Just wanted to giver you all a heads up on two pieces of software that I came across recently: Cinch and Divvy.

Divvy · Window management at its finest.

Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions.

With Divvy, it is as simple as calling up the interface, clicking and dragging. When you let go, your window will be resized and moved to the relative position on the screen. If that seems like too much work, you can go ahead and create as many different shortcuts as you’d like that resize and move your windows in exactly the same way.

Divvy is designed to be quick, simple and elegant. We want it to stay out of your way as much as possible while providing the most powerful window management available today.

Irradiated Software – Cinch

Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as ‘hot zones’. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side (splitscreen). Cinching to the top edge of the screen will resize the window to fill the entire screen (fullscreen). Dragging a window away from its cinched position will restore the window to its original size.

I use Cinch, as it is simple and suites my needs perfectly. If you needa bit more control or functionality, Divvy might be for you.

This is another presentation from Jeff McNeill (who brought you the Drucker and Goldratt Concept map).

This one is an introduction to Information Graphics, a topic I that has fascinated me ever since coming across Edward Tufte and recently stimulated by Dan Roam’s superb Back of the Napkin series of books on Visual Thinking.

This is a concept map showing the key ideas and relationships between Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive and the Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt (The Goal, It’s Not Luck).

It was created by Jeff McNeill using IHMC Cmap Lite. Another concept mapping tool is Sciral’s excellent Flying Logic visual planning application.

The map is well worth downloading and reviewing at full size.

Came across a great little app today that allows me to take control of my iMac screen from my Macbook Pro across the network

Teleport:

“Teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs.  Simply reach an edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your nearby Mac, which also becomes controlled by your keyboard. The pasteboard can be synchronized, and you can even drag & drop files between your Macs. “

A quick tutorial on setting it up is here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2135941_one-mouse-keyboard-using-teleport.html

Its obvious in retrospect, but for years I have always manually added up figures in columns I was working on in Microsoft Word (e.g. a payment schedule in a contract).

This week I was getting sick of recalculating figures every time I made a change, and googled the problem.

Word Tips has just what I needed: Summing a Table Column .

1. Click the table cell you want the formula in
2. Click the Layout tab on the ribbon.
3. Click the Formula tab in the Data group. Word displays the Formula dialog box.
4. Insert your formula , default is “=SUM(ABOVE)” which sums all the cells above.
5. Click on OK.

I am currently crunching through Steve Litt’s brilliant series of books on Troubleshooting. I am hugely into general problem solving frameworks and his Universal Troubleshooting Process (UTP) is one of my favourites.

Today, whilst clearing my backlog on Instapaper I came across this Wired.com piece on legendary design firm IDEO. They use a simply process called “Design Thinking” that they claim is at the heart of their stunning successes:

Practically speaking, the approach isn’t complicated. In stages, it goes like this: firstly, immersion, whereby the designers research the problem by plunging themselves into it – talking to the people they’re trying to help, working with them, interviewing experts. Secondly, synthesis – whereby they gather together their findings and look for patterns. Third, ideation – brainstorming solutions to the real problems identified by stage two. Then comes prototyping, making mock-ups of solutions to try out against the problem. After that comes the product. Only at the end, at the prototyping stage, are judgements made; until then, all ideas are given equal weight.

This methodology is radical in that it differs from traditional approaches to business strategy in two key ways. Whereas in many companies the concept for a new product may have already been based on, say, an idea from the marketing department with a designer later brought in to make it look pretty, design thinking places the designer at the heart of the innovation process. Secondly, the methodology gives a firm framework within which a wider team can work. It takes the cliché of the lone creative mind being struck with genius, and replaces it with a process that a whole team can follow. Creativity, therefore, isn’t a thing that magically appears, but a process you work through.

From: Reinventing British manners the Post-It way – Wired.co.uk

I can see similarities to Ken Watanabe’s simplified problem solving methodology as presented in his best-selling children’s “Problem Solving 101“

1. Understand the current situation current (Immersion)
2. Identify root cause (Sythesis)
3. Develop an effective action plan (Ideation)
4. Execute until solved, making modifications as necessary (Prototyping)

From: http://www.problemsolvingtoolbox.com/

You can also see similarities between IDEO’s framework and Dan Roam’s framework for proble  solving through visual thinking as outlined in “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures“. In the book Roam explores a four stage process for solving any problem with visual thinking:

1. Look (Immerse/ Understand)
2. See (sythesis / Identify patters / root cause)
3. Imagine (Ideation / Plan)
4. Show (Prototype / Execute)

How do these map to the Universal Troubleshooting Process (UTP)?

The UTP shares the core troubleshooting steps with the other three (3, 4,6,7 and 8), but it has some seemingly anachronous and superfluous steps (1,2,5,9 and 10). I say “seemingly” because experience has taught me that the Universal Troubleshooting Process steps are all necessary and in the right order.

It is aimed more at professional, routine troubleshooters and as such addresses the important psychological factors and habits that contribute to long-term effectiveness.

I cannot do this process justice in a few lines, but here is summary:

1. Prepare - This is about having the right attitude and mindset for troubleshooting as well as the required tools, skills and information. For professional troubleshooters (like Technical Support agents) attitude is one of the most important elements in their professional quality and success.
2. Make damage control plan – This is iatrogenic prevention i.e. do not make things worse. If forces you to think of consequences before trying pot luck fixes.
3. Get a complete and accurate symptom description - Here the UTP shares a step with the first principle of the other three (i.e. Look / Immerse/ Understand). In the UTP thi9s is usually achieved by creating a simple block diagram off the problem system so as to understand elements and relationships.
4. Reproduce the symptom - This is part of fully understanding and verifying the current situation. You verify the symptoms and measure them.
5. Do the appropriate corrective maintenance - This step is again targeted at professional troubleshooters. So many problems are caused by bad maintenance and fixed by routine maintenance, that often it is worth running the standard best practice maintenance procedures over the system and seeing of that fixes the issue.
6. Narrow it down to the root cause - This is the core step. Often it is a process in itself as you look from problem patterns, isolate elements of the system and systematically disqualify them as candidates for root cause. Eventually you generate a most likely root cause hypothesis and proceed to step 7.
7. Repair or replace the defective component - Here you generate a plan to test the hypothesis by fixing, replacing or implementing a work-around for the root cause.
8. Test - You now apply your fix and test to ensure the problem is indeed solved. 
9. Take pride in your solution – This is another psychologically important steps to help prevent burn-out and boost morale.
10. Prevent future occurrence of this problem – This is simple operational best practice. You learn from your problems, document your solutions and new knowledge, you modify systems and procedures to ensure the problem does not reoccur, or you can respond quickly and effectively.

This universal troubleshooting procedure has been a vital tool for my team and I in beating some extremely tough problems, sometimes involving desperate customers begging us to fix badly broken massively complex undocumented systems and us successfully finding and fixing the root cause problems in 24 hours where the system designers could not succeed for months.

I also heartily recommend the Dan Roam and Ken Watanabe books referred to above. They are both brilliant and accessible.

In an recent article for Future Changes, Bill Arconati – Confluence Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian – argues that Enterprise Wikis are much better than contemporary e-mail culture , creating what he calls an opt-in culture:

“In an opt-in culture, employees contribute to conversations where they gain the most satisfaction and have the largest impact. They look beyond their tiny fiefdoms and seek out situations where they can add value and offer their expertise.” – Wikis, “Opt-in Culture” Contribute to a Healthy Organization

Her contrast opt-in culture with its opposite – the opt-out e-mail culture – that completely dominates the business world:

Perhaps the best way to understand and appreciate an opt-in culture is by contrasting it to an opt-OUT culture like email. Have you ever left work at the end of the day and thought to yourself, “All I did today was respond to emails?” In email-based companies you frequently spend your days knocking down emails like a bad game of Whac-A-Mole.

The main problem with email is that you have little control over what lands in your inbox. Most emails are either (i) people asking you to do something or (ii) conversations between two or three people (frequently executives) with a dozen innocent bystanders in the cc line. The only way to shut out the noise in an email culture is to opt-out and say “Take me off this thread!”

Even if you successfully filter out mail you don’t want, there’s little you can do about the email you’re NOT receiving. Important management decisions are made every day on your corporate email server without the input of your company’s most interested and qualified employees. For example, I’m in marketing but I’ve worked in product development and corporate finance in past roles. I’d like to think I have something to offer to conversations about product development and financial analysis even though they’re technically outside of my designated role. But in an email culture, I wouldn’t be cc’d on those emails and hence not part of the conversation simply because I’m a marketing guy. Much of the knowledge and experience that I bring to the organization would be completely wasted in an email-based culture.

He is right, there is terrible waste in the fire-and-forget e-mail culture, with massive numbers of hours lost to simply cheking that mails can be safely discarded.

Bill ends by explaining how to use wiki’s to develop an opt-in culture:

1. Communities of interest – deploy a wiki that lets you create a separate space for every area of interest.
2. Comments and Discussions – deploy a wiki where conversations can naturally evolve out of content.
3. Subscriptions – deploy a wiki where users can opt-in to conversations happening in the wiki either by subscribing via email or via RSS. With email and RSS notifications, users can actually monitor and participate in conversations happening all across the company.
4. Openness – Consider a wiki where openness is the default.

Read on: http://www.ikiw.org/2009/03/04/wikis-opt-in-culture-contribute-to-a-healthy-organization/

Java is  super useful technology, but it has a dreadful habit of leaving multiple vesions of itself (all at 100Mb or so) lying around your hard-drive.

JavaRa is a simple tool that does a simple job: it removes old and redundant versions of the Java Runtime Environment JRE. Simply select “Check for Updates” or “Remove Older Version” to begin. JavaRa is free under the GNU GPL version two.

Get it here: RaProducts – Products

Gcal Popup provides “Google Calendar in a nice overlay so that your calendar can be updated without ever leaving the web page”.

If you use Google Apps for Domains,you will need to make a small change to make it work.

1. Close Firefox

2. Go to your profile directory

3. Go into extensions/GCAL@BenjiP.net/chrome/content and modify GCalPopupOverlay.js

4. Open the file in a text editor and replace the “src” attribute “www.google.com/calendar/render” with “www.google.com/calendar/a/yourdomain.com/render”, obviously replacing yourdomain.com with whatever your own domain is.

5. Restart Firefox

One small caveat, it is an experimental add-on, which means you need to have a Mozilla account to get it. You can get a Mozilla account by registering at the link.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9411

Recently came across a great service for those who might want a secure and private place to convoke colleagues to chat, but could not be bothered to install an intranet, forum or jabber server.

It is called Yammer, and it is a hybrid between Twitter, a discussion board and Facebook, but entirely private – for your company employees only. You need a valid company e-mail account to join your company network.

Here are its features:

• Yammer is a discussion board for your company: post a status update; ask a question; shares news, links, opinions, and information.
• Yammer is a private social network for your company: each user gets a profile displaying their photo, title, expertise, background, what they are working on, etc.
• Yammer is a knowledge-base for your company: you can search for any topic to see who’s talking about it and what’s been said. Great for new employees to get up to speed.
• Your employees stay connected wherever they are when they use Yammer through our free web, desktop , BlackBerry, iPhone, IM, email or SMS clients.
• Yammer is only accessible via SSL, and only by employees with a valid company email have access. Additional security restrictions can be added after claiming your network.

There is also a useful Firefox plugin for it called YammerFox