Mac

Streaming Music Services VS an iTunes Addiction Music has been a huge part of my life for many years. I’m no longer a touring musician but I still play music as much as I can. Music is always playing in our house and I can’t imagine living life without it. Time has changed the way I listen to music a lot. I came of age in the era of the CD, but ever since I got my first iPod I’ve relied almost entirely on iTunes for my music consumption. At this point I’ve amassed a collection that would take 43 days to listen to. ...

I started using task management software slowly as the need to keep track of things began increasing in life. Starting college was the main catalyst. At first I had a spiral notebook for each class and I would write any assignments at the top of a page in there. When it came time to complete work I would search through the notebook until I found the proper list. It was unorganized and it didn’t scale well. ...

Yesterday I determined a compromise. I’m going to keep using iCloud for contacts and calendars. Google sync makes a mess of contacts, iCloud “just works.” I’ll keep using Gmail for my main email. I’ll access it through Apple Mail on the desktop and the iPhone’s built in mail app. Here’s how I set it up to avoid duplicate messages and other craziness. Log into Gmail’s settings and navigate to the labels tab. Here you can control which labels show up in IMAP. What I did was hide all mail, starred, and important from IMAP. ...

I’ve used Gmail or several years and have really enjoyed the experience. It’s not without its quirks however. Anyone who has ever used Gmail with an IMAP client can attest to how wonky things can get. The way Gmail’s All Mail folder functions causes lots of duplicate messages to show up. If a message has a label it will appear in both a folder for that label as well as in the All Mail folder. If you search for a message in the client multiple copies will pop up. The Gmail experience on the iPhone is also annoying. You can setup up Gmail through IMAP just like a desktop client, with all of the duplicate messages, but you can’t get push. That means I have to set my phone to poll the network at a certain interval. This is bad for battery life at high settings and means that messages don’t show up right away. The other option is to set up Gmail though Google sync as an exchange server. You can get push with this option but deleting a message will always archive it. I don’t want to archive all the junk newsletter messages I get. To delete a message with this setup I have to select it and then manually move it to Gmail’s trash folder. ...

For a long time I used Echofon as my main twitter app. It was ugly as sin but it would sync my unread status between my iPhone and my mac. Eventually I fell in love with Tweetbot too much to keep using Echofon. I always missed the syncing though and I usually avoided using Twitter on my mac because I hated having to scroll to find where I left off, not to mention it telling me all of my direct messages were unread. Thankfully a developer named Manton Reece created the Tweetmarker service. This is an open service that can be implemented by any Twitter app and will sync your timeline position between multiple apps. Now, when I open Twitterific on my mac it automatically scrolls the last tweet I read in Tweetbot on my iPhone. Simply put, I love it! ...