Thursday, November 15, 2007

Leopard: 10.5 Reasons I Love It

I've been (very) slowly moving into Leopard. In short, I'm a fan, and here are 10.5 reasons why:

  • Time Machine Rocks For Most People. For a simple "set it and forget it", and "now my mother will be backed up" Time Machine keeps people protected without having to do anything. Backups for people who don't back up.
  • Spaces. Apple meets virtual desktops. This is really cool - especially dragging windows from Space to Space, setting apps (like iTunes) to appear in every Space, and the first time you set up a Space wholly for a full screen Terminal session you'll love it. It rocks with multiple monitors. It even works doing VNC (via the builtin Screen Sharing) with Spaces + multiple monitors. Rawk.
  • Things seem much faster than in Tiger
  • XCode 3 is pretty good. The Research Assistant rocks, the editor, while improved, is still "fair". (Although "fair" is better than XCode 2's "poor" editor). I don't know if I like the new warning/error bubbles, I always fight with getting them out of the way. The new themes are a great idea - I'm going to spend a lot of time staring at this thing, might as well make it look pretty.
  • Stacks only make sense to me when using the Overlay Drawers. Without these overlay drawers I always try to control-click on a folder to access the hierarchy. With the drawers I have a visual indicator that they are "bins"... not folders (so I don't expect them to work like they used to, like being... well, useful). It's a personal brainhack, but boy does it help. Apple should hire that designer, cause Stacks needed that.
  • Spotlight is so much better. It's actually responsive, and you could use it for an application launcher if you wanted. Things that would always crash on me under 10.4 (like trying to find an application by some oddball Kind that wasn't in the initial list of kinds) now are lightning fast.
  • Terminal: So much better. Themes (like in XCode 3) are a nice touch.
  • Back To My Mac (like a built-in dynamic-dns) sounds really great. As does being able to sync widgets, and some other stuff from machine to machine. .Mac goes far beyond the Calendar/Address Book syncing it used to be able to do, and that's great.
  • The new Downloads folder is just the thing I've been manually creating for 7 years. Thanks Apple for finally realizing the Desktop isn't the place for Downloads.
  • I don't know what I think about the new look for when windows are in the background. Sometimes I find it hard to pick out background windows from active windows, or one background window from another. (It could just be me.) BUT: Having a unified appearance again... About Darn Time!
  • The Dock, on the sides, looks really cool. On the bottom... garbage heap it, boys.

Looking at Tiger through Leopard eyes: Tiger was version 1.0 of a lot of things (Spotlight, Dashboard). Leopard removes the warts and makes them actually work. (Spotlight team, I'm looking at you. So happy).

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Thoughts on 4 Hour Work Week

I've been listening to 4 Hour Work Week. Here is what I've taken away so far:

  • Optimize your workflow - even if it's something simple like spending 20 mintues to turn a 10 minute task into a 1 minute task
  • Go info-lite. There's got to be some RSS feeds you can live without (NetNewsWire tip: Get Info on a feed and in the Refresh settings you can set it to Never refresh. It's an easy way to shut down a feed without deleting it... and really, all the important stuff filters through Gruber anyway...)
  • I'm not sure 4 hours of work a week is feasible (maybe in sales, but here in production land...), but such extremes do mean there's a lot of portential timesaving measures - even if you don't expect such dramatic results
  • I'm starting the whole "Get Something Done Before Checking Email and News" habit. Mornings are hard for me, so this may or may not last. Doing light work like news and email was my way to start the day out easy... OTOH, starting the day out productive sounds really great too.

Nutshell: Where as GTD helps organize your life, 4 Hour Work Week helps optimize your life. (Wouldn't you like to get your pretty Next Action context lists done faster?)

Other Reviews: The Simple Dollar's Review of 4 Hour Work Week, which gives a really good summary of the book (instead of my "Ryan's Taken Away Gems" approach).