Mysterious Flame is all about sharing ideas for maintaining creative momentum and finding ways to become "unstuck."
My friend Patrick Rhone has recently launched a new site devoted to running a minimalist Mac. It’s chock full of great tips for de-cluttering your Macintosh computer.
It’s also gotten me thinking about the idea of minimalism and eliminating unnecessary stuff so that I can be more productive. More on that later!
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.
About a year ago, the rookie designer in our office asked me how I am able to blaze through the Adobe CS3 apps with keyboard shortcuts. She wanted a list of the keyboard shortcuts so she could start learning them herself. I think I had just launched this site, and thought such a thing might be nice here. So, I started jotting down shortcuts on a 3x5 index card, and perused the web for other keyboard shortcut lists, but never really found what I was looking for. Everything had too much information or was too hard to read, or used someone else’s custom shortcuts. I was starting to give up. The project stalled.
Fast forward to late this summer. I discovered that all the Adobe CS3 apps allow you to export your shortcuts to a file (plaintext or html, depending on the app in question). Bingo! I simply exported the default keyboard shortcuts, pulled them into InDesign files, formatted the information nicely, and exported that to PDFs.
After sharing those files on the work.life.creativity. forums, I condensed them down so that they only showed the items that had actual shortcuts assigned. There are a LOT of possible commands in each program, and comparatively few come with keyboard shortcuts out of the box. Most of the most-often used ones are mnemonic, so that helps. (Pressing “P” gives you the Pen tool.) The ones that aren’t just have to be committed to memory.
Here’s the great part of it all: it’s easy to customize keyboard shortcuts to your liking. Delete the ones you don’t use, reassign those to commands you use more frequently or make sense to you. (I’d avoid changing the basic ones like Save, Close, etc. from the OS defaults.) Simply choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and start modifying the ones you want to change. I recommend saving them to a unique name so you can come back to your own setup if your settings get reset. (It happens sometimes when the auto-updater runs.) Once you get your shorcuts set up, you can make your own cheat sheet.
Memorize the shortcuts you use the most. Next time you go through the menus looking for a command, look for the keyboard shortcut next to it, and commit it to memory. First, learn all the basic commands (Save, Close, Quit, etc.). Then learn the tool shortcuts. Get to where you have one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse, avoiding mousing through to the menus. Build that muscle memory! So commit those shortcuts to memory, and make them work for you.
For a long time, Photoshop used Command-Z as “Undo” and Command-Shift-Z as “Redo.” A few years ago, for reasons unknown to me, they changed Undo/Redo to the same shortcut, which forces you to resort to scroll through the History palette to get your documents back to a future state. It takes too long to mouse over to the history palette (if I don’t have to hunt for it first since it might be collapsed or hiding behind something else) and click, click, click to find the document state I’m trying to get back to. This for me is unacceptable and unintuitive, and interrupts my flow of thinking. Plus, it’s inconsistent with the other design apps I’m accustomed to using.
So for every fresh install of Photoshop I work with, I always change “Step Backward” to Cmd-Z and “Step Forward” to Cmd-Shift-Z. Now Photoshop appears to Undo/Redo in the same fashion as everything else does.
You probably have personalized your Macintosh setup to your taste. You have desktop wallpaper featuring your favorite band, your kids, or a picture from your last vacation. Maybe you’ve customized application and folder icons to your liking. Not only can you personalize your Mac to your own individual taste, you can personalize it to help you be more productive. Here are some ways to tweak your Finder, some add-on applications for manipulating files and actions, and ways to organize (and name) your files.
Before I get into this, I have to say that much of this is borrowed from an article I read in Macworld a while back. The online version of the story is here. Also, this covers Mac OS X v. 10.4, as I haven’t really used 10.5 with the exception of the times I’ve played with the new Macs at the Apple Store. The Finder Sidebar is a little different, but the same principles apply.
You can change the icons visible in your Finder sidebar for quick access for a variety of items. Drag and drop icons to create aliases (shortcuts) to things you use often, placing them in the sidebar visible in each Finder window. Here’s what I suggest placing there:
When you right-click (or Ctrl-click if you’re still using the one-button mouse) on a file or folder in the Finder, you can choose from a number of colors to tag your files with. Create a system where each color means something special to you. I use green on images that I have downloaded to add to my “inspiration” folder. You can also use color-coding to remind yourself when finished project folders are ready to be burned to disc for permanent offline storage. Folders that are over 3.5 GB are labeled with red, so I’ll know to burn them to DVD.
While you’re in the Get Info window, you can tag your files by adding keywords to the Spotlight Comments box. This way, when you run a Spotlight search, you can search for a specific word that you’ve tagged your files with. This will work in conjunction with a “keep everything in one big folder” method.
Using the buttons at the top of the Finder window will allow you to view a folder’s contents a number of ways: icon view, list view, column view, and with Leopard, the new Quick Look view that lets you preview documents without opening them. Personally, I find list view and column view most useful. The former since it lets me see color-coding at a glance, and the latter since it makes it easier to go up or down in the folder hierarchy. You can read a lot more about it here on Apple’s site.
Third-party application launchers do exactly what the name implies: launch programs via keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps the most popular one for the Mac is Quicksilver, which does a lot more than just open files and run programs. (I use it in conjunction with a MoodBlast AppleScript to update Twitter and Facebook.) Lifehacker recently ran a feature that polled readers for their fave app launcher. The jury seems to be out on using Spotlight as a launcher, though.
One thing to keep in mind is to remember to name your files well so that you know what they are, even without special tags or color codes. This really should be a no-brainer, yet it happens all the time. You don’t want to end up with five different files named “Business Card.” Give it a name like “JohnSmith_bc” or something else descriptive that you’ll be able to identify immediately when you’ve got the flu and you’re loopy from cough syrup. You may be the only person who will ever look at your files, but you need to make it clear enough to other people what they are, in case you are unable to work with them at a future point. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of writing your tasks as if you are delegating them to someone you actually know.
Designed, coded, and maintained by Brad Blackman (except where otherwise noted.)
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.