A short and glorious life, or a long and dull one?

Owners of the new 3G iPhone face the same dilemma put to the Greek hero Achilles by the gods of Olympus. In the end, he chose glory. But iPhone users might take a different view.

The new phone has a more power-hungry chipset. Walt Mossberg is not the only one who has found “the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day”.

I take and make much fewer calls than he does, and I notice it too.

Apple has published a page of tips to help users manage this Achilles’ heel.

Much of the advice is common sense: reduce the brightness of the screen, minimise or turn off the phone’s “push” features, turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you don’t need them, don’t play games on it, and so on.

But three of the suggestions were news to me.

First, you can turn off 3G and still receive calls and data via GPRS and EDGE. Makes sense, but it never occurred to me. You will find the option in the Network section of General Preferences.

Secondly, “applying an equalizer setting to song playback on your iPhone can decrease battery life.” You can switch that off, or set it to “flat” in the phone’s iPod settings.

Lastly, Location Services chews a lot of power. Switching it on only when you need it will prolong the life of your battery.

Finally, it surprised me with its advice on cycling the battery:

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).

I have always thought—following someone’s sage advice when I was a gullible new Switcher—that it was important never to let the battery level fall too low. Now I know.

Luckily, just like Achilles my iPhone thirsts for a short and glorious life, so there will be no problem getting the battery charge down.

[Via InformationWeek ]

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Since the announcement that Quicksilver was going open source (back last November), things have been moving slowly along.

Etienne Samson is now producing new alpha builds which he is posting on the Quicksilver Google Code page . The latest build is timestamped 25 June and another build is imminent.

These new builds are modestly described as “only a bug fix version”, a clean-up operation while the creator of Quicksilver, Alcor, is reportedly “working on a complete re-write of the frameworks of Quicksilver and should hopefully release it soon”.

Nonetheless, some users (including me) find that the new builds are slightly zippier and have a smaller memory footprint. However, they are not so good for people using Mouse triggers, which are apparently broken.

Although based on some of his changes, these builds are not the same as the tweaking that Ankur is doing independently. His work also promises a much slicker build, but progress seems to be stalled.

What is Quicksilver?

Quicksilver is act without doing, work without effort, do your work then step back; it is empty yet infinitely capable; the more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

More accessible information on this absolutely kick-ass productivity tool can be found in the Quicksilver User Guide in the Quicksilver Google Group and/or in a beginner’s tutorial post by Lifehacker’s Adam Pash, MacBreak’s Quicksilver screencast and the AppleBlog’s screencast on using Quicksilver to send quick-fire emails.

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Mac users who want to use Gmail (or some other webmail service) as their default email app rather than Mail.app already have at least three ways of doing it.

With the launch of Firefox 3.0, there is now another way for Firefox users.

All you have to do is enter the following text into Firefox 3.0’s address bar and hit return:

This will register Gmail as the default handler for any mailto: link you click on in Firefox. Of course it doesn’t work for mailto: links in other apps—say, a web archive or note in Yojimbo.

To undo it, just reselect Mail.app as the default in the Applications tab of Firefox’s Preferences.

For a comprehensive solution, you still can’t beat Webmailer which is easy to use and free.

[Via Torben Brams ]

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Fluid has just been updated. It’s a clever new app that allows you to make your own site-specific browsers (including the power of Greasemonkey scripts in Cocoa).

Along with a raft of bugfixes, the new version (0.9.2) can now turn the browswers into menubar items for even greater flexibility.

Longtime Hawk Wings readers will remember the small flurry of site-specific web apps two years — Michael McCracken’s WebMail app for Gmail and Chip Cuccio’s GCal app for Google Calendar. With no bookmarks, other windows and other temptations, these apps allowed users to focus on their productivity without distractions.

Fluid works on the same principle. Based on Mozilla’s Prism app , it creates a site-specific app, complete with its own Dock icon, menubars and other individual settings.

Here are some that I made earlier for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, mint and facebook:

Now, when I want to get the email done, I open the Gmail app, when I want to unwind I turn to the facebook one. I am never tempted to work when I should be relaxing, nor to relax when I should be at work. (That’s the theory; as every “Getting Things Done” fan knows deep in their heart, in the end no app can save you from yourself!).

The ability to run Greasemonkey scripts inside these Fluid apps is very cool. Previously only really available to Firefox users, Fluid now lets me load my two favourite scripts from userscripts.org so that I can use Gmail with killer keyboard macros and some of the noise taken out of the Gmail interface:

Fluid’s free-standing apps can each have their own preference settings. The overall behaviour of the window is also customizable — overlaid on the Dashboard, normal, floating or embedded in the Desktop. Here, for example, is my mint in Fluid’s simple black HUD style:

A Flickr group - Fluid Icons - offers lots of nice looking Dock icons for various web sites. I scored most of the icons in the screenshot above from there.

The possibilities seem enormous, and this article only scratches the surface of the app’s potential.

This updated version lets you turn a browser into a menubar utility, so that clicking on its menubar icon opens its window–instant, roll-your-own to-do lists in a Fluid-generated Remember the Milk or Stikkit app!

Fluid is freeware and available from the Fluid web site .

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EasyTask 2.0 has been released, bringing a range of new features and bugfixes to this “mid-range” Getting Thing Done (GTD) app.

Hawk Wings has posted on EasyTask Manager before.

The changelog for the new version seems promising:

•    New 3-panel Preview. View and edit tasks faster.
•    Tasks can have system wide alarms (Leopard only).
•    Quick add system wide hot-key allows to add new tasks from any application (option+apple+right arrow key).
•    Improved Online Sync (fix various bugs with some tasks not syncing).
•    Automatic realtime sync with iCal / Calendar store in Leopard so tasks are visible in Apple Mail and emails can be converted to tasks. (Leopard only. Tiger syncs with iCal but users need to click Sync button).
•    Added option to sync using Projects instead of Contexts as Calendars (Leopard only).
•    New Outline look.
•    Fix problem with Online Sync and firewalls.

But what caught my eye was the claim on the developer’s web site that it can “Sync with the iPhone”.

This turns out to be only half-true (if that). It doesn’t sync with the iPhone at all. What happens is that app syncs up to an online interface accessible through an iPhone.

It’s not a beautiful interface, but will get the job done. However, when you mark a task as completed on the iPhone you are greeted with the screen on the right:

Hmmmm…. This is not the key to a seamless GTD workflow.

If you are looking for a solid GTD workflow that involves an iPhone, Remember the Milk remains a much better solution (although the launch of the 3G iPhone promises lots of new apps, like OmniFocus for the iPhone ).

(UPDATE: According to TUAW Remember the Milk has just won the 2008 Apple Design Award for best iPhone web app.)

With its much more polished iPhone interface (pictured), Dashboard widget , Quicksilver action and whatnot , it’s the best iPhone solution currently around.

The Republic of Geektopia (see all its RTM posts ) and David Chartier have both written fine posts on how they Get Things Done with Remember the Milk and its tools which I won’t repeat here.

I should point out, that in order to use the iPhone interface, you need to puchase a “pro” subscription (USD 25 a year) to Remember The Milk.

See too Bruce McKenzie’s fine post on Getting Things Done using an iPhone.

I’m torn about EasyTask Manager. On the one hand, it presents a fine mid-priced (USD 19.99), mid-featured GTD framework.

On the other, with Things and OmniFocus and others powering ahead, it’s simply falling too far behind the pack. Harsh but, I think, fair.

Check it out for yourself from the developer’s web site .

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[Although I use it a lot at work, I don't usually post Word tips on Hawk Wings. This one, though, is too good to pass up.]

If you do a lot of cutting and pasting from one document to another in Word (2004 and 2008) and want your pasting to adopt the style of the new document, you will know what a pain in the butt it is.

Word expects you to go to the Edit menu, choose Paste Special and then select Unformatted Text in the next dialog box and click OK.

I couldn’t count the number of hours I’ve spent doing this. I came to accept it as an Office for Mac user’s fate; something that just had to be endured.

Joe Kissell, senior editor at TidBITS, has the shortcut I wish I had discovered years ago. In a TidBITS post he provides the scripts needed to reduce this convoluted process to a single keystroke.

As he points out, I could have automated this with the macro-recorder in Word 2004. Never thought of that!

But Word 2008 has lost its scripting support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and ,along with that, the ability to record macros.

Instead, in Word 2008 you will need to use AppleScript.

Joe provides the steps for setting up the macro in Word 2004 and the applescript Word 2008 users will need to get the same result.

He even unlocks the mysteries of the way a file called Paste Plain Text\smV.scpt is automatically bound to a keystroke shortcut.

Check out his article and other newsy posts and tips at TidBITS.

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