I ticked the wrong box

This morning I saw on the iTunes store that Automattic had their wordpress iPhone application released. I promptly downloaded and installed it onto my new phone. I’m writing this entry on it now and it seems pretty good. You can upload photos but I think writing HTML will be a bit of a pain, but for a quick blog post it seems to do the job. I say if you have an iPhone and a wordpress based blog then this is a good application to have, and the price can’t be beat.

Update: uploading a photo causes my iPhone to crash. I’ll try again :-S Hmmm, it worked that time.

Update 2: now it tells me I have an invalid image, and it won’t upload it. I hope they get that sorted soon. No images for you this post sorry.

Today I had my first experience creating a VERY simple workflow with Automator.

I was editing word documents, excels and powerpoints on my mac and then sending them back to my work PC so that I could embed visio diagrams in them, as well as image files I have on that machine.

I was emailing lots and lots of files, and doing it over and over again, so I thought there must be a better way to do this. Even Windows has a “Send To” option in Explorer, so the mighty OSX 10.4 should be able to do that too.

So, to cut a long story short I clicked on Finder in the applications pane, then selected “Get Selected Finder Items” as the action. That was dragged over to the workflow area.

Then, I checked out the actions in Mail. This was a bit confusing, because initially I tried to run “New Mail Message”, and then “Add Attachments to Front Message”. This second step is unnecessary. First of all “New Mail Message” returns “Mail Messages” and can’t be used as input for “Add Attachments to Front Message”, and secondly files/folders are input to “New Mail Message” and they are attached automagically. I then selected my details by clicking on the Address Book icon, and set a subject “Files from home”.

Third step was to send the message. The action is called “Send Outgoing Messages”. This was dragged over, and then I saved the action as “Send Files to Work”.

Now I have a shiny new menu item under automator. Basically any file(s) or folders I want to email to work, I now just right click, go to automator, and click on Send Files to Work. And off they go!

I will have to play with Automator a little more I think. I’ve had my mac over 2 years now, and this is the first I’ve used it.

(from wikipedia)

Getting Things Done, commonly abbreviated as GTD, is an action management method, and the title of a book by David Allen.
GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

I have previously used the GTD method when I was leaving Auckland, so I could ensure that I managed the many tasks I needed to complete to move countries. Since then, my GTD implementation (based on tracks) slipped back to becoming a home for stagnant tasks. My tracks implementation was also local to my home machine, and I couldn’t use it for my day job. I also had a couple of usability issues with tracks (which I _should_ really write patches for and submit).

BUT, a couple of days ago I discovered gtd-php. It seems like a more complete (read: strict) implementation of the GTD methodology. I installed it with ease over at textdrive (it’s PHP, so requires none of the proxy-forwarding malarky that Rails needs to run under lighttpd), and have started to use it for work and home(work). It seems like a good implementation, and I’ve experienced few issues with it so far. The only thing I don’t like is the inability to see what contexts exist without pretending to create an action to access them via the dropdown box – I added some, and made a mistake, and had to drop into the database to correct it. It’s quite a new implementation I think, but it looks very promising.

I also got lots of stuff done yesterday.