LaunchBar 5

Looks like a lot of long-wished-for improvements are coming in the next version of LaunchBar -- support for multiple (global) clipboards is the big one for me. There are a lot of programs that provide this service, but the way LaunchBar is doing it looks very clean and robust -- a lot of data formats are supported. The ability to add an event to iCal from LaunchBar is also very cool.

Go look at the beta.

VoodooPad 4

VoodooPad 4 is out. It was already a great tool... and now it finally looks at home on Leopard.

I can't tell you how many times someone has asked me if I remembered some design project we did way back a couple of years ago, and who was the printer, or why did we have to bla-bla-bla, and I'm able to recall it instantly.

It's the best way I know to make your coworkers think you're a genius.

Of course, it only looks like magic if you are diligent about putting stuff into it, and keep your VoodooPad documents available all times.... which is why 4.0 features like document synching and "The Bucket" are cool.

TextExpander gets an update

Many programs have the ability to assign the current date or time to a shortcut. For instance, I have TypeIt4Me set up so that if I type "dd" it will insert "2008-10-30 Thursday" into whatever I'm writing. But, I've never run across an easy way to have a shortcut that expands to, for example, tomorrow's date.

But, I have now. If you are one of those people who keeps plain text files around in order to Get Things Done, then you may actually be thinking to yourself, why yes, I do hate struggling to type out future dates in year-month-day format all the time. If so, check out TextExpander 2.5.

little black notebooks

I found a blog covering Moleskines, Miquelriuses, and other little blank books. You love 'em, I love 'em, and this guy loves 'em so much he has a blog devoted to them. And if you go there, you'll see the reason I'm linking to him in this post....

The blog has a prejudice for smaller rather than larger, the idea being that if it can't be with you at all times, it won't be with you when you need it.

Personally, I go for the 200 sheet SM Grid Miquelrius. Barely fits in my back jeans pocket, but it's good for about a year's worth of pensees...

Torschlusspanik

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors is a nice take by John Tierney on the power of letting go -- accepting realistic limits on how many possible futures you can entertain.

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.
He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

And thanks to Time putting some of its archives online, I can provide the name for the trope of the closing door: Torschlusspanik, as felt in East Germany, 1961:

Last week a curious and serious malady was affecting Communist East Germany and reaching almost epidemic proportions. The name of the disease was Torschlusspanik, which literally means "fear of gate closing." Everything East German leaders did to shut off the flow of refugees to the West seemed, instead, to spur it on.

So the fear of a closing gate spurs people to finally take the hard path to the desired outcome.

There seems to be a lot of Torschlusspanik in the air these days.

Software I Use

I hereby present my list of Geek Force Multipliers.... with URLs now:

Effort Reducers

• LaunchBar — CLI for the GUI. A revolution away from pointing and clicking.


• DragThing — the opposite of LaunchBar; still better than the Dock.


• Path Finder — still better than the Finder. Gets routine things done more easily, and copy operations are faster.


• Typeit4me — now I can type 80 wpm.


• Hazel — rule based refiling to keep up with the torrent. For instance, anything on the desktop with "receipt" in the file name gets moved to the receipts folder.


• MenuCalendarClock — I use this just because it lets me see the date in the menubar in yyyy-mm-dd format, and I don't suppose I need to say why that's so great.

Outboard Brains

• OmniOutliner — for a while every project had an outline; now I use it mostly for structured writing.


• TaskPaper — for the daily hit list.


• VoodooPad — like an extra large messenger bag, it's simple and versatile. Requires a change in mindset to get the most use out of it. Hoping it gains all of taskpaper's abilities over time.

System Utilities

• Cocktail — once every 6 months or so. Good for clearing out font caches, etc.


• Growl — good for use with hazel so you know what your robot is doing.

By the way, a couple of these are on sale this month only through MacSanta.

TaskPaper

TaskPaper is actually a lot more useful than it looks like it might be at first glance. Zero bloat. "Fiddle-proof" as Merlin Mann says....

and it's at least a little bit AppleScriptable. I'm sure Jesse will be working on making that more robust... would be nice to have a QuickSilver-like method of text entry.

Visualization

In which I start out talking about decision trees, and end up talking about shelf sets.

Matt Neuburg has an interesting writeup at Tidbits of a decision making tool called Flying Logic. The program creates "intelligent" decision trees that provide visual feedback as to how to navigate the complex web of dependencies required in order to get to a goal.

Yes, you can do this with a whiteboard (or Omnigraffle), but those don't let you offload logic out of your head.

This is a tool that's probably only worth checking out for major initiatives, but more broadly, the power of visualization in aiding group decision-making can't be overstated. Without visual reference, planning meetings are essentially Socratic dialogs, which is unnecessarily hard work.

Even in the world of brand design, I am often sitting in a meeting talking about "the chosen design" and what needs to happen to it... without any visual reference. Looking around the table, you can see everyone's eyes focussing off in the middle distance as we recall what that design looked like. More unnecessarily hard work.

Think ahead about what needs to be in your library of visual reference material, and keep it at hand in your team's public discussion areas. For CPG design, this means comprehensive shelf sets, and reference for visual equity elements and physical materials. Don't have your meetings in conference rooms, you'll just have to bring your stuff there, and that's too much work, so you won't.

Yes

It's really true about surgery these days; everyone shows up asking you for your full name and birth date, and why you're here today, and which knee it is that they're going to operate on.

And someone really did inscribe the word "yes" on me, like a charm, to affirm to all who could see that I was going to get arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. Without seeing the charm, the surgeon cannot make the cut.

it takes a village.

Time for my story about how when I was a kid I lived in Pakistan for a year, and saw that road crews consisted of a lot of men, some donkeys pulling wagons with truck tires, lots of gravel, and a few shovels.

There was this technique they had where one man would hold the shovel normally and do the downstroke, and a second man would then pull on a big rope attached to the shovel shaft, to actually toss the gravel.

Seemed odd but I'm sure it makes sense in a world with more men than tools.

This picture takes it to a new extreme. I found it on a google search as I was trying to explain the concept to a team mate.

The particular circumstance that led me to be sitting in air conditioned comfort, using Lotus Notes to compose an explanation of the "two man shovel" technique is not interesting enough to be described here, but I do find enough need for the picture to keep it around.

Hazel

This is a pretty innovative Mac OS X utility for robotic filing which I've been using since the early 2.0 betas; it's great. I had already given up trying to get everything off my desktop by finding just the right cubbyhole for it. Instead I had started a chronological dump bin system for anything but obviously project-related files. There's a large middle ground of miscellaneous "Might want this later" attachments and ephemera which 120 GB+ hard drives seduce one into keeping around... but one can get pretty distracted with all that interesting junk on one's desktop. Now I'm letting Hazel clean it up for me.

to do list

Seen on a WW2 sub at a submarine museum at Pearl Harbor. The diving officer would stand at his station and call back (through some kind of pipe) to each post to verify verbally that each hatch was closed, etc. This metal indicator panel was just a physical checklist for the officer to go through before issuing the order to dive.

Don't you hate it when you get ready to dive and there's just one thing you forgot to check? Kind of like thinking, hmm, did I turn off the iron?

I would improve the survivability of the device by making it so that you couldn't see the words "Rigged for diving" and"Rigged for surface" simultaneously. You'd only see the phrase which was true, like a big if-then statement.