Distraction Elimination Week: Day 2: OS X Finder

The human eye is extremely sensitive to changes in the visual field – especially in the periphery. The OS X Finder places quite a few distractions – changing things unrelated to the task at hand – in the edges of the screen.

Let’s eliminate them.

Start by opening up System Preferences:

Dock: Check "Automatically hide and show the Dock"
This will hide any dock-icon based indicators (unread mail, etc).

Bluetooth > Settings: Uncheck "Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar"
This keeps any change in your Bluetooth status from distracting you.

Energy Saver > Options: Uncheck "Show battery status in the menu bar"
This keeps the changing battery indicator from distracting you.

Sound > Options: Uncheck "Show volume in the menu bar"
The indicator that shows up when you change the volume is so much better.

Date & Time > Clock: Uncheck "Show the date and time"
It was the changing clock that started me on this quest to eliminate distractions. My replacement – the world clock Dashboard Widget.

Now open up Internet Connect, select AirPort and Uncheck
"Show AirPort status in menu bar"
This keeps changes in the wifi signal from distracting you (you’ll probably feel it in the page loads if something happens, to verify an issue, open up Internet Connect).

Tomorrow, we’ll go through some other apps. Until then Command + H.

FriendFeed.com – Just Aggregating Your Friends’ Feeds?

“…if you’re brilliant enough to create Google Maps, Gmail, et. al, move on to inventing a flying car or something.” – Rex Hammock

A while back, when I was regularly publishing to multiple sites, I had a thing I called the gFeed that pulled all those feeds (probably a half dozen at my peak) into a single feed.

Sure some people subscribed to it (I believe some still are) but straight aggregation isn’t actually that useful1 – and if you’re crazy enough to want all my feeds, your crazy enough to know how to get them yourself. Soon, FriendFeed will start offering to do the same for you or me, or us.

The value isn’t in the aggregation, it’s in what happens after ther aggregation.

While my exposure to FriendFeed, Streamy, and FeedEachOther is very limited at this point, they all feel too “social network” heavy at this point. Unfortunately, that’s not the biggest missing piece in today’s aggregators.

1. I’ve stopped promoting the gFeed because it’s easier for both of us if I publish more in fewer places.

Why I Prefer Working Outta the Home Office

“You’d think working in close proximity to your co-workers would keep you accountable, but most times it has the opposite effect. We actually attempt to hide ourselves in a cloud of co-workers hoping no one notices our lack of speed and productivity.” – Arik Jones

Unless everyone in the office is working on the exact same part of the same project – where the office should be excited and alive – the office should be dead quiet, otherwise someone is being distracting.

Between email, IM, and phone, I have close virtual proximity to my co-workers. These are far lower-fidelity interruptions (and therefore more productive) than a shouting over the cubicle wall or hanging out next to my desk.

Many offices I’ve been in were too much about socializing around reality TV programs for my taste. The most productive offices I’ve been in? I had a desk in the back corner of an otherwise empty room. Made me think I should just work from home.

Distraction Elimination Week: Day 1: Audio

Each day this week, I’m minimizing some distraction on my MacBook Pro. Today, it’s the unnecessary and often redundant audio noises.

In the OS X Finder, go to System Preferences > Sound and make sure all three checkboxes are unchecked.

In Mail.app, go to Preferences > General and select "None" in the New mail sound: pulldown menu and uncheck “Play sounds for other mail actions" 1

In SpamSieve, go to Preferences > Notifications and uncheck "Play sound".

In Adium, go to Preferences > Alerts and select "None" in "Sound set". Name this set "Quiet" at the prompt and click OK.

In Transmit, go to Preferences > Transfers and select "None" in "Transfer complete sound".

1. You may also notice that I’ve also changed my "Check for new mail" frequency to "Manually", that’s to minimized Mail.app’s visual indicators – we’ll talk about that later this week.

ELSEWHERE:
Arik Jones’ is also fighting distraction.

RE: Pioneer Press to Launch ‘e-paper’

Every couple of years, the idea of delivering a frozen PDF instead of a living, breathing website hits my radar 1. This is the first time it hit’s this close to home.

“Presumably, you’ll now be able to pay a premium to have a format that less searchable, doesn’t get corrected or updated the same way a normal paper doesn’t and ultimately cannot be linked to or aggregated.”- Aaron Landry

At best, this effort is a distraction from their two other delivery channels – paper, pioneerpress.com. This middle ground is just silly.For everyone over at the Pioneer Press, could you something, anything by Jeff Jarvis or Doc Searls. Oh, and maybe you’ve heard that NYTimes has dropped their paywall.1. I remember an HP project that would automatically print out your newspaper on your home inkjet every morning.

RE: What is the next podcast brand?

“…there’s no strong brand in podcasting – except for iTunes. And iTunes doesn’t really care about podcasting. Which means there’s an opportunity there. The podcast format is still brilliant…” – Peter Van Dijck

I think the first mistake made in podcast-land is considering it something different. Different than a blog, different than radio, different than video, different than an mp3 file, different than a conversation. That made the world very small, lame, and self-defeating. ‘Podcast’ rides atop all those things.

Hell, technically, all you have to do is make use of the ‘enclosure’ tag to be a podcast. Yes, as a communication form, the best ones have their own aesthetic and aren’t just ‘time-shifted’. But the idea of a podcast directory is as unmaintainable as a locked iPhone.

The Twittergram work I did a while back reminded me of the podcast-client that I’d like to see. It’s on the list of things to revisit after I launch this other app. Why? Cause it rides atop.

FeadEachOther.com = Facebook + Bloglines

Ben just pointed me to FeedEachOther.com another entry in the social feed space.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to know which feeds your friends subscribe to? Shouldn’t you be able to find new feeds by topic? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could browse feeds related to your subscriptions? Shouldn’t you be able to share things that you find in your reader without clogging up your friend’s email? How great would it be if your reader could automatically point you towards other interesting, like-minded people?”

Also, reading comments inline is nice.

As you can tell from the above intro from founder, Udi, this is the closest I’ve seen to the project I’m working on 1, so I’m real happy to see forward progress made elsewhere in feed land.

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Analysis:

“The only shortcomings I’ve seen so far are the absence of offline and mobile modes, weaker analytics than Google Reader offers and a limit of 500 feeds by OPML import. Those problems are big enough that I’m not likely to use FeedEachOther.”

Those aren’t showstoppers for me – and hey, this is day 1. I just don’t think FeedEachOther is intended me, Marshall, or anyone with a serious feed problem. Walking through the intro screencasts it definitely feels like a Facebook + Bloglines (or Google Reader + Orkut if you believe the rumors), with corresponding RSS Feed 101 language and tone.

I do have 1,223,948,234,981 invites remaining, so you can expect one soon.

UPDATE:
Based on the further comments @ ReadWriteWeb, it looks like FEO has been having some issues supporting the number of people that want to check out the service. I think that hurts everyone – the service provider and the people that want to use the site. For free services, there are only a few ways to minimize the bad experience. Unfortunately, throwing up a 500 is probably the easiest way to do it.

1. While my perspective may be skewed – 10 minutes from now feeds will be ubiquitious and we need more and better tools than we have today to help us stop drinking from the firehose. That’s just one reporters opinion.

You’re Worth $294.12

“I WANT to be enthused about things like Myspace, and Facebook, and Second Life, and iLike…In every case, I feel like people are blindly giving away value, and not getting enough in return. What do you get from these websites that you can’t get on your own? What do they do for you that you can’t do for yourself? The real purpose of all of them seems… to me, to be convincing people to give up personal information so that information can be sold to businesses, or otherwise used to market products. They are SPAM factories.” – Rusty Dubose

Rumor has it that Microsoft is about to purchase 5% of Facebook for $500 million.

Let’s put those numbers against the stats on Wikipedia’s Facebook page:

($500,000 * 20) / 34,000,000 active members = $294.11764 / active member.

No, I don’t think most “active members” get $300 of “free” value out of Facebook, MySpace, or Pownce.

Maybe LinkedIn….more likely Twitter.

The free blog their cousin set up for them on the server in his basement – absolutely.

Twin Cities Cool. Not Just Cause It’s Autumn

When we moved from Chicago almost 5 years ago, I got a lot of snickers and jeers from my co-workers. Completely understandable given that Chicago sees itself as the second city and all the reports of Mayor Daley trying to make it into NY without the bad parts.

It’s the quality of life that separates the Twin Cities from that cross-country rivalry. That’s continually highlighted in the recent WSJ article: The Twin Cities Hit ‘Critical Coolness’.

The quote, “It’s such a get-out-there and do something culture,” reminds me of Rex‘s MSP vs SEA comparison (can’t find the like right now) – everyone in MSP has a side project.

UPDATE: Rex’s comment reminded me that MSP has far more in common with PDX and SEA than ORD. But if you’ve spent anytime in the PNW you already know that. There’s been times that I’ve wondered if there’s some sorta high-speed tunnel between MSP and PDX.