Jimmy Zimmerman » tips

Using Mac Spaces

Jimmy'z — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:54:21 +0000

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattbrett/1804301958/

The first time I tried using Spaces on the Mac, it really didn’t click for me. I recently found myself frantically trying to keep up with everything at work and getting distracted mid-thought by other tasks, that I finally decided I needed to try something new.

I decided to give Spaces a try and really stick to it. Today was day 1 in this experiment. I enabled 4 spaces and have designated the spaces as follows:

Space 1: My primary workspace (browsers, text editor, Evernote, etc.)

Space 2: Misc. (haven’t figured this out yet)

Space 3: Communications Apps (Skype, Mail, iCal)

Space 4: Media (iTunes, iPhoto, Twitter)

I actually used the option to constrain those apps to the designated spaces. I use hotkeys to navigate between spaces and I believe it actually helped today. I’ll stick with this for a while and see how it works out for me. Stay tuned!

(Photo used under Creative Commons by Flickr user: mattbrett)

How to Get Hooked on Twitter

Jimmy'z — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:08:27 +0000

I started using Twitter on the 25th of November, 2008. Before then, I thought Twitter was an immense waste of time. I finally saw the light, joined, and have become a huge fan.

Here are a few things I did to help me get hooked on Twitter.

1. Used the Gmail address book finder from the “Find People” link at the top. This helped me connect quickly with about 15 friends I didn’t even know used Twitter.

2. Found more friends to follow by exploring my friends’ “Following” lists.

3. Installed TweetDeck and Twitterberry. TweetDeck makes posting updates to your timeline really easy. It also has a handy URL shortener and gives you fast Desktop notification of your friends’ updates. Twitterberry allows you to easily give updates while you are on the go without needing to use SMS.

4. Began tracking my links with Tr.im. Tr.im is a link shortening service that will give you click stats on all of the links you post. These numbers will begin to show you the power of Twitter as a broadcast medium. Think nobody is listening because they don’t reply? Tr.im will show you that people actually do care about what you post.

5. Began posting regularly, although I still go through dry spells at time.

Hopefully this post will help other Twitter newbies more effectively use Twitter.

What have you done to get hooked on Twitter?

Any WordPress plug-ins I should be aware of? Other tools?

[Gmail Tip] is:unread in:inbox

Jimmy'z — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:58:57 +0000

If you find yourself falling behind in getting all of your emails read, like I have in the past week, you may find it useful to put the following in your Gmail search:

is:unread in:inbox

This will filter your messages to just those that are unread and in your inbox. Pretty cool. This help a lot for me because I have a lot of filters on my mail that mark some mailing list emails as ‘read’ and put others under different labels without marking them as read.