I try to avoid having too many things in my Startup Items on my Mac as it tends to bog down the machine. However, there are several apps I use in concert with each other, such as the Adobe Creative Suite. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to click on all three icons in the Dock. I’d rather launch them all at once with a couple of keystrokes with Quicksilver. I figured out how to do this with Automator.
Launch Automator. The first thing it will do is ask you what direction to go in. We want to use the Custom option.
Scroll down until you find “Launch Application.” Or just type “launch” in the search box and you’ll see it immediately.
Select and drag “Launch Application” to the pane on the right to start building your workflow.
The pane on the right displays a popup menu that allows you to choose what application to launch. You may have to choose “Other” at the bottom of the list, and navigate to the application you want.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 as needed if you want to include other applications.
Save it as an application in the Applications folder.
Invoke Quicksilver and launch your app. That’s it!
If you want to go back and change your workflow, you can always open an existing workflow in Automator.
When this arrived in the mail Saturday, I recognized the box with the giant question mark right away. Then I saw that it was guest-edited by J.J. Abrams! It’s a great issue, and while I haven’t finished all of it, I’ve really enjoyed reading it, probably more than I really ought to. In true Abrams fashion, here are all kinds of little things hidden throughout the magazine. Plus there’s a fun article he wrote that talks about spoilers. Interesting tidbit from that article that I didn’t know: Abrams and Greg Grunberg (yep, the guy who plays Matt Parkman on Heroes) were roommates 20 years ago, and tried desperately to beat Super Mario Brothers 2.
It’s so good I stayed up til 1 am reading it. (And I meant to go to bed about 11:30…)
Anyway, go check it out and get yourself a copy. You’ll be entertained and have that creative noodle tickled. Plus, the whole issue is chock-full of Futura and sports a different graphic style, quite a departure for Wired. I don’t know if it’s intended to be unique to the issue or if it’s the way they’ll do things for the next ten issues or so, but it’s a pretty interesting departure for the mag.
With all his talent, even Paul McCartney can get stuck. In Paintings, he shares a fun, creative little strategy he has devised for dealing with stuckness. Read the rest of this entry »
Find something on the web that inspires you in some way? Make a screen grab and throw it into your digital inspiration folder. Grace Smith has a nice roundup of 15 (digital) tools for making screen grabs, which can be useful for capturing design inspiration for creating moodboards/styleboards.
As you can tell from what I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve come to the conclusion that “productivity” is not the point. And being organized is not the point, either, although it can be tremendously helpful in a number of ways (that we’re not going to delve into today).
The point is whether you are making anything at all. You can plan and plan and plan all day long and have little to show for it, except for a bunch of plans. I’m reminded of the Beatles song “Nowhere Man,” which is about this indecisive head-in-the-sand guy who makes “all his nowhere plans for nobody.” In fact, “isn’t he a bit like you and me?” Read the rest of this entry »
When this arrived in the mail Saturday, I recognized the 
