1. Find faster

Think about how often you “search” through your hard drive to find and open files, applications, or folders? 10, 20, 50 times a dayhttp://www.stefancrain.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=338&action=edit&message=1? Probably takes you a while huh? And then you find the file and cant even remember why you were searching for GuyDoingFacePalm.jpg in the first place.  Lucky for us there is a much faster way to find stuff on the mac.

Apple built this fucntionality straight into into OSX in 2006, they call it “Spotlight”.

TRY IT OUT: Press command + spacebar to open the window in the upper right corner. Type in the first 3-4 letters of what you are looking for, use arrow keys to navigate the list and press enter to open the file. Easy, fast, found.

More about Spotlight from Apple .

Time saved : 20-30 minutes a day.

2. Focus longer

The time you spend blocking out distractions and to getting focused work done is invaluable.

We can all agree that one of the big drawbacks of the new social web is our level of constant distraction. How much time do you waste checking your two favorite sites? I started keeping track of mine and I’m sure the results would alarm you.

I started using an application called SelfControl 1 month ago and immediately noticed changes in my work habits.

SelfControl blocks your access to any sites in its’ blacklist for a preset period of time. After you start a session there’s no going back.

Learn more about Selfcontrol – sGit the source on github

Time saved : 40-60 minutes a day.

3. Sync more often

I’ve made it a practice to use two computers in my weekly workflow. I have a rock solid desktop to really crank out most of my work, and when cabin fever strikes I have an old PowerBook that I take with me to escape. I wanted the computers to keep my projects in sync without being forced to work off of a remote server.

Enter Gitdocs. Gitdocs is awesome for my coding projects because not only does it keep my 2 stations in sync, but it also it keeps track of a files revision history, so if I need to revert to yesterdays file, its right there!

Git the source on github

Time saved : 20-30 minutes a day + countless headaches avoided.

What am I missing?

How have you streamlined your workflow  ?

Key Features

• Built with the jQuery framework
• Lightweight at only 1.9KB
• supports Multiple instances on one page
• timerEnd handler
• start, stop, and reset functionality

$('#counter').countdown({
	stepTime: 60,
	format: 'hh:mm:ss',
	startTime: "12:32:55",
	digitImages: 6,
	digitWidth: 53,
	digitHeight: 77,
	timerEnd: function() { alert('end!!'); },
	image: "digits.png"
});

Custom Even iCal / Google Calendar integration.

1. With an Arduino I can enhance my ability to add layers of interaction & interface design to my projects.
2. The majority of my experience developing comes from web development, Titanium allows me to program in the language of my choice.
3. If I could figure out how to connect it, I wouldn’t need to re-write my current app in an app like Processing ( Holy shit, processing is hard ).

There were people out there that were wondering about this same thing, I followed up on the leads they were given and stepped away with something that worked.

For many, The main draw to Titanium is that it will package back-end languages like Pearl, Ruby, or PHP into cross platform applications. With the power of google and these 3 languages we can easily fill whatever “gaps” that titanium may have. Luckily for me, Rémy Sanchez released his class in PHP to communicate with the serial ports on mac + pc + *nix. Using Sanchez’s script as a basis, I started to play with serial communication & PHP the mac.

This tutorial assumes that you have setup the Arduino IDE to upload sketches and have Titanium desktop installed. Here is the Arduino getting started guide, along with the Titanium getting started guide.

First things first, your Arduino needs something to report about right?. In our example the Arduino is going read from a photocell at the A0 pin, and output it to the serial port every second.

Here’s a quick wiring diagram, photocell with a 10kΩ resistor. For more info on using a photocell, please visit this photocell tutorial.

Here’s the Arduino sketch for this project. For now it’s really basic, I will be expanding on this in part II.

Lets take a look at the sketch. In the setup() function we’re going to start the serial communications at 9600. Then our main programming goes into the loop() function. In the loop we read the A0 pin, print it to the serial, and wait for 1000ms.

Insert this code in your Arduino IDE, and upload it to your board and open up your serial monitor (there is a button for it, or a menu option, either works). In your serial monitor, make sure you set the baud rate to 9600, or you wont see anything.

If you don’t have a photocell or other sensor to read from, you can comment out the serial.println(sensorValue); line, and remove the comments on the Serial.println(“test”); line. That way you will still be posting some data for the Titanium app to see.

/* AnalogReadSerial Reads an analog input on pin 0, prints the result to the serial monitor
This example code is in the public domain. */

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
int sensorValue = analogRead(A0);
Serial.println(sensorValue);
//Serial.println('test');
delay(1000);
}

If everything has worked correctly, your serial monitor should look something like this one.
Easy? I was hoping you’d say so, ‘cuz here comes the complicated stuff.

Please download the Arduino Serial Titanium project, in the comments it has better explanations of the functions that we will talk about later.

Before we can build anything, we need to need to import this project into titanium. This part shouldn’t stump you, import has its own button. In the titanium project’s resources folder you should be able to see the following files:

json.php

This is the most important file in the titanium project. It’s the bridge between your app and the Arduino, it contains the settings you need to update for this application to return the contents of the your Arduinos serial output. Currently the json.php file is outputting the A0 value along with the current time in a json encoded array. We later use jQuery to load this array into a table in our titanium project.

<!--?php<br /-->
<pre>header('Content-type: application/json');
$serial = new phpSerial();

//Specify the serial port to use...
$serial->deviceSet('/dev/cu.usbserial-A800etjJ');

// leave this alone
$serial->confBaudRate(9600); //Baud rate: 9600
$serial->confParity('none');
$serial->confCharacterLength(8);
$serial->confStopBits(1);
$serial->confFlowControl('none');
$serial->deviceOpen();

sleep(2);
$read = $serial->readPort();
// trim it down, there was an 'n' at the end of it.
$read = (substr($read, 0, -2));

$serial->deviceClose();

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');

$time = date('D, d M Y H:i:s O');
$json = '{
'serialdata': [
{ 'A0':''.$read.'',
'date':''.$time.''
}
]
}';
echo $json;
?>

You will need to know your Arduino’s serial port to get this to work correctly. This can be done using the Arduino IDE, From the menu selecting “Tools->SerialPort” will show you the serial port you are talking to the Arduino on. On windows it will look more like COM1, COM2, or COM3. In the Json.php file, replace the $serial->deviceSet(” “); value with your Arduino’s serial connection.

index.html

In our index, we are using jQuery to call the json.php. It then parses the results from the Arduino’s response and adds them to our data table. Also note that in Titanium, we have to initialize the php_serial.class.php in a script tag rather then include it in the header of the json.php.

Serial Monitor

<!-- blueprint css -->

<!-- jQuery Minified -->
<script src="jquery-1.5.min.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>

<!-- Initialize php serial class -->
<script src="php_serial.class.php" type="text/php"><!--mce:1--></script>

<table id="data" border="0">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>A 0</th>
<th>date</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<!-- content will go here --></tbody>
</table>

<script type="text/javascript"></script>

And here is the final bare bones Titanium result:

Over the next few weeks I plan on releasing 2-3 tutorials as I dive into Arduino & titanium. Hopefully I’ll be able to get past the basic getting started guide and onto more advanced projects like using firmata to build custom code based on user interaction.

Push2Highrise.php is a simple PHP wrapper which adds form submitted data from your webpage directly to Highrise CRM system. Using the Highrise API, the wrapper supports the creation of contacts, notes, tasks and deals.

I’ve made changes to the following areas:

1. Added The ability to attach new info to existing contacts.
2. Added The ability to attach background info to contacts.
3. Updated the search to look for people by email address, rather then first & last name (how many James Smith’s do you know?)
4. Corrected problems I was having with the “add notes” function.

Examples

This is my basic example of usage, I know it’s pretty minimal, but you can see how to add tags, notes, background info, update users, add tasks. Im posting this because when I started, I couldn’t find any examples of how to use this script. I’m sure if more time was spent with it we could get a bunch more out of it, Highrise is awesome.

<!--?php include ('StefanCrains_Push2Highrise.php'); $Push = New Push_Highrise(); /// tags for highrise $tag1 = "New Contact on ".date("M Y"); $tag2 = "Added again on ".date("M Y"); // array for the contats info // staff_comment = the background info $INFO = array('sSubject' =--> '', 'sEmail' => $BillingEmail, 'sFirstName' => 'first name', 'sLastName' => 'last name', 'sCompany' => '', 'sPhone' => 'phone #', 'sZip' => 'zip #', 'sCity' => 'city', 'sStreet' => 'street 1'.', '.'street 2', 'sState' => 'state', 'sCountry' => 'country', 'sNotes' => 'added via API', 'staff_comment'=> 'added on '.date("M dS, Y @ H:i"));

// the first query to see if person is in highrise
$xml = ($Push->person_in_highrise($INFO));

if (($xml) < 1){ 	// add new customer to highrise 	$Push->pushContact($INFO);

 // get the id of the person added
 $subject = ($Push->person_in_highrise($INFO));

 // add tag1 to the person
 $Push->pushTag($type, $subject, $tag1);

 // compose the note
 $Note = array('sPre' => 'first part of message', 'sSubject' => ' middle part ', 'sNotes' => ' last part', 'id'=> $subject);

 // add the note to the person
 $Push->pushNote($Note);

} else { // if id >1 we have returned the id of a person

 // we return a person
 $subject = $xml;

 // existing customer that has been added again to highrise
 $Push->updateContact($INFO, $subject);

 // add tag1 to the person
 $Push->pushTag($type, $subject, $tag2);

 // compose the note
 $Note = array('sPre' => 'first part of message', 'sSubject' => ' middle part ', 'sNotes' => ' last part', 'id'=> $subject);

 // add the note to the person
 $Push->pushNote($Note);
};

?>