petersteinberger.com » Productivity

A better Open Quickly: PeepOpen

studpete — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:19:46 +0000

PeepOpen is an alternative QuickOpen app. It replace the various (more or less bad) dialogs from TextMate, Xcode or some other tools. I just tested it with Xcode, and it’s awesome.

The tool is based on this blog post rant.

And yet most text editors offload these important tasks to the operating system or implement half-hearted custom solutions. Even worse, third-party plugins frequently implement file-jumping functionality for different frameworks with unique, cryptic key mappings (e.g. between implementation and test or controller and view template). This is a core task! Editors should approach it with the same innovation and care they spend on basic text entry.

It has fuzzy-style pattern matching and even shows your git versioning status next to the file. Nuff’ said, watch the short screencast and try for yourself!

On motivation

studpete — Sun, 30 May 2010 23:57:43 +0000

Everyone should know this. I linked both the animated presentation from RSA Animate, and a TED talk from Dan Pink. Go watch the TED talk first, Dan Pink is a really capable speaker.

If you don’t watch this, just remember:

Pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Big financial rewards don’t motivate. Give your employees autonomy, mastery and purpose. It’ll make people happy, your business more successful and the world a little bit better.

If you ever make a startup.

It starts today…

studpete — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:38:04 +0000

… after work, when I finally get my iPad.

Switch the picture of the Mac Pro with an iMac and you got it pretty right.

No related posts.

Me wants!

studpete — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:59:05 +0000

No related posts.

On project management

studpete — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:01:38 +0000

Lesson learned today: Use different email accounts for different projects. This seems to be the only valid solution to my email-lookup-obsession.

This also keeps mixing your private account with your support emails. I should have done this from the start, but convenience told me not to.

There’s also the problem that you can’t be logged in into multiple email accounts at a time.

Best solution out there: google apps (standard edition is free)

Split your working time in slots. If working on the project, don’t do anything else, and ONLY THEN look into the emails. You don’t miss anything if you don’t check your mails 10 times a day.

I still don’t know how to manage my app-review-obession though

The Readability Bookmarklet

studpete — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:37:32 +0000

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your Web browser.

First click after page loaded.

Tip: don’t use TypeKit fonts… the implementation is still slow & buggy in WebKit.

Fix Home/End on Terminal.app in Leopard/Snow Leopard

Introducing FocusApp

studpete — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:36:35 +0000

We all know, multitasking is evil and slows us down. But it’s not so easy to just focus on one thing, sometimes you wanna be reminded. What better place could be there than the always-visible MenuBar?

Let’s introduce FocusApp!

Yes, thats all. Enter some text you wanna be reminded of. It’s there as long as you wish, and hopefully it makes you a sore conscience if you slip away to something different than you should. For now, its Snow Leopard only, download it now.

It’s open source (new BSD) and on GitHub.

Disclaimer: FocusApp is really my first Mac app, besides all the iPhone stuff. It’ll will get more features eventually, but for now it just works, simple and beautiful.

Planned Features:

Keyboard support
History and Persistence
Flashing Text (to remind more obtrusive)
Sparke
About Screen

GMail Labs: Hide read labels

studpete — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:51:48 +0000

I absolutely love this feature. It’s like adding a bit ZEN to GMail.

Share mouse & keyboard

studpete — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:51:34 +0000

Really nice. Move your mouse to one side of the screen and watch it move to the next pc/mac in your room. This feels really natural is surprisingly easy to do.

Remember, it DOES NOT make sense for a device with no monitor attached! You want VNC then.

If you run macs only, there’s teleport. It’s free and supports encryption, although setting up the encryption is somewhat difficult. (be sure to remove all known screens and readd them after setting up your private certificate)

teleport works really well and is my perferred choice.

Well, if it happens that you have windows or linux on your desk, then synergy is for you. And there’s a nice mac installer too. Synergy was not updated for three(!) years now, but seems it does it’s job pretty well, and the mac port is actively maintained. (including snow leopard support).

Setting up one of these tools is quite similar, you need to add screens, synergy needs your own server name (network name) as screen and every client that you want connect, like this:

There are several tutorials for synergy, check them out if you need help.

Managing your dot files with git

studpete — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:41:28 +0000

I published some of my dotfiles in a git repository: http://github.com/steipete/dotfiles

You get colors, git completion, git branch naming, rails shortcuts and much more.

Some of the files are from http://github.com/slayer/dotfiles