Trey Connell

I’ve recently started using Mind Maps to organize my thoughts and to plan out features of a project or site.  In case any of you are interested, the best Mac software I’ve found is XMind.  It’s completely free, very intuitive, and makes some really good looking mind maps.

My first project using mind maps is to describe the features and plugins we want to have in the next iteration of our company’s Core product.  I really think this is going to help all of us understand what we’re building and how it all fits together.

I wanted to put Windows XP on my mac so that I could test out sites we build in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari on PC. I was pretty apprehensive about tainting my mac with an operating system like Winblows – even if it does run in a virtual server. But I digress…

After asking the opinions of several co-workers and doing a bit of searching, I settled on Sun’s VirtualBox software for virtualization. The interface and setup is a bit clunky and not exactly intuitive, but it’s free so who am I to complain? I should note that almost everyone told me to use VMware Fusion because it’s so slick, but I’m cheap and didn’t feel like forking over the $79.

In VirtualBox, I created a new 32 GB partition on my mac and then mounted my Windows XP installation CD. The CD then “booted” when I started the new Virtual Server and the XP installation began. The install went flawlessly, and I had Windows XP running on my mac in a virtual server window in about 45 minutes. The network was even automatically configured so I could reach the Internet in Windows from the time I started.

The only thing I’ve found that I don’t like is that the Virtual Server window is very small, and it causes me to have to scroll around a lot in Internet Explorer. I guess that’s a small price to pay for free virtualization software and easy access to Windows on my mac.

Update: I’ve now decided that Firefox 3 is not reliable enough to use as my default browser so I’ve switched back to Safari. It’s extremely slow to connect to most sites, and sometimes it won’t connect at all while Safari connects and renders the page extremely quickly.

Update: I am still using Firefox as my default browser. Version 3.0.5 seems to run very stable although slower than Safari. However, the plethora (learned that word in college) of plugins and add-ons for Firefox keeps me using it. My favorite plugin so far is Site Launcher.

I just spent 20 minutes writing a message to a customer in our Basecamp site only to have Firefox crash about 30 second before the post was complete. I lost every bit of that work and now have to start over. The frequency of the crashes is starting to get a bit ridiculous. If this keeps up and no patches or updates are issued then I’m going to have to switch back to Safari – or (gasp!) Google Chrome.

Apple’s iLife 09 Hardware Up-to-Date program lets you get a copy of iLife 09 for $9.95 plus tax if you purchased a qualifying computer on or after January 6, 2009. I was able to get a copy for my new MacBook for a total of $10.77 (including tax).

You can qualify and purchase right on the Apple Store online or you can download a form to mail in to Apple.  If you think you might qualify, go there now.

If you spend a lot of time on sites like Twitter, you have seen how URL compression is used to shorten very long URLs into smaller, more user-friendly URLs. I had been using a few web sites to shorten URLs, and it dawned on me that I really needed a slick Mac widget. That’s so much more convenient than going to a web page.

I did a quick look around and found the tr.im.it widget from Andrew Hedges. This widget uses the tr.im API to shorten URLs. It can even grab the URL from your active browser window and make the shortened URL available on your clipboard immediately after you submit.

If you’re looking for a great widget to compress URLs, check out tr.im.it and tell Andrew that Trey sent you. (I’m just kidding. Andrew has no clue who I am.)

Twitter is great, but if you’re not using a client that works for you it becomes a major time hog – especially as your list of fellow twitters grows.

In order to sanely manage my life in Twitterville, I have been using Tweetdeck.  The only problem is that it’s still at beta version 0.21, and it crashes about around 30 minutes on my MacBook Pro which causes me to spend valuable time relaunching it. The instability sucks the joy right out of the application which is a shame.

I finally give up and have switched to Twhirl. So far this is working much better.  It’s stable, and I LOVE the way it shows new tweets briefly when I have it running in the background.  It reminds me of Mail.appetizer.  That simple feature allows me to be so much more productive because I’m not constantly switching away from what I’m doing to find out what someone just said.  Now I can glance and read and be right back in the mix of my current ask.

I found a fantastic Firefox plugin called Site Launcher. It lets you visit your favorite web sites with a few simple keystrokes.  You can setup as many shortcuts as you wish, and the hot keys are configurable.  It’s still marked as “experimental” on Mozilla.org, but I haven’t seen any issues with it so far.  If you’re looking for a great alternative to traditional bookmarks, I highly recommend you check out Site Launcher.

I noticed a buddy of mine was using a new Twitter application called TweetDeck.  From their site:

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

I’ve installed the BETA, and so far it’s really slick.  Much better than Twidget which I have been using on my MacBook Pro.

Mail.appetizer has been around for some time, and I find it to be invaluable for dealing with email more efficiently. How many times have you been working in another application only to see the little red indicator show up on the Mail.app icon? In order to see if what you received is worthy of your attention, you have to switch over to Mail and click on the new message. That’s just too much effort to find out if you need to deal with a new message immediately.

Mail.appetizer will display a transparent window that displays the message no matter what application you’re in. You can configure the window to disappear after a certain number of seconds. I use 2 seconds which is long enough to see what’s up and short enough to disappear quickly and not be annoying. You can also customize the information displayed from the message, the level of window transparency, and other details illustrated below.

I highly recommend this little app as it’s a major time saver and providese a ton of convenience over chasing your email down blindly.

Mail.appetizer Preferences

Mail.appetizer Sample Popup Window

For anyone who works with WYSIWYG editors, you know that TinyMCE seems to be bundled with just about everything.  What I can’t figure out is why.  I’ve tried this editor in standalone installations, “module” based installations such as you would use on Drupal and WordPress, and custom installations where I needed it to do some specialized things.  Experience has shown me that it is very difficult to get it to behave, bugs are plentiful, and upgrading is a toss of the dice at best.

I’ve now started using FCKEditor as my WYSIWYG of choice, and so far it’s working great.  It has a relatively smaller footprint, is easy to customize, integrates nicely with Drupal, and allows for seamless image and file uploading within content.  Most importantly – what I type is actually what I get and not the control’s best guess.  It doesn’t insert a ton of superfluous code that I have to dig out each time either.

I might be missing what’s so great about TinyMCE, and if someone can show me the way then I’ll gladly listen.  But for now I’m sticking with FCKEditor as it gives me far less headaches and is working like a charm.

I’ve been looking for a really good RSS reader for Leopard lately.  I’m just not crazy about the built-in RSS support in Mail.  I wanted something simple but that allowed me to group posts by category or topic.  Sometimes I just want to read over technology posts and ignore what’s going on in the world according to Fox News.

I installed NewsFire – a free RSS reader for OS X – and so far it’s working really well.  It’s simple and allows a bit of customization such as display colors and font size.  NewsFire also lets you group the feeds and posts by topic so you can organize content how you want to read it.  Unless I run across something better, I think I’ll be using NewsFire for some time.

If you own GarageBand 4 then you can use it to create your iPhone ringtones. The latest version – at the time of this writing it’s 4.1.2 – lets you drag and drop any song into the GarageBand 4 window. The problem is that GarageBand won’t import protected songs from iTunes that you have purchased from the iTunes store.  That’s right – you paid for the song, you paid for GarageBand 4, but you can’t create a ringtone for your iPhone from the two.  Well, for those of you who have songs from other…ahem…sources, here’s how you create an iPhone ringtone in GarageBand.

After dragging a song onto the GarageBand interface, click the Cycle Region button.

You’ll see a yellow bar appear at the top. That bar can be dragged left and right as well as made larger or smaller. You can then select the area of the song you want to create a ringtone from. Be sure to select 40 seconds or less.

Once you’re ready, click the Share menu and select Send Ringtone to iTunes. That’s it!