After 5 years (almost to the day) of matrimony, it was time for me to replace my aging (read: dying) late-2006 Macbook Pro with a unibody model. You know it’s time when everything stops working even passably well all at once, even after you’ve done everything possible to breathe new life into the machine (my old computer has a SSD in the ExpressCard slot that serves as the boot drive, among other hacks). The new machine came in today, and I just finished getting some additional pieces of hardware installed.

Instead of paying Apple’s crazy prices for RAM and SSDs, I bought some memory off Newegg and found the only SSD company that seems to provide a Mac firmware updater with their drive. I also bought an Optibay, which allowed me to replace the optical drive with the hard disk that came with the machine. I tossed the SSD in where the original hard disk goes, and put the optical drive into the external drive case that comes with the Optibay so I can use it the rare times it’s needed. 120G boot drive and 750G drive for my user folder = <3.

I found great hard drive and optical drive replacement instructions on iFixit, since the Optibay instructions haven’t been updated for the latest revision of the Macbook Pro internals (shame on them). Thank you iFixit for being amazing!

After switching the drives around, I thought I would have to use my custom Snow Leopard installer USB stick to install 10.6 on the SSD then upgrade to Lion through the Mac App Store (the machine wouldn’t even boot from the USB stick, not sure why yet). It turns out that you can use the pre-installed bootable recovery partition to get Lion installed on the new drive. As I sit here writing I’m waiting for the install to finish – it’s estimating another 4 hours as it continues “Downloading additional components”….

Yay for new toys!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media.

Edit: clarified in some places and added more info.

I like to be really productive when I work, and I like to know what the heck is going on. At the same time, I am not the best at remembering my long list of things to do or places to be off the top of my head. While I found paper lists to be useful to a point, I found that tools on my computer made managing my life super easy. Over time I’ve adopted various portions of David Allen’s Getting Things Done action management method.

I am a dedicated mac user (and a switcher!), and I’ve found a ton of great mac apps that streamline my time on the computer, where I spend the majority of my time working or playing (and alternatives can be found for Windows as well!).

Email

Moving from my ISP‘s email to Gmail was like crossing the Iron Curtain. Suddenly I had tons of storage space and was able to access my email through an excellent user interface. As well, search became useful! Today I use my email as my primary inbox for tasks and information, especially because of my iPhone’s constant presence.

Calendering

The logical next step was towards maintaining a good personal calendar, and a great option was only a link away at Google Calendar. After switching to a mac laptop, I moved to Apple iCal, but I back up my calendar to Google Calendar using the excellent utility Spanning Sync.

Tasks

The hardest part of getting organized for me was finding the right task management software. I knew that paper just did not work for me, though I love using my moleskine notebook for notetaking when I attend conferences or otherwise go to hear speakers.

I didn’t begin a trusted GTD system until found an app that I liked. I tried way way way way way way way way way way way too many GTD apps (Note: a number of those are cross-platform). Eventually I settled on iGTD, which is free and was excellent until the sole developer stopped work. I jumped ship to the $80 OmniFocus and have been in heaven ever since. While it certainly is not perfect, I’ve finally settled into a system I can trust to keep me organized and on task.

Knowledge

I’m someone who tends to collect tons of random information that I want to keep. Right now everything is fairly spread out and hard to combine into something useful, but I have permanent links in Safari and Firefox, reference links for the future in delicious (thank you pukka!), whole website pages in Evernote (cross-platform with a webapp!), and DevonThink Pro for the miscellaneous knowledge that I forget two seconds after committing to the database (router config settings anyone?). I also use a password manager for all of my logins for websites, FTP servers etc.

Scrivener is my choice of software for creative or academic writing of all sorts–term papers, blog posts, and the like. Pages and Bean work great for most school assignments and random files full of text. Bookends is a fairly good bibliography management utility (yes, it formats all your works cited pages for you! ☺).

For school notes and anything else that works better in outline form, I use the great (mac-only)OmniOutliner (by the OmniGroup like OmniFocus).

Also, I finally committed myself to having “current projects,” “files,” and “school” folders on my Desktop with everything filed fairly neatly.

Putting It Into Practice/Conclusion

I like to believe that when I work on anything, I am proceeding at the fastest possible pace my mind and body are capable of (okay, okay, three hours of sleep slows me down, but not much). I know where everything is, I know what I need to do and when I need to do and when it’s due, and I have all of the tools to do everything as fast as possible.

I want to end with a special shoutout to the most amazing application of all, quicksilver. Quicksilver allows me to launch any file or app from the keyboard in seconds. But, it can do so much more, from moving or appending text to files to sending emails, viewing and editing my bookmarks, opening links, to controlling iTunes or my FTP client or the operating system…. Learn it, love it, live it mac users. Windows users, check out this list here for some poor alternatives ☺.

I hope you can be successful with your quest to be productive.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

HTML and CSS are the presentation languages of the web. A programmer may build an application in Python or Java, or make their website more beautiful or fun using Javascript, but ultimately all that these languages do is allow for abstracted, automated editing of a page’s HTML and CSS.

HTML

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, started as the sole language for making a website using Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW system, the system that became the web as we know it today; when you made a page on the net, you wrote HTML to define the content, layout, and design of the page. Note that HTML is not a programming language, but a markup language–you use it to describe how something should look, and the computer interprets it and renders a page onto your screen. Wikipedia says it best: HTML “provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on…”

Making a well-designed layout for a webpage was difficult because the only way to position elements such as images and text was to place them into tables with hidden borders. As well, much of the HTML code was redundant. There was no way to write one line that made every single link bold and green; you had to specify attributes of page elements individually for each element. To make a single link bold and green, you would write it as <strong><a href="http://woot.com" color="green">Woot</a></strong>. Please note that the use of the color attribute is deprecated; style should be used instead, but I’m using the old-fashioned example on purpose.

Edit: To clarify, the more important reason not to use tables for layout is that if you do, you are essentially marking all of your content as tabular data when it is not, thus making life harder on search engines. (Thank you: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_about_CSS_Is_wrong/)

CSS

In 1996 CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, was unleashed upon the web (although full support in the major browsers took another 3-4 years). CSS allows for the separation of form and content in web design. That is, you can write the content of your webpage then structure it using HTML, and then define the actual layout and colors and font and what links do when your mouse passes over them using CSS. Wikipedia always says it best: CSS is “used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language” such as HTML.

Now if you wanted all links to be green and bold, it only took one CSS statement ( a{color: green; font-weight: bold;} ) (note how I don’t even need to wrap all of my HTML links in the <strong> tag, I just use CSS). Web design became much easier because instead of structuring the page using tables, CSS could be used to position page elements either relative to the edges of the window or other elements, or absolutely using coordinates on the page. More complex designs became possible, and webpage maintenance easier.

Standards

Today, as always, the W3C, the World Wide Wide Consortium, manages these two languages, as well as the varied ecosystem of dialects that have sprung out of HTML such as XML and all other technical standards related to the web. XML is Extensible Markup Language, and it allows people to make their own languages with their own tags. Major use example: RSS and podcasting.

Tags

As you may already know, HTML is written as a collection of tags. For example, all HTML pages start with the <html> tag and end with </html>. All tags that “open” a statement are written as <tag> and all that close it are written as </tag>. With the exception of a few self-closing tags such as </ br> (which makes horizontal rules), always close your tags!

When you write posts using WordPress, you can always switch between the visual editor and HTML editor. All that the visual editor does is translate your clicks and words into HTML. If you do try the HTML editor, it works the same way, but you can see the code changes your actions make. The tags you will find most useful are the <a> tag, which is for links (a standing for anchor), the <p> tag, which denotes a paragraph, the <h1>–<h6> tags, which allow for headers to be inserted into a page, and the <ul> and <ol> tags, which allow for bulleted and ordered lists (and don’t forget your <li> tag too!).

The W3C has an excellent HTML primer that will do far better than I ever could at teaching HTML.

The Future

To me, the best feature coming out of the W3C’s work is the <canvas> tag. This tag allows for animations like those made in Adobe’s proprietary Flash software and played in Adobe’s proprietary Flash player to be done using open standards and tools.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.