Mac rant

OK, so as of this year, I'm a fervent Mac convert.  Dyed in the wool, drank the Kool-Aid, bought the t-shirt, dyed the t-shirt with Kool-Aid.  Whatever.  Not going back.

However.

The way Macs do window and app management is boneheaded.  (Disclaimer:  I'm still on Snow Leopard, but I don't believe Lion has improved this stuff - I'd be glad to be wrong.)

In Windows, here's how you need to think about managing your windows and programs - opening things, finding things, managing what's eating up your resources, etc.:

1) Is the app open *or* pinned to the task bar?  Great!  You can find it in the task bar.  Always, always, always.  Doesn't matter if it's closed and pinned, open and minimized, open and in the foreground, or open and hidden behind another window.  Always in the same place, in the task bar.  If you want it, you know where to find it.  And it'll be clear whether it's open (which means its eating up resources) or not.  Hint:  if you close it, it's closed, and not eating up resources.

2) Can't find the app in the task bar? It must be neither opened nor pinned; you'll need to open it from the Start Menu or something if you want it.  If you use it a lot, you might want to consider pinning it so you only ever have to think about #1.

Here's how it works on Mac (Snow Leopard, anyway):

1) Is the app open and in the foreground?  Yay!  You can probably find it, because you're looking at it!  Also, because you're looking at it, you know it's open and using resources.  That one's easy!

2) Is the app open and hidden behind some other window?  Good luck finding it.  There's no indicator in the dock that it's open. (You might be able to tell from the little glowy light that it's *running*, but that doesn't tell you whether or not you've actually got any windows open.)  And if you try to click on the app icon in the dock, very often nothing will happen.  What??  The window's already open.  So it's behind another window.  Not MacOS's problem.  Start pawing around in Exposé or whatever, or dragging windows around.  Good luck.

3) Is the app open and minimized?  OK, *then* you get a little window icon on the right side of the dock (if you've turned that feature on).  Make sure you keep careful mental track of which of your windows are minimized and which ones aren't, so you'll know whether looking down there will be of any use to you.  And don't try clicking on the main app icon in the left-hand part of the dock to get back to something you've minimized.  That doesn't do anything, silly!  You're supposed to click on the one on the right!  Did you forget it was minimized?  You need to keep better track of that stuff, in your brain.

(I know that's because you might have multiple windows.  But if you've only got one, why not open it?  If you've got three, why not bring them up in Exposé?  Really, "do nothing" is the best you could manage??)

4) Is the app *running*, but with no windows open?  This state is visually indistinguishable from "running with a window hidden behind other windows".  So make sure you keep careful mental track of whether you've got any windows hidden behind other windows.  Also, as a special feature, most Mac apps will happily keep running (and eating up resources) even if you don't have any windows open (and even if they don't have any legitimate background work to do).  I'm always running around looking for rogue glowy lights in my dock so I can close programs that I'm not actually using right now.  On Windows, almost always, the little X means "If this is the last/main window for the app, close the app - don't just close the window and keep the app running and eating up memory."  On a Mac, the little red circle usually means, "Close the window, but even if this is the last/main window, keep the app running, because lightning-fast startup is more important than ongoing performance of the apps you're actually using."  No, it's not.

5) Is the app actually closed - no little glowy thing on the dock?  OK, then you know where you stand, and it's as convenient as Windows - open pinned apps from the dock; for other things, head to your Applications folder.  But once you open it, make sure you keep careful mental track of whether it's:

- Running (and eating resources) with no open windows, or

- Open and minimized, or

- Open and hiding behind another window, or

- Open and in the foreground.

One of the few things I miss about Windows is that in Microsofty-land, the first state mostly doesn't exist (unless there's a reason for it), and the second, third, and fourth are visually identical:  wherever your windows happen to be, you can always find them in the task bar.

Why I don't need a tablet

Just to annoy people, and also to prove (to any who still had doubts) that I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed (given that I'm paid to code apps for tablet computers), I made the following Venn diagram to explain why I don't need a tablet, and why I remain skeptical that anyone else really needs one either. I'm pretty well convinced that Apple and Amazon (because I feel exactly the same about e-readers like Kindle) created a brand new market out of nothing but thin air and gee-wiz-wowee-cool-factor. I suspect that the only folks who really "need" a tablet are those for whom it's really the only computer they need - very light users who pretty much just do web browsing, reading, and quick emails (and Skype with the grandkids). Alls the rest of y'all, lugging around your iPad or Nook along with your laptop in your bag and your iPhone or Android phone in your pocket - well, it sure does look cool, I'll give you that.

Anyway, here's my diagram. I'm sure you'll agree that that's settled, now. Carry on.

Geek corner: easily hyperlink text in any Windows program

Disclaimer: this is geeky, but you might find it useful.

Further disclaimer: this is a Windows-only solution. If you use a Mac, Linux box, or CR-48, find your own geek to solve this problem for you.

I don't know about you, but I'm constantly writing documents (emails, blog posts, word docs, etc.) using various rich text editors, and wanting to hyperlink text in those documents. Generally speaking, I have found this frequent use case to be too much of a pain in the ass. The steps are:

- Copy the URL you're linking to onto the clipboard (perhaps using Ctrl-C).

- Highlight the text you want to hyperlink.

- Find the "make this a hyperlink" button or feature in the program you happen to be using. Often this is a button that looks like a little chain, hiding in some toolbar somewhere. Perhaps there's a hotkey for it. Perhaps not.

- Wait for the "make this a hyperlink" dialog box to pop up. Make sure your focus is in the "URL" textbox in that dialog.

- Paste the URL into the textbox (perhaps using Ctrl-V).

- Press the "OK" button or hit Enter or whatever.

- Huzzah!

These are the steps I want:

- Copy the URL you're linking to onto the clipboard (perhaps using Ctrl-C).

- Highlight the text you want to hyperlink.

- Hit some hotkey to "paste" the URL onto the text in such a way as to make it a hyperlink.

- Huzzah!

(In fact, I sheepishly admit that I am always accidentally blowing away the text I wanted to turn into a link, and replacing it with the URL I wanted to link to, by forgetting that it doesn't work this way and hitting Ctrl-V. This means that I'm a dunderhead. Probably you're not.)

So, I did what every good programmer does when they want to solve a problem that can obviously be solved with code: I Googled to find out if anyone has already made a solution I can steal.

That failed. I did find an AutoHotkey script which does this trick when you're working in a raw HTML code editor, but I wanted something that will work in rich text editors (such as Gmail and Microsoft Office programs) as well as apps that actually have a "raw HTML" mode (such as Blogger and WordPress).

So I did what any good programmer does when Googling fails: break down and write some damn code. But not, as it turned out, very much code at all.

As it happened, I only needed a very tiny bit of glue to solve this problem, because others had gotten it nearly there. My final solution features a modified version of the AutoHotKey mentioned above (by Lowell Heddings) as well as a C# class to simplify interactions with the Windows clipboard (by Mike Stall). Beyond modding Lowell's script, all I actually had to write were two lines of C# code. FTW.

So anyway, now I can copy a URL to my clipboard, highlight a chunk of text in any HTML-aware Windows app, hit Ctrl-Alt-V, and turn that text into a hyperlink. Want the same capability? Here's what you do:

0) You'll need the .NET Framework 2.0 (or better) - you've probably got it already.

1) Download and install AutoHotKey.

2) Download LinkPaster.zip and unzip it to somewhere convenient, such as c:\Program Files.

3) In your LinkPaster folder (such as c:\Program Files\LinkPaster), double-click the InsertHyperlink.ahk file to install and run that AutoHotkey script.

4) Huzzah! You should be off to the races. Let me know if it doesn't work.

(BTW, this hack made me very happy while I was writing this post.)

Enjoy!

image by small world (rights)

iPhone Terzanelle

Giving in to only a little mild goading (I'm easy to goad), I went ahead and did a silly one. It's a JOKE, 'k?

iPhone Terzanelle

I think, in truth, that I shall never see
a pocket-filling block to rival this.
Could better friend than thou, o iPhone, be?

Except for fear of moisture, I would kiss
your clean-lined form, and know I’ll never own
a pocket-filling block to rival this.

Your screen so touchable, as smooth as bone,
Your compass...gyro...hidden deep within
your clean-lined form. And no, I’ll never own

A tiny fraction of your offered apps.
Some use your GPS, while others need
your compass...gyro...hidden deep within.

With you I never may miss tweet nor feed.
The people ‘round me...happy with their phone?
Some use your GPS, while others...need....

Apart from you, my most beloved one
I think, in truth, that I shall never see
People ‘round me happy with their phone.
Could better friend than thou, o iPhone, be?

image derived from Heart of flowers by zakwitnij (rights)

What I want (social media consumption edition)

I'm just sort of thinking out loud here. Different forms of communication, right? Too freakin' many. Currently, I consume the following forms of electronic communication:

PUSH:

• Phone calls (cell, Tina's cell [= home], work)
• SMS messages
• Email (Gmail, work)
• IM (AIM, Gtalk, Facebook; maybe Yahoo, MSwhatever, ICQ if anybody else cared)
• Facebook notifications
• Twitter (DM's, @mentions)
• LinkedIn notifications
• Notifications from various Nings
  
• Yammer (could change to Pull if volume increased)

PULL:

• RSS feeds
• Facebook news feed
• Twitter stream(s)
• Non-Push activity on various other social nets, like LinkedIn and Nings
  

Then there are communications from myself - Calendar events, Evernote and reQall items, etc., - which could be lumped in above - but those aren't really my problem. Communication with other people is my problem.

So here's what I want:

• For the Push items, I want to be alerted when they come in. I want alerts on both my laptop and my iPhone. I want each type of alert to sound different from the other kinds, and include a popup with some useful info and the ability to jump to the appropriate app for more info/response. I want to be able to easily turn off or snooze these alerts, and put them in silent mode.
  
• For the Pull items, I don't want to be alerted when new ones come in, but it would be groovy if something (on both my desktop and iPhone) would count them up for me, and let me know how many are waiting for me at any given time, without me having to ask it to check.
• For the Pull items, I would pay money - srsly - for something which would detect cross-posting and show me items only once, even if they were posted to both Twitter and FB, or both FB and RSS, f'rinstance. And, ideally, this would allow me to easily respond to a cross-posted item on the platform of my choosing (i.e., if it was posted on both Twitter and FB, I should be able to jump to either one to reply/comment).

That stuff would make me (a little) healthier, wealthier, and wiser when it comes to my info overload and Chronic Partial Attention syndrome, I think. I'm edging ever closer to it, by screwing around with a wide variety of notification apps, etc., for both platforms I use (PC and iPhone). But I'm still a ways away, especially on that third bullet on consolidating cross-posts. If y'all run across tools that make this stuff easier, let me know? Thanks!

image by Saumya Agarwal (rights)

Armchair Lifehacker, Tip #2: Use Outlook like Gmail

So I had intended to make this "Armchair Lifehacker" thing a bit of a series, but then I forgot about it. Oh well, here's #2.

Perhaps, like me, you have no choice but to use Outlook for your work email communication. And perhaps, like me, you've been using Gmail for too long to go back to those old, clunky, self-defeating ways of filing and finding your email messages, like folder hierarchies.

So here's what I do: In Outlook, apart from the built-in ones (Inbox, Sent Mail, etc.), I have exactly one folder. I call it "Archive". (Yes, this is a bit confusing, becuase Outlook has its own, very different idea of "archive". So you might want to call it something else. "All Mail" would be a very Gmail-like choice.)

I practice, more or less, "Inbox Zero". I've been doing it for years, since long before it had a well-known name. So when I'm done with an email, I simply move it to my Archive folder, just like Gmail. Actually, before I do that, I might tag it with one or more Categories, which can be used in Outlook much like Labels in Gmail.

Then, when I want to find something, I never grope around in folders. Instead, I either look for it by Category (Outlook makes it easy to create Search Folders for Categories), or I use Google Desktop Search to find it instantly by typing in search terms. (I'm pretty sure that Windows Live Search, or whatever it's called, would suffice for this as well, but I've been using Google Desktop since long before MS came out with that, and haven't seen reason to switch. The built-in Outlook search capability is not useful, as anyone who's attempted to use it will attest.)

So anyway, that's my tip. Working this way makes me happy, and efficient. Possibly you'd like it too. Possibly not.

Now if only I had a way of getting the thing to properly thread conversations....

image by justingaynor (rights)

Armchair Lifehacker, Tip #1: Inspirational passwords

Set your password to an acronym of the words of a favorite song, poem, prayer, or Bible verse. Mix up the case (upper/lower) a bit, and substitute some numbers or special characters to improve security. Benefits:

• You end up with a very high-quality, hard-to-guess password.
• Every time you type it, you're reminded of your song, poem, prayer, or scripture passage. It can even prompt you to brief prayer, in a very Brother Lawrence sort of way.

Example: Take the first verse of the well-loved Psalm 23:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want

This becomes:

TLimsIsnw

Mix in a couple special characters:

TLim$I$nw

Voila - a fairly high-security, relatively easy to remember password...which also reminds you, every time you log in, that God's got your back.

Is good, no?

Image by Max (Tj) (rights)

CellAlert.org is off to Berkeley!

Hey, remember my friend from a few posts ago, with the non-profit that was competing for a grant? Well, he wanted to say thanks! Here's Israel:

We made it to the top 10! http://www.netsquared.org/hrc-ucb/topten -- Thanks
for your support! Now off to Berkeley to compete for $15,000 and to
inspire world changers and be inspired!

Yay!

My friend's non-profit could use your vote

Hey all,

My friend Israel's non-profit (Cell Alert) and some others are trying to win a non-profit challenge. It's a good cause (actually, several good causes), so if you wouldn't mind going and voting, here's how:

1) Go here and register: http://www.netsquared.org/hrc-ucb/vote

2) Then click "Vote in the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge" here: http://www.netsquared.org/user

3) Then vote for these 3 projects
http://www.netsquared.org/projects/frontlinesms-alerts

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/ijcentral

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/freedom-fone

4) Then click "View/Cast Ballot" (below your selected challengers in the upper right hand corner)

5) Then click "Submit Ballot"

Does that make sense?

Israel Kloss

Founder, Cell Alert

CellAlert.org

israel@cellalert.org

P.S. Would you mind passing on this URL (http://cellalert.org/node/104) to your friends and family so they can vote for us too?

I'm in ur interwebs hackin ur life

So this is another thing that I'm the last person on earth to find out about, but a big tip of the hat to Tony for pointing me at Lifehacker, o great font of wisdom that it is.

In just the last day or two that I've been following it, I've found all kinds of good ideas. To pick out just two, which I'm now using in a satisfied manner:

I heart Digsby. Bye-bye Pidgin (which is going the way of Trillian and AIM before it).

I heart foobar2000. Bye-bye WinAmp (following Windows Media Player and iTunes before it - though I still use both of those sometimes).

Lots of other good stuff there too, much of it non-computer-related. Check it out!

Code = Poetry

I was just reflecting on the strong commonalities between these two art forms: poetry, and code (i.e., computer programs). (If you don't think code is an art form, either you aren't a coder, or you are a coder and consider "art" to be a somewhat pejorative term.)

Both are, ideally, elegant and powerfully expressive applications of language.

Each form values both beauty (simplicity, elegance, etc.) and "correctness" (i.e., conforming to practical rules), though probably to differing degrees. A poem may perhaps be valuable if it is beautiful, but conforms to no rules. A program, in theory, may be valuable if it's correct, but ugly. I believe both cases are very rare.

Both are, by virtue of the process that creates them, greater than the sum of their parts (i.e., their words and characters). A good program accomplishes some practical task; a good poem evokes some emotional or spiritual response.

And other stuff, too.

That's all I have to say about that, today. :-) Here are some Perl poems, including:

# Perl Haiku by Bob Meyers

use strict; my @love;
my $wounds = open(FLAME, "of_passion");
foreach () {
push @love "fully";
}

And you can buy the shirt up top right here.

Nexus

Likely this will fascinate nobody but me. But it fascinates me.

I probably have too many Facebook friends. I've made it a practice to accept friend requests from anybody who "friended" me, unless there was no discernable non-commerce-related reason why they would do so. For the most part, folks whom I don't know who friended me have been one degree of separation away, and part of the "emerging/missional church" conversations in some way shape, or form. It's seemed, well, unfriendly to ignore those friend requests, and so I haven't.

But over time I've gotten more requests from folks who are not just friends of friends, but friends of "friends", if you know what I mean - i.e., two or more degrees of separation away, connected to me only by other folks I don't really know that well, if at all. Still, I've tried to err on the side of "friendly", and it's actually been pretty interesting - seeing, through the status updates of folks I don't really know, what's going on in the Church in a wide variety of contexts. And also seeing frequent updates from chatty folks who rave or rant about things I really just don't need to know about. (Sorry. Luckily, Facebook has ways of regulating that without necessarily un-friending people.)

Anyway, now I have lots of "friends", intersecting with the rather more significant blessing of many real-life friends, many of whom are not, alas, on Facebook. But I'm fascinated with exploring how my Facebook friends relate to each other. Who are they friends with? What do they have in common? How do clusters of friends from different "spheres" of my life intersect? Who are the "bridge" people in my life? The picture afforded by Facebook is very imperfect, what with all the "friends" on FB that I don't really know, and all the dear friends in real life who aren't on FB. And also, lots of people who know each other in real life aren't the Facebook sluts that I am, and haven't necessarily friended one another. But anyway. This fascinates me.

And aiding in my fascination is this cool tool called "Nexus". Here's the link to the interactive version. I think you can access that without being me, my friend, or even a Facebook user, but in case I'm wrong, here's a less-enlightening flat version (click to embiggen):


And here's the flat version, annotated to mark out "clusters" of my friends:


See? I told you I was going to find that a lot more fascinating that you do. But if you use Facebook, you might find it interesting to generate your own graph.

This is true

Same goes for smartphones. Thanks, xkcd.com. :-)

The new me

I've been seeing these icons/avatars all over, so I figured out where they come from and created myself one. Beware, though: the technology on their site sort of sucks. Your user experience may suck too, particularly if you use Linux.

Still, the icons are cute.

Clay Shirky on the brokenness of one-way content flow

This brief (16-minute) presentation (by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008) is must-viewing. If you're bored (and you shouldn't be), at least fast-forward to the 11-minute mark and watch the last 5 minutes.

Choice quote (at 11:35): "'I could do that too!' - this is something people in the media world don't understand." Just strike out "media" and substitute "church", and it's equally true. Another quote at 14:45: "Here's what 4-year-olds know: a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken." Watch it, and think about the implications.

HT: Len Hjalmarson.

Good stuff on the day job: a new USATODAY.com

I don't tend to blog much about my day job, but I have to say that I think the redesign we launched this morning for USATODAY.com looks right spiffy. And it's faster, and more convenient, and puts more of the info that folks seem to want in front of their eyeballs. I can claim very, very little credit for this, but I am proud to be part of a crack team of designers, editors, programmers, and business folks who do fine work and have a good time doing it.

Check it, y'all.

P.S., it's also an awesome place to work, from a values/culture/flexibility point of view. Join us! ;-)

Blogcast of the Common Table

OK, so I can't not post about this. :-) If perchance anybody who reads this blog from afar has ever wondered, "So what do they do at this little coffee-house church called Common Table?", my best advice is to come and visit and stay for at least a month, 'cause no single gathering is going to give you anything like a good answer to that question. My second-best advice is to come and visit at least once. My third-best (and last-ditch) advice is is to check out our (quite nifty, IMHO) web site. But while that will give you some idea of what we think about and how we relate to the wide, wild world, until recently there wasn't a whole lot there that would tell you what it's like when we gather for worship services and service-worship, our two most frequent forms of coming together IRL (in real life) to serve and love God, our neighbors, and each other.

But now, thanks mostly to the tireless creative genius of the mighty iPete, we have a rockin' blogcast site with elements to help you experience (a little bit, anyway) our current worship series, on "Space". So far, we've got posts on our first three worship services in the series: Physical Space (the [human] is in the space), Relational Space (the [healing] is in the space), and Temporal Space (the [funk] is in the space), plus one for this past Saturday's joyous service-worship, in which we made space in the lives of some friends of ours who are parents of young kids, giving them an afternoon to themselves while we transformed the inside of Jack and Pete's house into a (well-regulated) party zone for 11 kids, aged 7 months to 8 years.

There are also podcasts of the worship services, and if you keep on scrolling down, you'll find content from last year's Easter season series ("Blooms"). It's all good stuff, and although it's only a taste of our gatherings, a taste is far better than nothing, and I think it's pretty cool.

For those who only read my feed...

I've added a section near the top of my blog called "Where else on the Web is Mike Croghan?", so now there's one-stop shopping if perchance you want to be my Facebook friend or LinkedIn contact, or take in some truly amateurish Flickr photos (unless Tina took them). Also, there are some new photos up on Flickr. (That has a feed too, in case you don't want to miss a single poorly composed, out-of-focus, infrequently posted masterpiece.) FYI.

Open social networks

A few weeks ago, I was brewing up a post on "open social networks", in which I was going to get all philosophical and rail against the "walled gardens" of online social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Friendster, LinkedIn, etc., etc., where they try to reel you in and keep as much of your internet social experience as possible within their "walls", so you'll be looking at their ads. They do this by limiting interoperability. You can't be on Facebook and make friends with somebody on MySpace or LinkedIn. It's easy to make connections to folks' blogs, photos, videos, etc. within the walled garden, but not so easy to connect to these items if they're outside the garden on Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, etc. And you need to set up a different username and password - and type in all your gorram profile data - separately on each site. This sucks. I was all set to decry it.

But then, in the intervening time, I became a Facebook addict, which undermined, somewhat, the soapbox upon which I'd intended to stand. (It's fun! Join up! Be my Facebook friend!)

So, thankfully, iPete came to my rescue, sending me a link to an awesome BBC News article by internet law professor Michael Geist. Instead of getting all boorish and philosophical like I would have done, Geist makes the case pretty concisely and compellingly, in terms of self-interest:

The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness is stifling their potential.

Some services may believe that it is in their economic interest to stick to a walled garden approach; however, given the global divisions within the social networking world, the mix of language, user preferences, and network effects, it is unlikely that one or two services will capture the global marketplace. The better approach - for users and the sites themselves - would be to work towards a world of interoperable social networking

Read the whole article if you're interested in this sort of thing, but I hope the social networking corporate decision makers are listening to Michael Geist.

I know it's been months since there's been anything really original here, but still...

(Link to the video on YouTube)

Thank ya so much.

(HT: Jamie)