Paul Thurrot on the iPod Shuffle -

This is a rare misstep for Apple, and, I hope, the end of the miniaturization silliness that currently grips the company. Smaller isn’t always better. Nowhere is that more true than with the iPod shuffle 3G.

I think this is another case in which Apple has sacrificed form over function.

Apple made no apologies for the lack of a screen in the Shuffle when it was first released. Now, it’s as if they’re trying to shoehorn the capabilities of an iPod with a screen into the Shuffle. This had led to an overcomplicated and frustrating method for controlling the music on the Shuffle.

Creating Rules In Apple Mail

It’s not a pleasant sight when you get up in the morning, to find that your inbox is stacked up with over fifty new messages, all varying with importance and you have no idea where to start. Recently, I’ve made an effort to organize my email more appropriately and be more objective with what is relevant and what isn’t. Say you’ve got five emails telling you that you’ve got a new Twitter follower and an important email buried far below - you’ve got to decide which is more important to you.

Enter Rules. A solution that has been built into Apple’s Mail application for years, but has gone unnoticed by many. Rules happens to be the most useful asset I have found in Mail to date, and believe me, you’ll find a use for them, if not today - someday. So what does Rules do? It’s pretty much an automated filing system for your email that uses conditions that you set. Now, at first Rules can seem very daunting and may take a bit of time and experimentation to set up - but after you’ve spent that first half an hour you’ll find it second nature and very intuitive.

Creating a Rule

My aim in this guide is to streamline and cut down that thirty minutes into ten at the most. Firstly, you’re going to need to head over to the Rules preference pane. Go, Mail, Preferences and then to the Rules tab on the preference pane (see below). You’ll find that Apple already has a preset Rule about emails from them - you can ignore it or delete it, by doing so you won’t effect anything that this guide will be looking at.

Next, you’re obviously going to want to click the ‘add rule’ button which will bring down a menu for setting up rules. From here you’ve got quite a few options to mess around with. First of all, it’s probably a good idea to give it an appropriate name instead of something ambiguous. Next you’ve got to choose if all the terms you’ll be laying down have to be followed or just one of them - in doing to you’ll allow emails to move into a certain mailbox in your sidebar. To put this in perspective:

Say I wanted an email to be sent to me every time one of my posts got commented on and I wanted all those emails to go into a mailbox named ‘Project X’ in Mail’s sidebar. However, I also wanted any other emails that I received from my co-editors mentioning Project X that I received to go into that same folder. If I chose the “any” option - only one of the requirements would have to be met for Mail to put it into the Project X mailbox, however, if I chose the “all” option, the emails would have to meet both the requirements and therefore the emails about comments wouldn’t go into the folder because it was not from an editor - as I had requested.

Extra Options

It gets quite easy from here on out, you now need to choose what you want Mail to look in when it sees an email. This can vary from who the email was from, the date it was sent on, or even if the email was sent from someone in your address book. After this you’ve got to give Mail a little more information about the text your going to be defining later on. The email may have to contain a phrase, begin or end with something - there are a couple of other options available for you that I won’t go into at the moment.

Now that you’ve allowed Mail to chose the right emails thanks to your parameters - what do you want it to do with them? In the case of Desktop Vibes, I have those emails sent to a mailbox called ‘Desktop Vibes’. However there are some other, pretty cool scenarios that you could put together if you wanted.

Here are a few I came up with:

• Once you’ve replied to an email - have it archived or even deleted.
• Any emails you receive from social networks can go straight into one ‘Social’ folder, so you can reach the important correspondence.
• Do you get a lot of school assignments via email? Give them their own mailbox!
• Want to ingore all those

Conclusion

Rules turns Mail from one of those applications that you like into one that you love. That’s big. So go and have a mess around with Rules in Mail. You’ll soon find it a lot easier to reach that magic inbox number - zero.

Do you use Rules in Apple Mail (or any other email application) to help sift through all of that mail? If so, how do you use it?

I’m a little slow on the uptake, but Veronica Belmont and Ryan Block have started a new Tumblog called, The Vintage Web, which makes any tech savvy person - let alone web developer - cringe.

The most harrowing aspect of these sites are, often, they’re still being actively updated.

Along with the newly redesigned iPod Shuffle, Apple have released a ‘Guided Tour‘ for the product. It’s very informative but I couldn’t help notice the edge Apple took when they compared the speech synthesizing on Windows to Leopard - which of course was superior.

I can’t say I use Gmail a lot. However one of the latest ‘features’ of Gmail 2 caught my eye. The new favicon displays how many unread emails emails you’ve got in your inbox, in a very similar fashion to Apple’s Mail.

Pretty nifty, eh?

Feed Me

When I hear people talking about how many feeds they subscribe to, I’m nearly always astounded by the amount. I’ve seen the number vary from 80 to 500. That’s just crazy. I admire any person who is able to give so much time to their feeds because they’re probably the most productive people on the earth.

I certainly don’t have enough time (sadly) to give even eighty blogs the time and attention they deserve. Because I don’t put any blog in my feed reader. I’ll add a blog in there if I really, really enjoy it and I get excited about a new post coming down the line. If not, then that blog probably just isn’t for me.

Right now I’m subscribed to twenty-eight feeds, I’ve done this by employing a couple of methods that allow me to sort through the noise and get not only the most important news - but also the best opinions in the blogosphere.

Subscribe to Aggregators

I don’t use a folder system in NetNewsWire, but if I did - the Apple folder would contain only three blogs. Daring Fireball and Nobody Wants A Stylus (which currently seems to have slowed down a bit unfortunately) are two of the blogs. What you’ll notice about these is that they both sift through all Apple and iPhone news leaving only the most relevant pieces.

To top that they also happen to offer some terrific opinion articles that I know a large amount of the Apple community values. The third blog I subscribe to in this category happens to be The Macalope - because he’s just plain funny and offers a sometimes very different insight into Apple’s habits.

I’ve been able to do this in a lot of areas, and if I didn’t subscribe to so many personal blogs (not that that’s a bad thing) I would probably be subscribed to a lot less feeds as that makes up a large percentage of what I read.

Visit the Big Boys

Who are the big boys? These are blogs that tend to relay interesting a relevant (in my opinion) news. So, you’ve got the classic examples such as Engadget and Autoblog. But the thing is, I don’t subscribe to them, instead I visit them using my web browser.

Why? Simply because I probably only read about ten percent of the posts that are written, thoroughly. Instead, I visit the site in question and skim through all the recent articles until I see a story title that I find interesting.

Blogs like these tend to post several new pieces a day and all that would do - if subscribed - would be clog up my feed reader and in the end stop me from using one all together.

Feeds are precious things. Sadly a good one is very hard to come by. Right now I’m looking for more: interesting, insightful and thought provoking weblogs.

For those interested, they can download a copy of my OPML file here (right click and save as) and if they have any suggestions for a new blog I should try out or want to share their OPML file - please leave a comment pointing it out.

Collis Ta’eed, of Envato, has launched a new blog called, The Netsetter, focusing on internet marketing, online business and design. So far he’s got three posts online - all interesting and informative.

I’ve been looking for a blog like this for a while, if you know of any similar - email me.

The Hosting Paradox

When the conversation turns to web hosts, everyone has something to say. Be it positive or negative, it’s one of those (geek) subjects that people love to query each other on. I received an email recently that pretty much asked: “Who is the best web host?“. Not an easy question at all. Because you’ll find, that no matter what company you ask someone on - there will always be some sort of horror story.

Unfortunately, the majority of the comments people get about web hosts are always negative.

Why? Due to a vocal minority; in which people, simply due to human nature find it a lot easier and interesting to complain about things that don’t work instead of praising great things. After all, our newspapers are covered with scandals and bad news.

Furthermore, if someone has a problem, they’re going to post on a few forums asking for help, so just by doing that they’re adding to the negative swell of comments. While, on the other hand, if they’re content - they don’t need to say anything.

Because of this I’ve decided to ignore the majority of bad hosting complaints. Everyone, as I mentioned previously, has some problems with a web host. Instead, I would see how many positive responses you get from people without mentioning names.

So, you’ve got to try and reach out to people and ask them for their hosting experiences.

Testing The Water

Twitter can be a very useful tool when looking for advice with hosting in two ways. Firstly, direct responses to you. If you put it out there that you are looking for a good, reliable, and easy to use hosting service. I can guarantee that you’ll probably get a response. It’s a little harder when you mention specific companies, and by not doing so you’ll find that people will suggest hosts that have been good to them rather than slamming those which have not offered a great service.

The second method I would employ would be to use Twitter’s search functionality. By doing this you can search for both positive and negative points and see if you think that they are going to affect you. For instance; you could search for “Media Temple“. At the time of writing, all you will see is negative responses in the Twitter search as they recently had a major outage.

That said, they’re meant to be one of the best hosts, especially if you want great support.

Beware

I’m not saying everyone would do this, far from it. But when asking for recommendations, you should check if they link to a web host with an affiliate link without telling you. Because if they don’t notify you - they could be lying through their teeth and just want a little bit of cash.

As I stated previously, I am not saying everyone would do this, but it’s certainly something to look out for.

My Way

When I chose my hosting company, I simply decided to ask a friend, as to his experiences and if he would recommend them. I took his advice and since then have been trucking along happily with Siteground (don’t worry, it’s not an affiliate link!). Sure there have been a few issues and their website does look pretty terrible. But they’re reasonably reliable and have very fast customer support.

At the end of the day, hosting is a bit of a risk, and I challenge you to find a hosting provider who has never had an outage at some point in their history.

Educate Me

I’m bored. Really, really bored. Over the last few months I have watched people leave college and start working; sometimes for themselves, and often for others. I’ve also watched people become redundant and, if you’re trying to look at the positive side of things, they now have had the slate wiped clean - an infinite number of opportunities now available to them.

While all that has been happening, I, on the other hand, have been stuck in the classroom, exam hall and my room - doing homework. I don’t know what I really want to do in life - but I know what I don’t want to do. Put up with this seemingly endless bombardment of useless information for another minute.

But I do.

Why? Because at the end of the day I know that the harder I work, the more effort that I put into my education, I am widening my horizons, and when one doesn’t know what they want to do in life. That’s very reassuring to know.

Right now, I’m at the point when I’m looking into Universities and I’m not sure what to do. Every single person I talk to tells me that I must go to University, and I know why they say that - it’s just what’s ‘done’.

However, there is this voice in the back of my head asking me if I can really bare an extra four years of education - useful or not. I see the rational direction in which to go in. But yet, against everything my head is telling me - my instinct, just wants me to get out there and start doing something with my life.

So in the mean time, before I really have to start choosing Universities and what else I want to do; I’d better get back to digging my hole.

Audi’s CEO on the Economic Downturn -

“We heard about it, so we had a board meeting and discussed it thoroughly and have decided not to participate.”

Brilliant.

[Source: The Telegraph Newspaper]