Penn Stater. Consultant. Technologist. Aspiring Usability Ninja.

I will very soon be the proud owner of the 27″ Apple iMac. Drool.

A common problem I have when I buy/build a new system is “What do I put on it?” It is often difficult to list all of the applications, preference panes, and essential files that make a new computer YOUR computer. After spending a few months on a machine, I start to take for granted that Quicksilver will be there, that Firefox will look and act the way I anticipate, and so on. Often, I will forget to install applications that are important to me, but I do not use regularly. This has happened to me with Adobe Creative Suite countless times; I didn’t know I needed it until I needed it. When I popped up Quicksilver and started typing “Photo…” to only see Photo Booth, I realized my error. Taking an hour to install CS4 can seriously hamper the creative process if you have a sudden burst of inspiration.

To try and prevent this from happening when my iMac arrives, and because I’m going to be home for the holidays where I won’t have access to most of my tools, software, and a real internet connection (my parents use a basic DSL package, which suits them fine), I decided to poll my fellow Mac users on Twitter and Facebook asking what their must-haves are on a new system. Below are the results. I’ve included the number of “votes” each item received in brackets. This doesn’t exactly give a great picture of recommendations, but does let you see that some people suggest using Firefox, many use Quicksilver, etc.

Essentials:

Many “essential” applications (such as iTunes) are included in OS X. However, these applications also make the list of things I can’t live without.

• Quicksilver [4] – Launcher, awesome, absolutely necessary.
• Firefox [2] – The killerapp here is obviously the extensions.
• VLC [4] – Plays anything. Enough said..
• Adium [6] – Chat on just about any service.
• A word processor [3] – Office 2008 is my flavor of choice.
• The Unarchiver [1] – This is a classic example of an app that I forget I need until someone sends me a set of RARs.
• Evernote[0] – No one mentioned this, but I’m really trying to make it a part of my workflow. I see great potential.
• A torrent application [3] – Everyone recommended Transmission, which has a very sexy Mac-like interface, but I strongly prefer uTorrent.

Firefox Extensions:

These are all from my personal list, and were not mentioned by anyone responding to my informal poll.

• AdBlock Plus – Don’t see ads. Ever.
• FireFTP – Good for lightweight FTP tasks.
• XMarks – Sync bookmarks, passwords, etc. across all your machines. Like delicious, but private, and more useful.

Communication Apps:

• Skype [1] – For skypin’. I should note, the person who recommended this included it at both the beginning and end of their list. They must LOVE skypin’.
• A twitter application [4] – Several recommended a twitter app of some sort, with Tweetie getting the most votes
• Gmail Notifications [1] – Check your e-mail. Constantly. Make Merlin Mann cry himself to sleep.
• Colloquy [1] – IRC

Preference Panes / Add-ons:

A few add-ons for OS X that make life easier.

• BlueHarvest [1] – Keep OS X from contaminating your non-Mac partitions with hidden files
• TextMate [2] – Text completion that saves time and just works
• Visor [1] – A slide-down command prompt like the console in Quake when you push ~.
• Paragon NTFS [1] – Sometimes, you need to share with Windows folks.

What You Do:

One very smart person told me that it “depends on what you do.” While it is helpful to have a sense of what other people are using, I must admit it is strange for an electrician to ask a mechanic what tools he should be carrying around with him. So here’s a few tools that help me do what I do.

• Coda – webdev
• Adobe Creative Suite CS4 – just about anything involving pushing pixels, floating divs, etc.
• Aperture – exposure, levels, and flickr batch uploads (with a small plug-in)
• TiltShift – AdobeAIR app that simulates tilt shift photography
• DropBox – Make files available over the web, back up critical data into the cloud
• A video editing tool – I don’t have one particular tool that I like yet, but I’m looking… Suggestions?

This is far from an exhaustive list. In fact, this isn’t even all of the recommendations I received. However, most of the other suggestions were recommended  are intended to fill needs that I simply don’t have. These apps that seem unnecessary to me are likely critical in the daily activities of those individuals that listed them. This only emphasizes the fact that, it depends on what you do. I think the above is a good start, and with the exception of my section of tools-I-need, most of these apps would probably be useful to the majority of users. Suffice to say, if all of the above came preloaded on my Mac, I wouldn’t be too upset.

Did I miss anything? What are your must-haves, and are they similar to the results I got?

Things have been kind of dead here, but sometimes that’s a good thing.  I’ve been keeping really busy.

I’m making some upgrades to the site (note the new Twitter widget on the right sidebar), and feeling kind of creative.  I’m just in the mood to work on my own projects, rather than school stuff, right now.

Not going to make this a lengthy post, but I also should mention that I was fortunate enough to receive an internship offer from Deloitte for this summer.  The interview process was somewhat grueling, and I didn’t think I did great, but things worked out in my favor.

To anyone looking to obtain an internship with Deloitte: I highly recommend doing some research on the company’s website.  While I wasn’t asked many questions at all about Deloitte (which surprised me, since most companies ask “What do you know about us?” or something similar), I did find that many of the interview preparation materials on the Deloitte website were VERY helpful to me.

More soon.

Among my many responsibilities at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, I am the Media Director of IST2U.  In a nutshell, this means I’m the guy that gets e-mails about upcoming events from all the folks in the offices at IST, which I then condense into short blurbs that contain the essential information (date, time, location, a sentence or two summarizing the event.)  The purpose of IST2U is to be the official source of information about events and opportunities happening within the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.

In my previous semester as the media director, I focused primarily on keeping the wheels spinning.  The transition from the previous director was a tad bumpy (due to no one’s fault in particular, just the nature of the beast), and so my main efforts were spent meeting folks around the office and processing updates as they came in.  However, towards the middle of the semester I began to get a bit more experimental.  First, I added Google Analytics tracking into the Drupal installation that runs the site.  With the help of one of the IST system administrators, the analytics results exclude any traffic from inside the IST Building (since many of the workstations there have IST2U as their homepage).  This greatly reduced the number of “false hits.”

I also setup a Twitter account for IST2U.  This was my first stab at “real” marketing for the site.  While I have given brief talks at student government meetings, in classes, and so on, I had never really actively “pushed” IST2U to people.  By integrating IST2U with the Twitter social network, I took the first steps towards giving students the opportunity to select from a variety of content delivery mechanisms.  My predecessors used e-mail campaigns, essentially carpet bombing all-student mailing lists with a weekly digest of news and events.  However, students often begrudged this approach and would create spam filters, or simply delete the messages without reading them.

The best thing about the Twitter account for IST2U (for me) is that it is fully automated.  Using the TwitterFeed service, the RSS of the page is checked every half hour and updates are automatically posted to the Twitter account.  This is a great payoff, as it takes only a few minutes to configure, and after that you can just let it do it’s thing.  My ideal marketing solution is the passive “trickling” of data to different outputs, from which the userbase can choose their preferred method of content retrieval.  This will leave me free to compose new posts, analyze traffic and advertising results and develop new campaigns based on these results, and improve the site by adding new features.

I believe that RSS is highly underutilized within the college demographic.  I know very few people that use any sort of RSS reader, and even fewer that are “up to date” on the articles they subscribe to.  Therefore, having the website and an RSS feed as the only mechanisms for content delivery is, in my opinion, a terrible strategy.  For this reason, I am trying to extend IST2U into more social networks that I know are utilized by college students.

Tonight I setup a Facebook “Page” for IST2U.  On it, I have created a discussion board where students can post feedback, feature requests, etc. that I will evaluate and hopefully implement during the re-launch of IST2U.  My goal is to have IST2U fully migrated to WordPress (I find it to be considerably less “clunky” than Drupal) by Monday, January 26th.  It is my hope that through these improvements and renovations, IST2U can finally become what it was always intended to be: a useful, viable web resource for IST and SRA students.

I am currently in the process of drafting a traffic report, in which I’m conducting an analysis of the data I currently have on IST2U, as gathered by Google Analytics over the past several months.  This will be the baseline upon which we compare the success or failure of IST2U in the future.

I’ve kind of abandoned this page [with the exception of my tweets in the side bar] since setting it up.

Suffice to say, there are a lot of things going on.  I don’t want to go into too much detail right now, but here’s a quick overview:

• The Magazine of IST (MIST) has launched it’s new site (using WordPress) and will be releasing its Fall 2008 issue soon
• I am in the process of organizing a team for a startup, to be launched in Summer/Fall ’09
• I have, of course, been attending to my various duties at school (classes, papers, homework, programs etc.)

Big updates will be coming soon.  I have a few articles in ‘draft’ stages, and I’ve also got some posts coming out in the Fall issue of MIST.  Check back for more soon.