What’s in your Finder toolbar?

I find it useful to keep a few extra items in my Finder toolbar. Anything to which you would drag files and folders would be appropriate to put in your Finder toolbar. Here’s mine:

From left to right:

1. Path Button is one of those buttons that is not in the default set. It’s pretty handy, though. You can click it to see a list of the parent folders for upward navigation. I’ve recently discovered you can get the same functionality by right-clicking on the name of the folder in the title bar. So, I might remove the path button.
2. CleanArchiver is an essential app for creating clean zip (or gzip, bzip, Disk Image, etc) files without the pesky .DS_Store files. Every time I need to send a zip file to a Windows user, I just drag the file to this icon. You can find CleanArchiver at Sopht Square.
3. TextMate, everybody’s favorite text editor, is handy to have here because you can drag a folder to open a project.
4. Transmit is a nice SFTP app that has a feature called ‘Dock Send’ which allows you to upload files to certain places based on the location of the file on your computer. Just drag the file to its dock icon (or, in this case, it’s toolbar icon).
5. Transmit Droplets allow you to upload files to a specific server directory.
6. AppZapper is a popular app for removing applications including all related files.

That’s about it for my Finder toolbar. What’s in yours?

Update

I’ve merged Trey’s buttons into my toolbar. But, instead of ‘Open in Terminal’, mine is ‘Open in iTerm’, using this script and henrik’s icon.

I should also mention that I keep a divider between any icons to which I drag files/folders so I don’t accidentally drop on the wrong icon. And AppZapper stays well away from everything else.

The Result:

For the past few years, I haven’t had too much trouble out of IE — only because I’ve become familiar with its quirks. I know that floats need display: inline to fix the margins, position: relative or zoom: 1 needs to be added to misbehaving elements to trigger hasLayout, and height: 1% will make boxes stretch to contain their floated children. That’ll fix IE6 90% of the time. But today, I struggled with something I hadn’t run into before: Lack of Multiple Class Support

I was trying to reference elements with multiple classes in my CSS:

.aside.login {
  properties: values;
  ...
}

All the other browsers (including IE7) work with this just fine. IE6, however, only sees one class. I wish I had known about this before I spent most of my afternoon trying to figure out why rules were getting applied to things they shouldn’t have.

So, how is this any better?

Well, for starters, there is no white. How is that better? Well… it just… it just is. Secondly, I’ve removed a lot of the old posts that were completely useless. I’ve also put together this here design from scratch. So, I have a little more control over the layout and the markup. It’s still a WordPress theme, which is a little limiting, but I’m slowly learning to bend it to my will.

Why are the articles here so old?

All of the articles prior to this one are from the old blog to which I hadn’t posted in over a year. But there is plenty of fresh content on the way. I have been maintaining a list of articles I plan to write. I’ll also be writing about the Github projects and scripts to which I’m slowly adding.

Some stuff doesn’t seem to work.

It’s sort of a work-in-progress. There are probably some broken links and possibly some bugs. If you find anything, just let me know in the comments below.

Cheers.

…tell you how I know.
I read it in the paper
15 years ago.
John Prine

I try not to get to obsessive about techy gadgets, but man, that iPhone is just brilliant — and not as much for what it does, but for how it works. It’s like those seamless, intuitive, nice-to-look-at interfaces that futuristic sci-fi movie makers design, but that electronics companies never seem to be able to make.¹

1. That’s what frustrates me about most electronics companies (and most companies in general): they’re not really trying to innovate; they’re just hacking together stuff. Movie makers design cool gadgets because those gadgets are based on how they look and feel; not the underlying electronics and technology. Real-life technology companies, on the other hand, have their engineers put together some electronic components. Then, a programmer builds software on top of that. Then a crappy UI gets designed. Finally, it’s all just thrown together as cheaply as possible into a plastic box that’s designed to be easy to manufacture. So, you get a mediocre device that was designed from the wrong direction by a bunch of engineers/designers/etc.

   Some of those tradespeople may have been able to do some great things if their role in the design process wasn’t so limited by every other part of the process. Picture 25 people all holding a pencil above a piece of paper. It’s only one pencil and everyone has a firm grip on it, so they all have to move in the same direction. Think about how hard it would be to draw something creative when you have to completely coordinate every movement with 24 other people. Even if each person was a fantastic artist, you’d be lucky to get a simple smiley face on that piece of paper. It’s like the old “weakest link in the chain” scenario, except exponentially worse because the limitations of each member are compounded. So, when an electronics company manages to create even the slightest improvement (the equivalent of eyebrows on the aforementioned smiley face), it’s considered a “groundbreaking innovation.” Nobody seems to care that they’re just squeezing a little more paint out of the same old tube.

   So, why this creative gridlock? It seems to me that there are two types of technology companies: The first being the type that have lots of money and resources for product development and marketing, but are stymied by big committees and giant development teams. The second being the type of company that has great ideas but much more limited resources. (I remember seeing info on the Optimus Keyboard over a year ago, and it still hasn’t made it to market.)

   I think the big companies think that larger development teams mean more-bigger-better ideas. When, in fact, big development teams usually handicap the brightest minds. Democratic teamwork is crippling. The only way you can take advantage of a large group of minds is to have one genius overseeing the whole thing, cherry picking the best ideas and integrating them into a single, brilliant, focused vision.

   Apple is one of the few companies that I know of which has the resources to produce expensive things, yet is able to rest its fate in the hands (and minds) of a tiny handful of brilliant people. I just hope there is always at least one company like Apple to lead us into the technological future. ↑ back up there

Wishlistr is the most recent in a long line of Web 2.0 companies that have decided to say “no” to e. It’s a trend that started around the time of Flickr and has become almost a standard among the new web apps worldwide. Apps like Flagr and Talkr even attribute the majority of their success to their openly anti-e attitude.

“E is bad business,” claimed the CEO of one of the newest W2.0 wonders. “When we were starting out, we knew we would save considerable overhead by excluding e’s, but we had no idea how much it would help the image of our company overall.” It seems that these days, inclusion of e in your business plan is basically branding yourself “Web 1.0.”

Wishlistr’s r had this to say about his relationship with e and his newfound success:

Before W2.0, I felt like I was completely dependent on e. I mean, you hardly ever saw an r without an e. I think most of us r’s thought that the “er” sound couldn’t be made without e, but the web app revolution was a big eye openr and a major confidence-boostr for us. R’s like Flickr’s r proved that we can make it on our own. [Flick]r was the r who inspired me to join Wishlistr, and things couldn’t be better for me right now. And with the holiday season coming up, I’m looking forward to a level of exposure that I never could have achieved with e. Of course, I do feel a little bad about the whole thing. I miss e, but I guess that’s just the way the world goes round.

So, why all the anti-e-ism? Most say that it is a backlash against the e’s meteoric rise to success during the late 90’s. Once email and ecommerce became household names, e practically became a buzzword in itself. Every company of the first internet boom wanted to cash in on the e-craze. A whole language of words prefixed with e was created. The e-bubble became bigger and more fragile than the .com bubble off of which it fed. The e-bubble has now popped, and e’s are facing some hard, hard times.

Anti-e-ism is still rising on the web and spreading to consumer electronics like Motorola’s Razr and Slivr. Analysts seem uncertain as to whether the e’s will make a recovery before the end of the decade. Most agree that 2007 doesn’t look good for the vowel.

On the other hand, James Duncan Davidson’s article really made me appreciate Lightroom. I hadn’t really been able to look at the metadata panel in Aperture, but it’s obvious from Davidson’s post that Lightroom really did it right – and much better than Aperture. Those kinds of details are important to me. So, Lightroom gets another 10 points in the UI category as well as the annotation category.

For my needs, Aperture is still ahead by a small margin. More as things develop.¹

1. No pun intended ↑ back up there

Now, keep in mind, these aren’t huge changes. They are simple little things that would fix things that annoy me².

So, here’s the first thing that would make iTunes sooooo much nicer:

That’s right! A preference that applies sound check only when shuffling! Simple, isn’t it?

But it would fix a major issue for me. Songs that make up an album are mastered to have specific levels in relation to each other. Sound check messes the flow up majorly. However, when shuffling, it’s really nice to have a consistent level across all songs because songs from different albums have drastically different levels.

That’s all for now. Cheers.

1. because they read my blog every day ↑ back up there
2. and possibly a few other people ↑ back up there

Of course, I do love the De Novo Dahl. They are a great band and a great bunch of guys/girl.

And as a side note — if you have a Mac and like Pandora, you should try PandoraBoy. It’s a good free app with a stupid name that plays Pandora without a browser. That’s not the good part though. It will also let you control Pandora (including like/dislike) with the Apple Remote, and posts notifications to Growl. So, now I can hook the ol’ MacBook up to the stereo and listen to Pandora radio around the house. I also created a giant Growl display style so I can read it from across the room.

I know that some of you have mentioned Lightroom lately. I’ve tried it and it’s pretty nice. But now’s decision time. I am planning on getting Aperture when I get a new computer. I’d like to invite you all to try and convince me that that is a good/bad decision. What do you think are the advantages to going with Lightroom instead?

Here are the things that are on my mind:

Aperture pros:

• Aperture is available now. I know exactly what the price is.
• Lightroom is a gamble. No one knows how much it will cost and exactly what the final version will be like.
• So much of the Mac’s workflow has support for iPhoto, I can only assume that Aperture will easily replace it. Whereas, Lightroom might not plug in to the OS quite as nicely (importing/exporting to/from other applications and stuff).

Lightroom pros:

• I’ve tried out Lightroom and I like what I’ve seen. It’s fairly lightweight, and it has a lot of nice features.
• It might eventually come with CS. That would be really nice.
• Input from lots of current users can’t hurt the final product.

That’s about all I can think of off the top of my head. Please give me your thoughts. Pros. Cons. Whatever.

Flock seems pretty cool. I’m entertaining the idea of using it as a “leisure” browser (as opposed to my “work” browser¹). It would be kinda handy since most of my leisure web activities (feed reading, Flickr stuff, blogging, etc.) are all integrated into it.

The current work(play?)flow is this:

1. Open Vienna.²
2. Read some feeds.
3. Click on all of the articles that look interesting (usually about 10 or so)
4. Switch over to Firefox where all of those clicks in Vienna have manifested themselves as tabs.
5. Read articles in-depth, comment as necessary, etc..
6. Bookmark any good articles that will need to be referenced later³ either in Firefox’s bookmarks or in Yojimbo.
7. Head on over to Flickr, check out photos, interact, etc.
8. If I’m feeling really crazy, log into WordPress and post to ye olde blog.

If I start using Flock, the process will be similar, but it’ll all be a little more integrated. For example, Vienna will be out of the equation. Flock has its own feed reader that seems to work pretty well, although I haven’t yet figured out how to refresh the subscriptions on demand. Articles that I would normally switch to FF to read, would be read directly in Flock. Were I to bookmark one of them, I’d click on the big star in the address bar to add it as a Flock favorite⁴ which would send it over to my del.icio.us account. Finally, if I wanted to write a blog post, I could use⁵ the built-in blogging tool which posts right to WP.

I don’t know if the Flock scenario is necessarily any better, but it sounds interesting and worth a shot. So, that’s what I did (am doing). Over the couple of days, I’m going to test drive Flock. Just an hour ago or so, I set it all up. Which brings me to the response to the title of this post.

When you run Flock for the first time, it asks you if you want to import your Firefox (or Safari) bookmarks. I responded in the affirmative, and it did its thing. Next, I told Flock how to hook into my online accounts (Flickr, del.icio.us and WordPress⁶). Once all of the setting up was complete, I looked at my Flock favorites and saw a ton of ancient bookmarks that had been imported from Firefox. See, I’m not very good at cleaning out the old FF bookmarks. But since I have them all in subfolders of subfolders, I don’t usually notice too much that I have an assload of old, dead bookmarks. Flock, on the other hand, doesn’t have nested folders/groups/collections. So, when I went to “manage favorites” in Flock, I saw all of the non-nested folders (called collections in Flock) and all those old bookmarks. I thought, “Y’know, I don’t even really need those Firefox bookmarks. Cmd-A, Delete.”

“Are you sure you want to delete these favorites?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I already have them in Firefox anyway.”

[ …something’s not right here… a couple of minutes pass… thinking about all the stuff I just did… ]

“Oh, wait, were all my del.icio.us links also listed in those favorites that I just deleted?”

“Uh huh,” said Flock.

[ …switch to Firefox… log in to del.icio.us web site… look for links… ]

“No items”

For one brief moment, I saw all of the links silouetted against the lights of the traffic, and then they were gone.

“Ohhhhh fffffuuuuuuuuuuuudge…”

Only I didn’t say fudge, I said the word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the F dash dash dash word.⁷

Now I have a clean del.icio.us account. Fortunately, I haven’t used my del.icio.us account in ages, and all the links were probably outdated anyway. So, I don’t really feel that bad. But if I were a heavy user of del.icio.us, I’d be pretty sick right now.

I think I’m done with Flock for the night, but I’ll probably try it out again tomorrow, albeit a little more carefully.

I’ll probably post my final assessment here in a few days.

1. Work Browser meaning web development/testing browser ↑ back up there
2. Vienna, by the way, is a great feed reader. Version 2.1, which is due soon, looks even better. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it. ↑ back up there
3. These are usually either articles that I don’t have time to read entirely or articles that I’ll need to frequently reference for their reusable info. ↑ back up there
4. It kinda bothers me that Flock decided to use the term favorites instead of bookmarks. But that’s probably because hearing any IE-related term makes me cringe. ↑ back up there
5. Well, not really. For some reason, Flock refuses to hook into my WordPress account. It works perfectly with Stacie’s account which is running the same version of WP and was even installed within an hour of mine. I even copied the xmlrpc.php file from her installation to mine. Still no luck. ↑ back up there
6. Unsuccessfully ↑ back up there
7. Reference ↑ back up there