I’ve recently been converted.

No, I’m not talking about religion here. (Who knows why I would ever want to blog about religion, anyway!) I’m actually talking about something much more relevant to most of us in this day and age: e-mail.

I’m sure that many and relate themselves to me when I talk about how, during the past school year, I really didn’t do much to keep my e-mail under control, and I found myself having an inbox full of stuff dating all the way back to last September. By the end of June, I had over 1500 messages in my inbox, and I didn’t even remember what most of it was.

Well, one of my goals this summer was to get my life better organized (both in the real world and the computer world), and e-mail was certainly a major target for getting my life back in order. And lo and behold, I found my inspiration in the July 2008 issue of Macworld, which featured a three-part article by Joe Kissell called Empty Your Inbox (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was heavily based on the Inbox Zero philosophy by Merlin Mann. I delved into the Macworld article, Merlin’s video presentation and Merlin’s own set of blog articles surrounding this novel idea of getting your inbox down to nothing.

And after reading and watching, surprising as though it may seem, I’ve successfully implemented Inbox Zero into my life this past month, and now could hardly imagine going back to letting my inbox fill up. (I’m still going through the last few transitional growing pains of adjusting to a new paradigm for my e-mail, but a lot of this stuff is finally starting to become instinctive.)

While you can go check out this info for yourself, here’s my summary of what Inbox Zero is all about, and how it works.
Continue reading »

Tags: data detectors, e-mail, inbox, Inbox Zero, Macworld, Mail, Merlin Mann, OmniFocus, organization

I’m currently writing this blog post on an iPod touch at my local Apple Store, thanks to the WordPress App for the iPhone/iPod touch. Writing on this onscreen keyboard is still a little bit clunky, but I’m certainly doing it faster now than I was doing when I first picked up an iPhone here a year ago.

As i’m sure many of my readers are aware, I’ve been a very longtime holdout when it comes to iPods and iPhones. In fact, as I described in a recent blog post (boy, I wish this thing had a way to let me copy and paste links), my opinion of the iPods (including the touch) has been that they pretty much didn’t do anything that I couldn’t already do on my laptop. True, these things ate more mobile, but just how many of the mobile features that these things offered did I really need to have with me when my laptop was not handy?

But now this darned thing called the App Store is out. Not only has it wowed certain influential tech reviewers like David Pogue (if you haven’t seen his latest video about the App Store, you’re missing out on something GREAT), but it’s even making me take another look at these pocket-sized wonders.

Twitterriffic is certainly one of those Mac apps that has ported over very nicely to the iPhone/iPod touch, but it actually extends the ability of Twitter to reflect what you are actually doing. After all, most if us certainly don’t spend every moment of the day doing things just in the computer, so for Twitter to realize its full potential, it has to be the kind of service that can go mobile. I’ve had the chance to try Twitterrific on the iPod touch, and it has really felt like a nice transformation from its beautifully-simplistic interface on the Mac to an equally beautiful and simplistic interface on the touch. I could easily see it making me 50% more active on Twitter.

WordPress, the app that I am using right now to write this blog post, is also a very interesting examplenof what’s possible. After downloading this app onto here, all I had to do was enter the URL of my blog along with the username and password for my WordPress admin panel and boom, I was in my admin via the app with the ability to edit my past posts or write a new one, like I’m doing now. I could totally see using this to write a brief blog post from somewhere, although maybe not a really long one like I’m doing now.

1Password has not yet gotten their iPhone version out yet, but after seeing the preview that they posted on their blog, it’s another app I’m quite interested in. One of it’s abilities is supposed to be allowing you to generate super-tough and super-safe passwords, but I’ve been a bit slow at getting many of my passwords safe because I wouldn’t remember them if I needed to login from somewhere else and didn’t have 1Password there to autofill the info for me. Between having 1Password on the iPhone/iPod touch and the my1Password service, however, both of which are coming up soon, I could really have a nice solution for keeping track of my passwords and keeping them secure.

OmniFocus for the iPhone/iPod touch, however, has GOT to be the deal-clincher for me. Since I bought the Mac version at Macworld in January, I’ve been working on adopting OmniFocus and getting used to using it to help me organize the various tasks surrounding my life (and try to reduce stress as well). The problem, however, is that it lives on my computer, which I don’t have with me at places like school and other places where I really need to have it handy to add actions to (as well as reminding me of what actions I need to get done). OmniFocus for iPhone/iPod touch, however, would eliminate that problem by letting me have my OmniFocus lists with me to get to, and let me sync them with the ones on my computer. Add in those awesome mobile-only features like location-aware contexts, and it’s about time to put the “Slippery With Drool” signs out.

While I’m still not interested in the iPhone (unless someone wants to donate the $70/month AT&T plan to me, since I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford that and don’t like AT&T anyway), I’m starting to show a bit of interest in the iPod touch for the first time. It may have just been a touchscreen wifi media player when it first came out, but now, thanks to the App Store, I’m convinced that it’s the best PDA out there, and one that I’m really getting interested in. However, I’ll keep waliting until Apple releases their next line of iPods (likely this fall) until I start saving.

P.S. Do yourself a favor to maintain your sanity. Don’t write a post as long as this on an iPhone or iPod touch. It takes too much patience.

Tags: 1Password, App Store, Apple, applications, iPhone, iPod touch, OmniFocus, Twitter, Twitterriffic, WordPress

Well, I’m fresh back from my trip to Macworld Expo, courtesy of the tech group at my high school that I’m an “honorary member” of. (The “honorary” part means that I don’t actually do anything with them due to my busy schedule.) But yep, we got to go to Macworld as a field trip, meaning we got to legally miss all of our classes today to do so. Oh, I can just feel your jealousy rising.

The general consensus among us was that there was too much stuff for the three and half hours that we were there. (We finished getting all registered by 10:40 AM, and had to leave at 2:15 PM.) It didn’t help that there were two exhibit halls in separate buildings, a block apart from each other. Obviously not the ideal setup, but Moscone North was hosting the United Motorcoach Association of America or something like that. Wow. So, my schedule pretty much involved registering at Moscone West at about 10:20, then going through the West Exhibit Hall at 10:40-12:15, then getting lunch nearby until about 12:45, and then spending 12:45-2:15 in Moscone South. Unfortunately, I only got to see about half of Moscone South’s exhibit hall, which is very, very big.

However, this year, I spent most of my time talking with the smaller developers, which took up the majority of the West Hall and most of whom were together in the Developer Pavillion (aka “Tiny Town”) in South Hall, behind Apple’s humongous booth. I actually really enjoyed that, because in general, the smaller developers are much more approachable than these huge companies with the humongous booths, and they’re much more interesting. I actually got exposed to quite a few new apps that I’m going to have to check out (look at wallet, here comes the fire…). So although I obviously didn’t get to see everything I had hoped (the MacHeist, Micromat, and Microsoft booths were all on my to-do list which I didn’t get to), I still had a good time, a much less stressful time, and came back with some great goodies.

Included in my goodies was the official Macworld San Francisco T-shirt, this time a black T-shirt with blue and white lettering. I also got a WireTap Studio T-shirt from Ambrosia Software. WireTap Studio just looks so cool, so I’m really going to have to try it out. One of the companies actually was interested in doing a promotion with PreviewCast, and gave me his card, so there may be some interesting news coming from that soon.

Oh, and I got OmniFocus, the totally-awesome GTD application from the Omni Group for only $30. The regular list price is $80, and I got more than half off through a Macworld discount and a student discount. I’ll definitely be spending some time trying out OmniFocus and you can expect a detailed review here soon.

Don’t worry, you haven’t heard the last of my Macworld experiences yet, but I thought that I’d share just some of what I did at the exhibit hall today. One of these days, maybe I’ll actually be able to spend a full week at the conference.

P.S.: Sorry, but I didn’t get any pictures there this time. But I did get something else just as good! Hint hint…

Tags: Apple, developers, exhibits, Macs, Macworld, Moscone, Omni Group, OmniFocus, PreviewCast, recap, San Francisco, School, trip, WireTap Studio