Category: Mac

I’ve mentioned LaunchBar several times before – I’m simply addicted to this excellent Mac utility.

Recently, I stumbled across the Mac Power Users podcast devoted to LaunchBar – Katie Floyd and David Sparks do a great job discussing how they use LaunchBar and I’d highly recommend a listen.

If you want to become quickly more productive on the Mac, LaunchBar is just the ticket you need!

Last week I posted – in frustration – about Thawte’s decision to exit the Personal E-Mail Certificate business. They did so for pretty obvious reasons – why give away free certificates – as they had done for years – while bearing the costs of supporting them, etc.

As part of the transition, Thawte offered a 1 year free VeriSign Class 1 Individual certificate – and I had grumbled that the VeriSign issuance process didn’t seem to work well on my Mac. I was wrong.

Looking at my Keychain, the new VeriSign certificates were issued correctly and installed in my Mac’s Keychain. To use them, I needed to “untrust” my Thawte certificates and, once I did so, they started working fine for signing and encrypting in my Mac’s Mail.app.

Bottom line: I’m sorry to see Thawte exit this business but I understand why they did so. I appreciate VeriSign’s generosity in making a 1 year cert available. But I still think all of this secure email stuff is way to hard.

If only my friends at Voltage would step up to fully supporting the Mac, I’d be a very happy camper, I’m sure!

I’m a big fan of what the Google folks are doing with the Labs feature in Gmail.

One of the features they added a few months back allows you to enable/disable various “folders” (or Labels in Gmail parlance) so that they’re not made available to IMAP clients. If you enable that feature, you can – for example – make Gmail’s All Mail or Sent Mail invisible to IMAP clients so that they won’t spin forever trying to keep a desktop version of those multi-gigabyte (!) mailboxes in sync with the Gmail server version. A major step forward! But, alas, not a complete solution to my needs.

On my desktop (Mac), I use a program called EagleFiler to manage huge archives of files that I think at some point I’ll want to go back and refer to again. EagleFiler makes searching my archive of saved “stuff” quick and easy. It’s really great at what it does!

What I’d love to do is to have my sent email, for example, added incrementally into my EagleFiler archive – so that I’ve got a local copy, easily searchable, right at hand. The problem is that there’s no way I’ve discovered to be able to do that.

With Gmail, it’s an all or nothing proposition. I either get a copy of ALL my sent mail – or nothing. I can’t get a incremental update feed for sucking into EagleFiler as I’m sending outgoing mail.

I haven’t completely described my problem here – just a glimmer of what I’m thinking the issues are. I’d welcome any suggestions to a better “ecology of mind” on how to better archive my sent mail in a way that makes sense!

Over the weekend, I said I was going to try a revised setup/workflow on my MacBook Pro.

After giving it a try for a few days, I decided that simple is best – and have gone back from multiple site-specific Fluid browsers to running a single version of Webkit (Safari) instead.

Why? Turns out that running a half dozen Fluid browsers consumed more CPU cycles that I expected – driving up the fans on my MacBook Pro. It also turned out that old habits die hard – I found it easier to switch between browser tabs using the old browser setup.

So, we’re back to the old setup – and happy again!

I’m going to try a change in my current usage pattern on my Mac.

Basically, the change involves making extensive use of Fluid, the “single-specific browser” application that lets you “run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application.”

The way I’m using Fluid isn’t really in site-specific mode – rather, it is tying specific tasks to specific instances of Fluid browsers. So, for example, my basic configuration of multiple Fluid browsers now consists of:

• WebKit – my all-purpose general browser. I use the latest nightly build of WebKit in lieu of Safari.

• Email – a Fluid browser instance that has several tabs for each of my various Gmail, MobileMe, etc. browser-based email accounts. If I’m in the mood for email, I switch to the Email Fluid instance.

• Social – a Fluid browser instance that has several tabs for my various social networking accounts – including Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, and Twitter. My personal blog is also in this browser. If I’m in a social mood looking for stimulation, I can switch to this browser and tune into the outside flow.

• Productivity – a Fluid browser instance that has several tabs for the productivity apps (mostly from 37signals) that I use regularly. Here I manage to-do lists, contacts, follow-ups, etc.

• News – a Fluid browser instance that has tabs open for Google Reader, topic-specific private rooms I’ve configured on FriendFeed, and the major news sites that I like to regularly visit (BBC, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Wall St. Journal, etc.). If I’m in the mood for news, I can find it here in this browser!

• Glenbrook – a Fluid browser instance that has tabs open for the various Glenbrook websites including Payments News, Glenbrook, and various web analytics sites that monitor activity on Glenbrook’s websites.

That’s it. I’ll give this setup a try for a few days and see how it goes. I am a heavy user of CMD-Tab to switch between apps on my Mac – hopefully being able to easily switch to task-specific browsers will prove to be useful. We’ll see – and I’ll let you know.