There is a very fine balance point of maximum effectiveness between simplicity and complexity of systems. How much detail, how much cross-referencing, how much coding and categorizing is enough, without becoming too cumbersome? Most of what’s out there to help is grossly overbuilt. Once you realize that you only need to define your projects with the next actions on them and keep track of all that in a complete but simple set of lists, you won’t need to bother yourself with much else. You’re better off being a good carpenter with a simple, well-balanced hammer than a novice with a garage full of unused power tools.

– David Allen, David Allen Company Email Newsletter July 19, 2010

I started a pretty serious test-run this week of TaskPaper as my GTD app in place of OmniFocus, so reading this in David Allen’s email newsletter today could not have been more timely.  While it’s still too early for me to say for sure if I’m sticking with it, the allure of TaskPaper is exactly what David Allen talks about above.  It gives you exactly what you need, but nothing more.

Side note: The simple act of writing this short blog post has invoked a subconcious fear that Merlin Mann will come out of the woods running and screaming that I need to stop talking about switching productivity apps and do something meaningful.

So I got thinking. How did I develop the basic skills I have right now? Mostly by copying heroes. When you’re fresh starting out, you have no fear of diving in and copying something directly. It’s like playing guitar. When you start playing guitar all you want to do is play the first verse of your favorite song. Big success! You don’t need to write the next great guitar symphony or a hit single. It’s totally satisfying to learn to play something somebody else can already play. And you get better by doing it.

via How do you turn inspiration into skill? – 37signals.

Basically this is exactly what I am doing right now by emulating John Gruber’s technique of creating a quoted linked list post for a piece of content that I liked.

I can’t believe I’ve been using 1Password for who knows how long and did not realize there was a keyboard shortcut to autofill your saved 1Password logins.  I always assumed that since there wasn’t one listed under the 1P menu, it didn’t exist and was a miss by Agile Web Solutions.  Well, I will never doubt them again.

The shortcut is Command + \ by default, however it can be customized to whatever works for you within the 1Password Preference pane.

Killer time saver.

One of the nicer discoveries I had today was that the iPad supports the Safari Bookmarks Bar.  This means you can create both bookmarklets to extend the functionality of your browser and bookmark folders to group common browser shorcuts.

It’s very easy to set up, you just have to go to Settings > Safari and then set “Always Show Bookmarks Bar” to “ON”:

Now you can add bookmarks directly to the “Bookmarks Bar” folder in Bookmarks:

Then you can add any bookmarklets you wish to the bar, and create bookmark groups right on the bar just like you do on the Mac.  For example, you can see I’ve added Instapaper’s Read Later bookmarklet below and created two bookmark groups:

Enjoy!

If there is one truth I have learned in my short time in this world, is that there are filers and there are pilers. Most people are very squarely one or the other.

via Minimal Mac: Unclutter Your Mac in One Week – Day 6

I’m most definitely a filer.

Ok.  Last one (for now at least!).  Here’s the syntax to put in a LaunchBar search template for Twitter’s “Find People” search:

http://twitter.com/search/users?q=*&category=people&source=users

To continue with the recent theme, here’s another quick tip for customizing LaunchBar search templates:

LaunchBar in its initial install includes a lot of search templates that you may not want in your index.  For example, there are default templates for “Amazon Deutschland”, “Google Japan”, “Wikipedia Deutsch”, etc.  These are not all that useful if you are a U.S. resident.

A snippet from my LaunchBar search template index. I've unchecked all of the non-U.S. Amazon entries.

You can prevent them from being shown (as well as any others you don’t want to see) in your index by simply unchecking them in the LaunchBar Index > Search Template window and then saving changes.

]]> http://kenclark.me/2009/12/remove-search-templates-from-thelaunchbar-index/feed/ 0 http://kenclark.me/2009/12/create-a-launchbar-search-template-for-twitter/ http://kenclark.me/2009/12/create-a-launchbar-search-template-for-twitter/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:43:37 +0000 Ken Clark http://www.kenclarksblog.com/?p=1445

I just set up a LaunchBar search template for Twitter.  It is easy.  Just follow the same procedure I outlined in my post on setting up a LaunchBar search template for Gmail, but use the following search string instead:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=*

This just saved me a ton of time!

Of late, I’ve been hunkering down and digging into the depths of Objective Development’s LaunchBar.  It goes without saying that the utilty of the application is amazing.

(Note: If you are not familiar with LaunchBar and want to know what is all about, you should check out this short video or even this longer screencast for an overview).

LaunchBar’s “Search Templates” option provides a configurable interface to easily access the search functions of almost any website and comes with preconfigured search templates for many mainstream websites and search engines such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and more.  The power of the feature however is that LaunchBar makes it very easy to add custom searches for your own needs.

To give you an example — I realized the other day that LaunchBar does not have a default search template to search Gmail messages, and I was able to create one in about 5 minutes.

1. Within LaunchBar, select Index > Show Index from the menu bar.
2. Click Search Templates (UTF-8)
3. Click Add..

1. Under Name, type “Gmail”
2. Under Details enter the following string (no quotes): “http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/*”

1. Close the window and save the configuration before exiting.

That’s it.  The next time you invoke LaunchBar, type “GM” and you should see an option to invoke a Gmail search template. Click the space bar and you will be presented with a text field to enter your gmail search string.

This template supports full gmail operators, i.e. from:, label:, etc., so give and as long as you are logged into gmail should work like a charm.

Yesterday I read that DropBox announced their new iPhone app, and it occurred to me that you could set up the Dropbox iPhone app to clip images directly into Yojimbo with very minimal effort.  I was so pumped.  This was a total game changer.

Here’s how to do it:

(Note:  I’m assuming that you have Yojimbo installed on your Mac and Dropbox installed on both your iPhone and Mac.  If not, download Dropbox here and Yojimbo here.)

1. On your Mac, create a new folder called “Clip to Yojimbo” in your Dropbox folder:

2.  Copy and past the below code into Script Editor.  This will become a folder action that runs anytime a file is added to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder (note: you will have to enable folder actions if they are not already set up).  Save the script to your Mac’s Library/Scripts/Folder Actions folder as “import to Yojimbo” or whatever name you like.

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
	repeat with x from 1 to the count of these_items
		set theFile to item x of these_items
		try
			tell application "Yojimbo"
				import theFile
			end tell
		end try
	end repeat
end adding folder items to

Note for Scripters:  You can certainly get a little fancier with the Applescript, i.e. move the picture to an archive folder after the import is complete, etc. but this is all you need to get the basic import done.

3.  Assign the “import to Yojimbo” folder action to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder.

4. That’s it.  Now it is time to test it out.  Go to your iPhone, go to DropBox and navigate to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder. Take a picture.

5. If you are at your Mac, you will see the picture almost immediately show up in the Dropbox folder.

6.  A couple seconds later, it will import right into Yojimbo.

You’re done.  Pretty cool, right?  You can watch the whole process happen in real time on your Mac if you have the Finder open to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder alongside an open Yojimbo window.  It is almost instantaneous.  The lack of an iPhone app for Yojimbo was the reason I started using Evernote, so this is pretty exciting.   It probably just swung my decision pendulum back to using Yojimbo.