For the last week or so I have been trying out a new social network aggregator application called EventBox from The Cosmic Machine. It allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit accounts from the same window. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds.

I had read some glowing reviews on Smoking Apples and thought I’d give it a try. After all, I love Twitter and regularly use Flickr. I also subscribe to 40 or so RSS feeds. I must confess to not liking Facebook much and only check on my account once a month or so. I don’t use Reddit at all. Having everything together sounded like it could be quite convenient. Plus, I just love trying out new software!

Currently EventBox is a beta application. In other words, it isn’t yet complete. Some of its features are missing and there are still a few bugs. Now, most developers offer beta applications for free while users test them and give feedback. Then once the application reaches its final version beta testers are usually offered a discount off the full price. EventBox gives a 2 week free trial but then you have to pay $15 to continue using the beta. (The full price will be $20.) I can’t deny I was a bit annoyed when I discovered this is the system. I’ve never before paid to use a beta product and I felt it was rather cheeky to expect payment for an unfinished application, even it it is at a lower rate. I am ashamed to say I had pretty much decided I wouldn’t like EventBox even before I had started using it.

Prior to using EventBox I had been using Twitterrific to access Twitter from my Mac and NetNewsWire to subscribe to 40 or so RSS feeds. I was visiting the Flickr website most days and was only checking on the Facebook website once a month or so. I don’t use Reddit. So as things stood I wasn’t paying a penny to access any of these services. I figured EventBox would have to be pretty good to make me want to actually pay for it.

Anyway, I downloaded it and I must say I was impressed with how easy it was to set up. It asked me which services I want to use (I  selected Twitter, Flickr and Facebook), I input my username and passwords, and it synced them all. My initial impression was of a clean, attractive interface – the main window has an iTunes-style sidebar and the events appear to the right. An input area for typing tweets and dragging photos is at the bottom of the screen.  It also had an HUD (heads-up display) that looks very much like Twitterrific and works with Growl.

So far so good. I then decided to start working with keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys. This is when I became frustrated. I didn’t work in the same way as Twitterrific. The keyboard shortcuts were different. The hotkeys worked differently. In Twitterrific, when the HUD appears I clicked my hotkey to make it the focus and then used the up and down arrows to navigate. In EventBox I clicked my hotkey but this made the HUD disappear. I then had to click it again to make it reappear and then I can use the arrow keys. When I closed the HUD I had to click back on whichever app I had been working with previously – it didn’t automatically go back to it. These may seem like minor issues but I found them intensely annoying and pretty much gave up on EventBox at that point.

A few days later I decided to take a look at EventBox’s help page. I really don’t know why I hadn’t checked it out before. I’m someone who usually won’t use anything until I’ve read the manual cover to cover. Here I found a list of all the keyboard shortcuts and preference settings including, hooray, the ability to make EventBox inactive when you close the window so that it automatically goes back to whatever you were using before. No solution to my hotkey problem so I tweeted @eventbox. I received a prompt reply saying they’d see what they can do about it.

Once I’d sorted the HUD I realised there was a lot I could do in EventBox that Twitterrific can’t such as search, retweet and shorten URLs.  I also like that it tells you how long it is since each tweet was posted. On Twitterrific you have to hover over each tweet to see this information (and it doesn’t always disappear when you move the pointer). I would still like to see threaded conversations (such as in Tweetie) and I see it is on The Cosmic Machine’s roadmap. I did miss the chirping bird sound that Twitterrific uses to alert you of an incoming tweet but my family were glad to see the back of it – they all found it really annoying! Something else I’d like to to is the the ability to have Growl only alert you to @replies and direct messages. At the moment it alerts you to all tweets so I turned it off as it was all getting too much.

Now I was able to take a look at EventBox’s other features. Earlier this month I signed up to the 365/2009 group on Flickr. You have to post a photo taken on each day of the year. (One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to take more photographs so I figured this would be an good way to get me using my camera.) So now that I’m using Flickr daily (well nearly, I have missed a few days) I found easy access to my and my Flickr pals’ photos really handy. You can view full size photos from within the app as well as upload them. (I haven’t tried the upload feature as I like to do it from iPhoto.) You can also view and add comments.

The Facebook integration is quite nice to have but to be honest, I could take it or leave it. You can view photos and statuses. You can also upload photos and update your own status messages.

I thought I’d try out the RSS reader so imported one of my folders from NetNewsWire. It all works well but the interface isn’t as good as NNW. Each news item has a title and a small preview with another preview pane below. I’d rather just see the titles of the items so that I could see more at once. I’d never used Google Reader but I thought I’d give it a shot so that I could try out the syncing with EventBox. I imported my feeds from NNW into Google Reader (which turned out to a surprisingly easy process) and then synced with EventBox. It worked very well, with all my folders coming through too. I would love to see the addition of Instapaper support.

So, having spent some time reading the extensive help pages I came to realise that EventBox is actually far more powerful than I had originally thought. It comes with an enormous number of keyboard shortcuts and the preferences allow for a great deal of customisation. Having set out with the intention of not liking EventBox I found myself rather enjoying it. It really is quite handy to have everything in one place – especially if you want to switch things off for a while. There is a mute button to switch off all notifications until you click it again. Saves you having to go to individual apps to switch them off when you need peace to get on with something.

All in all I’ve come to the conclusion $15 isn’t a bad price and once it’s finished and fully featured $20 will probably be reasonable. I’m still not sure of the wisdom of charging for a beta. I think it may put a lot of potential users off. However, in the current economic climate developers may be finding it increasingly difficult to work on applications without any income. Maybe this is the way things are going to go. Anyway, I have stumped up the money and am now a fully fledged EventBox user. Twitterrific has been abandoned. NetNewsWire is on probation. (I thought I might carry on with Google Reader for a while as it syncs nicely and I rather like the stats it gives you on its webpage.) I’m looking forward to seeing what further features The Cosmic Machine come up with in the final release of EventBox.

Note: At the time of writing the price for EventBox is $15. However there is a discount code in Smoking Apples Magazine giving 20% off. I don’t think this code will be valid for much longer though.

Currently subscriptions to this blog (RSS and email) are dealt with by FeedBurner. Google have taken over this service and over this weekend I’m transferring the blog. They say moving the feeds won’t make any difference to subscribers and feeds should come through as normal.

I’ve neglected things here somewhat recently (too much other stuff to do and lack of inspiration for things to write about). However, I am currently half way through a new blog post – should be up on Monday.

Less than a week left in my quest to find alternatives to MobileMe that cost less than Apple’s £59 annual fee. I have quite a few home movies on my web gallery and will need a new home for them. The obvious choice is YouTube. It’s free, you can upload directly from iMovie ’08 and virtually everyone’s aware of it (maybe even my computer-phobic in-laws!).

I love YouTube. You can find just about anything there. My husband and I watched Obama and McCain’s speeches on it on our Apple TV last night. I’ve watched videos on swimming technique. My husband watches rugby highlights and archery technique videos. The children like that baby that laughs and OK Go on the treadmills.

But I also have a concern regarding YouTube – the less than savoury content that appears. I always feel I have to be very careful if I’m looking for something while the children are in the room. Too often the comments people have added or the recommended videos aren’t suitable for little eyes.

So I thought I’d take a look at Vimeo. I have watched a number of videos on it over the last few months and I’ve been impressed with the simplicity of the interface. YouTube is a mess in comparison. You can also upload HD video. Not that I have an HD camcorder, but I might one day. Vimeo also has a friendlier feel than YouTube – the comments are more sensible. There’s more of a community feel.

I spent most of this morning uploading the same home movies to YouTube and Vimeo to see how they compared. It’s easier to get movies into YouTube as it can be done from within iMovie. Not that Vimeo was difficult. I already have all my videos shared with iTunes so looked for the medium size version in Movies>iMovie Sharing>iTunes via the Vimeo uploader. There’s a huge difference between the two when it comes to watching videos. The quality on YouTube is awful, even when viewed at higher quality. The quality on Vimeo is much the same as on iTunes and MobileMe.

So this has been a quick and easy decision. It’s Vimeo for me. I can upload up to 500MB a month for free. (There’s a pro account for $60 a year should I need more but I doubt I will – unless I go HD in the future.) It’s easy to use and looks good. An excellent replacement for MobileMe.

If you fancy a look at the movies I’ve uploaded so far, they’re here.

I now have one week left on my MobileMe subscription. £59 is a lot to pay when there are free (or cheaper) alternatives. I’ve spent the couple of weeks looking for a photo sharing service that could replace the web gallery. I decided to try out Flickr as I already had a pro account (usually $25 but I get it for free with my ISP, BT).

I have been using the MobileMe gallery as a means for family and friends to easily see my photos rather than me having to print them out and post them. (This of course assumes they have internet access and know how to use a computer. Not quite there with my in-laws yet but we’re working on them!) Flickr, of course, can do far more than just share photos with distant family. It is a social network where you search for photos, send comments, join groups, all sorts.

MobileMe’s web gallery allows you to upload as many photos as you like (well, up to a 20GB limit also shared amongst its other webapps). Flickr’s free account lets gives you 100MB of uploads per month but unlimited total storage. However, you’ll only be able to see your 200 most recent photos. The pro account allows unlimited uploads and storage with access to all your photos.

It’s really simple to get photos into the web gallery – it’s all done through iPhoto. Create an album, click the MobileMe button and Bob’s your uncle. The titles and metadata are also uploaded. Each time you make a change to the album in iPhoto it automatically syncs it again so MobileMe always up to date. It’s really incredibly easy.

To get your pictures into Flickr you need to download the free Flickr Uploadr and drag in your photos from iPhoto. Like the web gallery, your titles and metadata are also uploaded. You are given the option to change the titles and assign tags to your photos if you wish. Unfortunately it doesn’t use the keywords you have already used in iPhoto. You can also choose to put your photos into a set (or album) or collection (a group of albums). (I should point out here the free account only allows you 3 sets whereas the pro account is unlimited.)

There is another option for getting your photos into Flickr. A £12 iPhoto plugin, FlickrExport does much the same as the free Flickr Uploadr. However as it’s built into iPhoto you only need to select photos rather than drag them in and it also uses iPhoto keywords. If you were uploading large quantities I think this would be useful as assigning keywords in iPhoto and then having to repeat it all again for Flickr is tedious. For now, as I’m dealing with fairly small numbers I think I’ll stick with Flickr’s free offering.

When it comes to actually viewing photos MobileMe does a lovely job. It’s clean, simple and you can even skim the photos in an album in the same way you skim events in iPhoto.  Flickr in comparison is cluttered and less intuitive to use for my computer-unfamiliar relatives. Viewing the photos as a slideshow looks good though. Flickr also shows far more metadata than MobileMe and you can geotag your photos which is fun.

Although my main intention had been to use Flickr for friends and family to see pictures of the children, I’m rather enjoying the social aspect of it. It’s fun looking at other people’s photos – some of them are just incredible. And I’ve found it useful to be able to search for photos taken by others using the same camera I have. It’s inspiring to see what they have been able to do with it.

To summarise:

Advantages of MobileMe web gallery

• easy to add photos
• easy to sync photos or albums that have been updated
• attractive, intuitive interface

Advantages of Flickr

• free
• fast
• geotagging
• being able to view others’ photos
• interactive – others can leave comments
• unlimited storage [Edit: added later as I forgot]

The MobileMe gallery may look pretty but actually, overall I think Flickr does a better job and I’m going to stick with it. If you fancy having a look at my snaps they’re here.

Next step, where I am going to put all the movies I have on my web gallery? I’ve only got a week left to decide…

There are three weeks to go until my MobileMe subscription is due for renewal. The service isn’t cheap at £59 so I thought I would look into possible free (and maybe even superior) replacements.

The only feature of MobileMe that I use on a daily basis is email. It has worked almost flawlessly for me and I love the way it integrates seamlessly with my Mac and iPhone. Deleting or moving an email on one it is almost immediately mirrored on the other.

I have had a Gmail address (or Google Mail as it has be called in Britain) for quite a while but have almost never used it. There didn’t seem much point when the MobileMe mail worked so well but I thought maybe now was the time to give it a try.

I spent hours (make that days) trying to get Gmail properly set up with my iPhone and with Apple Mail on my Mac. There were two reasons I had difficulties (and both were down to my own ignorance). The first is that I need IMAP Gmail for syncing between the server and my Mac and iPhone. Unfortunately Apple Mail sets up a POP account by default. Handy hint: Follow the directions on this Gmail help page – had I read this in the first place I probably could have saved myself an hour!

I then went on to set up my mailboxes as directed by this Gmail help page. And this is where I ran into my second problem. What was this “All Mail” folder? Why were my emails duplicated – one in the inbox, one in All Mail? Where were my deleted emails going to? Not the trash, that was for sure. After a day of tearing my hair out, moaning and fiddling with settings I finally looked at the Gmail help pages and all was revealed. All Mail is just a smart folder. The emails aren’t duplicated at all. (Why I didn’t read the help pages first I don’t know. I usually love instruction manuals. I won’t touch a new gadget until I’ve read at least half the manual.)

I have always downloaded all my MobileMe mail and stored it on my hard drive rather than leaving it on the server. With Gmail, the emphasis is much more on retaining all your mail on the server. You are given so much storage (currently over 7GB) that there is no need to delete an email. Just archive them all and they’ll still be there, in All Mail, should you ever need to refer to them again. Well, there has been much humming and hawing over whether I should carry on as I have been or should I embrace the cloud. I could potentially free up a fair bit of hard disk space by keeping all my email on Gmail’s server and just use Apple Mail as a more attractive interface. But I’m still not sure how comfortable I am with cloud computing. What if my internet was down? What if Gmail was down? After three days of pondering on this (with useful input from family and Twitter pals) and trying a multitude of different setups, I have finally decided to continue to download email to my hard drive for storage. I just feel more comfortable that way.

Advanced IMAP controls (in Google Mail Labs) has been very useful. It allows you to select which Gmail labels you don’t want to appear as folders in Apple Mail. So now I no longer have All Mail and Spam in my Mail sidebar. (Thank goodness. I didn’t much care to see how many spam emails I had building up.) I also mapped Sent Mail, Drafts and Bin to their corresponding folders in Mail. (Select the Gmail label in the Mail sidebar, click Mailbox (in the menu bar at the top), click Use This Mailbox For and pick the appropriate mailbox.) This makes everything look nice and tidy.

Now that everything is up and running properly I’m very pleased with Gmail and, assuming everything runs smoothly over the next three weeks, it is more than capable of replacing MobileMe Mail.

Firstly I must apologise for the paucity of posts. I have been somewhat lacking in inspiration recently. I have now however found a topic I would like to write about. MobileMe.

I became a .Mac subscriber last year shortly after the release of iLife ’08. I was really impressed by the integration of iPhoto and iMovie with the Web Gallery. It looked like an easy (and attractive) way to keep friends and family up to date with photos and movies of the children. The syncing of Safari bookmarks between our two Macs looked useful. The IMAP email was also a draw. At the time I was using Yahoo POP email and was perfectly happy with it. However, I was planning on buying an iPhone 3 months later on the UK release and IMAP email was preferable to keep both my Mac and iPhone in sync. I felt the £65 cost was rather steep but decided I would give it a go.

There have been a few changes to the service over the last 15 months. .Mac has become MobileMe. I can sync my iPhone’s bookmarks, calendar and contacts automatically over the air. Email is instantly updated. There have been other changes too (such as increased iDisk storage space) but these have been of little value to me.

In 3 weeks my subscription is due for renewal and it is time to re-evaluate MobileMe. The fee has gone down to £59 but am I making enough use of the service to justify the cost? Flickr, YouTube, Dropbox and Gmail could replace a number of MobileMe features for me without spending a penny. I thought it would be helpful for myself (and hopefully others) to document my investigations into possible MobileMe alternatives. Next post: Gmail…

I listen to a lot of podcasts on my iPhone – when I’m doing housework, weeding, walking the dog. Something that has annoyed me is that when a podcast ends the next doesn’t automatically start playing in the same way that music tracks do. This is particularly irritating when listening to a series of short podcasts such as the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 where each item is only five to ten minutes long. Every ten minutes, gardening gloves off, iPhone out of pocket, choose next podcast, iPhone back in pocket, gloves back on. 

To get around this I have been creating an On-The-Go playlist. Which is fine so long as you remember to do it. The number of times I’ve set off for a walk with the dog and realised I’ve forgotten to create a playlist of podcasts. Poor dog – he’s desperate for a pee and I’m fiddling with my iPhone!

However, no more. I noticed yesterday the podcasts were playing through continuously. I can only assume this was part of the 2.1 software update. Goodness knows why it wasn’t like this at the start but I’m very grateful it’s fixed now.

We all have different reasons for wanting to be more productive. Some want to be more efficient so they can get more work done in the same amount of time. Some want to be more efficient to free up more time for other activities. Me, I got into this to save my sanity.

I was a fairly late arriver to the Cult of Productivity. It all began when I came across Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders blog a year ago which in turn led to me discovering GTD and The Flylady. This couldn’t have come at a better time. I had lost control of the house – piles of washing, messy floors, toothpaste all over the sinks. Urgh, it makes me shudder to think of it. I was disorganised at work too and repeatedly would wake in the middle of the night realising I’d forgotten to do something. I crave order (there’s certainly a touch of OCD going on here!) and when things aren’t organised I get horribly stressed. As you can imagine, GTD’s promise of “stress-free productivity” was really quite seductive.

Around the same time my husband was going through a particularly difficult and stressful time at work. And then he’d come home at 6 o’clock and have to cook because I’d not got dinner organised. (I should point out, he is generally a better cook than me. Especially when it comes to throwing random ingredients together from the fridge. He makes a mean stir fry.)

I decided to do something about it. I read Getting Things Done, adopted the Flylady routines and started reading productivity blogs. So my initial reasons for being more productive were to relieve my stress, stop CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome – a fantastic Flylady acronym) and make my husband’s life as easy as possible at home. 

The whole experience has been life changing. I no longer forget to do things at work. My house is usually presentable – it’s clean although it might not always be tidy. It has certainly made my husband’s life easier. And a happy Dylan makes for a happy Rachel! (I am aware that wanting to be a better housewife to make my husband happier isn’t exactly how things are supposed to be in this modern age. But frankly, I can’t be doing with any of this PC stuff. And anyway, he works full-time and I’m part-time so the housework should be my job.)

Back to the topic in hand. My reasons for being productive have now altered. I want to be more efficient to create time. To spend with my family. To rediscover old hobbies and take up new ones. To do the things that are actually important to me.

Over the last few weeks while I have been reassessing my productivity needs and goals there has been a shift in feeling in a number of the blogs I read. A move away from the traditional “here’s how to be productive” post towards a more holistic “make the most of your life” post. Merlin Mann has written a couple of really good posts this week on making his life better and how he is going to change 43 Folders to reflect this. The Weekly Review and Patrick Rhone have written on related themes. This change in feel to my favourite blogs couldn’t have come at a better time for me and I’m very interested to see where they lead.

Here in the far north of Scotland we’ve had a pretty good summer (unlike the rest of Britain) which has meant I have been able to spend a lot of time in my garden. We started it 6 years ago when our house was built and have slowly increased the number of plants. For years I have been intending to start a garden notebook or log to record what plants we have, when they were planted and other useful information. This summer I finally got it off my someday/maybe list.

I had initially planned to use a Moleskine notebook. However I also wanted to include photos of my plants so realised this wasn’t terribly practical. Instead I have created a digital notebook using Evernote.

Its iPhone app makes Evernote ideal to use for a garden notebook. I can take a photo of a plant with my iPhone and instantly turn it into a note. I add a title (the name of the plant) while still out in the garden with the plant (and its label) in front of me. 

Once I get back indoors I may add a link to a relevant webpage on Wikipedia or The Royal Horticultural Society. I record where the plant came from and when it was planted. I also include other useful information such as whether it needs extra watering and its eventual size.

A number of plants that we have bought had sticky labels on the pot with details about the plant. These pots have been piling up in the garage for years waiting for me to copy down the information from all the labels. Rather than write them down I have now begun photographing each label and adding it to the appropriate note. (Unfortunately my iPhone camera isn’t up to this job as is unable to do macro shots so I use my normal camera and drag the pictures in.) Evernote has the ability to read text in photos but it doesn’t seem to work too well for the labels. Possibly because they are a bit dirty.

I’m hoping this notebook is going to help me keep the garden a bit more organised. We’re not terribly good at planning where plants should go. We just see something we like, buy it and put it in where we see a gap. We often fail to leave enough space for plants to grow, forgetting that over the following years they will become considerably larger. Now that I am recording what size plants are likely to reach I’m hoping that next year when I add more plants I will choose more appropriate locations for them. I’m also keeping a note of which plants have grown so big (because I didn’t plan properly!) that they will need divided next year. By having a photo of them now in full bloom I will be able to plan how much to section off next spring.

I’ve only just begun cataloguing plants and still have dozens to do but it’s fun and I’m enjoying it. I suspect there are many more ways I could enhance my garden notebook. Any tips or comments would be appreciated.

Recently I felt my productivity slipping. In fact, I found myself becoming increasing apathetic towards the tasks on my lists. GTD was no longer working for me and I wasn’t sure why.

A thread on the Work.Life.Creativity forum made me realise what the problem was. My lists were far to long to the point of becoming overwhelming. For example, my “Things to read for work” list had 63 items on it. I would estimate I was adding at least five items every week but I only managing to read two or three. The list was becoming longer and longer and the chance of me ever clearing it was becoming increasingly unlikely. The realisation that I couldn’t complete everything I had set myself was utterly demoralising.

I decided to thoroughly review all my lists. How important was each item? How likely was I to actually complete it? If I never did it would it matter? I managed to delete quite a number to to-dos – forty from my work reading list alone. I was quite nervous initially, wondering if I had done the right thing, sending so many tasks to the trash. But once I was left with a manageable list of realistically attainable tasks I felt quite liberated. My interest was renewed once I realised I could actually clear all the items and I’ve been more productive over the last week or so than I had been for the whole of the previous month.

There are two underlying problems here. The first is that I am not good enough at processing. I am very good at capture. Initially I struggled with it, regularly forgetting to write down to-dos. But over time and with practice it became a habit – especially once I started using a Moleskine notebook which is such a pleasure to write in. I am also good at remembering to transfer my to-dos into Things. What I’m not good at is not transferring items. Something that seemed important in the morning may not be so important later in the day. I certainly have a tendency to over estimate the importance of tasks without considering whether it is feasible for me to do them. Now that I have developed a good capture habit I need to concentrate on improving my processing skills.

The second problem is that although I always do a weekly review I have a tendency to concentrate on adding new to-dos and ticking off items that have already been completed. I need to spend more time considering each item and whether it still belongs on my list. Hopefully with more efficient processing and reviewing my to-do list will remain manageable.