Codswallop reader favorite software - including Daylite

Codswallop's reader list of favorite tools is surprisingly good. I recognized most of them, but Daylite is new to me.

I'm surprised I've not heard this integrated productivity suite -- but the $1000 5 user license fee might be part of the reason. Their sync would have to be extremely good to justify even a license for Emily and ($400).

On another note, I was surprised to see Total Commander on the list. It's been a while since I've seen a Norton Commander clone. Those were the days ...

Update 7/24/08: Great comment from Carolyn. If Daylite can't do basic task/calendar integration, how can we take them seriously?

Forklift: Norton Commander for OS X

I've never used a file management tool on any OS as good as John Socha's Norton Commander for DOS. Nothing in OS/2, GeoWorks, Commodore, Windows 3, 95/98, NT, 2K, XP, MacOS, OS X, Palm etc. Others must agree, there've been clones for years, including clones of clones by people who don't remember the original (FileCommander for OS/2 came closest to the original).

Norton Commander was like Symantec's MORE 3.1 or GrandView -- software so good it cannot be adequately replicated. NC even has a fan pages and an official history. It was the progenitor of what's now called an "orthodox file manager" (OFM).

So when TUAW wrote about a "dual pane" file manager for OS X I had to investigate. TUAW's writers are too young to recall NC, so they didn't mention it, but indeed ForkLift ($30) is an NC clone for OS X. They even use tabs to switch panes. There's no command line (odd omission really), but the Spotlight integration is well done and substitutes for NC's marvelous NCD command, no tree views, and sadly there's no real equivalent to the NC Alt-F10/NCD functionality (see below). (Now if only Microsoft would remember that search strings need to execute against folders...)

Will I get it? $30 is quite a bit for something like this, I think they should have gone for $20. It feels like a starting point rather than a finished solution -- there are no tree views for example. Still, I'll try it for a week and see ...

Update 6/3/07: Alt-F10. That's what they're missing. That would make this worth $30, its absence makes this worth $10. Sometime in the evolution of NC, perhaps even NC 5, Symantec integrated NCD/Norton Change Directory (esp. see WCD) into Norton Commander. Tap Alt-F10, and the currently active pane was replaced with a tree view of the disk directory structure. Type a few characters and the view switched to the first match. Tap a quick key to move to the next match, always in the context of the tree. Hit Enter to switch the pane to the selected directory.

Brilliant. Nobody has done it better. This was post John Socha I believe; true genius in software requires multiple contributors working around a shared theme and vision.

The Forklift team ought to be able to leverage Spotlight and Cocoa to provide the indices and tree views, so much of the heavy lifting would be done for them.

I doubt they'll do it, but I'll send them a comment.

Incidentally, speaking of parts of the later NC that everyone's forgotten, there's NC Mail/NCMail. Symantec bundled the most efficient email app I've ever used with NC in the waning days of DOS. It was plain, but it was hyper-efficient.

Launchbar for Windows - not quite

Launchbar is one of my favorite OS X applications. (Quicksilver is an imitator that is free, and thus gets more attention, but LB came first.) I've long looked for a Windows equivalent. I registered AppRocket and used it for a while, but it was disappointing in the end.

I was surprised then, to learn there are so many XP apps that try to be Launchbar for Windows:
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Replacing Start Run.

Vista has implemented a Launchbar like feature, so maybe others will work to bring Launchbar to XP. It would be most appreciated.

Update: Just noticed one of Scott's update comments: Ctrl-H in Google Desktop?! Wow, that's killer. I much prefer Yahoo Desktop Search to Google Desktop because GD doesn't grok folders, but this might switch me.

Spotlight for a Simple Finder user: How?

Update 12/12/06: You can't delete a file in Simple Finder.

Think about it.

Simple Finder is proof positive that Apple is quite capable of producing absolute cr*p. I wasted several hours of work experimenting and learning Apple's undocumented Simple Finder, only to realize I could create files in SF, but I couldn't delete them.

Simple Finder in OS 8 was an important addition to the OS. In OS X it's an blight, a festering sore, a sick joke on Apple's customers. (Can you tell I'm annoyed?).

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My mother's Mac Mini will run Simple Finder -- at least for a while. I've been experimenting with SF and, if one ignores the official way to configure it and uses the 'Full Finder' configuration method (more on all this is a later post, I'll create a future link) I think it will work. Nisus Writer Express, which can be configured to look and feel like a very simple word processor (it's really quite powerful), will be her writing tool.

The biggestA relatively minor problem is that Simple Finder knocks out Spotlight. That's right, there's no way for an SF user to use Spotlight to find items. Kind of ironic, since Spotlight is in part a response to the complexity of the folder/hiearchy world.

So now I'm looking for a Spotlight front end. I searched on one I've licensed (MoRU), that led me this post where the comments mention a few others [1]: Hawk Wings: Two apps for a smarter Spotlight. I'll also play with Launchbar and see how that will work -- but a simple Spotlight front-end that works with Simple Finder, and that can be constrained to only search Documents, is what I'm looking for. I'll see if I can configure MoRU to do that.

Any suggestions?

[1] My favorite technique for finding good reviews of a class of products is to find two product names, search on the two together, then find three, search on the three together, etc. Chances are a review that discusses 2-3 competing products is a genuine review, not a fake.

Update 12/12/06: I tried creating a smart folder that would emulate a spotlight interface, using the trick of defining the smart folder to show all files created in the past 99 years. Alas, smart folders are inert in Simple Finder. Then I tried MoRU ($10). It works pretty well, and with a bit of tweaking I was able to create a simple interface. It even supports zooming the UI. So far MoRU is looking like a good bet, but I'll try a few others.

LaunchBar - There's so much more

I've used LaunchBar for years. It's astonishing. I'm disappointed they never did a Windows version; even today the Windows imitators I've seen are worthless fakes.

Despite all my use, I've never tweaked the default configuration, nor explored all the advanced options. In part this is because my wife has first dibs on the iMac, and I make do with a pathetic XP box (sniff).

Today though, I became fed up with a longstanding annoynace. I want to use Launchbar to quickly navigate to folders, but the default setup indexes file names that clutter my search results. I prefer other methods to find files (Spotlight for example), LaunchBar works as my app launcher.

It turns out that it's only a moment's work to reconfigure Launchbar to ignore files and only index folders. Nirvana! I index applications, folders, and the address book -- nothing else. Works great.

I'm even experiencing with indexing the folder structure of my XP box, and scheduling an index update each night. I have a hunch that will work exceedingly well. I really do need to get my hands on a new MacBook.

If you don't use Launchbar you should, and if you do use it, browse the excellent web site. There are capabilities you don't know about ...

osx.iusethis.com: why it's interesting

The trouble with most software news sites is that they're biased to the newest fashion. Older, mature apps get no credit. LaunchBar, my all time favorite, isn't free and it's updated with care -- so it doesn't get much attention.

osx.iusethis addresses this problem. You simply say what apps you actually use, and optionally, why. Great idea. Seems like it might apply to other domains in which the excellent but older loses to the fashionable. Books, records, movies, etc. (Come to think of it, this was first done for movies -- but we don't think of it that way ...)

LaunchBar 4.1 is out

TidBITS has a nice summary. I've been using 4.1beta for ages, I guess I'll get around to updating. Every so often I adopt a new Launchbar feature, but the core functionality is hardwired to my fingers. A terrific product, I've never really been tempted to try anything else. Why mess with perfection?

LaunchBar 4.1b1 has Search in Spotlight option

I wrote Objective Development a month or two ago requesting Spotlight integration in their Launchbar application (Launchbar alone is sufficient reason to use OS X over XP). They told me the work was underway. I guess I wasn't the only customer to ask!

Now it's out in beta. I'll report on how this goes as soon as I install it. This might make Spotlight really useful for me.

LaunchBar 4

LaunchBar 4.1b1 is a Mac OS X launcher with drop-down menus, shortcut keyboard access to menu items, and launching of bookmarks, email addresses, files, and applications. This beta release adds new options for opening items, support for color labels, improved iTunes support, improved Address Book support, a Search in Spotlight option, a Look Up in Dictionary option, faster startups, and other changes. LaunchBar is $19.95 for non-commercial use ($39 for business use) for Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.4.

Update 11/1: Fabulous. Heavenly. Suddenly Tiger is worth something. The Spotlight syntax now makes sense. I can do phrase searches. I can do Boolean searches. I've removed Spotlight's keyboard shortcut and assigned the Spotlight Windows shortcut to F2. Launchbar again owns the cmd-spacebar key.

Google Desktop Incorporates a blend of Launchbar and Spotlight

Google Desktop 2.0 is big disappointing.

Update 8/24: Even bigger disappointment. After it finally built my indices (took days) I tried it out. I learned that:

1. It doesn't match on folder names. In other words, to GoD folders are invisible annoyances. ARGGHHH. The fools, the fools. This one just bit the dust.
2. It took forever to build the index, and you can't relocate it to a non-backed up drive without an unsupported utility.
3. Lookout search works, but I couldn't contrain what things were indexed and I couldn't restrict search to particular object types (tasks, etc).
   

I'm back to Yahoo Desktop! and Lookout for Outlook (now a zombie -- no further development going on post-Microsoft acquisition). I may try a look at MSN search sometime but I fear it doesn't include enough of Lookout's capabilities to be worth a switch.

Update: Biggest disappointment -- I can't find a keyboard shortcut so I can search and execute without a mouse. I'm sure one will be added shortly!

One of the most interesting features, however, may be a blend between OS X Launchbar (my favorite must have OS X utility) and Spotlight (which I'm still trying to find a use for -- if I didn't use Launchbar it would be more useful). That blend is precisely what I've been missing. They probably haven't incorporated, however, Launchbar's brilliant machine learning algorithms. (BTW, why doesn't Launchbar wrap Spotlight? Update 8/24: I'm told it will!!)

Quick Find makes launching applications and searching your desktop easy and fast. From within any application, just type a few letters or words into Sidebar's search box and you'll see the top results pop up instantly. You can use Quick Find to launch applications without having to deal with the Start menu; for example, if you have Microsoft Word installed, you can launch it by just typing 'wor' into the Sidebar search box and selecting 'Microsoft Word' in the list of results that appears. You can also use Quick Find from the Deskbar and Floating Deskbar, which are described in a separate section.

A few quick notes:

1. It's supposed to index tasks, calendar items, etc. We'll see. They mean Outlook but I wish they'd say so.
2. You can index networked drives and non C:\ drives. That's big, this was a major limitation of 1.0.
3. The Sidebar is an application deployment environment (aka an 'operating system' in which one can install other applications. Shades of Konfabulator and OS X Widgets. This is a shared desktop that can be accessed via any XP box (but NOT a Mac -- peculiar that Google should be driving their audience to Microsoft's platform)
   
4. You still can't move or relocate your index file, so you have to explicitly avoid backing it up. Annoying.
5. GMail indexing is most interesting. In my case, makes up for not indexing Eudora.
6. The deskbar does replace the Start menu.
   

The best part of OS X 10.4.2? Simple Finder for kids

Apple - Mac OS X - Family

My new machine came with Tiger. So far it's mostly a posterior pain. Old software has to be upgraded, the install is bigger, Spotlight insists on indexing peripheral drives it should ignore, I can't see how to constrain search to a path, and Quartz Extreme is still disabled and Retrospect has no Tiger support in their (orphaned post acquistion?) Windows based Mac backup (you can use the Retrospect/Mac client -- but that's not a licensed use and it's not supported).

There are a lot of nice touches, but I don't see any big advantage in Tiger for me over 10.3.9. Given a choice, I'd still choose LaunchBar over Spotlight, and I had to pay $10 for the new version of Launchbar after I upgraded!

With one exception. In 10.4.2 the 'Simple Finder' (managed user option -- Children) is very nice. It was broken badly in 10.0-10.3, so it's great to see it back. The Simple Finder now supports multiple 'windows' based on the number of icons in a folder, and there's an option (choose from menu) to break out to the full finder. So an administrator can now log in as a child, then configure the system as needed, then return to child!

The kid support is almost worth the upgrade.

AppRocket: A LaunchBar clone for Windows?

Candy Labs - AppRocket

LaunchBar 3 for OS X was an essentially perfect application. Yeah, I know about QuickSilver. There's even a LaunchBar 4.01 which is supposed to be a nice update -- but why mess with perfection? I paid for LaunchBar and I love it.

I've looked without success for a Windows equivalent. Today I idly typed in an old google search 'launchbar for windows'. It returned AppRocket, now on version 1.2.

On first inspection this is basically a clone of LaunchBar 1.x. Alas, it didn't work for me. On an initial test it didn't seem to be detecting directories or folders (!?!)*. I assumed this was a glitch of the initial (very long) indexing process, but before I could retest AppRocket threw an uncaught exception and crashed. The crashed process continued to consume 40GB of drive space, but I was able to eventually restart XP. (BTW, I thought .NET apps weren't supposed to do that sort of thing any more ...)

It looks like I'll stick with my home-brewed WCD-powered folder-navigator solution for now. I'll try again with 1.3.

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* One would assume any application designed to support navigation would do at least as well as Norton Change Directory (later integrated into Norton Commander 3.x) -- the perfect application for folder navigation (vintage 1989). Incredibly, application designers consistently ignore the metadata implicit in an enclosing folder. Several 'file location/navigation' utilities for Windows that I've evaluated completely ignore directories! Even some of much celebrated full text search programs don't return matches on folder/directory substrings! (Yahoo Desktop Search, my current somewhat-favorite, does match on directories.)

I do find it fascinating that truly superb ideas in software can be quite successful, then vanish and never be fully implemented again. Compared to what we attempt to do today, NCD was a trivial, utterly simple application. And yet, there's no reliable modern equivalent available on the dominant Windows platform. I think we can only explain this sort of market failure by comparison to the idiosyncratic "choices" of systems ruled by the peculiarities of evolution and natural selection.

5/21/06: I did eventually buy a later, more stable, version of AppRocket. It's ok, but it's definitely not in the same exalted class as LaunchBar. Worth the money though.

Update 6/07: I forget what happened, but I soured on AppRocket. Buggy I believe, and in the end far inferior to LaunchBar. Later, I think, Google bundled similar functionality into their desktop search engine.

Launchers for Mac OS X: LaunchBar, Butler, Quicksilver and more

MacDevCenter.com: Launchers for Mac OS X

This was published 4/04 but I just came across it. Quicksilver has since gone into general release. Great discussion.

Wanted: An AppleScript for Safari that will open a viewed page in Firefox (OS X)

Apple - Discussions - Looking for: Open in Firefox AppleScript

From a post to the Apple Discussions Forum:

I use Firefox on Windows, but Safari on my Mac. (When Camino gets to the same Gecko engine as FF, and thus gets the web site support FF 1.0 now has, I'll probably switch to Camino on my Mac. I like Omniweb, but it has the same constituency problems as Safari.)

Although Safari works well most of the time, there are some sites, where I'd really like to use FF. Blogger, for example, provides its superb wysiwyg Compose editor only to the most recent FF/Moz release. Safari users are stuck with a barebones editor, Camino gets the previous Mozilla editor (for its version of Gecko).

Firefox on the PC has an "Open in IE" extension that lets me view some poorly implemented banking sites in IE. We need a similar "Open in FF" function for Safari. That way I could mostly work in Safari (for now), but switch to FF when I need it. (Ugly fonts and all.)

Has anyone done an "Open in Firefox" AppleScript for Safari?

Update: "Camelot" quickly replied with the script:

tell application "Safari"
set theURL to URL of document 1 -- get the current URL
end tell

tell application "Firefox" to Get URL theURL

For those who know even less AppleScript than I, this is what I did.

Wow. This works just as you described. It will help with Blogger and those other pages that don't quite work in Safari.

For those who know even less AppleScript than I, this is what I did.

1. Located the AppleScript folder in my Applications Folder.
2. Launched script editor and pasted in above (second example)
3. Saved script in my personal Library/Script/Safari folder.
4. Saved script again as an application. Unchecked StartUp Screen, checked Run Only. (This step is useful for LaunchBar integration, otherwise ignore it.)

Since I have the script icon on my toolbar (forget how I did that) I can click there and launch the script.

I also extended the script so FF would come to the front (not sure if this the right way to do so):

tell application "Safari"
set theURL to URL of document 1 -- get the current URL
end tell

tell application "Firefox" to Get URL theURL

tell application "Firefox"
activate
end tell

Lastly, by saving a copy of the script as an application, I had something that when I click on it just opens in FF. Then I configured Launchbar to index my scripts folder. Now when I activate launchbar and type 'OIF' FF launches.

I can start a post in Safari, and finish it in FF.

I can start a blog post in Safari, do Launchbar OIF, then complete editing it in FF. Works great.

LaunchBar interview -- a great piece of OS X software

MacDevCenter.com: From NEXTSTEP to Now: An Interview with LaunchBar's Norbert Heger

I adore LaunchBar. I really miss it when I suffer with my XP machines. It wasn't until I read this article, however, that I realized it's supposed to index my folder names. I'd never bothered to use it beyond its basic program launcher capabilities.

Turns out it was indexing my folder names -- but the data was lost in the noise of indexed address book entries, bookmarks, file names, etc. Fortunately I've had lots of experience with indexing software over the last few months (mostly on XP -- Lookout and several others). From that experience I've learned:

1. Full text indexing of email works great. In fact, the easiest way to locate a file on my work machine is to find it as an attachment, identify the file name, and then find the current version in my file system. Why does email indexing work better than full text indexing of the file system? In a word ... metadata. Email has tons of metadata -- people's names, all kinds of dates, surrounding text, subject lines, file names, etc. Way better than any currently popular file system, and all "free".

2. Full text indexing of the file system isn't as useful as I'd have thought. Too much noise.

3. Full text indexing of folder names is VERY useful -- especially as one learns to create descriptive folder names. They provide a sort of enclosing metadata. (Yes, categories as in gmail work as well or better, but folder names are what one gets nowadays.)

4. I don't use bookmarks very much. I use them for a few frequent things, otherwise I search Google and/or my blogs. (I want a searchbar that integrates google search with searching my blogs and bloglines subscriptions.)

So I applied that knowledge to launchbar:

1. index all application names
2. index names of folders
3. ignore most everything else.

What do you know ... it's twice as useful as it was! Just by doing less -- and more.

LaunchBar's configuration UI, btw, could use a bit of work.

X1.com -- search files and outlook -- a review

X1 instantly searches files & email. For Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape Mail.

I took another look at this since Fallows wrote of it recently in the NYT. It's a product of Bill Gross, a Caltech undergrad classmate of mine. He made his initial fortune on a Lotus Notes module (long forgotten).

It's not quite ready for primetime. Some odd bugs and behaviors. Sent my CPU usage through the roof. Every time I hit the letter 'e' when searching in the file tag it jumped to the email search tag!!

Now it's quieting down after I tweaked the options:

1. Turned off all outlook/email/contacts indexing. Lookout works great for Outlook, and X1 doesn't search notes or tasks (meaning it's not useful for me).

2. Removed all the quick key entries for email. That stopped the 'e' problem, so now I can search for terms containing the exotic letter 'e'.

3. Restricted indexing to a subset of directories and to files under 2MB. In some directories limited indexing to file and folder name. If nothing else X1 may be fast way to locate directories and files.

4. X1 ONLY does stem searching. It doesn't do substring searching. This is a reasonable compromise for document indexing, but for finding folders/directories substring searching is feasible and necessary. So it's not as good for navigating directories as WCD (for example).

5. I need more control over what NOT to index, preferably using regex to define directory paths and files to exclude. X1 is indexing all of the FrontPage index files.

Given the above it might be useable. I have a LOT of content to index.

Erwin Waterlander, WCD Wherever Change Directory

Erwin Waterlander's WCD - Wherever Change Directory

This is much more impressive than appears on first look. It's a cross-platform text mode program that does what Norton Change Directory did, but with far more control on what's indexed and how. It also allows wild card searches -- which is very, very cool. Combine this with some personal conventions for naming directories and there are great productivity gains. It's too powerful and complex for most WinXP users (it's really more for the UNIX/Linux user), but it's a Source Forge project that could be integrated into many Norton Commander like clones -- or into a Mac OS X AppleScript application! (There's an OX port.)

Erwin's web page doesn't mention how to integrate Windows Explorer with WCD. I was playing with all kinds of trickery, but he gave me the very simple and elegant solution. It's easy to understand what's happending in the Win9x version, but to change the current directory in WinXP one must use a batch file intermediary. Read the Win9x version first to understand the WinXP version. Once the current directory has been changed the command "explorer ." opens the current directory. There are more options for the explorer command I'll probably add, but this is a good starting point. Here's Erwin's advice:

I used this script to run explorer after wcd (on windows NT/2000/XP):

@echo off
wcdwin32.exe %*
echo explorer.exe . >> %HOME%\wcdgo.bat
%HOME%\wcdgo.bat

If you use the dos32bit version on windows 95/98/ME this script will work:

@echo off
wcd.exe %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6
explorer.exe .

Erwin Waterlander
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
www: http://www.xs4all.nl/~waterlan/

Servant Salamander File Manager - Norton Commander Clone #452

Servant Salamander File Manager - Homepage

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Cute. Commander -> Salamander, Master -> Servant. I'll test this one too.

Any application that spawns as many clones as Norton Commander has, over 15 years since it vanished, was doing something right.

Update: It's missing the critical Norton Change Directory feature, but the developer tells me it's high on their priority list. WinNC.Net is missing it as well. Only Total Commander has it, but their implementation is a bit awkward. Given the size and complexity of modern drives I think to be useful today NCD would need to be constrained to a given directory structure. I believe the WCD utility allows this.

Update 10/12/04: I ended up primarily using WCD to find directories along with some extensions the developer suggested that unified WCD with Windows Explorer. As for Salamander, I discovered there was some kind of Windows extension loaded on startup that lived in my TEMP folder. I don't like that kind of uninvited guest -- even if it is probably fully benign. I uninstalled Salamander.

WinNc.Net - Norton Commander Clone - Filemanager for Windows

WinNc.Net - Norton Commander Clone - Filemanager for Windows

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Every so often I get so irritated with Windows XP that I search for anything that would help. Something like ... Norton Commander. NC was a DOS 2.1 (maybe earlier) file management application. It was brilliant. Even OS X isn't quite as good for file management ... ok, OS X is better -- but not THAT much better.

One of the best featurse of NC was it built a tree of directories, so one could navigate instantly based on character matching.

Under OS/2 I used FileCommander, an NC clone, but it didn't quite make the transition to Win2K.

Today I came across this Norton Commander clone. I'll give it a try. XP's file manager was never very good, and it's completely collapsed in the face of my hard drive.

Now if only Google toolbar would add the ##@! full text indexing we were promised. (I hear MSN might get there first ...)

Of course Longhorn is supposed to solve all these problems. I'm not holding my breath.

Update: Uh-oh. There's no "norton change directory". The DOS version of NC built a directory tree index, one could navigate to a folder/directory through a dynamic string match (type more characters, jump around the tree. The author of WinNC.net is very responsive --he says they've received few requests for this feature. A classic problem with customer-driven product development -- the customer can't ask for what they can't imagine. NCD/NC was a work of genius.

WCD is a cross-platform text-only command line implementation of NCD. I think it could be nicely integrated with WinNC.Net and I've suggested that. In the meantime I'm going to see if I can figure a way for WCD to drive Windows Explorer.

Blacktree - Quicksilver for OS X - Cory Doctorow likes it

Blacktree - Quicksilver

Quicksilver is an evolving structure for manipulating any form of data. The current modules include a launcher, a clipboard recorder, and a shelf.

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This web site defines cryptic. Doctorow likes it, swears it's better than my beloved OS X Launchbar. Worth revisiting in a month or two?