9 posts tagged “os x”
Last year Michael Sippey clued me into his method of managing the deluge of email he receives every day. I was in a similar predicament: My inbox (and assorted Rules-based folders) of mailing lists and various specifically-addressed email was becoming a source of frustration.
His system was simple: Have two mailboxes: Inbox and Archive. Use “smart folders” and search for the rest. The goal is to keep the Inbox folder as close to empty as possible. Messages in the Inbox are effectively a to-do list. Messages in the archive require no immediate or further direct action on your part.
I was able to delete 20-odd mail rules and replace them with this simple logic: If the message was sent to a mailing list, therefore not requiring immediate action, then move it to the Archive folder. If it looked like a bounce, spam, or anything else not requiring immediate action—file in Archive.
This let me reduce my email parsing time to a few seconds: I could actively read and respond to messages in my Inbox, and when I had free cycles, read messages in the Archive. I estimate my throughput for reading/responding to mail increased by at least a factor of 5. Email, previously a giant time-suck, shrank to a manageable slice of my day. I knew that I could realistically devote as much time as necessary to each message in my Inbox, since it was limited to those specific mails that I would most likely have to act on.
OS X has a nice feature: You can assign a keystroke combination to any menu in any application. Just name the menu, and voila: It has a keystroke equivalent.
The single most common operation I do in OS X Mail is “Move to Archive.” I assigned a keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+A) to the “Archive” menu. Unfortunately, Mail chose to apply this to a pop-up menu buried in a dialog box, not the top-level Message > Move > Archive menu.
On Saturday, I was trying to figure out why the iPhone did not let me set an empty IMAP root path (it always reset to INBOX). I eventually gave up and tried another approach: I moved the Archive folder to inside the Inbox folder. This saved me time in two ways: Dragging & dropping a message from Inbox to Archive was now a shorter process: The folders were adjacent to each other in the sidebar. Second, Mail added the keyboard shortcut I’d originally defined to the correct menu!
I’m a contacts packrat. My phone(s), Macs, Windows boxen and everything else is synced with the Exchange server at work. This weekend I installed Leopard to test some Vox code on my MacBook Pro. Aside from the numerous bugs, everything was pretty much hunky-dory. Settings, email, contacts, calendar entries, it all worked [1].
Fast-forward to this morning. I’m writing an email to someone at work and notice that Mail.app is not autocompleting the address. Odd, I thought. Later, when it refuses to autocomplete someone else, I open Address Book and notice that every single contact I had (a few hundred) is gone. In its place is a pair of entries for Apple, Inc. and myself.
Cue OMFGZ.
I check phone. All contacts still there. Check ActiveSync settings: Make sure conflicts prefer the data on the phone. Set phone down and go to Outlook Web Access. All contacts gone. My Mac had synced and destroyed the server’s record of any contact I had. Dismayed I checked my phone again. It had synced. Now my MacBook, the Exchange server, and my phone all had the same shitty 4 contacts: Me and Apple. Cue 2nd round of OMFGZ.
I remembered the MacBook Pro at home. Maybe it still had a copy of my contacts list in Address Book.app. I SSHed home, and tried to ping the MBP. No luck, it had gone to sleep and wasn’t on the network. I decided to cut bait and go home to try to recover the data manually.
I stepped into my apartment, hit the “Internet” button on the cable modem, and went upstairs to the loft. The MBP was asleep as I’d figured. As quickly as I could, I woke it, entered my password and hit the Airport menu and disabled WiFi. Just to be sure. I then dug into the ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook directory and noticed a number of files that were not present on my Tiger machine’s. There were also a lot of files with the word “corrupt” in the filename. The AddressBook.data.previous file was, miraculously still big (several MB). I copied the directory to a tarball, a DMG, and a duplicate folder, and queued an email of it to myself on two different servers.
I crossed my fingers and opened Address Book. Crash. Again, crash. Then OS X asked me if I wanted to revert the settings and try again. Crash. OMFGZ, round 3!
So I tried nuking every file in the Address Book data directory that looked like a generated/dependent file, and moved the AddressBook.data.previous to AddressBook.data. Address Book started! All of my contacts were there, and iSync started complaining about conflicts. I resolved those, and disabled the machine from ever syncing with Exchange again.
I backed up the Address Book, and then emailed that file to myself, copied it to another machine and generally didn’t waste time getting the precious data off this (cursed) machine. When I got back to the office, I was able to import the backup file. Crisis averted.
Lesson? Back up your OS X Address Book. There’s even a command for it in the File menu. Maybe something in there about trusting all your eggs to the unholy mix of Exchange and iSync. Anyways.
[1] Dear Apple: Please make Leopard iCal talk to Exchange. OS X Calendar Server is a nice idea, but nobody is going to install it.
This post composed entirely in the shiny new Safari 3.0 browser, part of Leopard. A couple minor things are left to get working, but overall, I’d say the outlook’s good for full Vox support. Hooray!
Just ran across this little gem: Perian, an open-source QuickTime codec for a few of those other formats that QT chokes on.
Perian enables QuickTime® application support for additional media types including:
- AVI and FLV
- 3ivX, DivX, Flash Screen Video, MS-MPEG4, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6, and Xvid
- AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio using A52Codec, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
Woot.
At home, I have two Macs: A MacBook Pro for work/email/gaming, and a Mini in my living room for watching movies, listening to music, etc. I was looking for a way to control iTunes on the Mini (it will have the large library as soon as I can de-dupe and wrestle it off this NTFS partition) from my MacBook and came across this extremely handy (and open-source to boot) OS X app:
It's 25 bucks, which I consider borderline extortion for a shareware app, but man is it good. Speed Download lights up my internet connection like nobody's business. It can saturate my cable connection, besting Safari for the same download by almost 10-fold.
The only quibble I have with Speed Download besides the price is the developer's fascination with red as a primary color for Every. Single. Icon. Hello, Apple UI guidlines?
