Sciral Consistency lets you track repeating tasks using fuzzy intervals.

Elegant app for writers.

[n.b.: this post has been updated to reflect the release of version B32r2. --2004-11-06 15:35 PST]

Since there's new folks moving to Quicksilver all the time, I thought I'd post some more starter tips if you're following along here. If you have questions about stuff not working as described, doublecheck your setup and the tips below.

O, Quicksilver, that little minx. The way she hides her functionality in coquettish little corners vexes and delights me. Did you know, for example, friends, how much you can do with Quicksilver and your modest arrow keys? Me neither. Til now.

So, quick review: once invoked, Quicksilver primarily uses the arrow keys to let you navigate through hierarchies and sets of matches. Up and down arrows let you surf sibling contents of a given directory or catalog, while the left and right arrows allow you to drill down and back up out of hierarchical levels, such as nested folders and the like. (Related tip: you can also surf up and down most any hierarchy using / and Shift-/)

All easy enough, right? But did you ever try clicking the right arrow key with an application selected? Well, you should.

OSXCon | Merlin Mann

Danny and I had a great time doing our talk yesterday at O’Reilly’s OSXCon. Met a bunch of great people and enjoyed the chance to hang with like-minded nerds. I love that people want to show me their squirrely productivity setups. Time management pr0n! Totally into it.

Our time for the session just flew by, so we didn’t have the time we would have liked to spend with all the apps. If you were there (or just like to play with OS X apps), here are links to all the things we talked about (or planned to talk about). If I left anything off or you have any questions, feel free to leave comments.

Thanks to Derrick and Vee for all their hard work, and thanks to everyone who showed up, asked questions, and just said hi. Stay in touch.

• TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X - Text editor with interesting shell integration
• Daring Fireball: Markdown - Turn structured txt into valid XHTML
  • HumaneText.service - Txt to HTML and back again, as an OS X Service
• Quicksilver - Application launcher and much more
• nondeterministic . net : hack : fiwt - Incremental search for Safari pages
• michael-mccracken.net - [i-search] - Incremental search in many Cocoa text fields
• Notational Velocity - Sexy note-taking and incremental search in one nerd-friendly app
• Welcome to Flying Meat Software, home of VoodooPad - Wiki comes to your Mac’s desktop
• PithHelmet - Filter ads, apply styles, and protect your privacy, per-site
• Welcome to Growl! - Notification program lets you know what’s happening under the bonnet
• Tynsoe projects - [GeekTool] - Make your Desktop look like “The Matrix” with notifications, photos, and shell output
• Safari Enhancer - Flip on the debug menu and more
• Bonus - Here’s the modest “hamburger helper” html file I use as a snippet in TextMate

Also—since a bunch of folks had asked—the Finder replacement app you saw in the demos is Path Finder. It’s a terrific, super-functional app that adds tons of features to speed up your work flow.

Wrote this long-winded post to the TextMate list, so I thought I’d repurpose it here. Just quick tips on adding metadata to your text files and—because I’m a dull and repetitive scold—using controlled vocabularies to keep your stuff searchable.

You probably already know about Instiki. It’s is a terrific, elegant, beautiful wiki that I personally use for half a dozen of my own projects. I’ll probably run a longer post on Instiki some time in the future, but I can especially recommend the OS X install for Mac users. If you have a server that can handle Ruby 1.8.1, I can equally recommend the regular Ruby install. The app is gorgeous and works swell either way.

One of my favorite things about Instiki is how attractive and simple it is to use (PHPWiki, you’ll always be my first love, but sometimes, you’re just too high-maintenance). Instiki even lets you apply your own custom style sheets without having to change any actual code (Dear Typepad: Please steal this idea. Love, Merlin.). Here’s a quick tip for adding your own styles to your Instiki wiki.

Funny thing. I installed SideTrack primarily for its ability to emulate the “CTRL-click” (or “right-click”) on my one-button PowerBook. I tried it for a week, almost loved it and eventually disabled that one feature because it was driving me nuts (forever glancingly tapping the trackpad and getting contextual menus everywhere. Gaaah!). Well, the good news is that I love practically everything else about SideTrack and thought I’d share how I’m using it to hotrod my web surfing in particular.

So here’s screenshots of my setup, with notes where needed. Note that although I'm using Safari here, many of these bits should be even more applicable on Firefox, which generally allows more granular preferences control as well as more key bindings, I believe.

I can tell I’ll be spending a lot of the next few days exploring TextMate. In the interest of efficiency, I’ll park all my preliminary notes and “gee whiz” stuff in this post. I may do a fuller review/intro later, but I want to share what I’m learning since there’s so much interest in this app.