The Mogambo, lurking in the harbour.

If it were, it would make a good photo, especially as I live about five minutes’ walk from the lock gates, the yacht’s only escape route. Well, assuming that it wouldn’t just transform into a submarine, drill to the centre of the Earth and destroy the human race while its owner searched for a fabled superdiamond. You never know, with these Bond villain types.

Anyway. My point is that I did two things when I heard this. First, I set up a Twitter search for “Mogambo”, the name of the yacht, and then I whizzed my Mac’s screen over to its “Dashboard” with a Minority Report-style finger-flick and checked my tide table widget.

High tide wasn’t until gone 1pm. So, I could easily nip to the shops. But – I checked the weather widget – when the yacht did leave, I’d probably have nice blue skies behind it.

At which point, I realised I use quite a lot of apps and widgets for photography. Not apps that take photos, or process photos, but helper-around-the-edges apps. Photography support apps, if you will.

Dashboard tideApp

For example, in my Mac’s Dashboard I’ve got:

• The Weather Channel widget.
• The Sol app, which lists sunrise and sunset, dawn and dusk.
• The TideApp widget, which tells me whether the Avon is going to be a nice, wide reflective surface, or a vee of mud with a trickle of water in it. And is also useful for predicting superyacht movements.

As well as dashboard apps, I use a few iPhone apps.

The most obvious is my friend Benjohn’s Sun Scout, an “augmented reality” iPhone app that tracks the path of the sun across the sky during the course of the day. Go somewhere photogenic, fire it up, and it’ll superimpose the path of the sun throughout the day on top of whatever your iPhone camera is pointed at. So, you can easily figure out exactly where and when the sun sets in your scene, say. Handy. (Disclaimer: if you buy Sun Scout, I get a small kickback from Benjohn, because I helped out a bit with it.)

WorldView

Thinking more laterally, I also use Momento to keep notes when taking holiday photos, where I might not get around to processing photos until long after I’ve forgotten exactly where I was. On my last trip to Crete, I fired up Momento at the start of every visit to an interesting place. At the Roman ruins at Aptera, for example, I took a picture of the signboard and tagged the location. When I finally looked through my pictures, a month later, I had a little potted history of the place and the exact latitude and longitude, which made tagging and titling a lot easier.

I’d guess Evernote (also available for Android) could do this, too, or maybe a geographical check-in tool like Google Latitude. Whatever you use, make sure it doesn’t need a net connection if you need to use it abroad and you don’t want to pay roaming charges, though.

Conversely, you’d have to be on the net to use WorldView. It shows you feeds from nearby webcams. Even if it’s sometimes just motorway cameras, it can still tell you if there’s a nice photogenic fog out there in the morning, or give you an idea of what today’s sky looks like. All without getting out of bed.

So, you get the general idea. Find an app that’s not specifically intended for photography, and bend it to a photographic purpose. Twitter, webcams, location tagging, weather, tide tables – whatever works for you, on whatever platform you’ve got.

Do you already use some photography support apps? What are they? If not, can you do a bit of lateral thinking and come up with an app that can make your photographic life a bit easier? Let me know!

The Mogambo leaves Bristol

After quitting my job, I studied for a while, then started work on porting Get Running—an iPhone app I’d already been tangentially involved with—to Android. (Don’t get too excited, Android fans; we’re in the “R&D” stage at the moment, this will not be an easy job, and any one of a large number of problems could scupper the project before it sees the light of day.)

I started work at the beginning of December, so I’ve now been working from home for a couple of months. I’ve found a few things that work well for me, when it comes to getting stuff done, so I figured I’d share.

First up, what I think of as the Early Morning Call. For the Get Running job I’m freelancing for my friend and erstwhile Warwick CS coursemate Benjohn, who runs Splendid Things. He suggested an Agile–style “stand-up meeting” at the start of every day, and that’s worked really well.

The idea is that we get together at the same time every morning—for us, around 9:15—and each say what we did yesterday, and what we plan to do today.

If there are things that might get in our way during the course of the day’s work, we might talk about them, too, though not necessarily to solve them. Just noting barriers in advance can help you start thinking about ways around them.

I’ve found our morning “stand ups” extremely helpful. I was a bit skeptical when Benjohn first floated the idea, because I’m from a corporate background, and therefore naturally suspicious of meetings¹. But I’ve found that:

• The stand-up helps me focus on what I need to get done today. It often generates my “list of stuff to do today”.
• Knowing that tomorrow morning I’m going to tell someone what I did today motivates me to get useful chunks of work done every day.
• It helps me be realistic about what I can achieve in a day, and how much free time I actually have. If “get the car serviced” is one of my barriers, that’s realistically half my day gone, and accepting that fact in advance can make me feel less rubbish when I only get a few hours’ work done that day.
• It helps get me out of bed. I seem to be more productive when I keep regular hours. I try to be up, showered and dressed by the time the meeting starts. Though I don’t always succeed. Sometimes the meeting is held pyjama party-style!

You don’t have to have a client, or be working on the same project, to have a useful stand-up. Benjohn and I aren’t truly collaborating on the Android port of Get Running, because I’m writing the Android version from scratch (for various reasons), and because Benjohn’s working on a different project at the moment. You should have someone who can understand roughly what you’re up to when you describe it, and understand your barriers, as Benjohn and I can because we’re both programmers, but that’s the only common ground you need.

Also, Benjohn and I are rather stretching the definition of a “stand-up meeting”, frankly. We don’t stand up, or actually physically meet. We do the meeting via Skype, and we’re normally sitting down, me at my desk at home, and Benjohn in a café.

We do try to keep the meeting short and to the point. It helps to have somewhere to shelve things you want to talk about at length: a “let’s talk about this one down the pub on Thursday” list. Benjohn and I are toying with the idea of making a podcast about mobile development, so we often park things on the “possible podcast topic” list.

So, find a way of limiting the time of your stand-ups, whether it’s a rule that you do physically stand up, or a countdown timer where, when it goes off, you just stop the meeting. And don’t try to fill up an agreed time with meeting. Your timer is your maximum. Some days Benjohn and I are only on the call for a minute or two.

We don’t always manage to get together, but not having the meeting is the exception, rather than the rule. I think we’ve probably managed to have the meeting on about 90% of the weekday mornings since we started. If we cancel, we’ll generally cancel at the last minute.

So, that’s my first tip for working from home. If you can find someone—anyone—who is in similar working circumstances, even if you’re both working on separate projects, I think it’s worth a try. It’s certainly worked for me. (Thanks, Ben!)

1. Meetings, for technical people in the Dilbertian corporate world, are quite often intensely unproductive and pointless

Most telling for me was what I thought Marco was going to say in his last paragraph. I think it could equally well read: ‘I don’t think the e-reader is “doomed” at all. It may just be relegated to a fringe device for reading nerds, but then so has the book.’

I was in the same exact situation, except mine’s a BMW, not a Mini =). I found that if you disable podcast syncing, do a sync, and then re-enable podcast syncing and sync again, your podcast playlists will come back. I hope that works for you too.

As soon as I got back to my iMac, I tried this workaround. Here’s what I did, exactly:

• I double-checked my phone. There was definitely no “MINI4_Podcasts” playlist.
• I docked the iPhone with my iMac.
• I selected the iPhone in iTunes’ left-hand pane.
• I switched to the “Podcasts” tab of the phone management screens.
• I unticked the “Sync Podcasts” checkbox.
• I hit “Apply”.
• I waited for the sync to finish.
• I re-ticked the “Sync Podcasts” checkbox. Handily, all the options about which podcasts to sync were remembered from before.
• I hit “Apply”. This time, the sync took quite a while, as it had to re-copy the podcasts (all 36 of them, in my case) back to the phone.

So, did it work? I fired up the Music app on my phone. Now, my MINIn_* playlists are all in a folder called “iPod Playlists”. Bizarrely, when I launched the “Music” app on my phone to have a look, I now had two identically-named “iPod Playlists” folders. The first was as it was before — it contained only the Smart playlists, “MINI1_RecentlyAdded”, “MINI2_Recent_Podcasts” and “MINI5_5Star”, with no sign of the manual podcast playlist, MINI4_Special.

However, the second copy of the “iPod Playlists” folder had “MINI1_RecentlyAdded”, “MINI2_Recent_Podcasts”, “MINI3_Audiobooks”, and “MINI4_Special”, the manual playlist that was missing. (Oddly, this “duplicate-but-not-quite” folder is missing “MINI5_5Star”. I’ve no idea why.)

So, though it looks a bit broken, at least the manual podcast playlist seemed to be back on my phone. I headed out to my car, and tried it, and my stereo found all the MINIn_whatever playlists just fine, regardless of which of the two odd duplicate playlists they were in.

W00t! So, thank you very much, YouOverRotated, looks like you’re quite right — turning off podcast syncing, and then turning it back on, seems to be a workaround to this odd problem. Yet another wacky workaround to make podcasts work properly in iTunes — but at least it’s working!

I hope this helps anyone else who’s been having trouble. Happy holidays!

EDIT: Whoop! Looks like YouOverRotated’s comment below was spot-on. Thanks! See my new post on how that suggestion got my playlist syncing working again.

Oh, iTunes. Does it have to be this way?

So, I now have iTunes Match, with all of its associated Cloudy goodness. But I also have a problem. Can anyone help me solve it?

Here’s the circumstances:

• I like listening to podcasts on long journeys in my car.
• My car, a Mini, has an iPod connector in the glovebox, which is therefore where my iPhone lives while I’m driving.
• My car’s iPod connector makes certain playlists available through the buttons on the stereo. Specifically, if I have a playlist called “MINI1_whatever”, it’s selected when I press button 1; “MINI2_*” is available on button 2, and so on.
• My MINI4_Special playlist is my favourite playlist for long journeys. It’s a (non-Smart) playlist I pre-fill with podcasts that I want to listen to while I’m driving. I specify which podcasts, and the order I want to hear them.

Up until iCloud started raining on my parade, this all worked fine. Before I drove anywhere, I’d fire up iTunes, fill up MINI4_Special with the podcasts I wanted in the order I wanted, sync my iPhone, and it would all be there and waiting for me when I plugged the phone into the car and pressed button 4. If I fancied listening to music for a while, I could press another button to listen to another playlist, then later hit “4” again and go back to the podcasts.

But now — disaster!

I paid my £21.99 for iTunes Match, and turned on the iCloud stuff on my Mac and my iPhone. And now I can’t sync my MINI4_Special podcast playlist with the iPhone any more. In iTunes, the playlist has a little sad picture of a cloud with a line through it. It tells me:

This playlist is not eligible for iCloud. iCloud playlists can only contain music. “MINI4_Special” contains other media types, and will not be uploaded.

And I can’t for the life of me find any way of getting the playlist back. No matter what I do, it won’t sync to the phone.

Did I just pay Apple £21.99 to shoot myself in the foot? Am I being dumb? Bueller? What am I missing? All help gratefully received.

But it’s difficult to ignore the issue when seven hours of every day is spent doing something you’re just not that fond of, even if the people are nice and you can get the boat to work.

So, a while back, I started digging around to find some more personally-interesting bits of the programming trade. First, I started learning about the web (although I was at university at just the right time to see the web kicking off, I went straight into the back offices of the finance industry when I graduated, and so haven’t touched it much.)

The web stuff led to a bit of work for my friend Benjohn, who makes Get Running (and also got me started jogging, but that’s another story.)

Long story short, I’ve spent a fair bit of my free time retraining myself, learning about HTML, PHP, CSS, XML, JSON and all the other acronyms and abbreviations with which the web likes to surround itself. On top of that, I’ve done odd jobs like designing icons for iPhone apps (I did the Sun Scout icon, and all its little suns, too. Not bad for a first attempt, I thought…) and familiarised myself with a whole bunch of different tools.

But doing all this stuff on top of a day job, as well as keeping up all the weird and wonderful spare-time things I like to do (from taking up photography to interviewing people for the BBC!) has left me pretty much exhausted and anxious and lacking in time to unwind.

So. Enough is enough, I thought. Part of my long-term strategy was to save up a chunk of rainy-day money, and I recently decided to declare now as my rainy day.

I have therefore quit my day job. This may seem a foolhardy move during a recession, but it was either that or lose my sanity, I think. As of a couple of weeks ago, the 21st September, I am no longer slaving away at a corporate desk writing complicated SQL queries and calculating loss ratios.

Where do I go from here? Well, first of all, more education. For the next few months, I plan to throw myself into a crash course on mobile app development. I’ve got lots of excellent resources lined up, from books like Tapworthy and The Big Nerd Ranch’s Guide to iOS Programming to Harvard Extension School’s E-76 course (available online as a set of video lectures. Their E-75 was brilliant, so I have high hopes for E-76…)

Now, that’s not all I’ll be doing — I’d probably go stir-crazy learning on my own at home for too many days in a row — so I’m sure there will be more of my usual spare-time weirdness cropping up. Last week I took a couple of days to put together my first Arudino project, for example, and I’m sure other whims will arrive. And I will have to make some attempts to socialise; my longest conversation today was with the lovely Fran at Boston Tea Party, and I think we made it to five sentences.

But the good news is, for a while at least, I have seven extra hours in the day, and my weird spare-time projects should at last have some real spare time to be done in. And maybe I’ll have a bit more time to blog about them, too…

I’m sure the release of Lion will be accompanied by an entire pride of in-depth reviews. In fact, people have been doing warm-ups to get ready for John Siracusa’s mammoth review…

So, instead of digging too deep, or tackling any of the more controversial features — and it’ll be interesting to see which generates the most arguments out of Resume, Launchpad, iCal’s leather look, or just the new scrollbars — I’m going to touch on a few teensy, out-of-the-way Lion areas that I particularly like.

Photo Booth’s Four Quick Pictures

Photo Booth gets a refresh with Lion, most noticeably the Full Screen mode, with its wood panelling and curtains. But the feature I like most could easily pass you by. Photo Booth has always had a “take four snaps” photo mode, where you get the chance to take four poses. But it would only export the “four up” photo as a single photo, with all four snaps on it. Which is fine as a gimmicky shot, but not that useful per se.

With Lion, though, you get the choice. You can export the four-up ensemble as before, or click to zoom on any photo of the four and then export that photo individually — just drag and drop. Snap four sequential shots with a single click, and pick the one that works! As an avid DailyBoother, this is going to make my life easier.

Floating Dictionary Enhancements

As with Photo Booth, the “floating dictionary” window is not new in Lion. It’s been around for years, but is one of the lesser-known features of OS X. In Snow Leopard, hover your mouse over a word hit Ctrl-Cmd-D, and a little mini-dictionary pane floats up and defines the word for you, in Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Wikipedia.

In Lion, this dictionary has been given a makeover. The word you’re defining is highlighted in yellow, the pop-up is both snazzier and more informative, and, crucially, it’s easier to invoke.

Ctrl-Cmd-D is still the keyboard shortcut, but you don’t have to be floating exactly over the word. For example, if you’re typing a document, hit Ctrl-Cmd-D and you’ll define the last word you typed.

To go with all the other new touchpad gestures in Lion, there’s also a multi-touch shortcut for the floating dictionary — a double-tap with three fingers over a word will also bring up the dictionary. Quick, and, for me, easier to remember than Ctrl-Cmd-D.1

All these little improvements have made for a much more useful Dictionary, especially for us keyboard geeks who don’t like reaching all the way over to the mouse do do stuff.

Draggable Page Width in Full Screen Safari

I’m quite enjoying Lion’s Full Screen mode on my tiny 11” MacBook Air. It’s definitely designed for these smaller laptops. On the other hand, some web pages have text that flows across the full width of the page, which can make lines way too long to read.

Apple have put some thought into this one, though, with my next little luxury. Open up a web page in Safari’s full-screen mode, and then push your mouse to the extreme left or right of the screen. Your mouse pointer turns to a little “sliding division” cursor, and you can squeeze the screen in from both sides until it hits a good width.

Bonus tip: in the rest of Lion, you can now drag from any edge of an app window or dialog box — top, bottom, left or right — to start resizing it. Also — thanks for the tip, @mattgemmell — hold down Shift or Option to constrain the resize. For example, Option-drag in from the left-hand edge of a window and the right-hand size will simultaneously squeeze in to match.

iCal Natural Language Parsing

I’m straying onto the beaten track a bit here, but I want to mention iCal’s natural language parsing, because it’s a good keyboard-user-friendly change.

If you can bear to look at the new leather iCal, click that “+” button at the top. Now type “Dinner with Jane, 7pm Friday.” Pop! And there’s your new event, with the description, time and date ready-populated in the appropriate fields.

This kind of natural event entry will be familiar to users of Google Calendar. If you want to see it done really well on the Mac, try Fantastical.

Cute Greyscale Icons

Cuteness

If you’ve used the new iTunes, you have a hint of what a lot of icons are like in Lion. Everything’s gone grey. Now, even if you miss the colour, I hope you’ll admit that someone’s clearly put a lot of time into these new greyscale icons, and I think they look pretty spiffy, especially the Finder and and Mail.app sidebar icons.2

But my favourite new icons have to be the big “something’s not quite right” icons. It’s just like Apple to pay attention to icons even in areas where they won’t be seen all the time. The big greyscale Safari icon that appears if you try to load a web page when you’re not connected to the internet is good, by my hands-down fave is the big cute parachute icon that appears if you try to use AirDrop without having Wi-Fi turned on: beautiful, friendly, and sitting inset in a subtle texture background.

About This Mac

Finally, “About This Mac” (Apple Menu → About This Mac → More Info) gets a makeover. The part I most like is the Storage section, where you get a coloured-bar overview of your disk usage split down by category, very similar to the view of your iPod storage in iTunes. It’s a very pretty overview, even if most of my space is currently taken up by “Other” — this may be more useful for the non-geeks, whose files are probably a bit easier to categorise…

(If you want to see a really pretty disk space usage app, though, ignore the built in free stuff and give £13 to the developers of DaisyDisk, which is a gorgeous alternative to traditional treemap-style disk usage viewers.)

Geeks will be happy to know that OS X’s detailed System Information app is still available from the “System Report” button.

Conclusion

And that wraps it up for my little Lion luxuries. As I said, I tried to keep off the beaten track with these — have you encountered any more hidden gems in Lion that others might have missed? If so, leave a comment…

The OS X user-level Library folder (/Users/<your short name>/Library, or ~/Library for short) is hidden by default in Lion. I’m going to show you several different ways to show and open your Library in Lion, in increasing order of geekiness and permanence.

Caution: anything you do in your Library, you do at your own risk. Apple have hidden it for a reason in Lion, and I’m not going to be responsible for anything you break if you open it up and start fiddling with it.

The Simplest Option

If you’re in the Finder, hold down Option (Alt) and hit the “Go” menu in the menubar. As long as you’re holding down the Option key, the Library will appear in the list of locations in the drop-down. Select it and a Finder window will open up on your Library folder.

Favourites

Once you’ve got a Finder window opened on the Library, you might want to keep it hanging around by dragging it to your Finder’s Favourites list in the sidebar. But if you can’t see the folder itself, only open a window on its contents, how do you do that?

Well, the little folder icon in the title bar of every Finder window is actually draggable, if you hold down Option (Alt). So, holding Option, just click and drag the Library folder from the title bar of the Finder window straight to the sidebar, and put it wherever you want in your Favourites list.

The Toolbar

Again, holding Option, you can also drag the titlebar folder icon straight onto the Finder toolbar. It’ll then appear in every new Finder window.

From a File Dialog

If you’re in a File Open/Save dialog, you can just type your way to your Library folder. This trick isn’t new to Lion. Just type a tilde (“~”) and you’ll be presented with a “Go to the folder” box. Carry on and type “~/Library”, hit enter, and you’re there.

Bonus tips:

• Just as “~” will bring up a “Go to the folder” box starting from your home folder, typing a “/” will bring it up starting from the root, so to get to the System Library folder, just type “/Library” and hit enter.
• If you’re in a File Open/Save dialog box and quickly want to get to any folder or file you can see in an open Finder window, just drag the folder or file straight from the Finder onto the dialog. The dialog will jump straight to it.

From the Terminal

The Library isn’t hidden from the Terminal; you can see it and access it just like normal. It’s worth remembering, though, the OS X open command, which will open applications, files and — get this — Finder windows on folders. So, if you’re in the Terminal and want a Finder window on your Library, all you need to type is:

open ~/Library

…hit return, and a Finder window will appear.

Reverting To A Non-Hidden Library

While still in the Terminal, try having a look at your Library, including the flags set on the directory, like this:

Matt-Gibsons-MacBook-Air:~ matt$ ls -lOd ~/Library/
drwx------@ 74 matt staff hidden 2516 18 Jul 15:26 /Users/matt/Library/

And there’s the secret: The Library has the “hidden” flag set.

To un-hide the Library, change the hidden flag with this command:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

You may need to restart (at least the Finder) for this flag change to take effect. Also, I can’t guarantee that you won’t need to re-do that every time there’s an OS X version update…

That’s all the ways I can think of to access the Library in Lion, for now!

If you’re in the market for more Lion tips, I’d recommend David Pogue’s book Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual:

• Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual on Amazon.com
• Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual on Amazon.co.uk

Enjoy!

preppeller:

Just a quick note to say that the latest update of Fantastical (v1.0.1) now works great with Alfred. If Alfred is running, simply click here to install the custom search into Alfred then use the f keyword to enter a phrase into Fantastical such as…

f Thorpe Park for Roller Coasters tomorrow at 10am until 6pm

or

f Buy Alfred Powerpack in 5 minutes