Like most people married to their computers, I spend a portion of my time wondering how I can do things faster and how I can stay better organized. When I made the decision to move back to Mac, I put some effort into researching various productivity tools. The time I invested in research and running trial software has more than paid for itself. The tools described below have literally changed the way I use my Mac.
If my move back to mac was going to be successful, one of the first hurdles I had clear was getting my mail in order. As a consultant who spends a fair amount of time on the road, the communications piece of my tool kit had to be tight and tidy.
My first Mac was an original Macintosh 128, purchased in 1984 in a vain attempt to equip myself with tools for law school. It served me long and well. Somewhere along the way I found that funky screwdriver thing it took to crack the case open and crammed in another 128K. Man oh man. Then I hit the big time -- moved up to a MacPlus and bought my first external harddrive. The drive came in at a whooping 30 MB. Life was good.
After my recent switch to Back to Mac, I've received a variety of comments from my more vocal friends and associates. The Mac users in the crowd uniformly gave me a hearty "welcome back to the fold" slap on the back (the unspoken subtext: "we KNEW you'd be back."). The Windows users seemed almost cavalier in their attitude towards losing yet another user to the Mac fold (the unspoken subtext: "You never really were one of us anyways."). The Linuxtistas simply shrugged and said "Dude, why don't you just switch to Linux, you're already halfway there." (the unspoken subtext: "It's inevitable.
By now you must have heard about the Firefox browser from Open Source champions Mozilla. One of the joys of Firefox is that it is not a "take it or leave" package of features. Rather, Firefox is expandable and enjoys the benefits of being associated with an active developers community of programmers and enthusiasts who turn out a wide variety of enhancements (called "extensions") which give you the ability to customize Firefox to your needs.
