It appears I never have to throw anything away again
With unlimited storage, I need a new home directory approach. It's starts with reconciling my various home directories (main work machine, home machine, misc_firewire) into one home directory so I can stare it and figure out an organizational hierarchy that scales like crazy. Mac OS X is handy with it's home directory template, but HELLO EVERYTHING I DO IS A DOCUMENT.... a single Document folder doesn't really help me.
If you have any suggestions here, I'd like to hear them because I'm still chewing on this. Oh yeah, Spotlight better rock, too... because I'm about to have some serious search issues.
Rands in Repose: Crunch Time Cleaning
I don't remember when I started reading Rands. It's quality over quantity (that is, infrequent postings -- the posts themselves are long and enjoyable).
I have the same problem: lots of stuff, lack of good tools to organize it. I have some ideas. I think labels could be improved. Why do we have to have a limited amount of labels? Much like Flickr or del.icio.us tags, I could tag documents with labels, and just see slices of content all over the place. And obviously, smart folders to collect the stuff together. And the labels should be pervasive, from Address Book to Mail to Documents.
Maybe I should go read up on Spotlight again and see how much it does. With an open API (another necessity), one could perhaps build something like this.
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How much of the trunk threat is real ?
Interesting, but how oftern do all these new things come along that are not supported by Entourage? I don't want to pay a compatibility tax either but I am pragmatic about upgrade costs. I wonder if the solution is not relying on one application. For instance, my Treo (palm) is synced with Entourage (except email). If my iBook dies I have most of it. I also use .Mac and route all my mail through it, so if I changed the settings I could keep all my email online with .Mac as a security precaution AND continue with Entourage.
I wonder though is this is not about software but about working habits?
Stewart @ The MooseHat Blog
Nope, it's about software
I have used Entourage. It worked well. It crashed multiple times and I lost everything. This is not acceptable to me, since any solution I use needs to score well in the "reliability" category.
And, syncing to your Palm, if you lose Entourage, you'll lose the "extra" features of connecting project files/people/emails etc. So you're back to lowest common denominator features, for which I can just use my existing solutions (those that don't link the three).
Getting Organised ?
In a way I don't want to offer this suggestion. This is because it doesn' t give a perfect solution only a possible one to part of the problem. It also involves Microsoft! But credit where credits due ...
I use the 2004 incarnation of Entourage. This enables, with the use of its projects function, the organisation of calendar, tasks, emails, files to be captured in the same place. I've also taken to organising my folders within email and anywhere else to reflect the projects I use in Entourage. I then use views to group related stuff together below this.
I like it a lot - sure there is plenty of functionality I would like, but being Microsoft I'm sure in time I will end up with more of this than I ever use!
I don't want to be locked in the trunk
I do make use of MS documents in my work (primarily Word documents -- I use Apple's Keynote to do presentations, although I might start experimenting with the all-HTML solution I wrote about recently).
But as we move into the future...open formats are so important. What if version X doesn't read the files anymore? I used to use Entourage, and found it quite useful. I synced it with the Palm I had at the time, and all was good. Except, I have a very high volume of email. And the Entourage mail store got corrupted. Three times, in fact. Each time, I lost data. Each time, there was no way for me to get at the data any other way -- either Entourage read the data, or it didn't. And if a newer solution comes up that works better than Entourage....?
So I don't intend to be locked in anyone's trunk. If you don't make your data open, if you don't make it easy to work with other systems and take data in and out, I don't want any part of it.
Another point: if there is anything that isn't supported by Entourage, I have to wait for MS to come up with a solution. There are no APIs I can use to extend the platform. I have to sit and wait patiently for MS to make changes, to add compatibility. And then, I might have to pay a compatibility tax: upgrade to version X to get this new functionality.