A quick bug fix for registered users of MsgFiler. I noticed, along with a couple of other users, that MsgFiler would still display the “this app is unregistered alert” even after a valid license key was entered. This problem has been fixed in version 2.0.1 of MsgFiler. You can download it from the MsgFiler web page here.
MsgFiler 2.0 has been released! Fully rewritten in Cocoa, MsgFiler is fully integrated in Mac OS X Mail and is now blazingly fast at searching for mailboxes and filing your email messages.
MsgFiler 2.0 is a free update for registered users of MsgFiler 1.0. Previous owners will need to reenter their license key from MsgFiler 1.0. New MsgFiler users can purchase a license for US$8 from PayPal or Kagi. Check out the MsgFiler web page for more details.
A big thanks to Steve, Victor, and the folks at NSCoder Night in Campbell for their Cocoa tips and guidance. This was my first real app written in Cocoa, and I couldn’t have done it without you!
It’s been over a week with my new Apple Wireless Keyboard, and the experience up until now has been a mixed bag.
First off, the positives. The design of the keyboard is remarkable; I love how it’s so thin and small. Since I have three monitors — two hooked up to my tower and the other being my laptop — I find myself able to reposition the keyboard much more easily than with the corded keyboard, whose cable always seemed to get in the way of other things on my desk. The key action is pretty good as well for the main alphanumeric keys.
My single biggest peeve with the wireless keyboard is the position of the fn key. Like on their laptops, Apple has placed the fn key to the left of the control key on the left-hand side of the keyboard. Adding another modifier key results in the control and option key being smaller than their counterparts on the corded aluminum keyboard. I tend to use the control key a lot during development. Because the position and size of the control key is so different, I’ve been making a lot of mistakes.
In the Keyboard and Mouse preferences pane, you can change what the caps lock, control, option, and command keys do. I had the idea to turn the caps lock key into control, which is similar to the keyboard layout on old Sun workstations I used in college. However, Apple has modified the caps lock key to reduce accidental activation. If you set caps lock to control, you really have to press the key hard in order for the control modifier key to register. So, that trick was not going to work for me.
Update 2008-04-12: In the recent firmware updates for the Apple wireless and wired keyboards, a remapped Caps Lock key no longer has the activation delay. This means you can now safely remap your Control key to the Caps Lock key.
I did some more research and found apps that modified keyboard layouts such as Ukelele, fKeys, and uControl, but none of them panned out. Finally, I came across DoubleCommand, which provides a wide range of control for mapping one modifier key to the other. Unfortunately, the current version, 1.6.6b1, didn’t have the option to remap the right option key to fn. Because the application is Open Source, however, I recompiled the app with that option enabled. Sadly, in the Keyboard Viewer palette (System Preferences->International->Input Menu), the right-option key looks like it’s masquerading as the fn key, but pressing fn-return doesn’t output the enter key. Hopefully, a newer release of DoubleCommand will fix this issue.
Still, the biggest boon is getting the fn key to act as a second control key. To solve the problem of the space between the fn and control keys, I first tried taking a stickie, cutting it to size, and placing it on top of the keys. It didn’t look pretty, so I got back to work. I printed a sheet of labels with control written on each label (using the Myriad Pro font). I then cut a business card which would provide a firmer backing for the label. I then stuck the label and backing to the key using some tape. The end result looks much more natural — a big control key on the Apple Wireless Keyboard!
Of course, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to do this. Apple should provide a wireless version of their aluminum corded keyboard. If they kept the form factor of this keyboard, however, they could improve the design by moving the fn key to the right option key. Expanding the arrow keys to full-size would also be greatly appreciated, even if it meant making the keyboard a little longer or wider.
Check out the photos below!
Over the past few days, I’ve felt like a monkey in front of my computer as I’ve hacked out code for the Cocoa version of MsgFiler. It’s not going to take me until infinity to get out the update — I’ve pegged the end of the year as the release date — but man, I do feel like I’m just randomly typing things out on the keyboard and hoping that the complete works of Shakespeare will magically appear!
Fortunately, I have the help of many Cocoa experts. Steve came by the house yesterday and introduced me to the joys of Cocoa bindings. Last evening, I got great advice from Victor. This morning, Ben gave me some good pointers on how to access the various windows — MessageViewer and SingleMessageViewer — in the Mail application. Finally, this evening, I went to the NSCoder Night in Campbell. The group meets every Tuesday at the Orchard Valley Coffee in downtown Campbell.
I was surprised to see so many people with laptops at the coffee shop, most of them sipping and typing away. It reminded me of the early days of the Stanford Newton User Group at a packed Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto. These days, Printer’s like a morgue whenever I go there for SNUG and SIPUG meetings. I don’t know how much longer the cafe has left, to be honest.
I got super help tonight from Joar, who walked me through a great many things about XCode, Interface Builder, and Cocoa. Though I feel like I’m learning a lot, I know that there’s quite a ways to go before I can code effortlessly. One step at a time, of course!
The pre-release Cocoa-version of MsgFiler is shaping up to be a very nice update. Already, it’s lightyears faster than the AppleScript studio version, thanks to the fact that it’s interfacing directly with the Mail application. You can work immediately after filing a message — no more waiting until all 10 messages have been filed before you can move onto the next message. Searching is also incredibly quick… as fast as you can type, the search results will appear!
My quest for a clutter-free house has reached to lands where few dare to tread, the underneath of one’s computer desk. My current computer setup consists of a PowerMac G5 with two monitors, a UPS, two speakers, one subwoofer, and hordes of cables. You can see in the photos below how many cables I needed to hide:
There are also times when I plug in an external hard drive or two, which would add additional FireWire cables and power bricks underneath the desk.
The other day, I purchased some loom wire from Fry’s. Loom wire is a corrugated plastic sheathing that has a cut along its entire length. I simply stuffed as many cables as could fit into the wire, effectively creating one giant cable that went to the computer. As for the display power bricks, I was able to place them to the left of the UPS, where they are nicely hidden. One thing that I’ll be doing in the future is to give some more slack to the display cables, since I often reposition the monitors on my desk.
With everything out of the way, cleaning those dust bunnies underneath the desk is going to be a lot easier. There are a few more places in the house where cables have gone wild. That will be a decluttering battle for another day!
Check out the photos below!
Rae and I went to the SmugMug holiday party this evening. It was great to run into people from COBA, Stanford, and Eye-Fi. In fact, according to Ziv, one of the founders of Eye-Fi, there were several photographers using Eye-Fi Cards to wirelessly transfer the photos directly to SmugMug’s servers on the Internet, including the pro who took our photo above. How cool is that? SmugMug recently launched some wicked cool features to the site today. I’m really impressed with the way they can dynamically resize images on the fly. The old design looked mighty cramped on my 30″ display; the new one makes great use of available screen real estate now.
After the party, Rae and I went to the Apple Store, where I picked up the new aluminum wireless keyboard using my iPhone early adopters $100 credit. In my quest to declutter, the new keyboard will remove one more wire from my desk. I do miss the numeric keypad and the large arrow keys, but I think that I’ll get used to keyboard in no time. I’m looking forward to contributing a photo of my workspace to the Unclutterer Flickr Pool, but I have a bit more work to do under the desk. There are still a few too many loose wires visible at the moment.
With the release of Leopard, I have a little work to do to get MsgFiler fully compatible. I’ve already posted revised installation instructions on the MsgFiler webpage. Users who are using the app on Leopard have probably noticed that mailboxes are showing up twice. This will be fixed in the next version, which I hope to get done before the New Year. Leopard users will also want to bind a new command-key equivalent for MsgFiler by going to System Preferences / Keyboard and Mouse / Keyboard Shortcuts.
The delay in getting this out is due to the fact that I’m rewriting the entire app in Cocoa and Objective-C. It’s probably a trivial task for someone who’s proficient in Cocoa. For me, a relative newbie to Cocoa development, it’s taking longer than I expected.
Our wedding cake made Great White Snark’s Geeky Cake of the Week!
Thanks to Cindy and Jay for submitting the cake to GWS!
I’m a yo-yo when it come to clutter. There are times when I’m a pack rat, obsessively keeping and filing away things in the hope that one day, it might be useful. Other times, I make a 360 and ruthlessly throw away things that I know I’ll never use again. Periodically, I read and marvel at Felix’s Simplify My Life posts. Lately, I’ve been pouring through the great tips and articles on Unclutterer. What more impetus did I need for the pendulum to swing?
For the past two days, I’ve been decluttering the home office. Since we moved into the new place, the bookcase had become a disorganized mess of empty boxes, CD cases, loose paper, and knickknacks. My document bins were filled with opened envelope, ads, and other things I’ll never read. It’s amazing how much crap can just accumulate in such a short amount of time; before you know it, your bookcase and filing cabinets have turned into clutter monsters!
Yesterday, I started with the bookcase. Obsolete software like Final Cut 3, iWork ‘05, and Baldur’s Gate went into a “Computer” box. The original packaging for some of my camera gear went into a “Photography” box. I reserved yet another box to hold all of my Newton paraphernalia except for my 10-year old Newton MessagePad 2100. Though it’s sad to see all of my Newton gear packed up, you have to say — or at least start saying — goodbye one of these days.
I spent a long time organizing my software collection, placing CD/DVDs into either a Case Logic binder or spool case. I then removed the labels and packaging from the CD cases, which will be reused in the future. Next, I organized my books in descending height order; there are a few books, however, that are no longer relevant and will soon be destined for the garage or public library –nothing makes a technical book more obsolete more quickly than purchasing it!
The bookcase was also home to dozens of DV tapes, covering events such as one of Vienna Teng’s early East Coast Tours, my wedding, parties at the house, and various film projects. Those tapes are now organized logically in a perfectly fitting box.
But wait, there’s still more! Envelopes, printer paper, and mailing supplies were collected at the top and bottom of the bookcase. I threw out tons of my old business cards from my previous companies, keeping about thirty of each for nostalgia’s sake. I do need to make new business cards for myself and Rae, but that’s a topic for another day. The shelves underneath my printers, which held my frequently used computer and camera gear — batteries, chargers, and hard drives. — was in sore need of reorganizing as well.
Finally, after dealing with the bookcase, I turned my attention to the cable swamp underneath my desk. I used a four-foot long plastic corrugated wire loom (that I got from Eric when I bought his plasma tv) to stuff as many cables as would fit. I still need to get a few more wire looms to finish the job, but the space looks much more orderly now.
The next day, I focused my efforts on my document bins. Into the recycling pile went envelopes from banks and utilities. Envelopes from the days when people sent in money through the mail for my software also went in the pile. One of these days, I’ll borrow or purchase a document scanner like the Fujitsu ScanSnap to handle bulk scanning. The flatbed scanner we have current takes too long to be efficient. After several hours, I cut the space used by my documents in half.
Let’s hope in the future, I’ll be able to better manage the clutter. For now, having an uncluttered office makes me feel better and more productive. For me, out of sight and organized means out of mind.
Copyright © 1995-2007 Adam Tow. All Rights Reserved.
tow.com is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
19 queries. 0.535 seconds.