Personal Productivity Update.

In the vein of a special day, the CS3 Suite will most likely get released and I was planning some big updates on my work in Cocoa (yeah, ‘Expert and Praetorian), I wanted to do a little post to tell everyone what I’m up to right now, and what helps me get the job done faster. First of all, a brilliant article, really the eye-opener of the day. I encourage you to digg the article. It’s about Quicksilver, my favorite productivity application. I never even figured, that you can store Quicksilver actions, and using the comma switch (you can add multiple items into a selection that way) you can actually run all those actions parallel! I’ve got a few personal uses for this, like;

- Make an action that opens my blog’s control panel, MarsEdit (I post with MarsEdit) and the main Yojimbo view (for my blog snippets). Open in one click.
- Open my incoming torrent folder, open Azureus, and make Quicksilver open Finder and do a (CMD+3) to get a convienient list view.
- Save my current working reference documents with comma, save the action to open them with preview on my desktop.
- Open xCode with GrowlCode and Interface Builder, all one one desktop (VirtueDesktops PyObjc plugin).

and those are just the few I just made. I can probably find some more innovative methods with the image actions, like scaling and reformatting my images. Ankur, you’re a veritable genius.

Now, I just heard the nice words over at Surfbits’ Macreviewcast, and I am very flattered to have that much attention for my little app. The nice words are a real boost to my working drive. At the moment, I am considering an early preview version, but I really want to give my testers something very feature-rich and stable. I’ll lift a bit of the veil of things to come here…

Whazzallthisthen? Well, since I got more than just iSight Expert coming up, and I don’t have all the time in the world to organize reported issues, I decided to build a site that allows you to do just that. You will be able to report your issue, and back other issues so I can see how many people are experiencing the same problems.

Why am I so non-verbal about my applications right now? Well, I got website work to do, you know? I just finished the complete design of the two websites, (Praetorian and iSight Expert) and I’ll release them by the end of this month, also replacing my blog’s current header, and, by massive request, adding a black-on-white layout (comments ranged from “I’d prefer a black on white layout” to “AHH! My eyes are burning!”). So, design-wise, you’ll see a lot of changes. And then what?

I might start releasing the first béta of Praetorian before iSight Expert (Praetorian’s been in development and active testing for much longer than iSight Expert), and then giving out a limited promotional alpha for several reviewers, pod-casters, developers and academia, before the stable 0.5 public beta. Anyway, as it stands, I have less than a hundred béta testers, so there is room for more. You know the address, just let me know if you want to get in, and of course, any more comments on why, your hardware, are all welcome and encouraged.

I want to thank Ars Technica and Macreviewcast for the very nice words and publicity. I’ll be sure to keep you up to date…