Writing and only writing

I’ve just recently discovered an Adobe Air app call Focused. It is very similar to the Mac app WriteRoom. It is a free app that runs on all platforms that are supported by the Adobe Air runtime.
Focused will fill your entire screen with a canvas to so you have no distractions when writing. I’ve enjoyed using WriteRoom but balked at the $25 price tag. Now I have an alternative that I can use on my home Mac and my work PC.

TaskPaper : ToDo or Not ToDo

Months ago (maybe a year) I purchased the MacHeist bundle in order to get the Pixelmator image editing software at a reduced price. The bundle also included various other prices of software. Some have been useful, like CoverSutra, and others I’ve never gone beyond installing, like Lineform.
One application that was included in the bundle is TaskPaper. It is GTD or ToDo list software. It seems very powerful but at the same time very simple. I’ve tried other todo list options such as, pen and paper, tasks list in gmail, Remember the Milk. Normally after a couple of days I forget about the lists. Since I’ve actually paid for TaskPaper I’m going to give it a try. Now I just need to find alarm software to remind to be check my todo list. Wait that came in the bundle as well. (Awaken)

Developing for Mac and iPhone

I’ve been thinking about teaching myself Cocoa programming in hopes of developing for the iPhone so the following blog entry from Command-Tab may be useful.
Learning Cocoa for the iPhone

I love getting a new computer (and I hate it)

Over the weekend I picked up a new Mac Book Pro and my girlfriend got a Mac Book. We’d been talking about these purchases for a few months now and finally decided to just make the jump. She’d been fighting with an old HP laptop and I’d just gotten sick of my pre-Intel iMac.
I love setting up new computers, determining how it is better than my old one, yada, yada, yada…..
I also hate the process at the same time because I’m so afraid I’m going to miss migrating some piece of data. I wanted to avoid the Apple Migration assist tool because it was going to migrate some applications I didn’t want anymore as well as mess up the licensing of those apps.
This makes the moving of an iTunes library a bit problematic to you can to retain your play counts, ratings and such. Eventually I just copied the entire library to the new machine and did a find/replace in the iTunes library XML file to change the path of the files.
Two days and I’m still not completely migrated from my old machine but I’m almost there.

(file under useless post about what I’m doing)