The problem

As the owner of a MacBook Air, I was looking to keep a lid on the size of OmniFocus’ backups directory. As an example of how this can get out-of-hand, on my iMac this directory had nearly 900 files (dating back more than 3 years), and had swelled to over 70 GB. This was choking my Time Machine drive to death, and clearly wouldn’t make the tiny, SSD on my MacBook Air very happy.

The solution

David’s suggestion was to make a Hazel rule that would delete any files older than a certain age; a couple of weeks, for example. That’s a great idea that I implemented immediately.

The fly in the ointment

Then I had a thought: what if I go on vacation for a month (I know: never happen — work with me, here), or work exclusively from one workstation for 3 weeks? Hazel will, as instructed, delete all of the backups on me. Not so cool.

As it happens, I had asked Noodlesoft about making a rule that would allow deleting files older than a certain date but retaining a certain minimum number of files, and they told me it wasn’t possible. That was before Hazel 3.0 came out, though.

The answer

Now it can be done. Add a rule (choosing “Other…” from the pop-up menu and searching for “number”). Set the “Number of items” to whatever you’re comfortable with. I chose 5.

Here’s the screenshot:

And here’s the finished rule:

Now any backups older than 7 days are tossed, but I’ll always have at least 5 files retained. Sweet.

As part of my daily routine, which is based on Daily Morning Review Routine with OmniFocus, at Simplicity Is Bliss by Sven Fechner, I check my spam folders for false positives — messages that got mistakenly flagged as spam.

Because I use C-Command Software’s excellent SpamSieve Mail plug-in on my MacBook, I don’t spend much time worrying about spam, but every once in a while something from a client gets caught in its filters. To keep this from turning into a big deal, I give my spam folder a cursory glance every day or so.

At least I used to.

Spam got out-of-hand

Today I discovered 404 messages in my SpamSieve folder. Been a while since I took a peek in there, apparently.

OmniFocus to the rescue

Since I already have OmniFocus tasks for each workday to remind myself to check email at 10 am and 4pm, I decided to add a reminder to check the spam folder once a day, too.

Tasks’ notes fields — not just for text

That’s a good start, but I want to make this as foolproof as possible, for obvious reasons (not just because I have 2 spam folders), so I was hopping to be able to add a link directly to the mailbox, rather than just the link to Mail.app that I have in my regular daily email tasks.

You probably know that you can enter notes, URLs and aliases to documents and individual email messages in your OmniFocus tasks’ notes field, but did you know you can drag applications in, too, making clickable aliases? It’s very handy.

It turns out that you can drag .mbox files in, too, and instead of revealing them in the Finder, it switches to Mail.app and opens the mailbox. This is very cool.

How to set this up

You can find your mailboxes’ .mbox files in ~/Library/Mail/V2/IMAP-@your-email-account-@your-email-host/, which you can get to under Mac OS X 10.7 Lion by choosing Go to Folder… from the Finder’s Go menu (Command-Shift-G).

Then typing ~/Library/Mail/V2/ into the sheet that drops down:

Double-click your email account folder. You should see a bunch of files like these:

After creating a “check the spam folders for false positives” task in my Monday daily routine project, I simply dragged my SpamSieve.mbox file into its notes field:

And, since I have 2 spam boxes — 1 for SpamSieve and 1 “On My Mac” — I dragged the other one in, too. (Purists might want to create a separate task for that. I didn’t: life is short.)

Spam isn’t a one-time thing, so…

The next step is to make it a repeating task with a 5-minute window just before the end of the workday:

Then set it to repeat every week (until OmniFocus understands weekends, I have 5 nearly-identical weekday projects, which isn’t all that bad, since Mondays and Fridays have extra tasks associated with them anyway), duplicate it and move copies into each day’s routine.

Set it and forget it

Now I won’t have to remember to check for false posititive in my spam box any more, and fewer things will slip through the cracks.

The more of these things that can be triggered without having to remember them, the better.

Happy GTD.

• iCloud Forgets to Keep it Simple by Ted Landau at MacObserver
• All about iCloud: Common signup scenarios by Serenity Caldwell at Macworld
• Take Control of iCloud eBook by Joe Kissell for TidBITs’ Take Control series
• Using iCloud with iWork for iOS by Lex Friedman for Macworld
• Search for all iCloud-related articles at Macworld.com — there are too many to list here

Situated directly across from Mount Allison University’s scenic swan pond, our new contact information is as follows, effective immediately:

• Our phone number is now 1 (506) 364-9408.
• Please note that our previous land-line and fax numbers are no longer in service.

We’re excited about this move and invite you to drop in once we’ve had a few days to get settled in!

If you’ve been expecting to hear from me I should be in touch soon.

In general the update to Lion has gone smoothly, though.

Home screen

Here’s my current home screen, with the most-frequently used apps in the dock. The closer to the bottom-left of the screen, the more-often it gets opened.

Dock

• OmniFocus has replaced Things as my GTD-based task management tool of choice on the Mac, iPhone and iPad. It is indispensable.
• Apple’s Mail app is used far too often.
• Twitter is my current Twitter client, though I bounce back and forth between it and Twitterrific. I like trying lots of Twitter apps because there’s a lot of innovation going on in this space, and because it’s easy to jump from one to another. Ideally, though, I want to run the same app on Mac/iPhone/iPad, otherwise it gets easy to confuse DMs, @replies, etc. And that can get awkward.
• 1Password. Stop reading and go get it. I’ll wait. Here’s a recent post on 1Password.
• Safari, for those times I don’t need a secure log-in.
• Notes apps — an entire folder full of note-taking apps.

Other home screen apps

• Calendar, Contacts. There are no compelling reasons to replace these that I’ve seen.
• iBooks. Solid. The reading experience is very good. Recent addition of Collections is welcome. Inability to copy passages from books is not.
• Kindle. Amazon’s reader is kind of weird around the edges; getting books into it is easy, actually, but totally any other iPad process I’ve come across. Still, their book selection is excellent, and reading in the Kindle app is just fine. Lack of clipboard-export support is as frustrating as with iBooks.
• Instapaper. Marco Arment’s little app that could. Send all the web-based stuff you want to read later to this service, then read it at your leisure on your iPhone, iPad or on the web. Might sound bizarre, but it’s awesome.
• Reeder. My favourite way to consume RSS feeds. The fact that the icon is a different colour than on the iPhone (where it debuted) or on the Mac (where it’s different altogether) makes it quite difficult for my visually-oriented brain to actually find this app; I wish the developer would bring the icons into sync.
• iPod. Yes, I acutally use this. Mostly for podcasts on the iPad.
• Videos. Movies (mainly backups of my DVDs or Digital Copies from my Blu-Ray™ collection), videos I’ve shot myself and video podcasts. Awesome for the treadmill.

Notes folder

• Evernote is fantastic. Mac/iPhone/iPad/web. Sharable, OCR-searchable, GPS-enabled, awesomeness. Job-related notes go in here. Everything goes in here.
• Penultimate. Just got it. Looks great. Looking forward to using it. Others, like Adobe Ideas, never really worked for me, and the Griffin stylus I have isn’t great for drawing (too much friction); a finger works fine, though.
• PlainText, with Dropbox support, seems to be my go-to app for quick notes.
• iA Writer is very nice. I’m not a writer, though, so I don’t use it very often.
• Pages. Never use it.
• SoundNote is great if you wish to record the audio in a meeting and be able to cue up what was being said when your typed something out. A revolutionary concept in note-taking, really. Can be handy, but get permission from meeting participants first — there is a creepiness factor otherwise.
• Trunk Notes is a wiki-style editor with Markdown and Dropbox support. Never really use it.
• TextExpander is especially great if you also use it on the Mac; it allows short, user-defined keystrokes to expand into longer strings of characters. Type “TII”, for example, and get “Tantramar Interactive Inc.” as output. Despite iOS not supporting the kind of background processes that would enable this on the Mac, enough apps have built-in TextExpander support that this turns out to be quite handy. When you remember it.
• Notes, Simplenote, Audiotorium, Adobe Ideas (a drawing-based notes app), and Chalk (an iPad-only, web-based, drawing-oriented notes app from 37Signals, round out the notes apps.
• WordPress, which used to be buggy, and which once deleted an entire post on me, sits here, languishing, until MarsEdit for iPad comes along. Are you listening, Daniel?

Work

I have a conflicted relationship with most of the apps in this folder. In theory they’re all great. I never open this folder.

• Daylite. Sigh. This might be awesome if I ever find the time to finish setting up a proper server for it.
• OmniGraffle. One of the best apps I never use.
• Keynote, Numbers. They’re great. I don’t need them.
• Bento. Why do I keep imagining that I will need this one day?
• Doodle. Website is all I need.
• Insight. Please don’t make me use Basecamp any more.
• LinkedIn. Website is more than I need.
• CSS3Machine. I’m sure this would be handy if I was smart enough to figure it out.
• AnalyticsPro. I tend to prefer Google’s web-based version, but this is sometimes handy.
• dbd, Delibar & Bookmarks: Delicious apps. Delibar is my favourite on the Mac, but I think I would like dbd better if it supported multiple accounts. Maybe it does, but I haven’t figured it out if it does.
• iTeleport. One of the best apps I never use.
• Server Admin. I actually use this regularly. It’s quite good.

Reference

• Dictionary. The full, paid version. Love it.
• Maps. Handy.
• Google Earth. Don’t know why I don’t delete it. It demos well, but it’s useless to me.
• Translate. From Google. Mind-blowing.
• Star Walk. Real-time observational astronomy app. As someone who used to teach introductory astronomy at the university level, I love this app. The iPhone version is just as cool.
• Soulver. Very cool concept. Never use it.
• Wolfram. Very cool but hard-to-grasp concept. Is it reference? Is it calculation? Is it Q&A? Never use it.
• iMDB. Use this far too often.
• Articles. Award-winning Wikipedia app. Also great on the iPhone. Unnecessary. Get it anyway.
• Google. Never use it (I use Safari’s built-in Google search bar instead)

Social Media

• Twitterrific. On heavy rotation with Twitter.
• Friendly. Because Facebook has said they don’t view the iPad as a mobile computing device. Also because their iPad app — were it to exist — would likely be as frustrating as their iPhone app. Or their website, come to think of it. Never mind.
• Ego. Never use it. I never like what it has to say.
• Stumbleupon. No time.
• Droplr. A cool idea. Never use it.
• Birdhouse. A place to save Twitter drafts. Uh, what are twitter drafts? (drafts are built-in to most clients now)
• Echofon. Not on heavy-rotation as my Twitter client, but I like that it can sync my twitter stream’s read/unread status across platforms. Why do none of the others do this? Sadly not a killer feature, apparently. Still; not deleted.
• Osfoora HD. Huh. Forgot this was here. Twitter client.
• Tweet Library. Save your tweets, archive them offline. Handy, say, should you meet someone across the country and you want to review the timelines for a blog post…

Games

Not much to say about games, really. I don’t play them often. But then can amuse people who want to see what an iPad can do. mondoSolitaire from Ambrosia Software is probably my favourite. Osmos HD is cool, awesome sound, and also available on the Mac App Store.

Utilities

• Dropbox. The glue that holds it all together. So many apps sync/store their data via Dropbox. Love, love, love Dropbox. Works on all platforms. Get Dropbox free here.
• Awaken. Yes, my iPad and iPhone are my alarm clocks.
• DisplayPad lets you use your iPad as an external display for your Mac. Stupidly cool, especially if you have an 11″ MacBook Air with a small screen, and already carry your iPad around with it. Requires a wifi network.
• Pastebot. Copy and paste clipboard data between an iOS device and your Mac. Woah.
• Calcbot. Because Apple doesn’t ship a calculator app for the iPad.
• Napbot. Ambient/white noise generator. Handy for those with tinnitus.

• iPhone 4 lands face-down (tweet)
• Sad iPhone 4 photo (tweet)

Amazingly, the camera lens is a separate, inset piece of glass, and didn’t shatter, so the phone was 100% functional. It’s just that its functions now included drawing blood if you got any tiny shards embedded in your hand (which hurts a lot more than any cut that small has any right to).

A quick Google search revealed that it could be replaced while-you-wait at an Apple Store, which would be great if I didn’t live a 1000 km (an 11-hour drive) from the nearest Apple Store, in Montréal, Québec.

Last week, when I was visiting friends in Deep Cove, BC, I made a side-trip into the Apple Store in downtown Vancouver.

As you can see, for 2 pm on a Monday, when the Pacific Coast mall was not busy, the Apple Store was.

Despite the line-up at the Genius Bar, someone looked after me right away. They found out what I needed and brought me to someone who scheduled my repair. “Have a seat over there,” he gestured. “Someone will be with you in 8 minutes.” Uh, okay. 8 minutes? Yeah, right.

About 10 minutes later, a blue-shirted Apple employee came out and apologized profusely for keeping me waiting. “This will cost about $30. Fill these out”, he said, handing me forms that said I understood there was a chance the data would get wiped from my phone. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Sure enough, he came back with the repaired iPhone, but when he looked at it he noticed a hair trapped behind the glass. “Hey, this thing has looked like a spider-web for weeks; I don’t care about a hair!”, I said. “Yeah, but it’s over the camera lens…” He held it up to the light and turned on the camera. Sure enough, there was a large halo around the hair. “I’ll be right back” he said.

2 minutes later, he comes out with the iPhone again, takes my forms and says “I’ve taken up enough of your time today. There’s no charge. Get out of here!”

All in all, a pretty damn good experience at the Apple Store in Vancouver. No wonder it’s so busy in there.

I agree with Smith, by the way, that the iBooks experience with this eBook is excellent. Dini makes Creating Flow with OmniFocus available in a number of electronic formats, though, and his customer service is excellent.

The Apple ecosystem has been blessed with a number of really solid Twitter clients for Mac OS X and iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch), and one of the best — Twitterrific (which was featured among Macworld’s “10 best reading and productivity apps for 2010″) — has just released a major new version for Mac OS X.

Download Twitterrific 4.0 for Mac OS X:

• from IconFactory
• from the Mac App Store

Priced at $10 for the Mac, where the iPhone/iPad version is free for use with a single Twitter account, though you can purchase an in-app upgrade that unlocks advanced features, this price is not out-of-line considering the cost of competing apps and the value it provides.

As a regular user of many different Twitter clients (I’m not a fan of the Twitter website), something I value highly is having the same interface available across devices. Using Twitter’s iPhone app together with Twitterrific or Kiwi on the desktop is a recipe for confusion. Confusion that can result in sending what you thought was a private reply (a Direct Message) out to all of your followers on the public stream. Oops.

The main contenders offering Mac OS X and iOS clients are Twitter, Echofon and Twitterrific.

Twitter’s Native Apps

The Twitter app for Mac OS X (née Tweetie) was late to the game, and is very good. It’s also free, and has the competitive advantage of inside-knowledge of where Twitter’s feature-set is headed.

Despite that, the leap-frogging of iPad/iPhone/Mac versions of the client has resulted in a somewhat disjointed experience, with the iPad version in particular feeling a bit over-the-top in terms of interface conventions.

Twitter for iPad is also a bit buggy (direct messaging is a mess, frankly, with disappearing text and “send” buttons, inexplicably-inverted direct message timelines that lose position, etc.)

Echofon

Echofon costs $20 on the desktop, and has solid iPad and iPhone versions, and offers a compelling feature that I wish all Twitter apps would embrace: remembering what messages you’ve seen already — across devices. What Echofon lacks is an interesting interface. They’ve chosen a minimalist approach that many will love, but which doesn’t make it appealing to me.

Twitterrific

It’s hard to pin down what’s so good about Twitterrific. The cross-device consistency is a big part of it. It’s got an overall spit-and-polish that other platforms lack. Twitterrific’s colour-coding of your public stream, mentions and direct messages is one of my favourite features. It makes things easy to grasp at a glance and is very easy on the eyes.

Minor niggles

I only mention these because I like Twitterrific so much. Most people will never notice or care about these things, but I do.

1. the page-up/page-down keys do nothing in Twitterrific 4 for Mac (this harkens back to Tweetie, which fixed this in Twitter for Mac. Please fix this! The Home button scrolls you to the top of the stream, but that’s little consolation…)
2. when the timeline is scrolled to the top, there’s a gap at the top (the elevator/thumb/scrollbar doesn’t ever get to the top of the window), which makes it look as though there’s another message. The iPad version has this gap, but it’s much smaller.
3. messages (e.g. “Connection error”, “Message posted”, etc.) show up at the bottom of the window. But your attention is at the top of the window, where new Tweets show up. On a 27″ or 30″ display, that makes them effectively non-existant
4. Twitterrific 4.0 for Mac continues Twitterrific’s disjointed tweet-specific menu system. Right-clicking a tweet brings up one set of commands, while clicking the tweet’s arrow brings up another. Worse is that on iPad/iPhone, it’s hard to hit the arrow, which brings up the other menu, which is frustrating.
5. Twitterrific’s Messages pane mixes all of your DM conversations together; Twitter shows you each person’s avatar and lets you view conversations separately, which is better in that you’re less likely to send a reply to the wrong person

One of the best things about Twitter as a service is that it’s easy to switch clients, just to try them out, and switch back. There’s a lot of great, innovative work being done in this space, so download some apps, try them out, and reward the developers with a few dollars. They’ve earned it!

—Christopher Mackay