Sunday, June 30, 2013

Inbox management for RSS and Mail

Marco Arment notes that those complaining of RSS Inbox overload are not using RSS correctly: it should be used to check on a possibly large number of rarely updated but valuable sites.

He recommends simply deleting feeds that are updated frequently. I have a slightly different approach: two basic feed directories. One is my A-List, which contains feeds that roughly fall into the "rarely updated but valuable" category, and the other is my River of News, which are feeds that I enjoy and which keep me up-to-date, but which I don't mind clearing out by marking all as read.

Incidentally, pretty much the same goes for my E-Mail Inbox: as much of the lower priority stuff as possible is sorted into specific mailboxes automatically. The rest I triage quickly into one of 3 categories: action, read-ponder, will-file.

I used to sort by categories and that didn't work at all. In fact, it frequently managed to invert the actual priorities, leaving me focused on e-mails that weren't actually important, just hard to categorize, whereas most of the important e-mails would have their own categories and disappear from view.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

NSBezierPath description...

...shows the path segments as Postscript commands. So the following code:
  id p= [NSBezierPath bezierPathWithRect: NSMakeRect(10,20,200,100)];
  NSLog(@"p: %@",[p description]);
yields this output:
  Bounds: {{10, 20}, {200, 100}}
  Control point bounds: {{10, 20}, {200, 100}}
    10.000000 20.000000 moveto
    210.000000 20.000000 lineto
    210.000000 120.000000 lineto
    10.000000 120.000000 lineto
    closepath
    10.000000 20.000000 moveto
Neat!