rich

StartupNation.com is running their 2009 Leading Moms in Business competition, which ranks the 200 best mom-owned startups of 2009. My wife Nina has her business, Tasty Clouds Cotton Candy Company, entered in it. Ranking is done by popular vote, and it’s a tight race, so I’m asking anyone who has a spare second to help us out and cast a vote. You can actually vote once a day.

You can vote and read a little about Tasty Clouds Cotton Candy Company here: http://www.startupnation.com/leading-moms-2009/contestant/3464/index.php?mode=castvote

Thanks!

I love Pandora, but their AIR app…I’m not sure what’s goin on there, but it consumes a ton of memory. So after searching around for a bit I found pandoraboy, a native mac os x app that brings pandora.com to the desktop. Some cool features of the app are that you can control the app with global hotkeys, and it supports growl notifications to let you know what song is playing.

Just stumbled across a pretty cool “design inspiration” site: PatternTap. There are loads of design inspiration sites out there, but the angle with this site is that they focus on showcasing particular design elements as opposed to overall design, with categories such as backgrounds, borders, comments, audio, tabs, web application, 404 pages, and much more. For somebody like me, who has the design skills of an intoxicated chimpanzee, this site should come in very handy.

I use the app Things as my to-do list to keep track of..well, my to-dos. It’s been pretty great so far, definitely a huge plus for my workflow. I’m also trying to get more into Quicksilver to try and speed up some of the mundane tasks you do on the computer everyday…a good amount of your daily mouse clicks can be reduced to keystrokes by QS (or apps like it).

So today I was thinking it would be cool it I can take a bulleted list of changes from a client and add them to Things without having to manually copy and past them from mail, open Things, and paste each item one by one.

What I found was that you can do this with two features of QS: Proxy Objects, and the Services Menu Module plugin. To install the Services Menu Module, simply open up QS preferences, go to plugins, and click the checkbox next to ‘Services Menu Module’. To enable Proxy Objects, go to Catalog -> Quicksilver and enable Proxy Objects. If you click on the ‘i’ (info) button at the bottom of the window with Proxy Objects selected, a drawer will open displaying al iist of Proxy Objects you can use. They were all already selected for me, so I left them that way, but the one I needed for this to work was ‘Current Selection’.

So after enabling Proxy Objects, I went over to the Triggers tab (still in QS preferences), and added a custom Hot Key trigger. Under ‘Select an Item’ I chose ‘Current Selection’. For the action I chose ‘Things/New To-do containing selection as title’ (which is one of two Services menu item added by Things). Then I clicked on the info button at the bottom of the pane to open up a drawer which contains settings related to the trigger. I assigned the trigger a hot key of ^T (control-T) and made sure that the trigger would be active in all applications.

Now, in back in my email which contains the bulleted list of items, i can select an item, hit ^T, and the Things quick entry window pops up with the selected text already pre-filled in. I can add more info if i need to, tab down and select an approproate project/area to add the todo to, tab over to save and we’re done.

It’s one of those small things where the time savings really start to add up the more you use it, which is my goal of getting more acquainted with QS. The one thing I would like to do is have it so I can select the whole bulleted list at once and add each line as a separate to-do, so that I can skip the part of selecting each line individually. If Things had an API I bet stuff like that would be pretty easy.