MAC OS X – Quicksilver: instantly create text files and prepend or append text to them

Suppose you are in the middle of something, reading a post on a blog, or writing a fine article in your editor of choice, or even writing some code for your ground breaking web 2.0 application. And ka-boum: you have an idea! Something so interesting, so juicy and fun to think about crosses your mind, than you feel you can’t live anymore until you actually write down that piece of thought. Somewhere, somehow. So there you go:

1. leave your current activity/application
2. open Finder (or some other program menu containing an outliner application shortcut, for instance)
3. open that outliner application
4. open a new file in it
5. start writing the marvelous idea
6. hit save as menu item
7. chose location and save
8. close the outliner application
9. return to your current activity/application

But here’s how it would look like, if you would use Quicksilver:

1. type CTRL + spacebar to invoke Quicksilver window (while having the current activity/application still in front of you)
2. type “.” and start writing your marvelous idea
3. hit TAB and type “cre..” meaning the first letters of your “Create file” action of Quicksilver, and then enter (this really counts like a single action)
4. chose location and save
5. hit escape to hide Quicksilver window

Huh! We are four steps shorter than the original approach. That counts for less physical work, and less time, almost half, right? Nice, isn’t it? But that’s not the only advantage: you actually remain in the flow, while your thoughts are free to fly. Isn’t that really nice?

So, how we actually do that?

Automating Photo Booth and iPhoto

You know all those strange albums on Flickr or those psychedelic movies on YouTube when a guy took pictures of himself for a year, each day? Or for two or three? Each day, another picture of himself? Well, although in the beginning the idea seemed a little creepy to me, I soon started to see, well, some benefits… Needles to say that, in a more adventurous state then ever, and with little forseen reward, I started my own “A Photo Every Day” project. Just for fun, if you want. Or just to see how often I need to shave. Or just to test my iSight’s capabilities. If that little ting could do a photo every day it worth every penny, right?

But in less than five days, after being warned daily by a plethora of reminders that I put on my desktop (and in my GTD system, of course), I saw that I spent around 2 minutes for each photo. Start Photo Booth, take the pictures, start iPhoto, import that photo, rename that foto… The funny thing with these projects are the big numbers behind them. For a week, 2 minutes every day counts as what, 10 minutes? But for 365 days, that will bring us 730 minutes, or at least 12 hours. Hmmm, maybe I could use those hours in a more clever way? And still have that project running?

Digital Tools I Use

I want to jot down some stuff about the tools I use to get things done. This would be very sketchy at the beginning, and I’ll try to add more as I go along… As I already said, I was a Linux guy for about 10 years and I just turned to Mac several months [...]