1. Done. Btw, if you want to check if other apps are a Universal Binary, it is listed in the info pane in finder.

With respect to GTD: Textmate has 2 GTD bundles that I’ve yet to explore. But (as you’ll discover in Macbook Installation Email 101) MailTags is integrated with iGTD, so I’m going to stick with that for a while.

Thanks for dropping by, and thanks also for all the fun I had using Journler. I don’t wish to sound like I’m complaining about Journler, which is a fine piece of software. There were a few things that made it harder for me to enjoy using it recently:

1. I missed encryption when you dropped support for it. I used to run without Filevault turned on, and store passwords and web receipts in Journler from the services menu. When I upgraded to 2.5, I decided that I’d better turn on Filevault which made me nervous for a while… encrypting my whole home directory is a little scary, and probably slows my machine down a little.
2. Having to go through all my old pdf Journler entries after upgrading, and mark each of them to open the pdf by default was a pain in the butt. I found the preference to have new entries by default, but it took a while to discover by digging around in the documentation, and I don’t think it worked with upgraded entries from my existing database.
3. Because I have password protection on startup, If I don’t have Journler running continuously in the background, whenever I use the dropbox or service menu to quickly add a new file into Journler: the password entry box opens up underneath the translucent entry dialog asking me to choose categories etc. for the new entry, and I couldn’t find a way to get the focus into the password box. The only way out of that was to Force Quit Journler, restart it manually and enter the password, and then add the new item again. This was a real pain if I wanted to quickly add a file as part of my workflow without breaking my concentration.
4. The real killer was when an old VMWare Fusion instance locked up my machine with Filevault running, and I had to pull the plug and reboot. On restart, the Journler database was corrupted (likely Filevault’s problem, but if I didn’t have to leave Journler running permanently it probably would have been okay). I had to restore from the previous night’s backup, and then dig around in Application Support of the corrupted files to look for the stuff I’d added since then.
5. At that point, I considered going back to the old release of Journler, but couldn’t downgrade my database. I figured that I had bolted on GTD smart folders when Journler first came along, but since I’d adopted that, there’s now a huge choice of GTD applications for the Mac, so all I needed was a digital junk drawer… and actually, my Documents folder has all the right mojo out of the box.

I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to file bug reports at the time rather than just switching to a different application, but hopefully you’ll find my criticism useful.

Cheers, Gary.

1. Sounds interesting. I might have to check it out.

2. I did try out MoneyDance, however i found the transaction register a bit annoying to work with. Still, i thought the Dashboard was great! Speaking of Java based finance apps, i had a look round for free and/or open source apps. The only promising ones i found which appeared to still be active were Buddi and jGnash. The former being a little bit too basic (e.g. single currency only), and the latter having that goddamn awful Swing look, though being a bit more functional.

3. Also sounds interesting. Will have to check it out!

4. Not quite for me yet, though maybe i’ll change my mind in the future.

5. I have actually been looking for something to manage SSH tunnels, and this seems to fit the bill. Although the downloadable binary seems to be build for PowerPC, so i might have to grab the source-code and recompile for Intel – thus saving valuable CPU time by not having Rosetta running in the background (yikes!).

6. Not tried SuperDuper, though i did try Carbon Copy Cloner which surprisingly worked like a charm when i backed up my entire hard disk over firewire. In the past i have used rsync to synchronise my home folder to a backup disk, though i wasn’t entirely sure whether resource fork’s were being copied over (though reportedly they are). In any case, now i use FileVault i just copy over the .sparseimage file every once in a while which is much easier! :)

7. I’m not a Textmate convert yet. Still, from what i have heard it sounds like a great text editor.

8. Being a complete newbie with regards to Twitter, this is something i’ll have to look at.

9. Thanks for the plug. I appreciate it! :D

With regards to GTD, you could use a GTDTiddlyWiki which run’s self-contained in your web browser (which i think is neat). And on a similar concept, there is the todo.txt script.

I eagerly anticipate the next instalment of “Macbook Installation Applications 101″.