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How To Become a Mac Keyboard Maestro | Appstorm:

One of the key factors to becoming more productive while working with your Mac is to master keyboard shortcuts. Mac OS X includes a set of standard keyboard shortcuts that allow you to switch applications, close windows, quit programs, open new documents or browser windows/tabs and copy and paste between files.

Many Mac programs ship with application specific keyboard shortcuts as well, all in the name of streamlining your workflow and allowing your hands to remain on the keyboard. You can shave precious seconds off mundane, repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus more of your time and energy on the task at hand – rather than locating that rogue window, buried beneath 10 other applications.

Keyboard Maestro is an application that takes the idea of keyboard shortcuts and injects it with steroids. The result of which is a super-charged automation program, allowing you to execute several different actions with a single command.

“Climbing is meditation.”

- Craig Mod

“It’s not easy. It’s not fun, either, but it’s absolutely necessary if you have dozens of programs littered across your desktop. Take a good look at the applications you use on a daily basis. You’ll find, in most cases, that it’s only a handful, which raises serious questions about the rest still clogging up your task bar.”

- Matt Madeiro in Downsize Your Digital Life (Becoming Minimalist)

Tasty food, nice colors and a good drink. Simple food with a simple presentation is really good.

PlainText — Dropbox text editing for iPad & iPhone [Sponsor]:

Just wanted to take a moment or three to thank Jesse at Hog Bay Software for being the inaugural sponsor of Minimal Mac’s RSS Feed. If you have not tried PlainText yet, you should. An update was just released yesterday, it is free (ad supported) to download and give a spin, and Dave at 52Tiger just did a glowing review with instructions for how to put it to best use.

Back to the PC:

A fantastic commentary of what Apple’s new direction might mean and, more importantly, how it might affect the competitors, mainly the PC.

Basically the new Mac OS cannot be copied by the competition any more. What are you going to merge, Android and Windows?

But some implications are easy to foresee. For example, the consequences for competitors. When Apple launched the iPhone, competitors followed suit, powering their phones with a variety of “open” operating systems. When Apple launched the iPad, competitors followed suit, powering their devices with a variety of “open” operating systems. These reactions to Apple’s initiatives by dozens of “open-wielding” competitors are all being touted as the inevitably winning strategies.

And one key phrase in the article:

The power of Apple’s integrated approach across its product lines goes deeper than the user experience.

which brings me to the next topic. Integration.

Apple is a hardware company. But because they want the best UX for their users they also write their own software. Combine the control of those two factors and you have a really good overall experience that cannot, I repeat, cannot be achieved by any of the competition.

Apple is pulling away from the competition. And as each year goes by, and new or improved products are unveiled that feeling has grown to be that they’re not only pulling away but disappearing over the hill and around the bend.

Regardless of whether you are an Apple fanboy or a PC user (I feel sorry for you), you have to agree that the technical lead that Apple has by designing it’s own hardware and putting a tremendously well designed, robust and easy to learn OS on top of that hardware is giving them the advantage of being the best out there today.

Some might be intimidated by it, some might consider it too closed of a system, but Apple is taking the technology world to the future, a future where, hopefully, simplicity will rule.

Edit: I forgot to add a word about what happens with Windows.

Windows hasn’t changed much since the days of Windows 2000. Windows 7 is windows 2000 and XP, and that is an OS from the late 90s. For the technology back then, it might have been OK, however for today’s technology… Well, because Windows is so old it’s keeping PC manufacturers from innovating since Microsoft have them tight on crappy contracts. Since they don’t have something else (and for whatever reason they don’t want to write their own OS) they are stuck as well.

If Microsoft, and the PC industry for that matter, wants to remain a player in the near future (and I am talking the next 3-5 years) they will have to innovate as well. As long as Ballmer is leading MS they won’t. He thinks this worked for us on the 90s and early 2000s, let’s continue with this and MS can get away with it because corporations don’t want to innovate themselves, I mean, some of them are still using windows XP with IE 6!

In any case, my opinion is that if they don’t completely re-write windows or come up with a new OS altogether (a la Apple with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X) they will find themselves lagging too far behind to catch up. As it is, today they are struggling to catch up.