Software as the key artform of the 21st Century

Isn’t it time we stopped talking about media and returned to the term artform? A medium is ultimately physical in our understanding of it, no matter how enhanced or extended it may be. For me, one of the main achievements of the digital revolution is to have separated creative content from media. Now, no longer [...]

File Naming & the dumbest thing ever

John Foster in a recent episode of MacBreak Tech while in the middle of a perfectly enjoyable discussion on file naming… said the one thing you should never do is use the date in a name, that it was ‘the dumbest thing ever’. Now, I would have a lot of crossover interests with him, having [...]

Whatever happened to Computer Art?

I was asked a while back to give a talk on creative applications on the Mac and it set me off thinking about the early days when I first got into this. I have to say, it was much to the bafflement of loved ones and friends at the time, about 20 years ago. It’s [...]

Four Trillion Emails…

Well… so much for Inbox Zero. Once I finish clearing these 4 trillion out of my Inbox… give or take a few hundred billion… I’ll get right back to you. Related Tags: document.getElementById(“post-103-blankimage”).onload();

Getting Things Done using TaskPaper

I’ve been been a keen convert to GTD since reading the book by David Allen about two years ago. Since then I’ve been a daily visitor to 43Folders and found a lot there to help guide me, there’s a very well informed community of productivity heads all of whom seemed to be working their way [...]

Word Processors

Back in the day… that would be 1986 to be precise, the year i bought my first computer. It was an Amstrad PC1512, all of 512k ram and twin 360k floppy drives. It came with a choice of operating systems. MS-DOS or CP/M and two windowing systems, Windows 1.2 and GEM. The principal reason for [...]

Soulver

I love apps that break through your model of what you can do in a particular area. Calculation on the Mac seems to generally revolve around calculators like TopCalculette or spreadsheets, like Excel or Tables. Soulver is one such app. It’s neither a straightforward calculator, though you can certainly use it as one, nor is [...]

The Morphing of Interactivity…

While shooting the breeze with Brian Mulligan, who heads up e-learning at our College, we went through our histories, it’s always nice to talk to someone who knows what an Amiga is and who had worked with them. What I also like is chatting to someone else who knows the sweep of things, who remembers [...]

Skim

There’s some apps you just don’t bother replacing. Preview for one. Acrobat has tons more features but it’s slow and over-complex and takes an age to load. It’s not really for just looking at stuff, it’s about doing some work. I always feel that the real app is the Pro version and the cut down [...]

Spam

I run a pretty tight email ship… it’s one area I’m on top of. I practice Inbox Zero, I completely got that once David Allen pointed out the simple fact that an Inbox is where things arrive and not where they should live. When an email lands, I use Mail Act-on to deal with it; [...]