Manifest Your Reality

My portable office

While packing for a recent business trip, it occurred to me that a post inventorying my favorite tech tools for daily life and work is long overdue. While I have extolled the virtues of the MacBook Air and the BlackBerry Bold, a litany of other items round out my portable toolbox which may useful to others who use and enjoy a similar workflow in life and business.

It is important for me to have tools which work in a highly interconnected fashion. Since I use multiple computers between home, office, and travel, I require the fluidity and unity of a common environment across each of them. This extends beyond simply having the same operating and using the same software on each computer. So as not to have any transactions within my business development fall through the cracks, I require my devices to be synchronized with one another in a way which makes it seem as if my work and past actions have “automagically” transferred amongst one other. This single-entry, multiple-propagation characteristic is an important component of efficiently and accurately maintaining business-critical files and records across all of my work environments.

As a fair amount of my business is conducted on the move, and especially given that my local transportation is usually via motorcycle, having a compact and ultra-portable office is highly important. Establishing a tool flow which is lightweight both physically and logically allows me to work in a manner which is both fun and efficient. To date, the following are my favorite hardware and software tools of the trade:

Hardware and accessories

• MacBook Air
• Tumi Alpha laptop sleeve
• OWC external hard drive (320 GB, USB 2.0 bus-powered)
• Blackberry Bold (9000)
• Jawbone bluetooth headset
• iPod Classic for general-purpose traveling (160 GB, fortunately before it was trimmed down to 120 GB in the latest iteration)
• iPod Nano for walking, exercising
• Lubix UNHS-LC1 bluetooth stereo headphones and Phone
• iMuffs (primarily to use transceiver for iPod to interface with Lubix headphones)
• Mini USB hub for travel charging
• Zip-linq cables for compactly connecting to various USB devices
• Tumi backpacks for their stylish, practically designed, and rugged products to tote around all of the above, especially via motorcycle
• Dual-usb cigarette-lighter-adapter (CLA) for charging USB devices while driving

Software

• Butler – slick application/URL/media/document launcher
• Chronosync – allows easy synchronization of files across multiple computers via portable drive and LAN/WAN mounts
• Built-in Apple applications (Mail/iCal/Address Book/iChat/Safari), conveniently synchronized to multiple computers via MobileMe and IMAP mail service provided through MobileMe
• Things – effective task manager with items partially synchronized via iCal/MobileMe
• Yojimbo – excellent note/.pdf/image archive tool which conveniently synchronizes through MobileMe and to the BlackBerry via the Missing Sync
• Anxiety – lightweight task viewer which directly accesses iCal’s database
• NetNewsWire – handy news aggregator with free multiple-client synchronizing via Newsgator service
• MarsEdit – handy offline blog writing and editing (would love to see MobileMe synchronization integrated eventually)
• Apple’s iWork ‘08 suite, particularly for Keynote and Pages
• Microsoft Excel (as part of Microsoft Office) – still the industry standard spreadsheet tool
• ConceptDraw’s Mindmap Pro
• FileMaker Pro – custom database creation for client data management
• WireTap Studio – audio capture tool; fantastic for recording audio streams from webcasts
• Quicken Deluxe – for expense tracking, P&L generation, tax reporting
• VisualHub – great for transcoding video formats
• VMware Fusion – lightweight means to run Windows XP on the rare occasion it is useful
• TextWrangler – great basic text editor

What I’m still searching to find…

1. Smartphone support of entire feature set used by BluePhone Elite
• It works well with Symbian (SonyEricsson-manufactured) and Windows Mobile devices, neither of which are acceptable smartphone platforms for my usage based on their feature set and user interface.
2. Stable, non-duplicate-entry-creating, and full-featured cloud sync of native BlackBerry data to my PIM apps (iCal, Address Book, Things, and Yojimbo)
• Spanning Sync handles Google Calendar <-> iCal/Address Book syncing with some caveats, and this effectively allows for BlackBerry to Google cloud syncing for these two applications
• Things <-> iCal sync for tasks is supposed to work seamlessly, operating directly on the iCal database made available to applications in OS 10.5; unfortunately, this does not work well at all and results in many duplicate tasks
• Would love to have Evernote for Blackberry to handle the note/cloud piece (and possibly solve my task/cloud problem, as well)

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