Development Workflow

Computer customization can be a great thing for productivity, however it can take a turn for the worse. Case in point, today I decided to get my computer at work really ready for some hardcore GTD, but the problem with a guy like me is I never really know when to quit. I started with of course cleaning up the cluttered desktop, putting files in the works in their correct places, okay, five minutes later we’re done.

Then I started to stare at my cluttered Dock, the Apple Dock is wonderful and awful all at once. So I thought about being able to manage the order of the programs held within the Dock, would this help?

In a way it does, all of my communication apps are on the left, then come development apps, then fun, you cannot forget fun stuff or what’s the point right? I came across a few great ideas that I will share with you now.

For Dock Spacing I came across an article by Adam Betts where he made “apps” out of icons to space things, simple idea, very useful execution. Next step is image previewing, this can be daunting as I have taken over the spot of three previous artists at my job. Each doing things in their own unique way, not wrong by any means but difficult to find and edit things for the guy walking into the fray. Some files open in Photoshop, some in Fireworks, and then finally some in Preview.app, which takes less time. But while I could Control Click all files and select Preview to open this is a bit of a PITA throughout the days workflow. I came across Xee which seems to be a great replacement (will follow up with a review) for Preview, plus it has an option in it’s Prefs that allows you to auto select using it as the replacement file by file or all files supported!

Now, so far I feel like the choices I’ve made will increase my productivity and workflow, I did end up wasting about a day to figure these things out, hopefully I saved you a bit of time in this from my findings.

Happy developing my fellow monkeys! Oh, and a preview of my dock/desktop so you can see what I mean, it’s flickR (which I loath saying as much as Tivo) but I can then outline why I do what I do.