As a long time user of OS X I’ve tacked on application after application to handle small, but essential, tasks.

Fluid for running my calendar and Stacks, JustNotes for syncing with simplenote, The Hist List for personal tasks, Quicksilver for application launching, and xScope for Web Development quickies.

Each of these applications has the option, and generally encourages, the use of global shortcuts. For those of you that don’t know, a global shortcut is a keyboard shortcut that can be can be used system wide.

The main advantage of this is the ability to access common features or tools without having to switch apps (i.e. switching songs in iTunes). However, many applications have default shortcuts that get overwritten by the global alternative. For instance, a common shortcut in Photoshop is cmd-option-d which is used to feather a selection. Yet, in OS X, trying to use this results in the dock getting hidden.

The best way around this issue is to create custom shortcuts for things that have conflicts or need quick access. However, before diving in and going crazy — “uh.. what did I set that shortcut to? *Click*click*click*, oh, right, cmd-option-shif-ctrl-F3″ — follow a simple framework to avoid headaches . Here’s what I recommend.

1. If possible leave the standard program shortcuts in place. This makes for less hassle down the road if you ever have to reinstall the OS or use multiple machines for task (i.e. a school computer lab).
2. Make all program based shortcuts cmd-ctrl-LETTER. To date I have not found any program in OS X that by default uses cmd-ctrl-LETTER shortcut’s. The first advantage to this is that you don’t have to worry about overwriting already-in-place shortcuts. Second, and most importantly, the cmd-ctrl keys are super easy to reach and use.
3. For custom global shortcuts use a standard. Preferably cmd-option-ctrl-LETTER. Similar to the last bullet, I have never found a pre-set shortcut that used cmd-option-ctrl-LETTER. Yes, it sound like a lot of keys, but it’s three right in a row and they’re easy to reach.

The point is, if you standardize pre-set, local, and global shortcuts you’ll never have to worry about the key combo, all you’ll have to do is remember the letter or number you used. Further, it’ll keep conflicts at a minimum and give you a lot of options for growth down the road.

I’d love to hear other tips on what people are using so don’t hesitate to comment with your suggestions.

First off, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more said about the comparisons between Google Analytics and WebTrends. When Google acquired Urchin back in 2005 and suggested they would be giving the tool away for free, I thought WebTrends would last no more then another 2 years. But I’ve been totally wrong. They’ve still been able to ask for thousands of dollars for the privilege of using their software. I thought it was about time that we really compare these two popular tools and the data they report.

Ok, so Google loses on the matrix of features but let’s go into this a bit deeper.

Bot Traffic: Advantage WebTrends. If you absolutely need to know what bots are hitting your site then go with WebTrends because Google just can’t report that data.

Real-Time Analytics: Big Advantage to WebTrends. Real-time reporting requires investing an a substantial amount of server power. Sure Google has that power but they haven’t put it behind Analytics yet. My guess is you’ll see this in the future but right now the win goes to WebTrends. In my opinion, it’s the sales team that needs to know about real-time visitor activity and there are plenty of tools out there that can do a better job then WebTrends at reporting real-time activity.

Hits: For real? Who still uses this as a metrics and why? Slight Advantage to WebTrends.

Tracking Advertising: This can be accomplished in Google but it’s a bit of a hack to get it working. WebTrends is more eligant in it’s approach towards tracking advertising.

Animated Graphs: Advantage Google. I’m a data visualization junkie and I can easily lose hours working in the visualization tool; however for the majority of marketers this is overkill.

So, how does that data compare?

Total New & Returning Visitors

This data is comparing a 1 year time frame by monthly totals.

Referral Traffic Counts

Six months of data from Jan 1st, 2009 and June 30th, 2009

Page Views

Six months of data from Jan 1st, 2009 and June 30th, 2009

Verdict

To each their own. I personally can’t justify WebTrends to our clients. Google’s feature set is 95% of what is available in WebTrends and the few features that stand out don’t justify the hefty price tag. I’d love to chat with someone who feels WebTrends is superior to Google, I just haven’t found that person yet.

It’s 6:30pm and you’re tired from a long day of work. You’ve just finished writing a four page email to a client. Documenting all of the tasks you completed that day. In fact, you even took time to explain the reason you used nofollow linking to the client’s intranet website. Then, moments later, Mail unexpectedly quits. Your work is gone.

Or… is it. You remember copying the contents of the email to your clipboard minutes before. Quickly you open a new email and anxiously paste:

http://tr.im/OMG_ribbons …

wait, no, surely that can’t be right. You paste again:

http://tr.im/OMG_ribbons …

Then you remember, that co-worker of yours, Taylor, sent you a link on IM (”Haha, d00d this is hilarious”). But for some reason it didn’t format right and you had to copy it.

You think — there must be some solution, assuredly. Yet no, your work is gone. You swear to yourself, “never again.” Fortunately, moments later you find a blog post describing your exact scenario. It suggests downloading the free app Clyppan to record your clipboard history. “Wow, that’s awesome,” you say to yourself, “I’m gonna use this all the time.”

And guess what, you do.

Edit: One note, if you don’t set Clyppan to run on startup via system preferences > accounts, then you’ll have to start it manually every time you login to OS X.

Edit 2: Some might suggest the Quicksilver Clipboard module for this same functionality, however, as of 10.5 that module tends to randomly appear when quitting certain applications. Hence why I moved to Clyppan.

For a long time here at Imulus we had trouble keeping track of internal company information. Client datasheets, software licenses, Imulus specific programming tips, bug tracking, email setup documentation, employee calendar links, etc. This problem was not something isolated to just us, every work environment I’ve been a part of has struggled with documenting and finding information. Generally the solution ends up being a massive repository of excel documents or a shared hard drive full of text files and snippets. Neither of these solutions are practical or scalable.

Our answer to this problem was an internal company wiki. Our goal was to have a central resource that was easy to update and easy to get information out of. It needed to be searchable, easy to edit, and secure. Being a .NET shop we decided to go with ScrewTurn a free open source wiki for .NET environments. A few other alternatives are: Wordpress plugins and hosted solutions such as pbwiki.

We’ve been using this solution since last August and it has been a huge time saver. Our project manager no longer gets flooded with requests for, “that spec requirement the client sent over,” and our programmer’s no longer have to use local text files to keep track of bugs in their code.

It isn’t often that I run across a Firefox Add-on which just blows my mind and makes me want to sing the praises of the developer, but Better Gmail 2.0.5.2 is one such add-on. This week we converted the office away from Microsoft Exchange server and onto the Google Mail App instead. I won’t go into the reasons why in this post, but after I made the switch I was somewhat disappointed with the interface of Gmail and it’s inability to allow me to customize it.

Here were just a handful of my gripes.

• I can’t resize the width of the left side menu bar
• Why does Gmail feel the need to “label” my messages rather then using the conventional folder system?
• Shouldn’t I be able to modify the color scheme to my liking. There is only so much pastel I can take
• When writing messages the REPLY, FORWARD and DELETE aren’t in the most obvious or intuitive locations

I don’t want to continue on bitching about Google, because aside from the interface the Gmail App kicks ass and checks SPAM well. It is reliable and it allows me to IMAP my mail to desktop clients. In light of my situation I looked for some way to relieve my disdain for the default interface.

Better Gmail 2 makes the entire mail experience much more enjoyable and easy on the eyes.
Google Talk actually looks like an IM client

Labels are converted into operating like folders.

A handy keyboard shortcut menu

All in all, this add-on has made the jump from Exchange to Gmail VERY enjoyable! I highly suggest Better Gmail 2.