I’d been hesitant to work in Spaces on my Mac, until now… Space 1: Adobe Programs. Space 2: Email. Space 3: iTunes and Social Media. Love it!!!

Spaces helps reduce clutter on your desktop by allowing you to group your application windows according to the way you work and easily switch between them.

I had tried working in Spaces a while back, when they first came out, but unfortunately I gave it a go when I was really busy at work. I didn’t have the patience to play with it and opted out. Recently though, again getting busy, I’ve had way too many windows open at once. Sure I can minimize them, but I like having certain apps open. So I decided to give Spaces another go and it’s really helping me stay organized.

The great thing is, you can very easily customize your Spaces. You can have 2, 3, 5, 10 different ones at once. And they allow you to customize your shortcuts, so you can pick the keys that are easiest for you to navigate with!

Apple has a great intro to Spaces “how to”, Mac 101: Using Spaces to organize your windows and applications. If you’ve never used Spaces in the past, I really recommend giving it a try. Especially if you constantly have a lot of things open. Just make sure you give it a try when you have a little bit of time to play with it.

Do you use Spaces?
I usually keep about 3 spaces open, but of course they let you have more or less. How do you split up your windows?

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Social Media can get a little overwhelming at times. With RSS Feeds, Twitter, Facebook, etc. there is just so much out there to read, I sometimes don’t even know where to start! The trick is to get a little organized.

Yes, yes, Spring Cleaning applies to anything that needs a little organizing. I just spent some of my morning re-arranging my TweetDeck. I love TweetDeck because it allows me to keep all the people I follow on Twitter in one easy-to-use location. Not only that, it allows me to have multiple Twitter accounts AND add things like Facebook (personal and fan page), Linked In and MySpace (which I no longer use, but I thought I’d mention it). I can tweet, post and reply all in one place. Plus I can post to multiple accounts at once, I don’t have to sign in to Twitter and write a message that I know I will also copy and paste into Facebook, for instance.

Lists for Twitter are the best! They allow you to keep all your followers organized. I have a list for my friends, musicians, Graphic Designers, Web Designers… you can add as many as you want. The problem I realized I had was that my lists were too broad. I have all design related stuff together, which is great, but a lot of my tweets from people I really wanted to hear from where getting lost in a sea of ReTweets. So I then separated them into Design, Design2 and Design Echo! Yes!!! Now the people I find have the most original tweets get sorted into once place, people I like but don’t always follow too closely are in another and twitters who have more RTs than actual content can go in a third column. This way I stay on top of the people I’m most interested in, without having to unfollow the people that send 200 tweets a day! LOL.

Yes, my TweetDeck loads a tiny bit slower now because I’ve broken it down into so many columns, but at least I can more easily find what I need.

The next order of business, will be to organize my Google Reader. In the past I just bookmarked blogs that I liked into one category and go into it regularly to see what’s new. My bookmark page started to get huge and after a while I couldn’t remember what some of these blogs were! Now, I’m using Google Reader to add my favorite blog feeds, the ones I follow daily. It will tell me when there is a new post to a blog without me having to actually go to the blog and see. I like it better than adding an RSS Feed to my browser because it very clearly shows me what blogs have new content, this way I only click on what I will read. It also allows you to create folders if you want to further organize your feeds. Feel like reading Health related things today? You’ve got a folder for that. Design? Yup, you get the idea.

How Do You Organize Your Social Media?
I know there are a ton of apps out there and these are just two of my favorites. What else do you recommend?

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Creative Opera

Creative Opera is a blog for new designers, aspiring designers, and anyone who has a passion for design. I want Creative Opera to be a site full of useful information, creative inspiration, career and professional advice, and lively discussion. Because I come from a teaching background, many of my posts are targeted toward students and new designers, but I love it when experienced designers stop by to share their own experiences and advice.

Note-worthy Posts:

I admit this might be a tad premature as I’ve only just downloaded it last night, but I LOVE Adium! I have been debating what to do with my email accounts and instant messagers. I have YahooMessenger, which I only really use to get email alerts, I’m always offline. I also have MSN messenger, which I actually do use for chatting. There’s also AOL which i don’t even bother to sign into anymore because I just don’t want to have too many apps open. I had come across Digsby which sounded like the perfect solution, but unfortunately there is no Digsby for Mac. At least not yet. Curses!

So in doing a simple google search, I found someone who was asking are there any good programs like Digsby for Mac? which is exactly what I was looking for. And voila! One of the reco’s was Adium. And it’s FREE! Yay!

I really love how customizable Adium is. You can add AOL Messenger, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, Facebook, ICQ and a few others that I didn’t even know existed! You can set different statuses (online, offline, invisible) to each account and you can even receive email alerts, which was one of the main reasons I love this so much. Most other instant message apps that gather various programs only allow you to chat but not be alerted to emails. It also allows you to change your interface so it looks just like you want it. Not only the background image/colors, but the layout. Whether there is a buddy icon shown, or if new chats open in a new tab or new window. They have a page on the site of just Xtras, from contact list styles, to emoticons to the dock icon. Yes, you can even choose the dock icon! So far I’ve only changed the little ducky’s color from green to purple, but there are a bunch of other icons to choose from.

I’m still playing with it, but so far I’ve not been disappointed. I feel its very well thought out and has so much that can be customized, I feel most people will be able to get it working exactly how they need it to. I definitely recommend it.

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I’ve been meaning to checkout Evernote for a while now and I’ve finally given it a go. I like it. Quite a bit actually. As some of you may know, I recently bought the Palm Pre. I don’t love their Memos system. It’s a cool design visually, they use a little cork board screen with different color post-it notes that you can write on. However, cute and functional are two different things. It will not allow me to move back within the note. I’m either doing something really wrong or this is ridiculous! I make a mistake 50 words back, and I have to either live with it or delete everything I wrote after it. Not right!

Which brings me back to Evernote. I can see why this is one of the few apps that the Palm Pre has signed up for. I’m basically using this now instead of the Memos on my phone. One of the things I like most about it, is that you can type notes online or on your phone. Considering I spend the better part of my day on the computer, sometimes it’s easier to logon on my web browser and type there. However, I can always access my notes on my phone when I’m on the go.

And it doesn’t end there folks! There are lots of cool features for Evernote. You can not only type notes, you can also upload images. Say I’m scribbling an awesome new idea on a napkin at a coffee shop. I can take a photo of it with my phone and save it to my Evernote notebook. This way if I lose the napkin, I have a backup. I can also type notes on the images, if I wanted to. Also great for taking notes on that awesome wine you just drank at a friend’s house. Just photograph the label and you have it as reference.

Checkout this video tutorial on Sending Tweets to Evernote. You can use Twitter to post a tweet or photos and simultaneously copy them to your Evernote notebook. There are also additional tutorials on more features I won’t get into.

Another really great thing, is that Evernote is free! Yup, you can sign up for a free account with limited monthly upload and some restrictions of course. They also have a Premium Account, which offers additional features and bigger monthly upload allowances, which I’ve seen a lot of people say it’s worth the fee. I’m still playing with Evernote, but what I know of it so far is pretty damn cool. I definitely recommend it!

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Note on privacy: By default, notes are set to private so that only you can view, edit, and delete them. However, you can publish notes and make them available to anyone. Steps for that here: http://www.evernote.com/about/support

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