the personal blog of john montgomery

I get an enormous volume of email every day, with several hundred received every 24 hours. Dealing with the volume is minimized a bit by utilizing Gmail filtering, which is absolutely brilliant. When mail is received, it gets filed into various folders such as mailing lists, fxphd support, fxguide press contacts, software development lists, and newsletters. In the filters, I set each to “Skip Inbox”, so they don’t show up in the Inbox. This leaves my inbox count with only direct communication I have with others, which includes time-urgent emails, non-urgent emails, as well as a few emails that don’t fit the filters.

But that’s still a lot of email to deal with and if I’m not on my computer for a while, I can easily have more than 50 emails waiting for me when I get back. That’s where Triage comes in, an incredibly simple iOS app to deal with my Inbox. It is basically a “stack” of snippets of the unread messages in my Inbox that allows me to do the following:

• Flick up to mark as read, so when I get to my computer it’s not in my unread smart filter
• Flick down to “keep”, which keeps it as unread so that I can deal with it when I get to my computer
• Click to view the full message if the snippet isn’t enough
• Reply to the email or forward it

In a way, it’s a super simple Mailbox. But I personally love the focused simplicity of what it does.

Which is helps me keep control of the emails that I truly need to deal with in a timely manner

The next offering in the “Apps I Love” series is Alfred, a killer application launcher. If you’ve never used an application launcher before (Quicksilver was a previous standard), they are great for quickly navigating through your system. But the thing about Alfred is that is so much more. With the addition of the PowerPack, it has totally changed the way I get around on my Mac.

How does it work? After installing, you’ll have a little hat icon in the menu bar where you can access the various preferences for Alfred. The app, by default, will launch on login so that it is ready and waiting to work its magic. By pressing Command-SpaceBar (note this overrides the default Spotlight command), you’ll call up the default Alfred search entry. You can then type in what you want to search for. There are lots of things you can do with Alfred…

Launch Applications
In the following example, I wanted to launch Lightroom, so I pressed Command-SpaceBar and then typed “li” (could have actually just entered “l”, since Alfred will refine its results based upon your past behavior). Pressing return will launch Lightroom. I could have launched any of the other items by pressing the appropriate Command-Number combination shown.

Pressing Command-Space and then "li". Pressing Enter would launch it.

It’s at the point where I hardly ever use the Dock to launch apps — it’s so much easier with shortcuts.

Play Music
Why would you want to use Alfred to play music? For me, it’s because the search functionality is much faster than itunes. The PowerPack has a built in mini-player which is easy to use. Just press Command-SpaceBar and type “it” Return to launch it.

The Alfred iTunes mini-player

Calculator

Clipboard History
Alfred will remember your clipboard history. Admittedly this can be a bit of a security risk if you mac is open to everyone, but mine is on lockdown so it’s fine by me.

Clipboard History

It may seem as though I’m calendar-obsessed, but frankly it’s a critical part of what we do in the collaborative workflow of fxguide and fxphd. In the Chicago offices, we have several calendars which we use to track production, term needs, and even my (insane) travel schedule.

I also love apps that are cleanly and simply designed — they look great and just work.

Put these two things together and I’ve come to rely on an app called Fantastical, which places a calendar icon on your menu bar. By clicking on this icon, you can see at a glance what you have planned for the day (or the next week by scrolling down). It’s nicely presented and always there to refer to.

But the real killer feature imho is the ability to quickly enter appointments in a human readable form. In the example to the right, I’ve simply written:

record fxphdod on monday at 5pm

And it correctly enters the event into my calendar. It’s not perfect, but it works extraordinarily well most of the time.

iCloud is still very much in beta, experiencing the loss of several useful features from MobileMe when making the transition to the new platform. A huge shortcoming of Apple’s calendar functionality is that if the person you want to share a calendar with doesn’t have iCloud, you can only share it read only.

The fxguide/fxphd crew is OSX-centric, but sharing outside the company becomes problematic. So I’ve shifted the hub of my “calendaring” to Google Calendar. This does involve a bit more setup than the pure Apple one, but the extra hassle is worth it…once you find the real instructions on how to make it work
Read more

Well, actually, this included some hiking, trail running, and a bit of photo taking walking. I got up to go running and again it was raining early on Sunday morning. Luckily the showers were brief and I was able to head out and enjoy the morning.

The run starts out at Artarmon train station, which is effectively where I’m staying in Sydney for the month. After a short run through the neighborhoods, the path begins at Artarmon reserve and meets up with the relatively new bike/run paths along the Gore Hill Freeway. Unlike the weekday mornings, the path had quite a few runners, cyclists, and walkers. It then flows into the Bicentennial reserve and Flat Rock Gully before emptying out in Long Bay.

Click through for the GPS track and more images from the run….

Read more

One thing I really enjoy about traveling is running in a new location. I’ts my third day in Sydney and I got up early to to go out, but it was pouring rain. Luckily around 9 it tapered off as there was a gap in the rain coming off the Pacific. I had plotted out a path on Google Maps after hitting numerous dead ends on Saturday — and was very glad I did.

There is a fantastic network of running/cycling paths between the various suburbs here such as Chatswood, Cammeray, North Sydney, and Lane Cove. It seems as though when they put in the Lane Cove Tunnel several years ago, they planned for these paths along the new highway. While some is along that highway, much is through neighborhoods and park lands.

The most stunning part was Flat Rock Gulley, where the entire drainage for the surrounding suburbs runs. I first ran along the rim and then found a trail which lead down into the gulley to the rushing waters. I was actually quite close to the harbor and hoping to make it, but couldn’t cross the several foot high river torrent. The gulley was a lush rain forest with some amazing bird wildlife and plants. I’ll take my camera the next time.

I walked quite a bit this morning just to take in the sights, so my stats weren’t great. But sometimes it’s not about the numbers, but the sights.

Distance: 5.07 mi/8.16 km
Duration: 1:11:00
Average Speed: 4.3 mph/6.9 kmh
Elevation Gain/Loss: 726ft/720ft 221m/220m

I’ve been dealing quite a bit with our health insurance industry in the states, attempting to provide insurance for the employees of fxphd. That’s a different and fucked up story, but it has opened my eyes to how state-supported healthcare in other countries is, at the very least, a great safety net. But that’s the insurance aspect — let’s just talk about where we stand in the world regarding life expectancy:

50th.

Pathetic.

See The CIA World Factbook for the figures.

I’ve decided to start 2012 with a new series of posts reflecting upon how the US could look outside our borders for examples of how to improve things, as well as a reality check on things that really aren’t something to brag about in our country. I really do love living in the United States with all it brings; each time I return from visits outside the country I’m truly happy to be home.

That being said, my travels over the years have pointed out many areas that could be improved in the states. I’m not suggesting we emulate them fully — there are many problems with the social welfare structure in Europe and the UK. But we do have something to learn.

What’s especially disappointing is our current political situation, where (mainly), the Republican party often drapes itself in the flag, turning its back on the facts and pointing out how wrong it is to look outside the borders for ways in which we could be better (see Mitt Romney, Gingrich, Santorum)

So I figure I’ll take a lookat some realities as to how the United States compares with the rest of the world. Some will be based purely in facts/stats — and others will be more based upon my experiences. One thing that I’m sure will be true is that those that think we’re number one will be sorely disappointed.

I’ve been working with OS X Lion installed on my MacBook Pro for the last several weeks and the experience has been incredibly painless. It’s not my main “production” workstation as I’m still using a MacPro tower at work for Nuke (Nuke 6.3v1 does not run under Lion) and Smoke and large scale projects. But I still use various mainstream desktop apps such as Adobe CS5.5 and do my main web development on the MBP. I listed the main apps I use on my MBP below.

I thought I’d put together some initial thoughts and suggestions. It’s not meant to be a full up review — for that go, to a professional such as John Siracusa’s review at Ars Technica whose reviews are always incredibly in-depth.

That being said, here’s a quick overview of my initial thoughts/suggestions I feel you might find useful….
Read more