MacBreak Weekly 58: Repeal the Nerd Tax

>

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Alex Lindsay, and Chris Breen

>

Chris reviews the new iPods, screen issues with the Touch, and the trouble with ringtones...

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 58.

Oh, brother, I was totally high on cold medicine when we did this episode. But, not so high that I couldn't recommend Flying Meat's amazing new Acorn, a stripped-down, and very inexpensive graphics app. It's one my favorite Mac programs of the year.

The Problem

GTD is all about rapid, intuitive selection of what you need to be working on now. Whip out your context list appropriate for the time-place-opportunity-space you are in now. Scan through it, then do.

For the longest time I was having a problem with this. I'd scan through my context lists and I'd see things like:

Very fun video by Matt McInerney -- what it would be like if Quicksilver came to life outside your Mac. I sure like it better than living in a YouTube thread.

Quicksilver in Real Life from Matt McInerney on Vimeo.

[via: tumbl.us]

• How to catch a mouse without a mousetrap - 43f’s designer, Chris Glass, shares his humane mouse mojo. “Set the fella loose at least a mile away from your abode. Postnote: It worked within the hour.”
• notes on ‘dancing monkey rss reader’ - “I would like an RSS reader with a button that says 'Gimme 5' and it loads only five posts people with similar subscriptions are reading within the last 24 hours.” I want something kinda related for email — show me exactly 5 messages that need a response (then, let me get back to work)
• Daring Fireball on switcher-come-latelies - “There’s a whole class of recent switchers who define ‘Apple fanboy’ as ‘anyone who’s been an enthusiastic Mac user since before I switched to the Mac.’”
• Name that Color - Chirag Mehta : chir.ag - “Being a typical guy, I have no clue what the colors Lavender and Mauve look like. You can show me Indigo and I won’t know if it’s more like Violet or Purple. So I made this little app where you can create a color on the screen (or copy-paste CSS hex# color) and find out the name of the closest matching color.”
• greys : Java Glossary - Me? I love me some greys, and I like seeing them all at once with their hex codes. Handy.
• A List Apart: Articles: The Perfect 404 - Seems like a smarter person than me could make a pretty nice “similar to what you searched for” using Drupal and Views Fast Search. Sounds like a job for the Lazy Web. Any takers?
• someecards.com - “When you care enough to hit ‘send.’” Hilarious ecards, nearly all in terrible taste, and outfitted with awful Reagan-era clip art. Pure gold.

I've become an ardent Google Documents fan over the past few months -- especially as its support for Safari has improved (didn't say perfect; just improved). I use it for collaborating with clients and 43f guest authors, as well as for managing small projects and keeping various small teams organized. Personally, I find it simpler than a wiki and a lot more powerful than using a static .doc.

My favorite use right now is to use a single shared document as a common space that 4 or 5 people have access to and that they can use to give each other to-dos, ask questions, etc. I know stuff like Basecamp does this better and certainly with more sophisticated features, but I'm really attracted to the simplicity of the one-document approach -- especially for informal, remote teams.

I think my gDocs cincher was the first time that it occurred to me to see if I could even look at my documents on my iPhone; I was gob-smacked to see that it actually worked. Obviously it's not optimal for doing lots of editing, but you can see and perfunctorily edit your documents without a laptop, and that's just pretty mind-blowing to me.