Is your time yet to come?
Wired 14.07: What Kind of Genius Are You?: Very interesting article about the studies of David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago. The gist of the research is that there are two kinds of innovators: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual innovators make large breakthroughs when they are young, and tend to stagnate later. Experimental innovators work tirelessly to perfect and achieve their breakthroughs, so they take longer to make it big, but tend to produce more influential works later in life.
From the article:
Picasso and Cézanne represent radically different approaches to creation. Picasso thought through his works carefully before he put brush to paper. Like most conceptualists, he figured out in advance what he was trying to create. The underlying idea was what mattered; the rest was mere execution. The hallmark of conceptualists is certainty. They know what they want. And they know when they’ve created it. Cézanne was different. He rarely preconceived a work. He figured out what he was painting by actually painting it. “Picasso signed virtually everything he ever did immediately,” Galenson says. “Cézanne signed less than 10 percent.”
I was trying to figure out which camp I fit in (not that I am or will be an innovator, necessarily, but the basic idea has a lot to do with work habits) when I read this passage. I sound a lot like Cezanne. It isn’t unusual for me to be halfway through a paper before I realize what I really want to say — in which case I end up rewriting the entire thing from a different perspective.
Definitely worth reading, especially if you need a pick-me-up about your career.
Lampin
Lampin
The social nifty OS X apps list
osx.iusethis.com – cool apps for the mac population:
You can store the apps you use on iusethis, so it’s easy to download them again if you get a new computer. You will also be able to help others pick the best apps, and we can suggest new apps to you based on your profile..
There have been other attempts at sites like these, but iusethis.com seems to have taken off. Lots of apps and users already. I’m chalking it up to the nice graphic design and quick ajax interface. Check the site out. I already discovered some programs that I didn’t know about. Everything is tagged, every entry has a link to an app or a demo, and it’s really easy to build your application profile. There is a mixture of free and commercial applications, too, which I like, since most of us use a combination of the free stuff and the pricey stuff.
Free, full screen QuickTime hack
Just make a new script containing this:
tell application “QuickTime Player”
present front movie scale screen
end tell
Play your movie and run the script.
Via Macworld: Mac 911: Full screen for free, via Lifehacker.
WordPress.com freedback
Just wanted to say that the new tag pages, widget layout, customizable image headers and “Light” theme are all welcome additions.
Definition of the day
Daring Fireball: The Mac OS X Tipping Point:
What makes nerds “nerds” is that they care to an irrational depth about certain specific things
OS X tip: Use file comments
This is my first real contribution to the GTD world, hope it helps some people out. I frequently work with directories containing hundreds of files. For example, I might have a directory with ten consecutive versions of the same doc file, all with very similar names, as well as ten consecutive versions of ten different spreadsheets. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep all the files straight — which one is the current one? Which has that one piece of critical information?
To make matters worse, I often leave a big project for a month or more before coming back to work on it again. While I may have had an accurate mental map of all of the files when I was working with them actively, after a long break, it can be almost impossible to find a particular version of a particular document without opening each version and scanning it. And that is exactly the kind of mind-numbing work that leads me to procrastinate.
Enter file comments. On OS X, every file in the finder can have comments appended to it by accessing File > Get info, or by hitting command+i. This is what the dialog looks like:
Notes written in the Comments field can be viewed from within Finder by:
- Setting the Finder to View as list (shortcut: command+2)
- Selecting View > Show view options (shortcut: command+j) and checking the Comments box
Once the view is set properly, you will see something like this:
The comments are in the far-right column. They can be used to quickly identify the contents or status of a particular file or folder (or for a million other things, I’m sure).
Of course, you have to remember to keep the comments current, but I can’t help you (or myself) with that.
Ghostbusters
GhostBusters.gif is the entire Ghostbusters movie in animated gif form. Gracelessly stolen from Kottke.org.
Sentence of the day
Good Hodgkins » New ears are listening. » Blog Archive » ESSAY: The Garden State effect:
Here’s what I mean: nobody thinks long and hard about music and what it means to them and then ultimately decides to listen to Toby Keith.
Review: Opera 9
There is a strange irony in that, for me, the greatest diversions from the work at hand are attempts to streamline my future workflow by finding new tools and new ways of using existing tools. It was just such a diversion that brought me to Opera 9 today.
Opera is a free, cross-platform browser. Opera 9 was only recently released, and though I had tried previous versions, I found them either buggy or difficult-to-use. Much of this has changed with the most recent version of Opera.
Features
Two of the most salient features of Opera are its built-in Mail and RSS clients. Other browsers have attempted this kind of integration — the Mozilla suite, for example — but they haven’t achieved the same level of seamlessness that Opera has. The clients are kept very simple, ostensibly because the developers realize that users with very specific demands will probably use a standalone client anyway. But for those with basic needs, that means that Opera comes with very usable RSS and Mail programs.
Adding new feeds is as easy as importing your OPML (from Bloglines, for example). The default behavior is to check each feed once every three hours, which is just the right interval to stay on top of the news without losing all productivity. Adding a new mail account is similarly easy. One nice touch that I noticed was that, when adding a Gmail account, Opera automatically filled in the pop and smtp server information for me. I could have easily looked this information up, but I was impressed by the attention paid to detail.
Opera does not have an extensions capability like Firefox, though my most important bookmarklets (post to del.icio.us and ectoize) worked fine when imported from my Firefox bookmarks. However, Opera does offer widgets, which are sort of like a cross between OS X dashboard widgets and Firefox extensions. I haven’t played with them much, but they strike me as having a high eye candy: usefulness ratio.
One convenient feature that I doubt gets much attention is the Magic Wand. Unlike most other browsers, Opera doesn’t automatically fill username/password fields. Rather, it highlights them and requires you to click on the Magic Wand to automagically fill the fields. This extra click might seem like a usability flaw, but for those that use multiple accounts on the same service, it’s a welcome and unrivaled feature. For example, I have two Gmail accounts. When I visit gmail.com, the login forms are highlighted. And when I click on the Magic Wand, I’m given a choice of two different logins. When I click the desired account, Opera fills in the username and password.
Performance
On my system (OS X 10.3.9), Opera starts up a little faster than Firefox, and uses less memory, even after using the Mail and RSS features, despite the fact that my version of Firefox is running with no extensions installed. Opera performs smoothly on websites where other browsers, including Firefox and Camino, choke. For example, I’ve always had problems on One Good Move, a video site that features many embedded Quicktime files. Opera scrolls through the page quickly and smoothly, even when a movie is playing.
One area where Opera is lacking is support by web applications. Writely does not support Opera at all, and visiting the home page just redirects to a blank page ending in “unsupported_browser.” Google Calendar throws out an error message when you arrive, but all of the functions that I tested still worked. WordPress.com and Gmail worked perfectly. On other websites, some Javascript worked, some didn’t.
Overall
Opera is an innovative browser that has been optimized for high-performance. It loads quickly, uses a relatively small amount of memory, and has features that power-users will love. These performance boosts, however, come at the price of reduced compatibility with certain web applications, which are written to support Firefox and Internet Explorer (incidentally, this is just another example of why web applications will not replace desktop applications for most purposes — users want to use their favorite browsers). Anyone who uses such web apps on a daily basis will probably want to stick with Firefox. But if you’re looking for a fast, feature-packed browser that that can give you a speed boost, give Opera a try.
Oh, and you’ll want to learn these keyboard shortcuts.
