Pocket Revolutionary

I am not a multi-tasker by nature. I like to concentrate. If you show me a whole bunch of windows on my desktop, I’m not focusing. The irony, of course, is that I willingly run a lot of apps at once all day long. I’m normally using at least 3-4 programs at a bare minimum with another half-dozen in the background, but I need to switch my focus between them quickly. And that, my friends, is why Isolator is my new best friend. It’s not just a little app that I kind of like; no, I turned this on two days ago and have not turned it off yet. It is one of the sacred few programs that I actually want to “start at login.” Seriously, that’s not an honor I give out lightly. What does Isolator do? It simply blocks out all the apps except the one I’m focused on. This one has some new features that I’ve never gotten to have, though, in other apps. I just want to list some of my favorites off for you, please:

1. It focuses on what I click on. I’m lazy, and I type fast. If I need to do anything to focus on an application that involves fancy “right-clicking” or “drop-down menus,” I won’t do it. Isolator knows what I want to focus on because it’s application I’m typing in right now. That’s it.
2. It can be transparent. I can even adjust the transparency. This is great, because I can still see the other windows if I want to, but they don’t grab my attention.
3. I can blur the background. This kind of ties into transparency, but it’s new to the 3.1 beta they just released. Now, I’ve set everything that’s inactive to be blurred about 75% (you can adjust that, too). I can see the shape of the window, I can identify other windows as TextMate or Safari, but I’m not reading them subconsciously. I love this.
4. I can click on inactive windows and they become active and focused. This is mind-blowing. I don’t want to be distracted by a lot of apps, but I am, as I already stated, running a lot of apps that I’m constantly switching between. I need to concentrate on TextMate, then Safari, then Navicat, then TextMate, then the terminal. I don’t want anything to slow that down, and that’s probably why I can’t use anything that either hides my other windows completely or requires to focus and un-focus apps manually. I want to click on a window and watch TextMate fade to the background as Safari comes up. It’s that simple. I really, really need it to be that simple.
5. Finally, I can toggle it from the menu bar. I’m trying not to fill up my menu bar, but it’s becoming inevitable. I can click on the menu bar icon for Isolator, though, and it just toggles. I don’t have to go through the drop-down menu or anything. It’s on, and then it’s off. This is especially helpful for the times that I’m either watching something on my second screen or trying not to annoy my coworkers who don’t use Isolator when I need to show them something.
6. It’s free. Although free is always nice, it’s not a necessity because this app is good enough to pay for. All this means is there’s no reason to even think about it twice before downloading and installing it. It really is awesome, though, so I’ll have to give ‘em a donation as soon as I can.

Just a quick post to tell anyone who cares that I’ve finally picked a real method for managing my growing RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. My first advice is to get a real RSS reader, of course. Something that lets you categorize your feeds, either NetNewsWire (I paid for it, but now it’s free), NewsFire, Google Reader, etc. You have to break up your feeds at least a little bit.

Special Folders

First, I threw online comics and my daily deals like woot! into their own folders. When I want to read today’s Dilbert, I’m not in the mood to look through a lot of news feeds, and the same goes for my daily MacUpdate promos. I look at those early in the morning on my iPhone, normally. I need to be able to jump on those woot! deals first thing, you know?

The River

Next, I created a folder I just call “The River”. This has almost all of my feeds in it, and I look through it once or twice a day as a quick glance through everything going on in the world that I might care about. It’s basically a fire hose of information, and undoubtedly, I might miss something, but I’m okay with that. I scan through all the headlines spending about a second on each one. If something is remotely interesting, I’ll open it. If I accidentally miss something and it disappears, it will probably be duplicated on one of the other blogs in the river. This actually gives me the freedom to throw even more feeds into the river. Since I’m scanning everything, throwing more feeds in just allows me to have a bigger view of the world and spot more trends as they are repeated. I can easily have two or three-hundred items in this feed to glance through without feeling any stress at all.

Heavy Hitters

Finally, I’ve pulled a small handful of feeds into a special folder I call the “Heavy Hitters”. The heavy hitters are bloggers whose articles I will always read. I don’t want them lost in the river, because I know that I’ll read every word they write. This is only a half-dozen writers for me. I probably know them personally, and they aren’t just “aggregators” of other blogs. Because of this, I will probably only have five or six posts show up in this folder on most days.

My Secret Weapon

Of course, my not-so-secret weapon is the NewsGator service. Because I use NetNewsWire on my laptop, it syncs up automatically with NewsGator online. It just happens that NewsGator has my favorite iPhone interface for reading RSS feeds. So, I end up reading everything on my iPhone about 80% of the time and just “clipping” the few articles that are too long or use Flash video that I can’t watch on my iPhone.

37signals posted an article that echoes some of my own thoughts from this very blog:

Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

[via Signal vs. Noise]