I had a client describe me as ‘meticulous’, I quickly corrected him, I’m nowhere near meticulous, what I am is ‘specific’ or possibly ‘hugely-anal-retentive’, I know precisely what I want, and generally don’t waiver from that, does that make me ‘meticulous’?
I don’t often get to see the art Museum from the 52nd floor of the Mellon Center - shot with my iPhone through a substantial slab of glass.
Tagged: iphone
I: “That uses PHP, and a custom ODBC connector API”
C: “Why are you ALWAYS spelling?”
I almost passed out I laughed so hard, glad it was a conference call.
This mellow audio mash-up features:
Interestingly this track loops almost seemlessly - I had it on repeat and didn’t even notice it until I’d been listening for 20 minutes - thinking to myself, “man this is a long Zamfir track”.
grr.. typical weekday spam numbers — 3095 emails — 407 mention breasts — 105 mention Viagra — 2 Nigerian Bank scams — 175 stock alerts, 300 folks following up on the mortgage email they sent me last week and 202 horny girls in my area that want to meet me.
I guess there’s no original spam anymore.
For years I’ve joked about a utility function that I use on every job appropriately named Client.random() — I know what you’re thinking; Saul, how is Client.random() any different than random()? The answer is actually very simple – Client.random() doesn’t randomize, it iterates - and this post isn’t about programming, it’s about customer relations - confused yet? The difference between the two functions - is the difference between clients and programmers:
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So I’ve been twitting for a short time, Like so many people I downloaded ‘Twittererific’ and have been happily twitting away - it’s a solid sexy little app, and honestly I would expect nothing less from the guys at iconfactory, they rock, and rock hard. Given my recent love affair with the shell, I realized last night that I could easily leverage Launchbar to be my twitting tool of choice; twitters API is simple and concise.
curl --basic --user "USERNAME:PASSWORD" --data-ascii ¬
"status=YOUR DESIRED TWIT" " ¬
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"
So to tie that to Launchbar we simply add the argument passed (your typed status) from launchbar into the script, save it in ‘\bin’ CHMOD it executable, and bind it to a search template
curl --basic --user "USERNAME:PASSWORD" --data-ascii ¬
"status=$1" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"
That’s all it really takes to post, how simple is that?, of course to get your friends status it’ll take a bit more, I’m thinking ‘geektool’ is the right tool for that job, but that’s a different post (hopefully tomorrow).
I’m forever fiddling with online ‘organizers’ one of the nicest IMHO is Backpack by those 37 signals guys, it’s clean and straightforward - and while I doubt I’ll ever actually use it for my day-to-day masterlist, it’s an excellent place to jot down some quick notes - till I can transcribe them into the ‘uber’ paper list that rules my waking hours (yes..paper, I confess, I kill trees, regularly)
So my recent insomnia had me poking at the BackPack API - to see if I could easily marry BackPack to Launchbar which is my preferred launcher du-jour (whole other post needed as to my choosing it over QS) Natively launchbar supports applescript (which I hate writing), and it also supports Shell scripts (which I love writing) so that choice was simple.
BackPack’s API uses XML over HTTP - which I found annoying (which means I couldn’t get it to work) but Backpack also has a email interface - which is cake. I create a shell script named ‘createTODO’ and parked it in my bin directory. I CHMOD’d it executable.
#!/bin/bash
E="address@yourpage.backpackit.com"
S="Subject: todo: $1"
echo $S | sendmail -f youremail@domain.com $A
that’s the nuts and bolts of it really. it’s clean, simple, bulletproof - you don’t even need to worry about your API key, tested with some static content, boooyah! step one done.
Now to connect that to LB it’s so easy it’s sick..
Open your LB Configuration and create a new search template, give it a simple to type name (like TD)
and make the detail is (Note the linebreak ¬)
x-launchbar:execute? ¬
path=/bin/createTODO&arguments="*"
Using it is as easy as;
Trigger LB, type ‘TD’ hit space. type your task/note and hit enter DONE!
I created a similar script and template for Backpack notes, I’m pretty sure you can figure that one out. Maybe the next version will use applescript and have Growl feedback… hmm.
I was looking for a way to drop bookmarks to email threads in Mail.app‡ when I stumbled upon Hallon a VERY cool open-source project by Peter Borg (of Smultron fame), it’s exactly what I was looking for and SO MUCH MORE.
Peter does a much better job describing it than me.
Hallon can create bookmarks in many applications (like iTunes or Mail.app) that usually can’t create bookmarks and they are always accessible from a menu whatever you are doing. You can e.g. bookmark your favorite songs, an email that you have to reply to later that day, some documents that you are working on or the contact information of a friend whom you need to call before the end of the week. And you play the song, open the email, the document or the contact information just by choosing the bookmark in the Hallon menu.
IMHO most software is for the most part derivative, Hallon rings unique, filling a void that most people don’t even realize the have. The ability to jump back into an email thread, an address, a playlist, and set reminders and notes as well is great for anyone who deals with an unreasonable amount of information on a daily basis.
‡ I knew this was possible because my brief exposure to iGTD did this perfectly, iGTD was an excellent program in it’s own right, just not a great fit for me.
I’m a pretty heavy gSuite user(gmail,calendar,docs) for the most part I’m fine using them in a browser, my browser of choice happens to be Safari, When I got a chance to try the then beta Mailplane out, I jumped at it, it’s not bad, it made managing my five gmails accounts pretty painless, and the drag and drop file attachments was interesting, but ultimately it’s just a browser with a few sexy tricks, and I don’t think those tricks justify the soon-to-be 24 dollar price tag. So I needed an alternative..of course Safari is perfectly fine, and 40% of the time that’s what I use even when Mailplane was open, but searching I went anyway.
Hana is interesting in a laughable way - if you turn off safari’s address bar, hide the bookmark bar - you have hana, it offers not a single differentiator over Safari - other than no navigation, but wait….it’s $19.91, I nearly laughed myself sick… I can only assume they paid a bunch for the sassy icon.
So I won’t be using Hana, but I found a gem in my travels, Webmail.app, a little bit of webkit, served up by Michael McCracken, it only does gmail, it’s devoid of sexy tricks, and it’s rock freekin solid, I’d love for it to deal with my five gmail accounts, but I may solve that problem differently.
Webmail.app really shines when you set it as the ‘compose’ app via G-Mail notifier, that marries the menubar display with Webmail’s single-minded approach.
I suppose eventually i will have tried every application the world has to offer, here’s two more I can strike off my list.