Now I would like to speed things up a little bit. I’ve been quite busy with other projects lately, and I don’t want this website to suffer from that. It never was my goal to write a post every day, the last year it was closer to a post a week most of the time, but it shouldn’t become much less than that!

So Now I’m Looking for Writers

To help me keep Streamlined Mind alive and active I would like to ask for your contribution. It would be nice to have more posts, shorter posts combined with a longer more in-depth post now and then. The main focus of the website will not change: Helping out students and others who are in a learning situation accomplish their goals in a streamlined way and providing helpful tips, tricks and hacks to keep things going, get inspired, stay motivated, get things done.

What I Ask For

Motivated writers interested in subjects like: life hacking, web2.0, networking, organizing, writing, GTD, simplifying life. I’m an avid Mac user so most of the software I discussed has been OS X software, but if you’re a Windows user that’s fine too, reviews of related Windows applications could also be added. You don’t have to be an experienced writer, as long as you have something to say about these subjects that are helpful to our readers.

It’s preferable if you are in any way affiliated with a school/university/learning situation, as a student or as a teacher, but being passionate about the subjects you write about is most important.

It would be nice if you could contribute regularly, writing a few short posts or one longer post a week. But if you just want to start with one post and see how things develop, that is also fine! It would also be nice if you could do a little promotion for your own content to attract more visitors. If I can get a few people helping me with that, we can make it grow much faster!

What I Offer You

If you have your own blog, you will get links to your site with every post you write, as well as permanent links on the sidebar if you become a regular writer. If you don’t have your own blog, this could be a good opportunity to develop your writing skills, develop your online profile and learn about blogging.

You probably noticed there are some ads on the site. They don’t generate a lot of revenue though. What I earn is used for hosting the site. But the site grows, and some months more people are visiting.

So for when we get bigger: Future revenue will be split up and shared with all contributors, depending on their input. So if I write four posts a month and you write eight posts, I’ll get a third of the revenue and you get the rest. The better we promote the site together the higher the amount will be.

Interested?

Are you interested? Please send me an email using the contact form. I would like to know what your background is concerning the subjects mentioned, and I would like to read some of your writings. Send me the URL of your own blog or write a short article. I’m eager to see your work! I’ll get back to you right away.

Picture by: karindalziel

Feedback Afterwards

You finished an important assignment. It took you a lot of time so now it’s time to find out if you did it right. You deserve it, and whoever gave you the assignment owes it to you, especially in a learning situation. It gives you the opinion of a professional with the intention to teach you something. For a student this is essential as it provides new ideas to improve his/her work.

In some situations it’s hard for a teacher to provide every student with the right amount of feedback, especially when a large group of students has to be assessed. So you might be told you did what you were supposed to do, but you still have a lot of questions you’d like to be answered in order to improve your future work. Read on to find out what you can do about this.

During the Process

Coming straight from school you might be surprised by the way things work in the ‘real world’. Maybe things aren’t that clear anymore, maybe you won’t just pass if you do your work and hand in the results on time.

Getting feedback from a contractor is essential. You have to know if what you’re doing is according to what they have in mind. It might say more about meeting your clients requirements than it says about the quality of your work, so don’t be offended if they don’t understand your brilliant ideas.

It becomes difficult if a client starts to talk about subjects he doesn’t really know or understand. Try to give clear examples, don’t get into details with them because this gives them the opportunity to form an opinion on every single detail, even if they didn’t notice it before.

Ask for Feedback

While working together with others a lack of feedback can really lead to misunderstandings and false expectations. Unless you’re working with a person you know very well you have to keep asking for feedback if it’s not given to you. You might feel like the other doesn’t care or doesn’t doesn’t want to take the time to look at what you made, but probably they just assume you know what you’re doing.

If your client or you teacher doesn’t like what you made, try to get a clear picture of why that is and how you can solve this. Did you misunderstand them in the first place? Did they give you a wrong idea of what they wanted? Keep asking until you really know what to do to solve the problem.

Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t get the right feedback, so you didn’t know how to continue or you didn’t know what you did right, or wrong? Please leave a comment and tell me!

Photo by Jacob Bøtter

Although this is my first screencast ever, I’ve been instructing a lot of groups in situations where a good thorough explanation of software is needed. While sitting at my desk and showing things on a beamer there is no way my students follow every single thing I do, unless I say it. It’s very helpful to explain every single keyboard shortcut, but there simply isn’t enough time. So having them visualized on the screen could help a lot.

Three Things that Enhance your Presentation

The main functionality of Mouseposé is highlighting the mouse pointer. This is particularly helpful while working with complex software with a lot of options and a lot of things going on on the screen. A little mouse pointer might be hard to find in such a case. Apart from just highlighting the mouse pointer, there is also an option that highlights the active window.

Visualizing mouse clicks is the second thing. Your audience will exactly see what you’re clicking on, because every mouse click is represented by a little red dot. There’s a difference between single, double and right-clicks. You can adjust the color and whether you want the clicks to be visualized all the time or only when the Mouseposé effect is active.

Keystrokes can be visualized in a similar way. There is a bar covering your screen showing a key the moment you hit it. You can exclude certain keystrokes in the settings.

There’s a handy little menu bar item from which you can access the settings and toggle the effect on and of (although I recommend using the ‘hotkeys’ for this).

So Will it Help?

I haven’t had the chance to try it out in front of a full classroom yet, but I will soon. I think it’s a little tool you just have to start using and after a while pressing the F1 key to highlight something will become routine. I really think it will help those students who always want to know every keystroke you make.

For screencasts I don’t think the mouse highlight function is very useful, as the viewer is sitting close enough to the screen to follow every movement of the mouse. The keystroke visualizer is nice though.

For presenters and screencasters Mouseposé is well worth a try. It can be downloaded from the Boinx Software website. It can be tried for free and bought for €13.93, or $16.95

My recent switch to Gmail made me think about the way I’m used to work with my computer. Switching to Gmail doesn’t just mean switching to a new email system, it also means I don’t have my email on my own hard disk, so I have to trust Google to handle and backup my data well. I don’t know how they do this, and for a person who is used to organizing his stuff on his own hard disk this is quite a shift.

Having my documents only available on the internet is too limited for me. I also want to be able to access everything when there’s no internet connection around. Luckily the tools I started to use have a solution for this. Things like Gears by Google or a desktop client make this possible.

What Gears?

For those who don’t know, Gears is a piece of software which enables offline access to services that normally only are available online. Like Google Docs for instance. One of the things I started using much more actively during the last month. Google just announced offline access to Gmail too, which made it even more appealing.

Things are probably going to move in that direction more and more, as it bridges the gap between online and offline computing. You don’t have to worry about losing your connection to the internet, while everything stays in sync with the ‘cloud’ and accessible from anywhere.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Compared to word processors like Pages or Microsoft Word, Google Docs may seem a bit basic. I does everything I want though, and on the other hand, its simplicity can be seen as a strength. If you prefer to use a separate application in stead of accessing everything from one browser, you can easily use an application like Fluid to create a site-specific browser.

With Fluid I have made my own Google Docs application. Now I have all my documents and spreadsheets together, labeled and searchable as one database. With the new Google Quick Search Box you can even search your documents right from your desktop.

Share It With Others

The real strength of Google Docs lies in it’s sharing capabilities though. How many times have you been emailing a document back and forth? Especially when you’re working together with more than one person this isn’t fun. You quickly loose track of who has it and who made the latest changes. Using Google Docs you can work on the same document at the same time and revisions are automatically saved.

You can choose whether you want other people to collaborate on a document or just view it. It is also possible to publish you document for the whole world to see. It then gives you a unique URL you can publish or send via email. Another great way to work with others on you documents is by making a form, publish it and let people fill in your spreadsheet this way. Great for the evaluation of a course for instance.

Evernote: One Big Box

While google Docs and Spreadsheets offer a great way to organize your data, they don’t swallow everything you throw at them. It would be nice to have a complimentary system that can capture anything, anywhere. That’s why I use Evernote. Evernote can really take the form of a big box to put all your stuff in.

To get stuff into Evernote you can use the web clipper (for chunks of websites), the desktop client, the online version or a mobile version. If I record a voice note on my iPhone it directly syncs with the other clients I use. I don’t need to manually sync anything or set up syncing through Mobile Me, it just works! Besides voice notes I can make a snapshot with my built in iSight camera or my iPhone camera and Evernote will recognize the text for me and make it searchable. Or I can just write a text note.

I can tag my notes, use multiple notebooks if I want (I prefer tagging and using the Search box), and access my notes from wherever I am. I don’t need an internet connection because the Evernote client on my Mac doesn’t need to be online to work. It’s different from Google Docs in that way, as it doesn’t need to run in a browser and thus doesn’t need something like Gears to work offline.

Evernote is available in two versions. A free version which allows you to upload a maximum of 40 MB per month, and a paid Premium version ($5 per month or $45 per year) which allows you to upload 500 MB per month and has additional advantages like sharing any kind of file (with a maximum file size of 25 MB). I just signed up for the Premium as I like to share sound files and bigger PDF documents.

Is cloud computing appealing to you? Are you using these services? I would like to hear your opinion, please leave a comment.

Photo by: viZZZual.com

I have been using Gmail before, but just as an account on the side for subscriptions and mailing lists. I left it at its default setting and never really looked at it extensively. I heard people talk about using Gmail solely for all their email, and I didn’t understand why someone would use web mail, as web mail always seemed to me like a thing people use if they don’t know how to set up their mail clients properly. Now why do I like Gmail so much?

All in One Place

The first new thing I found out, was what eventually made me decide to take the step from Mail.app to Gmail: The ability to set up multiple email addresses to send and receive mail from. When I compose a message I can choose from which account I want to send it. Recipients will not see I used my Gmail account to send it. Now I can send email wherever I go, and I never have to worry about outgoing mail servers.

When new mail comes in, the filters I set up apply colored labels to the messages, so I can see to which address they’ve been sent without opening each message. If I only want see the messages sent to a specific account I can click on the corresponding label in the sidebar and there they are.

Get it Out of Your Inbox!

I try to keep my inbox as empty as possible. After reading and answering a couple of messages I move them to a folder to archive them and get them out of my inbox, out of my sight. More often than not though, I forgot about this step and did it only once a week or so, resulting in a cluttered inbox anyway.

Gmail is designed with archiving in mind. In fact, the first button you see above your messages is the ‘Archive’ button. So all you have to do after reading and/or answering an email is hit this button and your message is archived. It’s still accessible via the ‘All Mail’ menu item on the left of your screen.

Labels and Filters

What about those labels? We’re used to store email in folders. Gmail allows you to automatically or manually assign labels to your messages. This way you can sort your email, you can view messages grouped by label, and give each label a color to make it stand out.

Labels can be manually assigned, or automatically, using filters. A filter can process your email when it comes in. When I receive a message from a mailing list I’m occasionally following, I can set up a filter to let all email from this mailing list skip the inbox, mark it as read and label it. Now if I feel like reading I just click on the name of the label in the sidebar. I also set up a filter to label all email containing attachments. Now I have a nice list of all attached files sent to me.

Keyboard Shortcuts

One of the problems with most web applications is that you have to use the mouse for everything. Being able to use the keyboard for allmost all Gmail actions makes it easy to process your email at a high speed. You’ll have to learn those shortcuts first, but we’re talking about email, you’ll probably spend quite some time in there, so taking this effort really pays off.

Google makes it easy for you, pressing “Shift”+”/” brings up an overlay with all available keyboard shortcuts. There are no difficult combinations, to reply to a message you simply press “r”, to compose a new message press “c” (or “Shift”+”c” to compose in a separate window), to archive a message press “e”, to go back to the inbox press “g” followed by “i”, to undo the last action press “z” and so on. Not very hard to remember when you use it every day!

Enter the Labs

Labs is Gmails “testing ground for experimental features”. Under this tab in the Settings you can find and enable a lot of powerful enhancements to the user interface. Things you don’t want to miss anymore, once you switched to Gmail. To name a few I like:

• Tasks
  Manage a task list in Gmail with nice check boxes and the ability to directly create a task from an incoming email;
• Superstars
  I love this one! In Gmail you can ’star’ a message, making it easy to find it back. Superstars allow you to select different kinds of stars. I use an exclamation mark for emails I have to act on, and a question mark if I’m waiting for an answer.
• Canned Responses
  Create default messages you can send with two mouse clicks, nice if you’re getting asked the same questions over and over again.
• Forgotten Attachment Detector
  How many times have you wanted to send a message with an attachment and then forgot to actually attach the file? This detector will remind you, if you mention attaching a file in your text.
• Send & Archive
  This just came out. It enables a button which allows you to send a reply and immediately archive the conversation in a single action.
• Google Docs Gadget
  A short list of your most recent Google Docs in the sidebar.

There’s much more, and it’s great to be able to customize your Gmail just the way you like it. Talking about customization, you can change the way it looks by changing themes. This feature is only a few months old and I really like to be able to personalize it this way. As I like to keep it simple I use the Minimalist theme at the moment. It’s mostly grey and white and colored labels stand out nicely.

Anything to Improve?

It can’t be totally perfect, can it? Well, I have a few things I would like to see improved in the future. First of all I didn’t find a way to create a nice signature. In Mail.app I had a custom CSS signature with a few links and even a little picture. Gmail only allows you to have a plain text signature, you can’t even include a link to your website.

I’ve been working with Google Docs and Google Reader and I love the ability to work offline using Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser extension that allows developers to create web applications that can run offline. So when I don’t have an active internet connection I can still access and work on my Google Docs, which is awesome! I would love to be able to read and write email offline using Gmail.

Really, there is much more to tell you about, this is just a summary of the things that made me finally switch to Gmail and make it work so well for me. I didn’t even mention threaded conversations, using Gmail on my iPhone (it works great), and the Firefox extensions out there. If you’re not using Gmail (to its full potential), I encourage you to give it a try.

Are you using Gmail? Do you like it? What are your favorite features? Leave a comment to let me know!

Holidays are a perfect time for this ‘experiment’. We have a few days off, how are we going to spend them? We’re so used to being entertained all the time. We can listen to the radio, watch TV, surf the internet, play a computer game, rent a DVD, and our vacation will be over before we know. We could also spend those days to find out what’s really important in our lives. Let’s leave that laptop alone for a few days and:

1. Read a book
   Immerse yourself in a story. Find a quiet place, forget about the time and enjoy the crisp paper between your fingers.
2. Go for a walk
   Get out of that warm house, breath in and feel the cold air in your lungs. Stretch your legs and make a good long walk. Also great in the evening, before sleep.
3. Just sit and listen
   While walking, take a break, sit down and just listen to the world around you. Did you ever notice all those sounds, and how beautiful they are?
4. Bake bread
   Baking a bread takes time. We’re not aware of this when we buy it in the store. Taking the time to bake one makes us aware of those little things in life we take for granted.
5. Chop wood
   Chopping wood with a heavy axe will warm you up, and it’s great to release some energy in a productive way!
6. Make a fire
   What if there’s no central heating? You’ll have to make a fire when it gets cold. If you just chopped some wood, let’s make a fire, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
7. Talk to people
   I don’t mean twitter or IM or Skype with your online buddies, take the time to really talk to a good friend, and don’t avoid difficult subjects, say what’s on your mind.
8. Make music
   If you can play an instrument, grab it and play. Taking the time to jam together can be so much fun and so relaxing!
9. Listen to live music
   If you can’t play yourself, listen to music being played live. It brings such a different energy then when you’re consuming half a song like a snack between two stops in the car.
10. Make plans
    Think about the things you’ve been doing. Is this what you really want to do? Are you happy with your work, your projects, education? Make new plans, and write them down.
11. Enjoy nature
    Many of us are living in cities. That’s where everything happens, there’s no need to get out, right? Do you still know what a forest smells like? The sound of the waves on the beach?
12. Take a bath
    A quick shower is all we allow ourselves most of the time. Now is the time to grab your favorite book, fill up the bathtub and add some lavender oil for true relaxation.
13. Prepare great food
    Now your email is not drawing your attention every five minutes and you don’t have any TV shows you’ll miss, put a little bit of extra thought into your meals and take the time to prepare some really great food.
14. Write a letter
    When was the last time you wrote a letter? I mean a real letter written with a pen on a piece of paper? Is there a person you would like to write to? Would there be a difference between writing this letter and writing an email?
15. Play a game
    We don’t need computers to play great games. Whether it be a card game or a board game, choose your favorite and share the fun together.
16. Go to bed
    My computer can keep me awake way too long. There’s always something more I can do, I can find out or I can read. Sleeping is healthy though, so go to bed early, and wake up fresh and energetic.
17. Read another book
    And when you go to bed, it’s great to read a book, until you drift off to sleep. I prefer reading two books at the same time. One that requires my full attention (non fiction mostly) and one that’s easy to read and works well before sleep.

Avoid Technology to Reclaim Your Focus

Next to the relaxation a few of those days bring, I experienced that I’m paying much more attention to the things I do. There’s a much better focus. Nothing is drawing my attention away from what I do, and I don’t feel the pressure to check my email and don’t have the feeling I’m missing out on something important.

And you know what? After a few days I start up my laptop, I come back online and find out that I really didn’t miss out on anything. Only a few emails that really need to be answered and if there are too many unread news articles in my RSS reader, I just click the ‘mark all as read’ button.

Could you take a few days off and avoid technology and the internet for a while? Is there anything you’d like to add to my list? Please leave a comment!

And the winners are:
Cher and Palma

Congratulaions! Your Poken is on its way.

Two years ago Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte discussed the ‘Undistracted Mac‘ on MacBreak. The Undistracted Mac basically means you hide away as much unnecessary items from your screen as possible so you’ll not get distracted by anything on your Mac except for what you’re doing right now.

Information overload?

There’s a huge amount of information coming to us every day, from various sources. Email, SMS, Twitter, RSS, IM, next to the more traditional telephone, can keep you busy all day. It’s very important to streamline these flows of information, and to keep control of it. If we have all those things checking for new messages and notifying us all day we won’t have a single minute to work on what’s really important.

Applications like Growl can be very helpful, sending visual notifications of what’s happening on your computer, but be careful with it, those little messages in the corner of your screen can easily distract you, especially when you’re using something like Twitterrific and you get a message every few minutes.

Once we’ve taken care of the information overload it’s time to focus. We can make this a little easier by eliminating as much visual distractions as possible. We can hide the applications we’re not using and hide the dock manually, but what can we do to automate this and get an even cleaner desktop?

I don’t need the Dock!

Let’s see if the methods Merlin explained are still applicable two years later. First of all I don’t use the Dock. As I’m an avid Quicksilver user, I never use the Dock to open an application, so I don’t keep any icons in it, it basically stays hidden all the time.

A lot of the things Merlin used are now combined in one nice application: Desktopple Pro by FoggyNoggin Software. It can hide the icons of your desktop (like Backdrop), it can automatically hide other applications for you (like Spirited Away), and it can hide the menu bar (like MenuShade). So there’s no need to run those tools separately, Desktopple will take care of it all.

Don’t hide the mess, clean it up

I like Desktopple very much, although I don’t use it’s main feature: covering up the mess on the desktop. I don’t like to have anything on my desktop at all. And frequent readers of Streamlined Mind know how I solve this: Hazel is doing the work for me.

Whenever a file arrives on my desktop, Hazel sends it away. It can be configured to send movie files to the Movies folder, music files to the Music folder et cetera. When files are sitting in the Trash for more than a week, Hazel deletes them for me, and when I move an application to the Trash, Hazel throws away the application’s support files too.

Finally, I changed the background color for my desktop to black. Black is not a standard color in the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences, so I made a completely black image file myself. Not very hard, you can just capture a part of the screen using Option+Shift+4. You could also use white if you prefer, although you’ll still see the shadow beneath the menu bar if Desktopple hides it for you.

Was this article helpful to you? What does your desktop look like? Please tell me by leaving a comment!

For the end of the year I’ve decided to give away two free Pokens to readers of Streamlined Mind. To enter the contest you just have to do two simple things:

• Sign up to receive new Streamlined Mind articles by email, using the field in the sidebar on the right of this website;
• Tell me your New Year’s resolution by leaving a comment on this post.

That’s easy isn’t it? The contest will be active till the end of this year, so you can enter before the 1st of January 2009. You can enter only once.

I’ll randomly select two commenters who will win a Poken. Make sure you provide the right email address, so I can contact you in case you win!

Since I wrote about Poken I’ve been trying it out, and I have to say it works like a charm. It only really works when you know other people with a Poken too, but in the two weeks I had mine a lot of people asked me about that strange little gadget on my key chain. So if you want to be one of the first Poken users on earth, you can by entering this competition. We might discover that Poken actually is the future of social networking.

Note: I’m not associated with Poken in any way. They did send me some Pokens to give away. So here we go!

If you like this, please spread the word about the contest!