Posted on 2011/02/12 by

This is a blog about being a more productive academic with a Mac. It explains how to take notes, write, present, email, organize files, schedule, manage projects, tasks and time - in a faster, easier and more entertaining way. Good work habits learned on Mac are irreplaceable on any computer (or even without) – so many posts on this site are about academic productivity in general while most of the remaining contain some Mac tips. Enjoy reading!

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Try Ulysses for editing Multimarkdown documents

Posted on 2013/04/29 by

This is just a short note for those who may be relying on Multimarkdown documents at some point in there writing workflow. Aleh mentioned in one of his earlier post that he was using Byword and of course there are a number of other lightweight apps for writing up ideas in a no-distraction manner (e.g., iAWriter, Writeroom). If you are looking for a somewhat more sophisticated solution, I recommend that you check out Ulysses by the Soulmen. It offers some novel features which, quite paradoxically, will enhance your minimalistic writing experience.  Continue reading →

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Welcome back, MailTags!

Posted on 2013/04/14 by

Last November, I uninstalled MailTags 3.1 because they significantly slowed down my Mac. About  1.5 months ago Scott from Indev mentioned the release of MailTags 3.2. I re-installed them and have not experienced any issues ever since. I enjoy MailTags as much as before. If I decide to organize email, one of my favorite methods  is “filing in a hurry” with a combination of Mail flags and Mailtags.

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Managing email with SaneBox

Posted on 2013/04/06 by

SaneBox is a software which shifts email in and out of your Inbox depending on certain rules. Most directly, SaneBox filters less essential incoming emails into SaneNews and SaneLater mailboxes but it can also do other useful tasks.

Let me start with explaining why I prefer to manage my Inbox by SaneBox rather than by Google’s ‘Important’ or my own Apple Mail rules. The main reason is that it is very fast and smooth to train SaneBox. I have a shortcut ^N which shifts an email to the SaneNews folder. Once I’ve done that, SaneBox is trained and similar emails never end up in my Inbox again. About 50 emails a day come to SaneNews, which, frankly, I rarely look into (do you hear, newsletter enthusiasts?!) Doing the same through Apple Mail would result in hundreds of additional rules which I would probably be too lazy and busy to define. Moreover, for some emails SaneBox does not even need training to decide that they belong in SaneNews, not in my Inbox. Continue reading →

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Custom Academic Searches on iOS

Posted on 2013/03/20 by

As a follow-up to my earlier post on academic searches on the Mac, here’s an easy way to replicate most of those custom searches on iOS. The key app is Drafts, which recently received a massive update. Among many other things (including full integration with Dropbox), Drafts now enables “url actions.” Now you can easily create saved searches that hook into frequently used sites like Google Scholar.

Drafts, in essence, is a quick capture tool. When you open the app, you see a blank screen ready for text entry:

Continue reading →

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Don’t let your Keynote animations compete with you

Posted on 2013/02/13 by

One of the best things about using a Mac is getting to use Keynote. It is a powerful and beautiful alternative to working with power point. Keynote has flexible and easy-to-use animations (called “Builds”) and transitions between slides which can be used to surprise audiences or manage their attention. They can also be used to show the connections between simple concepts. While animations are powerful and can help you make your point they should only be used when they specifically relate to what you are saying.

One good use of animations is in building a table for the audience. In this case I use animations to move from the definition of a concept to an assessment framework for it. The method of moving from two (simple) lists to a (complex) matrix is a widely applicable technique. Continue reading →

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Custom Academic Searches on LaunchBar

Posted on 2013/01/31 by

Application launchers like Alfred and LaunchBar are Swiss Army knives of software, but to take full advantage of their flexible power you really need to tweak and customize their settings. The apps aren’t designed for academics, but because they’re so versatile they can be bent to our purposes—and with very little effort.

Take custom web searching. I tend to search particular sites—like my library’s catalog or Google Scholar—over and over again. Alfred and LaunchBar, along with the original launcher, Quicksilver, make it dead simple to create custom searches. Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Workflows | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Talking to slides

Posted on 2013/01/30 by

Lucy Kellaway of Financial Times has just distributed the 2012 ‘Golden Flannel Awards‘ for ‘guff, cliché, euphemism and verbal stupidity‘. The winner of the Preposition Award is the innocuous word “to” as increasingly heard in presentations: “I’ve got some slides to talk to” – the unfortunate implication being that the speaker has to talk to the slides because no one else is listening. But rather than being ‘verbal stupidity’ I think this phrase simply accurately reflects our recent observations on slides becoming more important than people. Continue reading →

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