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TUAW Resolutions: Organize iTunes
I had been living near my iPod's 30GB threshold for many months. So I recently resolved to take a few days and get my iTunes library into better working order. Here are the steps I personally took to organize iTunes. Some of these are pretty extreme and may not be universally appealing but you might find an idea or two among them that you might want to apply to your own music collections. Nothing lives in the iTunes music folder. I decided I didn't like living with iTunes' default library management. I switched off "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" in Advanced preferences. Yes, new purchases go into that folder, but I treat it more like a sorting and holding area, not as a final destination. Now I sort all my media using my personal folder management. I'm far happier with the results.
TUAW Resolutions: Organize your life and get things done
Psst. The secret of the Getting Things Done philosophy? Keeping a calendar and doing regular reviews of your to-do lists. Yes, it's a bit counter-intuitive. Who would think that the underlying basis of controlling your life is to focus on planning rather than on actually doing the things that need to get done? But it's a fundamental truth that without a game plan for a specific destination, many of us will get lost along the way wasting time and energy that would be better used productively. If we don't know where we're going, we end up someplace else. Getting-things-done relies on choosing tasks after assessing all tasks that need getting done. Sure you could start juggling 43 folders and all that, but you don't have to. So long as you start making room in your life for planning, your life will get more organized. Your Mac can help you do that. Here are some ways to use your Apple equipment to take control. Use a calendar. iCal is the two-ton gorilla in the world of Apple planners. It offers a single destination for all your appointments. You can even subscribe to a Google calendar via iCal or use two-way Google/iCal synchronization via Spanning Sync. Your (non-shuffle) iPod will sync to your iCal calendar and you can set alarms on iPods for calendar events. Use your calendar to make sure your time-dependent to-do items are kept on track. Best of all, if you're using OS X you already have it. Create to-do lists. We're all waiting for Leopard's built-in "to do" lists extensions to Mail so you can organize your action items as you work through your inbox. Until then, there are many alternatives not the least of which are Actiontastic, Stickies and, yes, TextEdit. A simple text to-do list can bypass all sorts of technological confusion and encourage you to update, review and annotate your action items on a timely basis. Use ticklers. Another feature of the getting-things-done philosophy is using a trusted system to remind you of items that have been lying dormant. You can send yourself scheduled e-mail via futureme.org, take advantage of any number of AppleScript tickler scripts, many of which work with iCal. The Omni group is working on a GTD app called Omnifocus, which apparently will offer tickler support. They're planning a meetup at MacWorld to solicit design ideas. Hide distractions. Uncluttering your workspace and trading multi-tasking for single-tasking can help some people focus on the at-hand task and better get things done. Applications like Spirited Away and MenuShade let you neaten your desktop and hide items that might otherwise distract you. And avoiding distractions is certainly an important part of getting the job done.
TUAW Resolutions: Learn a new language
Buon Giorno. ¡Hola!. Guten tag. Of course, the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the country where the language is spoken. But that's not always a possibility, especially if you're working your way towards a trip or preparing for a move. If you're trying to learn a language in the new year, here are a few ways that Apple technology can help you work towards your goal. Subscribe to a Language-learning Podcast. iTunes offers any number of podcasts that will help you learn new languages. A quick search on "language" turned up lessons for French, Japanese, Italian, Latin, Tibetan, Turkish, Gaelic and more. On the down side, clearly some of these podcasts are home brew. On the up side, the podcasts are free. You may want to try out several podcast providers before settling on your subscriptions. Buy a learning audio book. The iTunes store offers a wide range of language courses in their audio book section. These courses are typically of a higher quality than the podcast ones, but they also cost quite a bit more. If your local library lets you, you may want to borrow language audio materials from their collections and use them with your iPod. Ripping policy varies by library, so make sure you know the rules before you rip. Use OS X-compatible language-learning software. Many top-brand language packages like Berlitz now run on OS X as well as Windows. Interactive software can really help you master certain language skills like grammar via interactive lessons. Take advantage of OS X's internationalization. OS X is particularly multi-language, multi-alphabet aware. If you're trying to learn new languages, take a few minutes to explore the International system settings pane with it's "input menu" virtual keyboards that will help you type in the language of your choice. Sign up for a class. The success of iTunes U has made it possible to sign up any number of university and college courses. The use of iPods and podcasts are now so prevalent that Duke now offers an iPod-orientation course for all its language instructors. Unfortunately, some iTunes U courses require that you have an actual student ID for sign-up. (Stanford is one such university.) Some do not. Also unfortunately, you need to perform quite a lot of googling to find public iTunes U classes for any particular language, so be persistent. iTunes does not yet offer a specific iTunes U search engine.
TUAW Resolutions: Expand Your Mind
Where do literature, opera, history and art intersect with portable electronic devices? The answer is the iPod. There are those who laugh at the idea of experiencing culture through the lens of consumer electronics. And there are those who will load up their iPods with lectures, great audio books, museum tours and more to take advantage of the huge wealth of cultural entertainment available to iPod owners. Popularity does not negate possibility. Here are several ways you can use your iPod to enrich your mind. Listen to the classics. The iTunes store offers many classic works of spoken fiction and nonfiction, including Plato and Descartes, Bronte and Hawthorne, Shakespeare and Twain. Librivox is another great source for classics. They provide free public-domain audiobooks read by volunteers. Highlights include Beowulf and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. Experience Museums. Many museums now offer podcasts that you can load onto your iPod to provide a richer experience when visiting museums or when you want to enjoy exhibits that you're physically too far away to go in person. Highlights include the NY and SF museums of modern art, and the Chateau de Versailles. View art. The iPod's screen may be tiny, but you can load up your iPhoto collection with masterpieces to enjoy whenever you're on the go. Add an A/V cable and a TV and you create a portable gallery of your favorite art. Enjoy the opera. Searching for opera-themed podcasts in iTunes produced dozens and dozens of relevant hits. From the San Francisco Opera to the Royal Opera House, if opera is your passion, there are more podcasts to listen to than you probably have free time. You'll find season previews, and individual performances. You can also purchase opera music (as well as symphonies and other culturally enriching music) directly from the iTunes store. Listen to History. FreeAudio.org offers free spoken texts focused on freedom and the law. You can listen to the Gettysburg Address, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and other historic speeches. American Rhetoric provides free access to many of the greatest examples of American political speech in MP3 format, including MLK's "I Have a Dream", Eisenhower's farewell address, FDR's first fireside chat, JFK's address on the Cuban missile crisis, Elie Wiesel's "The Perils of Indifference", and more. Tinfoil.com is another resource, preserving early recorded sound files (including those recorded on wax cylinders) and providing many free MP3 files. The Library of Congress offers an amazing seven hour MP3 collection of first-person narratives recorded by former slaves in nine Southern states. Attend class. Apple's iTunes U allows you to listen to real University lectures for free, no matter where you are. Sign up for lectures from major universities like Stanford, Duke and UC Berkeley and more. Listen when you can, and learn on the go.
TUAW Resolutions: Get in Shape
Looking to get in shape in 2007? Your new iPod makes a great workout companion. Yes, you still have to "just do it", but your iPod can help you "do it" if you let it. Consider the Nike+iPod sports kit. It lets you track your training progress in real time by connecting a transmitter in your sneakers to a receiver on your iPod nano. This is great for people who want to start easy and work on pushing themselves a little at a time towards more and more progress on their goals. Tangerine from the Potion Factory is another great workout tool. It allows you to build workout playlists from the music in your iTunes library, creating training sets at either a steady BPM or using BPM profiles that ramp up and down for interval training. You can also download any number of training podcasts that provide a personal electronic trainer. Here are some of my favorites, both with and without coaching. Marina's Walking and Aerobics Marina offers 10-15 minute workout sets that range from 126-150 bpm. The free samples available at the iTunes link are pretty lame. You have to go to her website to purchase and download actual work-outs. You put together four or five of them and you get a full hours' workout. Marina is a love-her or don't-love-her phenomenon. I personally love her style, her reminders to breathe, her focus on walking for fitness. If you like the music but not the coaching, you can purchase the workouts without instructions. Podrunner Great music at varying BPM, running about an hour each in length. Fantastic stuff, easy to work out to. No coaching or voice-overs, though. If you're looking for nicely paced high intensity music, this is the podcast to turn to. My Pod Bod This is a mix of audio and video how-tos, including coached exercises and interval training. The audio sessions run about twenty minutes and the video how-to's are just a few minutes in length. Muscle Audio Workouts David Greenwalt's "world class" muscle workout training involves weight lifting and resistance training. I find these work best over speakers so your headphones don't get tangled in the equipment. Workout On The Web Short how-to video fitness info. Good reference material. Fitness Attack Amy McIntyre's 60-second fitness inspirations. For when you're looking for a little fitness boost in your life.
TUAW Resolutions
Christmas is over, and you know what that means: New Year's is just around the corner. When the calendar turns to yet another year people around the globe make promises to themselves, promises that they will better themselves by doing a number of things. These 'promises' are known as resolutions and everyone knows that they are often difficult to keep.TUAW has got your back this year. Today we start a series called 'TUAW Resolutions' in which we gives you ways to accomplish this year's resolutions with a little help from your Mac (or iPod).
