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Mountain Lion’s mini-revolution: renaming and moving without closing files
A nightmare had followed me for decades on both PCs and Mac. I am working on a file and decide that it should be called differently or be placed in a different folder. So I switch to Finder/Explorer,...
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Collaboration in academic writing: software and beyond
Unfortunately, collaboration in academic writing often causes frustration. Academics are used to think that co-authoring a manuscripts means emailing back and forth Microsoft Word documents with...
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Goodbye MailTags … and see you soon (?)
I enthusiastically used MailTags starting almost from the day I got my first Mac and until the last Friday. The reason I gave up was that my Mail.app has been choking on MailTags for the last several...
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It’s not Macs vs. PCs. It’s people vs. powerpoints
A meeting of an academic board. Ten people. Eight Macs. One PC. The PC is projecting PowerPoint bullet lists about academic excellence, technological innovation, and social transformation. The...
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Why is the quality of academic presentations declining?
I think that the quality of academic presentations has been alarmingly declining in recent years. More and more of presentations I hear from senior academics at major conference don’t meet clarity and...
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Academic presentations: ideas, workflows, and a Mac
I recently commented on the declining quality of academic talks driven by the logic of conference organizers, for whom ‘a presentation’ often means nothing more than a set of slides. We can counteract...
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OmniFocus 2 and OmniOutliner 4 on their way … at last!
The OmniGroup announced its plans to release OmniFocus 2 and OmniOutliner 4 in the first quarter of 2013. Both are very welcome and some would say long overdue. In the last couple of years the group...
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Custom keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word for Mac
Despite alternatives to Microsoft Word it is not possible to completely avoid using it in academic work on a Mac. If you have to edit texts in MS Word you might as well do it smoothly and efficiently,...
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Managing audience attention: Keynote animations
There are only two real scarcities in the world: the scarcity of time and the scarcity of attention. In public speaking, you engage with both. You can’t afford to waste time or to lose the attention of...
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Talking to slides
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”...
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Managing email with SaneBox
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...
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Welcome back, MailTags!
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...
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Note-taking with Ulysses: beside NValt and Byword
Following Csaba’s post on Ulysses, I have been trying it for over one month. Somewhat surprisingly, I have used it quite often. For example, for drafting grading rules, evaluating research proposals,...
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Responding to reviewer’s comments with Ulysses and TaskPaper
There is plenty of serious and humorous advice on how to deal with reviewers’ comments to your manuscripts submitted to peer review journals. This post is about two apps: Ulysses and TaskPaper that...
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Sending files which are too large for e-mail
I have recently asked a colleague to share one of her publications with me. I did not hear from her, but after a week or so, while cleaning my @SaneLater box, I discovered an email sent by her from an...
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Daily planning with TaskPaper and TextExpander
Have you ever tried to take your days one by one when they kept coming to you all at once? I have many times. To keep my days under control I use simple daily plans generated by a combination of...
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On vacation with SaneBox
In order to keep email from taking over my vacation I have created a custom defer folder on SaneBox called @SaneVacation. It is similar to how I use SaneBox to defer emails during the year, except that...
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Stop being boring! – another Keynote animation
These two Keynote slides illustrate some principles of animation described in an earlier post. The first slide starts with a screenshot of Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen website. The words “stop...
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Two emails
Monday morning. I am looking at an email message and feel I am about to lose it. The red text reminds that the time is flying and I am hopelessly behind. The blue text confuses or irritates. The...
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When and how to use email reminders
Reminders sent by email are not only unpleasant but often counterproductive. I must admit that sometimes they actually make me less willing to do what is asked for. Therefore e-mail reminders should be...
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