Tag: Mountain Lion

Posted on

Tools (an update)

So a while ago I wrote about changing the tools I was using in a bid to be more organised, has it worked, not really, but this is more down to me than the tools.

A bad workman blames his tools but in this case the fault lies squarely with the workman.  I’ve got out of the habit of making notes, setting reminders and generally (and to the amusement of those who know me) taken to relying on my memory (stop laughing at the back) and in a lot of ways that has worked, not relying on technology to feed me everything I need has helped, maybe not with my organisational skills, but it has helped in part with my memory, or maybe that’s been the recent work I’ve been doing and those I’ve been doing it with.

Amusingly as I write this I’m about to start a role which see’s me as “scrum master” for a project, surely a test of my skills, in both organisation and getting stuff done.

Posted on

All change (Tools that is) ?

So after a few recent frustrations with some of the software I used and a twitter conversation last night with @jamesketchell and @andyrixon I’ve spent a bit of time during the course of the day changing some of the tools I use.

So out with Google Chrome and back in with Apple’s Safari, this is in part due to frustrations with crashing but also I had been using Chrome on my iPhone and iPad but the default actions within iOS is to open in Safari so I had two different browser history’s and couldn’t see the tabs I had open via Chrome across all of my devices unless I copied and pasted the link from an email / tweet into Chrome.  However of course I still can’t not until the update to iOS to add iCloud tabs (but there is reader for sharing sites of interest.)

So change of browser, and good bye instapaper as a side effect, which I tended to forget I had anyway.

Next up, Getting Things Done (GTD)

So over the last few years I’ve tried a number of apps and ways of keeping / logging tasks and reminders.

and a couple of others which have come and gone. (in the case of some apps deleted in less time than they took to download)

My requirements in my mind were simple, a note / task / reminder should be quick and simple to add, be on all of my devices and be able to be added into folders / projects / related lists.

Nice to haves were things like recurring tasks when completed (useful for Physio which I should be doing daily for example!) but none of the above have really worked, so along the same lines of my browser change over I’m trying Notes and Reminders like Safari the power comes from using the iCloud account to sync everything up, so now  in theory with some of the other iCloud services I now have my bookmarks, reading list, open browser tabs (once iOS 6 comes out), notes, photos (using photostream) emails, diary, and reminders all synced up across all of my devices…. it almost feels like the future is here.

I just wish that iCloud still synced up the Keychain and could be used by developers such as Panic so that Transmit bookmarks were synced !

Yep, never happy ;-)