As mentioned in an earlier post on using faux Contacts for collecting, managing, and synching tasks offline on the iPhone, I've been reading Getting things done (GTD) by David Allen. I have to say I found the book a difficult, overly repetitive and non-engaging read, despite my motivation to learn from it. If you could get a lot of things done in the time it takes to read 267 anecdote-heavy pages, here's my somewhat condensed take on the bits worth sharing, along with a few Mac-specific embellishments.
Continue reading 'Personal productivity on Mac and iPhone'
Tag archive for 'workflow'
Despite strong indications of an imminent second generation 3G iPhone, the recent £100 price drop on the 8GB iPhone proved too tempting. I had hesitated because the iPhone failed to meet my minimum requirements for basic PDA functionality. With 1Password mostly overcoming the secure data exchange obstacle, the remaining challenge was to find a network-independent way of managing and synchronising tasks ("to do" items). I've also been wading through David Allen's book Getting Things Done in a search for ways to improve my personal productivity. Could I cherry-pick the key principles of the GTD religion and apply them on the iPhone using only the built-in apps?
Continue reading 'Using faux Contacts for GTD on the iPhone'
Ben Long nicely summarises the capabilities of Bridge (included with Photoshop CS3) in the context of dedicated workflow applications like Abobe's Lightroom and Apple's Aperture. The last word? "No piece of software will make you a better photographer... Instead, go out and shoot!". Perhaps too much efficiency could mean missing valuable lessons if not enough time is spent analysing individual images in order to improve capture, composition, and processing technique?
We end this month in New Zealand with a sense of achievement: we walked the Tongariro Crossing without significant pain nor injury. We had good weather and got some great photos of the beautiful volcanic landscape. Our 18.6 km walk began early morning in the shadow of Mt. Doom, as Ngauruhoe is now popularly known following its role in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. In the bright sunlight at altitude, capturing well-exposed images of the dark landscape required extra care to avoid blown highlights.
Continue reading 'In the shadow of Mt. Doom'
In the pre-Intel era I used the PhotoToolCM contextual menu plugin to take a selection of JPEG images in the Finder from our digital cameras and quickly resize them to send as e-mail attachments. Here's a way to do the same with Automator.
Continue reading 'An Automator workflow for batch resizing'
If you produce high-quality images (e.g. by means of a raw conversion workflow), you may find that they are unsuitable for e-mailing or display on the web as JPEGs in their present form. They may be of a large dimension, high-resolution (e.g. 300 dpi), high bit-depth (i.e. 16 bits/ channel), with an unsafe colour profile (e.g. ProPhoto), not enough compression, and be a bit fuzzy after re-sizing. You could open each individual image that you want to re-purpose in Photoshop and change the pixel dimensions, the resolution (to 72 dpi), the bit depth (to 8 bits), the colour space (to sRGB), the quality (e.g. to 8 cf. 12), and apply sharpening. But there is a much easier way using Photoshop Actions and Automator...
Continue reading 'Re-purposing photos for e-mail and web display'
