"On Windows, I used to…"

If you’re a recent Windows to Macintosh convert and you don’t have a Mac friend, relative, or colleague you can call on (or you just don’t want to bother them anymore) you can visit Switch 101: On Windows, I used to… on th Apple website for answers to many of the of the frequenty asked questions switchers have laid out in easy to understand graphics like you see below.

Let Your iPhone Take Full Control:

Many manufacturers are developing apps that make Apple’s ubiquitous mobile device a touchpanel controller for automation, lighting, distributed audio and more.

Apple has already sold more than 6 million iPhones, and many home control companies are capitalizing on that trend by engineering their systems to communicate directly with the ubiquitous mobile device, as well as with Apple’s iPod and iPod touch products.

“People depend on their mobile devices for communication and entertainment. Now those same devices can be used to control the home,” says Chuck Hudson, co-founder of Control UI, a software development firm that collaborated with home control systems manufacturer Control4 to develop a software application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

[read the full article]

FileMaker today announced the release of FileMaker 9 the latest update to thier #1-selling easy-to-use and award winning database solution.

Some of the new features FileMaker 9 delivers:

• Quick Start Screen: remembers your favorite
  databases so you can open them instantly. more…
• Conditional Formatting: visually formats fields and objects based on conditions you decide. more…
• Send Link: share FileMaker Pro databases via a clickable email link
• Append to PDF: appends multiple (PDF) reports into one file for easier distribution.
• Use External SQL Data Sources: allows you to integrate live data from Microsoft® SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL ito your FileMaker solutions
• New Scripting Tools: Script folders and script copy
  and paste
• Enhanced Web Viewer and Tab Control Options
• Auto-Resize: Design it once. Use it anywhere. Layout objects, such as portals, tab controls, and the FileMaker Web Viewer, will scale to fit the screen or printer being used.
• Software Update: FileMaker will automatically notifies you when a
  new update is available.
• And Many More ….

For more information regarding just what’s in FileMaker 9 from some other sources check out:

• Macworld: Filemaker 9 focuses on ease of use
• Computer World : FileMaker bucking enterprise trend with latest version:
  Clean it up, pare it down

Interesingly along with that Apple also annoucned at the conference that they’ll be releasing a version of the Safari Web browser for Windows-based PCs and the Windows beta is available today at Apple.com/safari.

When I moved on to OSX it was one thing I really did miss however after a few months without it I found a replacement in a program from St. Clair Software called Default Folder X.

What was I missing and what do I get from DFX? DFX is an application that takes the OS X save and open dialogs and adds features to them that improves and enhance your navigation through all the places your computer has access to for file storage. The first or primary thing that the program does is it installs a toolbar to the open and save dialogs that puts the folders you commonly use or want to specify within easy one click access.

• The Utility button, the first of 5 buttons on the toolbar, allows you to assign a default ’save’ folder for any applications you have and also rename, move, archive, and delete files from within the save and open dialogs.
• The Computer button allows you to navigate through your mounted volumes via hierarchical menus.
• The Favorites button allows the user to create and navigate through a list of favorite places on their Mac to save and/or open files from.
• The Recents button, probably my favorite and most commonly used button, just as the name implies can contain up to 100 of your recent folder locations organized by date or name.
• And the Finder button will give you a list of all the open Finder windows you may have at any one time.

One that I don’t use much but that I know a lot of other do is the program can be set in the Preferences to show you how much available disk space you have in your open volumes too.

You can also assign shortcuts to actions and save/open locations you commonly use and create different sets of Favorites for different projects and task that you do. And there is still much more that the application can do that I haven’t mentioned here.

In short and in conclusion it a very easy to learn ‘enhanced productivity tool’ and well worth the $34.95 shareware fee.

ExpressionEngine as a Content Management System is a lot more than just a blogging tool in that is also has modules that support discussion forums, an image gallery, simple commerce using PayPal, mailing lists, a wiki, and membership.

While to use the ExpressionEngine publishing system you really need to have something of a background and understanding of HTML and how to design a website they do provide a variety of themes and templates to help you get up and running quickly.

In order to run ExpressionEngine you’ll need a web server that supports PHP version 4.1 or newer with XML support ,
MySQL version 3.23.32 or newer and 10 MB of disk space and if you server doesn’t meet those requirements and you can’t find one that does they also can provide you with hosting through their sister site EngineHosting.com.

I think on obstacle that may exist for many contractors is seeing how Content Management System is going to work for them in that their first impressionis that it really a souped up blogging tool and they can’t see how that going to work for them. I’ll offer then this example of an outstanding site desgin produced using Expression Engine that I found in their Showcase: Hertzler and George: Landscape Design & Construction.

if you a little bit hesitant about spending money on a web development tool you not sure you or your staff can handle ExpressionEngine also offer an outstanding deal with a 30 Day Hosted Trial on their servers for only $10 which should be plently of time to set something up and test it out and they’ll even apply the $10 towards the purchase of thier system should you like it enough to decide to use it.

I’ve got some other work I need to get done first t his coming week but I thinking by next weekend I going to set my self up to start working with this tool and I even now thinking of possibly changing over one of my other site to ExpressionEngine too if things work out like I think they can.

(This article also appears in my Quietly Re-Thinking Out Loud blog )

Well today as I was reading The Google Mac Blog I found out that Google has released a ‘beta’ Google Desktop for Mac. It’s not just a port of the Google Desktop for Windows product in that the two file systems are fundementally different but it does carry over some features such as the capability to index Gmail and web history but it is very much a Mac program in look and feel.

If you’re at all familiar with QuickSilver you’ll see similarities in the way the interface is designed, where it appears on the screen, and where they are triggered on the keyboard (QuickSilver is Control-Space whereas Google Desktop is Command-Command) it is not the “launcher” utility that QuickSilver is. It comes off functionally to me as an enhanced Spotlight.

Certainly it is very much worth the look.

To say thanks for your support this release is a free upgrade for the 360 Difference 1.x and Simple Estimate Worksheet users out there.

To potential new users joining the ranks this April we’re offering the program at $299 plus new users will also get to be involved in the development program for the Version 2 Production, Accounting, CRM, Human Resources, and Digital assets modules and get them for FREE to when they are released to the public.

The program allows users to very accurately build a production cost library of items performed internally by a contractors own personnel based on the contractors actual real costs of doing business rather than what some estimating data book says their cost are supposed to be.

The program does the same thing with respect to building a library of production costs based on what your contractors actually charge you or you can build you own cost items based on the billing rates your subs charge you and what you know the real material costs to be too.

And for the times when you do need to pull data from a third party estimating database you can do that too and we’ll be offering them from various providers in the coming months.

Come May 1st 2007 the price on the module goes up to $365.00

Through a pull down menu that appears in the Google field you can specify if you want to Google to search the whole web, just the site you are googling from, or it can Google for images. And if you not too nuts about Google you can even change the default search channel from Google to any one of a number of other search channels too.

In addition to all that is also allows you to choose what type of search you want to conduct with key board shortcuts and through Safari’s contextual menu when you in the body of a web page.

One word of caution though. Keep the uninstaller around because I recall when Apple’s Safari went from 1.0 to 2.0 all of a sudden a bunch of things started to go wrong for me an it was related to Acid Search which hadn’t been updated for that version change yet. That kind of thing can be expected from something that’s being offered out of the sheer generosity of the developer as freeware. But I also recall I hated being without it and couldn’t wait for the fix to happen so I could get back to using Acid Searches tools.

I’ve been using iKey and before that QuickKeys to automate or speed up text entry on my Mac for years and while I’m going to keep iKey around to use for things like launching programs and opening documents from my keyboard (I am considering switching to yet another new application I’ve also just discovered but that’s going to have to be another post) but for text entry I’m switching over what used to be iKey tasks to TextExpander.

What does it do for me? Where here’s an example.

When The Journal of Light Construction switched over to vBulliten to power their forums I discovered I could bold and italicize text and set up links to terms in my project management glossary and other stuff too by utilizing these tags they had called vB code. While yeah, that was great I wasn’t too enthused at now having to learn and remember another set of tags. The problem was from working on web site development I was used to writing and working with HTML tags and whenever I wrote a post over there I would without thinking write an HTML tag and then when I previewed the post discover that I had used HTML instead of vb Code.

So what I did was I wrote a bunch of Ikey shorrtcuts that when I pressed a certain key combination I would get the vB Code automatically typed in to my document with the correct syntax. For instance hitting the command-/ combo would enter in ‘[b][url=•]•[/b][/url]‘ and I would then just replace the bullets with the URL and the text I was making a link and I would have a bolded link in my post.

That was great but this TextExpander tool does the same thing for me only even better. With TextExpander now I type the letters ‘llin’ like I’m trying to write ‘LLINK’ and TextExpander sees double L and then I-N combo and it then replaces that with ‘[b][url=•][/b][/url]‘ only instead of that bullet I used to use to tell me where to write the text I wanted linked, I programmed TextExpander to insert a blinking cursor there instead. That’s what I like about it over iKey. You program the insert cursor with a ‘%|’ and TextExpander know that means you want a blinking cursor there so you can just continue typing.

In writing this blog which I just switched over to using WordPress which I think is a really really great blogging tool there are tools to automatically insert the HTML code in to what you’re writing but when WordPress creates a link for you it doesn’t create the link with any attributes.

I often want the links to open in a new window so the reader doesn’t get taken away from what I was writing so I need the ‘a href’ tag to have the attribute: ‘ target =”_blank” ‘.

So I set up TextExpander so that whenever it sees me starting to write ‘ttar’ it replaces ‘ttar’ with ‘ target =”_blank” ‘. So now after WordPress has inserted the HTML code to create a link I click where I want the attribute inserted type ‘ttar’ and I get attribute I wanted to open the link in a new window.

So with those tricks right there I’m already pretty well hocked on TextExpander after just a few days but I’m thinking of all the other places I can use it too. If you’re someone who does a fair amount of Excel programming you can use TextExpander to insert the common formulas and variables that you use over and over again.

I’m already using text expander to enter comment code for me when I’m scripting in FileMaker along with date and time stamps for when the comment was written.

I’m going to use it to enter the different closings and signatures I commonly use in my email correspondence plus some of the other things that I find myself writing over and over again.

I just discovered that you can download a file they have of 100 common typos and get TextExpander to auto-correct those typos for you.

And I’m sure there’s lot more I can do with it as I become more and more familiar with it too.

If you’re interested in seeing it work there is a short little net cast MacBreak weekly video in which Merlin Mann demostates how it works you can view too. (MacBreak63: Textexpander)