Saturday, February 11, 2006

Productivity

I try to make sure I don't get myself locked into using one specific system. Most of the time, though, when I'm not at my desk, I much prefer to use my spiffy PowerBook (link to the newer model MacBookPro, which I don't have... yet). This computer's fast, light, and a pleasure to use. My most indispensable component on this machine is Quicksilver, a "unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data". Translation: you press a keystroke to popup the Quicksilver interface (typically Ctrl-Space nowadays), and type in a few additional keystrokes to make your computer do something. I can't standing digging through the dock, the file finder, etc, when a few keystrokes will do the job much better (for example, I just press Ctrl-Space,M,M,M to launch MusicMagic Mixer). But Quicksilver goes about a zillion steps beyond simple app launching (consider this example as just one of many). Oh yeah - it's free, and (yep) in beta. Getting attached to Quicksilver makes using my Windows box much more annoying. I've tried different solutions, like AppRocket from Candy Labs. None of them have really done the job in my book until Colibri - this is a free app which has nice performance and usability. It's really basic, but it does a good job for the tasks is does (I mostly using app launching, link launching, and google shortcuts). Last thought for this post - I've connected this blog to my Technorati account. Now I just need to figure out how to get post tagging to work. Looks like they recommend using Furl, though I've been playing with Del.icio.us in the past. Here's an explicit tag. Apparently some other blogging packages allow more direct settings of tags to blogs. That makes two reasons to look for a different blog engine so far.

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