Stay Focused with These OS X Productivity Apps

Tags

Apple, freelance, internet, mac, organization, osx, tech, yosemite

Hellscape.

Your computer desktop is a hellscape of distraction. And so is mine. But mine is slightly less so, because of a number of strategies and utilities that I employ to keep it as clean as possible.

The basic idea here is to stop keeping so many browser tabs open – email, Facebook, calendar, your to-do list, articles to read, videos to watch – it never ends. And the result is that every time you glance at your browser’s title bar, you’re bombarded with the distraction of all these open circuits and loose ends. It is absolutely counter-productive to a focused workflow, whatever you’re working on. Below are some strategies and utilities that I use to tame the Beast.

First, the Big 4 \m/

Better.

MailTab Pro for Gmail

Do you keep your email open in a browser tab at all times? Of course you do – what do I think you are, some kind of Luddite? Well, stop it. It’s distracting. MailTab Pro for Gmail is a menu bar app that alerts you when email arrives and gives you quick, browser-less access to read and compose. It looks and behaves exactly like gmail in your browser, but tucked neatly into your menu bar. $1.99 for the pro version; there is also a free version available.

Similar competing apps exist, as do menu bar apps for Yahoo Mail and other services, but I can’t vouch for those.

MenuTab Pro for Google Calendar

Think you see a pattern? You’re right. Get all of those pinned tabs out of the way and up into the menu bar, where you can access them when you need them without the psychological overhead of a browser.

MenuTab Pro for Google Calendar is a simple app that keeps your Google calendar in your menu bar, out of sight and out of mind – until you need it. $1.99.

Wunderlist

Wunderbar.

This one’s sort of a twofer. I’m assuming you already use a to-do list like Wunderlist or Toodledo. If you don’t, proceed immediately to wunderlist.com and sign up for an account. There is nothing quite so liberating as a to-do list that follows you everywhere you go, from desktop to laptop to phone to tablet. Well, that or maybe representative government. But you already have that. Sort of.

Anyhoo, once you have your to-do list set up, you will want 24/7 access to it, and you will begin keeping a tab open in your browser for it. Have you learned nothing from me, padawan? Ditch the tab, and install the free menu bar app. (Or, if you prefer, Toodledo.)

MenuTab for Facebook

And finally, if you’re like me, you enjoy Neil Diamond and are jealous of your wife’s relationship with your cat. Also, you have infrequent interactions on Facebook, but are compelled to constantly check to see if you have any alerts, despite all good sense. MenuTab for Facebook will fix that nonsense. Just stick it up in your menu bar and it will tell you when it’s time to check; in the meantime, those pictures of your cousin’s dinner won’t miss you one bit. Free, or $1.99 for extra features.

Next, Clean up Those Loose Ends

Evernote

Hopefully by now you have installed and are faithfully using your to-do list. That’s great, but what about when you need to make a note longer than a few words? Stop opening TextEdit, and start using Evernote.

Evernote allows you to create notes, sort them into notebooks, and sync them across multiple devices. It’s like Apple Notes, but with greater portability. You can use Evernote natively to sync your thoughts across OS X, Windows, iOS and Android, and there are several options for using it with Linux.

YouTube ‘Watch Later’

If you’re a YouTube power user (does that sound as ridiculous as I think it does?) you already know about the Watch Later playlist. But if you’re a casual user, you may not be aware. The Watch Later playlist is created in your account by default. Whenever you come across a video that you want to watch – but not right now – hover over the thumbnail and you’ll see a little clock icon in the lower right corner. Click that to add the video to your Watch Later list. When you have a few minutes for a break, check out the playlist (in the upper left of your screen) and see what you’ve queued up for yourself.

It’s a thousand times better than keeping twenty YouTube tabs open for stuff you’re totally going to watch, like, whenever you get a sec. For realz, yo.

Ok, so by now you ought to have your email, calendar, to-do list and Facebook apps running out of sight in your menu bar, and you’re tracking your projects with your to-do list and keeping notes with Evernote and sticking all those cat videos into your Watch Later list. If we’ve done this right, you might be able to – gasp – close your browser! And not even with tabs open so they all come back when you relaunch, but actually close it all so it opens cleanly the next time you actually need it. And as long as you don’t need it, it can stay closed, and your desktop is now free of distraction! Huzzah!

Honorable Mention

TotalFinder

I’m not sure TotalFinder is a productivity app per se, but it goes a long way to cleaning up your desktop, and I sure couldn’t live without it, so here it goes.

TotalFinder is the Finder replacement that ought to come stock with OS X. It maintains a single window with tabs for multiple directories, and keeps that window hidden when you don’t need it. A hotkey brings it up when you need it, and hides it when you don’t.

It also has a whole host of other options, so you can have granular control over your Finder experience, if you’re into that kind of thing. $18 and worth every penny.

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Use NeoFinder to Reclaim Hard Drive Space

Tags

backup, editing, freelance, osx

Duplicates Found

I’ve written about NeoFinder before. It’s a great tool to keep tabs on files across multiple external hard drives. (Basically, it creates a searchable database of every file on each of your drives, which you can then quickly search even when those drives are not plugged in.)

Ok, so that’s great. Easily worth the cost of a license. But what’s even better is the built-in “Find Dupes” feature. Once you’ve cataloged all your drives, just hit the Find Dupes button and it will let you know what projects or files are living on multiple drives.

I cleared over 100 GB in just a couple minutes when it reminded me that I had started a recent project on one drive and then moved it to a portable drive to finish it. (And it found quite a bit more than that, which I’ll deal with when I have a bit more time.)

Check out NeoFinder if you haven’t already. Really – I’m totally vouching over here. Great stuff.

Setting up Boost C++ Libraries for Large Integers in Code::Blocks on OS X

Tags

BigInts, boost, c++, code::blocks, mac, programming, projecteuler

Having trouble getting integers larger than 64 bits to work in C++? So was I. Here’s how I fixed it:

1. You’ll want to use the data type cpp_int provided by Boost C++ Libraries.
   1. Go here and download the zip: http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/1.56.0/
   2. Unzip into a forever home. (You’ll probably want this again sometime, so don’t just stick it in your project folder and forget about it.)
2. Code::Blocks needs some priming before you can use Boost:
   1. With your project open, choose: Project->Build Options….
   2. Select the Search Directories tab.
   3. Use the Add button at the bottom to add the path to your new Boost directory. This needs to be the directory that was created when you extracted the zip file. (In my case, I added /Users/jmatthewturner/C++/Boost/boost_1_56_0.)
3. And your project file needs some special code:
   1. Add an #include for the cpp_int.hpp file that is inside boost/multiprecision/. Mine looks like this:

      #include "/Users/jmatthewturner/C++/Boost/boost_1_56_0/boost/multiprecision/cpp_int.hpp"

Now you can use the data type cpp_int, which is an arbitrarily large integer, limited only by the memory available on your machine. It is part of the namespace boost::multiprecision, so always refer to it like this:

boost::multiprecision::cpp_int myBigInteger;

or define a namespace to make your life a little easier:

using namespace std;
namespace mp = boost::multiprecision;
mp::cpp_int myBigInteger;
mp::cpp_int myFunction(mp::cpp_int x);

…etc, etc. And that should do it. I used cpp_int to help solve Project Euler #20; I’ll post the source code when I get around to writing up the problem.

OS X Yosemite and Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

Tags

adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe premiere pro cc, Apple, creative cloud, Creative Cloud applications, osx, yosemite

When Adobe released its 2014 Creative Cloud applications earlier this year, I put off upgrading due to the usual concerns of “I am not your guinea pig.” But with Apple’s release of Yosemite this week, I decided it was time.

OS X Yosemite

I installed Yosemite this morning, and promptly spent an hour on Apple Maps doing 3D flyovers of various cities. (I gather this feature has been available on Mavericks for a while, but since I never use Apple Maps, I only found it when it got added back to my dock.)

After that I had to download and install an update to TotalFinder (my older version was broken on Yosemite, and I simply cannot be without it for a moment). Although the update is listed as beta, it seems fine so far.

I’ll spare you the laundry list of changes (if laundry lists are your thing, check out Apple’s product page and Lifehacker’s Top Ten Hidden Features), but I do like the changes to Spotlight, and why on Earth it took them this long to make the Full Screen button actually make an app go full screen, I’ll never understand.

Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

Next I installed Premiere Pro 2014, and opened up a recent project to putz around. I immediately had to download new versions of and reinstall my plugins (and in one case buy an upgrade) to get everything to work properly. But once that was done, smooth sailing.

Of course the previous version of Premiere sits alongside 2014, so I was able to go back into my old project when I needed to gather some details to recreate one of those upgraded plugin effects.

All told, it has so far been relatively painless. I did have one crash the first time I opened Premiere, but I’ve closed and reopened it many times since then and it hasn’t repeated. (I suspect it was related to one of the outdated plugins sitting in the timeline.) Editing the project to recreate the various plugin effects exposed no problems, and an export through Media Encoder 2014 worked perfectly.

In sum, this Late 2013 iMac seems to be running both Yosemite and Premiere 2014 without a hitch. I’ll install the rest of CC 2014 in the coming days and update this post; I’ll do the same upgrades on my Mid 2009 MBP soon and post those results separately.

Manage Your Hard Drives with NeoFinder

NOTE: This article was originally posted 8/27/2012.

Two things I know about video editors: most of us use Macs, and all of us have a LOT of hard drives. If you’ve ever wondered where that project from three years ago got off to, NeoFinder is for you.

NeoFinder (formerly CDfinder) catalogues all your hard drives and creates a database of all of their contents. You can then browse and search the file structures of all your drives without having any of them plugged in. So now when you can’t remember which of your 20 hard drives has Grandma’s 80th birthday party on it (don’t lie – everything you do isn’t for a fortune 500), you just fire up NeoFinder, search for your project, and let it tell you which drive it’s on. Easy.

So easy, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

NeoFinder is free for up to 10 drives, and after that it’s $39.99 for a single user. Mac only.