my laptop at home, I never see the same item twice. Awesome. They also have a nice iphone interface for reading on the go.

Theres a more detailed comparison on the unofficial apple weblog, but the syncing seals the deal for me. Get it here.

• autosoap
• ny chedder kettle chips in my lunch
• portland (and its public transportation)
• refactoring your rails app presentation content
• starcraft (anyone want a game?)

• slower than slow wifi (how much are we paying?)
• having to pass presentation materials around on usb drives
• asking questions by shouting (can we get something better? We’re programmers right?)
• presentation skills at #railsconf
• AIR presentation – I’m here to learn about Rails, not flex.

Lately I’ve been really getting into the merlin show . I’m only caught up to about episode 11 of 20, but if I had to sum up what I’ve seen so far, it’s sort of a mixture of GTD tips and interviews with musicians and engineers about issues surrounding human interaction and how technology shapes our communication and communities. So far I’ve found it both educational and intellectually stimulating. You should check it out.