Note to self: It’s not just about the solving a problem, but how you solve the problem.

Since 21-May–2011, Alfred has been shown 1,149 times. Average 18.8 times per day

Like everyone, I’ve found my own unique ways of using it. Today I thought of one more which could be quite handy. Quite often I run into text where it’s hard to make out a capital O from a 0, a capital I from a lowercase l. If I could change Alfred app’s default font to a console font, a quick copy and paste into alfred could be very useful.

Here’s a screenshot to illustrate:

I love the Alfred App team for sticking to simplicity & I respect that. Just throwing a suggestion out there.

I already switched from WriteRoom when Byword came out for longer writings, but with Markdown support, this is now the tool.

Roberto had tried to make me adopt Markdown when we were in Oslo, but the lack of built in support in Writeroom was always the showstopper for me. Now there is no excuse and I decided to give it a try. Loving, Byword & Mardown, so far.

Might try QuickCursor in a few days as well.

I’d really recommend QuickCal if, like me, you also:

• Use iCal regularly
• Don’t like to keep it running as it just sits there most of the time
• Like the idea of using plain english to add stuff to iCal
• Would like to have a quick and simple way to add and view events

After setting it up, now I can quickly press:

• “Shift + Cmd + C” to add a new event in plain english (love the feedback from the different fields that get filled in as you type)
• “Shift + Cmd + X” to get an overview of your days appointments

I had been reading about Fantastical the past few days, but I think it’s a bit overdone design wise. Feels “bulky”. And it costs more than 15 times the price of QuickCal ($0.99).

Update: Quickcal does not support caldav sync, which means you need to keep iCal running all the time otherwise the events you create will not be synced (until you run iCal). This might be a problem for some (like myself).

I recently caught a link to Olivier Charavel’s thoughts about Sparrow’s UI. It’s always interesting to read other people’s UI reviews, but I certainly hope Sparrow doesn’t go the way Olivier proposes. I’m not obsessed with it’s “Tweetie” like interface, but another “Thunderbird” would certainly be missing the point.

It would be a wish come true if blogging apps like WordPress & Tumblr used these. They would be awesome in the Mail app, but maybe that’s a bit too much to ask for ..

When we started with Weatherlah, it was a Weather forecast display app with a focus on the PSI levels and rain forecast for different regions in Singapore. We got the idea after the haze incidents of November. Our priority was to not spend too much time on it and the first mockup looked something like this:

The “Alerts” feature developed into something very interesting. We added the ability to set rain alerts for different regions of Singapore. Background location from the iPhone gave us the idea to alert you if it’s going to rain in whatever region of Singapore you might be. By this time, the second iteration of the design was in place and the “Alerts” section itself went through a few iterations:

Most of this work made it through to version 1.0 of the release. We got really good reviews for the app and downloads were going really well. People started talking about Weatherlah and that gave us some good feedback. The rain alerts were mostly quite accurate but at times when they would not get the forecast right, the users started tweeting about it. Ofcourse, this was only 2 weeks into the app being public, but that gave us the idea for another experimental feature. We rolled out a test in version 1.1 and today with version 1.2 we are releasing the the complete “Crowdcast” feature. In the Crowdcast section of the app, you can vote to let others know if it’s raining where ever you are in Singapore. We observe the voting trend and display an icon next to the official forecast for all regions in Singapore. You can tap on any of the regions and check the actual votes as well.

It’s a fun project and we’ve been very happy with the response so far! Hopefuly it was able to let you know in advance that going to Sentosa over the last weekend was a bad idea and instead, you stayed home and enjoyed “Scott Pilgrim vs the rest of the world”.

• History of HTML5: an interesting read can be found at http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html
• Usability testing slides
• Street photography: http://flickr.com/djnavv

Remember to ping me on twitter here if you have any questions

Also, here’s the list of all the apps we discussed we discussed at the MacApps talk earlier today at #barcampsg6 (exported from the Taskpaper file we used in the talk )

• alfred app
  • www.alfredapp.com/
  • free with premium
• taskpaper
  • www.hogbaysoftware.com
  • paid
• notational velocity
  • notational.net/
  • free
• Echofon
  • www.echofon.com
  • free & paid
• Fluid app
  • fluidapp.com
  • free
• Helvetireader
  • helvetireader.com/
  • free
• Writeroom
  • www.hogbaysoftware.com
  • paid
• Spirited Away
  • drikin.com/spiritedaway/
  • free
• DeliBar
  • www.delibarapp.com/
  • paid
• Pinboard
  • www.pinboard.in
  • paid
• Zootool
  • www.zootool.com
  • free
• Quix
  • quixapp.com
  • free
• Resizemybrowser
  • www.resizemybrowser.com
  • free
• Caffiene
  • lightheadsw.com/caffeine
  • free
• Insomnia
  • http://semaja2.net/insomniaxinfo
  • free
• Cinch
  • irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/
  • paid
• Coda
  • www.panic.com/coda/
  • paid
• Dropbox
  • dropbox.com
  • free & paid
• Jumpcut
  • jumpcut.sourceforge.net/
  • free

See you at the next Barcamp! Somewhere

That being said, I am a big fan of the mail client built into the Opera browser. It’s fast, and I love the way it automatically sorts my mails according to mailing lists, flagged threads, contacts etc etc. One other feature that I love is the default “Unread” message view. It allows me to check my “New, unread messages until marked as read.”. You can even set it to display unread messages from the last week, month and so on. I wanted to replicate this in Gmail, and after some tinkering I think I managed to do it. Here’s how (all the following steps are referring to the Gmail web interface):

1. Go to Settings
2. Click on the Labs tab, look for “Multiple Inboxes”, enable it and click “Save Changes”
3. Now you should see a “Multiple Inboxes” tab. Click on it.
4. Under “Search query” fill out “label:unread”. (Under “Panel title” I filled “Unread” and in  ”Maximum page size:” I filled out 9).

   

5. I also chose to “Above the inbox” for “Extra panels positioning:”
6. Click “Save Changes” and go back to your inbox.

You should now see something like the picture below:

I’m really happy with this setting. Hope you are too (I’m not apologizing otherwise anyway)