IFTTT

No, it's not a typing error it's a new application I've recently come across on the internet. IFTTT is a simple way to make connections, perform actions, post notes, control lights, sense messages and a whole host of other things you never knew you wanted to be able to do!

You create recipes of logical IF's to perform a task (If This Then That). For example, I've created a Twitter account for South Ockendon Sports (@socksports) and I've created a recipe that posts a daily weather update at 7:00am to Twitter. I've also created a recipe that puts a status update on my LinkedIn account when I create a new blog post about therapy related stuff on my other blog In2Motion.

Each If starts with a trigger form a channel. You can choose from a wide range of channels but not everything you might want to do is available. Once you've got a trigger you simply work through the steps as you are prompted and build your recipe. I'd really like to be able to include more than one blog in the recipe, but I can't see a way to do that at the moment, and I'd like to be able to link my Polar Loop daily activity data to Twitter or Facebook. You can do some editing of the logic, but I can't see a way of doing either of these things yet.

What looks good about IFTTT is the way it reduces the number of websites you need to visit in order to update something. It might just be a toy for some, but for others it could be a really useful tool to streamline social media. Of course, if you have some of the more interesting tech around the home you can even control the heating and the lights. For example, you could use location data from your 'phone to turn on the heating when you're within 30 minutes of home, or to turn on the lights at dusk.

Kindle's and iPads

Of the things that I find really useful about my iPad is the ability to stick pdf's on it and read them wherever I might be. It doesn't matter about the style of the pdf, it just works and I haven't had any problems at all as far as I can recall. My iPad has a number of articles and short papers that are colourful and easy to both read and navigate on the nice bright screen. But it's not the most efficient reader, and an iPad is a complete waste of money if all you want to do is read stuff.

The Kindle, of which Anne as the Wi-Fi version with the keypad and I'm getting the non-keypad version for Christmas (yes, I know how lucky I am!), is just one of the alternative e-book readers out there. One of the things I like about the Kindle is the ability to email pdf documents to it. The problem is that the Kindle renders the pdf by page, which can make the typeface very small indeed.

For documents that I write, the solution is simple. All I have to do is to create a custom page size (90mm by 120mm) with 1mm margins and no headers or footers (they're not really needed). I then change the font size to 10 and email the pdf from the print menu of my Mac. Nice and simple, even if a bit time consuming.

Of course the big plus is that I can email this pdf to anyone who wants it, and they too can read it on their Kindle too if they have one. Perhaps there is already a neat and easy solution to generating readable pdfs for Kindle from applications. I know there is something that will convert a document into the correct format for Kindle, but I haven't explored that yet.

I wonder if some bright spark hasn't already, or maybe would like to write an app onto which you can drop a document and it will reformat it for you. Rather like the way Tofu puts a file into columns to make it easier to read.

Two more online collaboration tools

Here are two more tools I'm exploring. The first is somewhat similar to Wridea and is called Symbyoz. I signed up and created a goal page but sadly I can't seem to get access to it today. Perhaps there's an internet problem, but the stuff I did yesterday seems to have disappeared. not a great start.

The concept is simple enough. You create an idea and other people can comment. There are tabs for people and resources and you have your own ideas and network ideas. There is no facility to add files to share.

In the end I think it will be a preference thing, not withstanding today's lost idea issue, between this and say Writeboard, that does the same sort on thing and does it well.

The second tool I've had a quick look at is Reviewpad. Now this looks very promising. Easy to navigate, able to add files (in fact you can't crate a "pad" without adding at least one file). Actually the whole point fo Reviewpad is to give you a place to review files with others. You can add comments, give permission to download the file and all with a free account with 500mb of space. You can even save a pad as a pdf which show everything including all the file contents. So if you wanted to, you could take a pdf version with you your mobile device to read on the train! No internet access required!

In looking for something simple and easy to use for less adventurous partners, this might just win the day.

Writeboard

I've just signed up to Writeboard and the difference with huddle and GoogleWave are immediately apparent.

If you are looking for a shared space to have that conversation I mentioned without the bells and whistles of file sharing, task management and other things, this could be just what you are looking for in the world of online collaboration.

Easy to set up, simple to use. even the most technically averse person would surely be able to contribute to a discussion using this tool.

Online Collaboration

So, with the demise of GoogleWave at the end of the year I've begun my search for a possible replacement. I had a quick squint at a few offerings but settled on giving Huddle a shot.

It looks quite promising although it takes a bit of getting used to after the style of waving I've been exploring. There are certainly features in Huddle that didn't exist in Wave and of course the inverse is also true.

What I liked about Wave was the concept of a single conversation. I guess in Huddle this is replicated by the idea of multiple workspaces where each idea or project has its own set of files and discussions. The free version only allows one workspace, which with some thought can be adapted to hold several active projects. I just feel that having easily identifiable space for a few projects would suit my needs better. I can get this facility if I opt for a paid version of the product (a monthly subscription is required).

Having said that, the extra features of being able, for example, to assign tasks to team members and send them an email reminder is very nice. I got one this morning about inviting people to enter my workspace.

Uploading files is easy and smooth, although I haven't tried uploading a file again after editing it. Huddle keeps an audit trail for each file you create or upload, which is useful too. I work with pdf's a lot because I don't use Microsoft software if I can help it. As a Mac user, I find Pages really easy and flexible for producing all my documents. Sadly Word is the standard for most people, so a pdf is almost guaranteed to be openable on every platform. Huddle accepts all sorts of file types and provides an online editor for excel and word files.

So, my first impressions are that although it doesn't have the feel of Waving, Huddle looks like a really useful online collaboration tool. Used properly I think it could help all sorts of groups and businesses to work together more effectively. These tools allow you to reduce the clutter of an inbox full of rabbit trail emails and they allow you to centralise a single copy of the most up to date version of a file. Everything in one place for every project.

Of course if you just want to share files, then Dropbox is great for doing that. But what Huddle gives you is all the facilities to discuss and organise around those files.

The downside of Google Wave was that it didn't work in the most common browser (Explorer) and it didn't work on one person's G4 Mac for some reason. Huddle doesn't look like it will suffer from those problems.

The question is, can I get the technologically averse to dip a toe in the water of online collaboration and join the Huddle? That may well be the defining criteria for success.

And by the way, thanks to the company for the courtesy call I got yesterday for signing up to Huddle. Both unexpected and thoughtful.

An alternative to Huddle might be Writeboard, but I haven't explored that yet.

Goodbye Googlewave

So I found out today that Google is to wave goodbye to its innovative online collaboration tool. Googlewave is to be no more. Apparently the lack of user uptake is the issue.

I thought Googlewave had tremendous potential for planning and developing ideas, but as I found out, not everyone is keen to explore new technology. Having a continuous conversation that is easy to review rather than an inbox full of emails was really exciting. I mourn its demise.

So, I will have to look elsewhere and I've already begun to have a look at what might fill the gap.

Wridea looks promising, but I've only seem the overview. Again the issue is less about finding something to use and more about getting others to try it too.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

iPastor App fix

iPastor has been updated with a fix to the "review by strategy" problem. Just in case you were waiting for me to tell you!!

Google Wave Preview

Google Wave is now in preview and it is looking rather good.

For anyone involved in group discussions, planning, project writing or anything else that happens by collaboration, this might just be the online tool to do the job. When I posted a link to the video I thought then that it had real potential if it could live up to its billing. Well, my early looks suggests that Google Wave might just be able to do exactly what I want it to do.

I've set up some waves for things like Advent planning, deacons' meetings and thinking about pastoral care. The true test will come when other people start interacting with these waves.

I'll keep you posted!

Update to isync script

Back in February I delved into the shallow waters of Apple Script in an attempt to automate the process of synching my Nokia 'phone with iCal and Address Book.

Well this week I refined the script a little more having discovered how to quit a programme (tell "application" to quit, not exactly rocket science), and how to delay it so that it didn't generate an error by trying to quit before synchronisation was complete.

I also discovered along the way that you could tell your mac to inform you that the task was complete using one of the voices.

The finished script is as follows:

tell application "iSync"

if last sync is less than ((current date) - 3600) then

synchronize

repeat while (syncing is true)

delay 5

end repeat

end if

end tell

tell application "iSync" to quit

say "synchronisation is now complete. Have a good day" using "Zarvox"

You can add a line that hides isync if you want, but it's not that important.

Google Wave

I've just been sent a link to this video from Michael. The concept looks really interesting and I can see great potential for doing the kind of round robin decision making via email that can get so messy with conventional email systems.

I also like the idea of being able to work together creatively in a single document.

Worth keeping an eye on the development.

iBank and me

I have to take back my previous comments about ibank, I actually don't find it that easy to use. I'm getting the hang of it, but the learning curve seems to run in a counter-intuitive direction for my thinking patterns. Here's where I'm struggling.

When it comes to paying a credit card from a bank account, there doesn't seem to be a simple, efficient way to do this. I can see the transfer option, but I'm not entirely sure it always does what I think I've asked it to do. Secondly the software seems to add balancing transaction if it thinks I've done something wrong. This does not help me get it right, it just covers up a possible mistake. At least that is what it looks like it is doing.

But the biggest headache has been the bank reconciliation process. I think I've finally begun to understand it, but I'm not at all confident that the bottom line number is telling me what I need to know or not. That confidence for me comes directly from the simple ability to see all my payments and incomes checked off against the bank statement and receiving a nice affirming "finished" message. A message I'm struggling to achieve most of the time.

It is also thoroughly confusing to see a credit card statement sometimes showing a positive cleared and statement balance and sometimes a negative one. I think I understand this now. In fact the penny (well we are talking about accounts here) dropped as I lay awake in bed not ten minutes ago.

What I think is happening is that the software is comparing the balances from consecutive statements. If you spent less this month on the credit card than the previous month, this balance will be positive, if you've spent more it will be negative. Now what I actually want to see is a figure that represents what I've spent and what I need to pay, not the difference between what I've spent month on month.

If this is true for the credit card reconciliations then I guess it's true for the current account too. Which means that the numbers I see in the reconciliation window don't actually tell me what I want to know. So I feel more relaxed now about my abject failure to reconcile my bank accounts in a way that makes sense to me, but at least I may be getting it right more than I thought I was getting it wrong.

I still might have a look at Quicken 2007, or worse still, I might just install Parallels and go back to Microsoft Money, perish the thought!

Create Booklet

Ever since changing to a Mac I've been looking for something that will produce a booklet nice and easily. I've tried a couple of things including Clickbook which worked brilliantly on the PC but never seems to do what I want it to do on my Mac!

I may have found the solution courtesy of a friend of mine who pointed me to this neat little utility. It may not have the bells and whistles of Clickbook, but at least I get a booklet at the end of it in the format that I want.

The next step, and I hope the author finds it in his heart to do this soon, is to be able to shift the margins so that when I print out my address list for my diary, there is a suitable margin for the hole punch!

Pdf to Word anyone?

One of the things I've always liked about the Mac is the ease with which you can create a pdf version of a file. Simply choose the pdf option from the print menu and the operating system does the rest for you.

I like pdf's because everyone can read them and see them exactly as you send them. No need to make sure you have a compatible version of a programme. This is great for me because I use programmes like Omnioutliner and Scrivener, and when I want to send the data I can simply convert it to a pdf.

The only problem is what do you do when you get a pdf that you want to edit? Well, if you are a Windows users, then you might find this application worth a look.

You can find the download here, and there's a free trial version.

As a Mac user I haven't tried it but thought I'd point it out in case anyone I send a pdf to wants to be able to edit the content!

I've yet to find a pdf editor for the Mac that I really like, but that may be because I haven't looked particularly hard.

Keeping track with accounts software

I blogged a little while ago about the need to find suitable accounting software for the Mac so that I don't have to keep firing up my old Windows laptop to do the household bills etc. My preferred choice would have been to return to Quicken. I used Quicken on a PC for a long time, and it just seemed logical to look for an up-to-date version for the Mac. Sadly it looks like it's going to be  a while before the updated version of Quicken for Mac is available, so I had to look elsewhere.

I decided on three possible applications, all mentioned previously. First I tried Liquid Ledger, but I didn't get on with very well. It didn't have a layout that suited the way my mind worked, and I quickly came to the conclusion that we wouldn't get along too easily. 

Next I tried iBank, and having passed through a bank reconciliation period and passed 75 transactions on one account, I taken the plunge and bought the software. I'm not overly enamoured of the data entry process. I seem to have to move around using the mouse a lot and it would be helpful to be able to keep adding entries without having to select "add new entry" every time.

The reconciliation page was quite good, once I got used to it. Being able to drag unreconciled items into the the reconciled window and see them reconcile right away is helpful. It certainly saves having to track back through additions as you do in Microsoft Money for example.

In truth, I don't use the full potential of any accounting software. I don't track taxes, I don't track investments, I just want to know how much money I've got, where it is and where it's going!

I could do this in a spreadsheet application, and if I tried, I could probably write some scripts to make it do exactly what I need it to do. I could, but I'm not going to. One reason is the number of accounts. What with ISA's and ordinary savings and credit cards and bank accounts, we have about 14 to manage, so a software package is a better choice.

In my limited experience, iBank does the job neatly and with a fairly easy to use interface. Now if only I could get it to say cheque instead of check, I'd be happy!

iBank is available as a trial download from iggsoftware.

Problem solved!

And no sooner had I posted the previous entry than I discovered the simplest of solutions!!

For those for whom this might be useful, here's what I did... it really was this simple.

Open Mail and go to Preferences. Go to accounts and locate the Outgoing Mail Server.

From the drop down list choose  and then simply add a new server.

Mail creates an account and then provided you have "use any available server" ticked for your outgoing mail, things should work.

And I thought it was going to be complicated!

Mobile email

I've been using my mobile broadband connection while away at Spring Harvest only to discover that I can't use email. Well, that's not quite true. I can receive email and I can use my web based email, googlemail and probably my Tiscali account if I signed into the site.

I'd like to be able to use my ordinary email but I've just discovered that I need to change the outgoing mail server and port. Not a thing I want to do every time I'm away from home. So, I tried to create an account with the outgoing email settings but Mail didn't like me creating a fake account.

The thing is that you can tell mail to use any available server, so it would be nice just to add the mobile server to the list, but I can't find a way to do that without changing everything else.

If I find a solution I'll post it, but if you know of one, please tell me. It would be much appreciated!

It worked!

Not sure why I'm so surprised, but my script worked fine. So I now have a new calendar called scripts which has a recurring event at 10:00pm to run my script. The calendar is hidden so the "appointment" doesn't show.

Simple!

Talking with Ally, we thought of some variations, but we need to find out a bit more about how to write the script to do them. I'm guessing, but it ought to be possible to set the status to bounce instead of delete and I thought about adding a growl notification to let you know that it was deleting a given number of messages. For me, just deleting the contents of the junk folder is enough.

Erase Junk Mail

One of the little bug-bears with some of the Apple applications are the little things that are missing. Take the fact that Mail doesn't have the ability to set a flag to delete the contents of the junk mail folder when you close Mail. Or better still, why not have a setting to delete the junk mail at the end of the day?

This got me thinking and after a little digging around I decided that it couldn't be that complicated to create an AppleScript to do the job. Someone must have done it already, but I couldn't find it so I had a go a writing one myself!

Here's the simple script that I've written:

tell application "Mail"
set junkMessages to every message of junk mailbox
repeat with junkMessage in junkMessages
set deleted status of junkMessage to true
end repeat
end tell

It seems to work. I've tested it a couple of times and enjoyed watching my junk mailbox empty before my very eyes.

Of course you might be thinking, why doesn't he just use the keyboard shortcut to do the job? Well I wanted to try something else. Having read about how you can launch scripts from iCal events, I thought that it might be rather neat to write the delete script and then schedule it in iCal at the end of each day.

If you open iCal and create an event "Delete Junk Mail" you can set the alarm to run the script. You can of course create this event as a recurring event in a hidden calendar so that it doesn't show up in your current view of iCal but works away in the background. 

I might try this for syncing my phone rather than the Proximity app running a script as I do now. As it is, I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow morning to see if my 10:00pm event to delete my junk mail works.

I'll let you know.

Looking for accounts software for the Mac

Previously I had a look at Money Dance as a replacement for Microsoft Money, the accounts package I was using on my PC. Sadly I found the colour balance in Money Dance difficult, being a chromatically challenged person as I am!

For a long time I gave up the search and just kept using Money on my laptop. But it's inconvenient to have keep getting out the laptop, firing it up, waiting for it to try and search out all possible updates before finally opening Money and doing the accounts. Consequently I've slipped out of the habit of doing it and quite frankly that frustrates me.

So I thought another search was in order and came across two possibilities that I thought I might look at. Liquid Ledger was the first. It looks like the kind of package I'm used to using, although they are all slightly different. Second on the list is Checkbook from Splasm Software, and a third option that popped up as I checked the url's to paste in this post is iBank.

I have no experience of any of these, but might have a look at all three, starting with Liquid Ledger. Downloading the application was easy and installing it as straightforward as you'd expect. They provide you with a licence key for a 60-day trial, which in itself is a generous trial period. You also have the option of importing data via what is euphemistically called the industry standard QIF format. 

The problem is that in my experience, including Liquid Ledger, migrating from one package to another using this file format simply doesn't work. Is it me or is this par for the course? Going from Quicken to Money was just the same. You export the file, import it and voila, a total mess!

Argh, it's so frustrating! Accounts are wrongly named, balances have disappeared and transactions are all over the place. The bottom line is that it looks like I will have to start from scratch, and with 13 different accounts to set up, that takes a long time.

Does anybody have any suggestions, apart from going back to large notepad and pen!

Introducing Amar Sagoo

I don't actually know Amar Sagoo but I do know Tofu, his ingenious little application that lets you read text in columns. I downloaded it a few days ago and really like it (see my quick post about it.) 

In the comments I noted that Tofu doesn't support Pages documents or Scrivener, two applications I use a lot. There is a solution to this problem because you can copy text and drag it onto the Tofu icon, thus opening it in columns. you can do the same for long blog posts or web pages.

But that's not all Amar has produced. If you visit his website you will find some other interesting little applications. There's Deep Notes ( a simple outliner/note taking application), Cambio (a unit converter for iPhone/ iPod Touch), Licensed ( a place to store all your software licence information), to name three. And they are all free although you can make a donation.

So, not only will it cost you nothing to visit the site, it won't cost you a penny to try out his applications. and if Tofu is anything to go by, I think the others should be rather good too!