David Claridge

It’s about time for some updates.

Yesterday I reformatted my MacBook Pro and installed OS X Leopard. Now one of the arguments I’ve often used with Windows (TM) users when discussing reasons to switch to Mac has been that unlike Windows which seems to get ‘clogged’ very easily and needs a reformat every 6 months, OS X does not suffer from these issues. I now have to bite the bullet and say I was wrong about that, because my Mac certainly was ‘clogged’. The only technical issue I was experiencing was it’s tendency to take up to five minutes to shut down, and I couldn’t seem to trace this behaviour back to the installation of any particular application, but the main reason for the reformat is sheer laziness on my part when it comes to cleaning this up properly. I suppose it’s very similar to the way I treat my desk at home, when things are getting messy, instead of meticulously going through each item and putting it in the right place, I dump the entire contents on the floor, then put back in place what I think ought to be there, and throw the rest out. The same applies to m home directory backup, and my list of applications, everything has been dumped on my Ubuntu box, and only those items which belong will be put back. I’ve certainly noticed a performance increase since the reformat, I wonder which processes were slowing things down, guess I’ll never know.

Since it’s a time for clean starts, I thought it was about time I start using my workspace properly, as well as preparing things for when I move to iPhone. In the past I had a fairly disorganised mashup of Firefox2 Live Bookmarks, Google Reader subscriptions, Google Calendar & iCal calendars, two or three different email clients, etc, etc. So, what did I install after my fresh install of Leopard?

• Software Updates
• XCode
• Firefox3 (oh so awesome)
• Adium
• iStumbler
• Last.fm

…. and that’s it. About 1/3 the number of applications I had previously, but most were unused. I’ll probably not even install TextMate, which I bought a license for 1.5 years ago, since in the last 6 months I’ve almost exclusively used Vim. I’ve still to install a few media applications, VLC comes especially to mind. My dock layout has also changed, I now have, from left to right:

Finder, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, Spaces, Firefox, Adium, iStumbler, Terminal, XCode

I suppose I should comment on two things that are new in my lineup, first of all Last.fm. This neat application that launches automatically whenever iTunes does ’scrobbles’ what I listen to, uploading statistical information to my Last.fm profile. Thanks to Chris for the tip. This would seem to be a much nicer alternative to my old ‘turntable’ page, that was generated by a script that runs every 3 hours, just displaying my 500 most recently played items. Last.fm not only knows what i’ve been playing, but how many times I’ve played it, and of course like all Web 2.0 applications, you can compare your preferences with those of your friends, to discover how musically ‘compatible’ you are. Unfortunately I didn’t install this application before reformatting, if I’d known it had a feature that could seed your profile with past play count data from iTunes I certainly would’ve done so, now it has to learn from scratch what I like… well it is a day for clean starts, so I guess what I listen to should be no exception, perhaps a bit less Coldplay since it’s been seriously dominating my playlist since their latest album, ‘Viva La Vida’, came out.

The second iTem that’s new, is ‘Spaces’. Now even back in my Debian Desktop days, I didn’t really take advantage of multiple-desktop features, mostly because I found it too much of a burden to keep track of which desktop I should place applications on as I launch them. The nice thing about Spaces in OS X, is you can assign applications to spaces, so they appear there whenever launched. This forces me to use spaces, and as such should assist greatly in the transition. My current application assignments are:

Space1: (Personal Information Management)

• Adium
• Firefox
• Safari
• iCal
• Address Book

Space2: (Media)

• iTunes
• VLC
• QuickTime
• DVD Player
• Last.fm

Space3: (Programming)

• Terminal
• XCode

Space4: (Misc)

• iStumbler
• System Preferences

Spaces really does the whole multiple desktop thing well, a view of all spaces with the ability to drag and drop windows, keyboard shortcuts to cycle through spaces, and a very neat way of moving windows between spaces, makes it lovely to use.

The other thing I’m doing differently is RSS. A few people have now suggested that I ought to know a thing or two about what’s happening beyond technology, so I’ve spent some time tidying up my Google Reader subscriptions. As well as the standard Slashdot, Digg, SMH Tech feeds, I’ve added SMH National and SMH World News, and made Google Reader my homepage, hopefully I’ll have some idea of what’s going on! I’ve also subscribed to xkcd.com, the amusing web comic that I’d recommend to those computer savvy or otherwise.

Hopefully all these pragmatic changes will increase my productivity once I get used to them in the next few weeks.