In January I designed an icon for one of my favorite (and indispensable) Mac applications: PhatMac. I offered it to developer Cameron Silver to use as he saw fit and the latest release (0.6.1) on April 22nd rolled it in.

With every passing day there is more and more support for the Mac platform but PhatNoise is one of the hold-outs. Without Cameron’s hard work I’d have to boot into Windows to sync my music.

With Apple’s WWDC coming in mid-June the rumormill should start churning out speculation for new product announcements. Apple did spill the beans about the iPhone and Apple TV in January, the Mac Pro was updated last month, the MacBook updated just days ago, Leopard pushed to October, and Final Cut Studio updated in May, so what’s left?

That leaves the MacBook Pro. What’ll be new? Maybe not much but in celebration of the speculation I present to you a gem from the internets. Mister BG, whose site/blog appears to lie dormant, houses one page that holds true today, yesterday, and tomorrow for every Apple fanboy and girl that gets crazy-giddy on what will spring forth from Cupertino.

Enjoy The Apple Product Cycle.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away there was Macintosh OS 9. In an effort to make file management easy Apple created a filesystem that used two physical files for each user document.

The primary file in the pair was called the “data fork” and contained the actual document contents. The second file was called a “resource fork” which provided metadata for the primary file. Over time Apple would need resource forks less and less but for some reason they still persist in OS X.

If you’ve ever used Terminal to ls -al or copied files to a flash drive and viewed it in Windows you’ll see a hidden file for each visible file. Likewise, those hidden files have the same name preceeded with a period (.). Why the period? Files beginning with a period are automatically hidden in UNIX. Most (if not all?) Mac OS X applications don’t require a resource fork but they appear to be created anyway. Windows will never use the resource fork so they can be safely deleted.

When do resource forks become a PITA? When your Mac is connected to a Windows network share or you’re passing files along via flash drive. Most recently I copied a number of photos to a MiniSD card for use in a digital picture frame. The frame’s minimialistic OS tried to view every resource fork file which meant every other image threw up a “broken” thumbnail. Not ideal.

Now that we know resource forks are inconvenient outside of the Mac world how do we control them? The easiest method, thus far, is using BlueHarvest to automatically delete these files. Once installed, simply enable the deletion of resource forks from non-HFS disks (aka: “not a Mac” disk) and you’re good to go. I haven’t tested BlueHarvest exhaustively but it works as advertised. Using a MiniSD with 250 JPEG files it took BlueHarvest between 10 and 20 seconds to delete the resource forks. In contrast, using rm -Rf .*in Terminal took less than five seconds. Perhaps I didn’t give BlueHarvest a required reboot, login, etc. but I’ll keep it installed and soon forget resource forks ever existed.

For anyone in the know (JJ, this means you) “Blue Harvest” was the codename for Return of the Jedi when it was in production. I’m guessing this little Mac app is paying homage.

Thanks to Wes Bos for the Joost invite!

Wes is a graphic artist with a style I’ll call “2D anarchy.” The t-shirt designs are excellent and you can keep an eye on his latest work via his blog.

While I was waiting at triple-A the other day I overhead a woman at another service window. She was in her late-50s and complaining (rather, boasting in that “I know it all” sort of way) that human brains are overloaded with managing torrents of information in their lives brought on by technology.

Specifically she pointed to all the gadgets “those young people” use, pumping information to their heads faster than it can be digested. She longed for the days before computers.

I thought about what she was saying. Yes, people are getting their information from blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, IM, and text messaging but it doesn’t equate to overload. Rather, these are outlets for obtaining that info. Those same tools allow the user to aggregate and filter the desired information. Tags, folders, even just a quick down arrow to the next post make it easy to manage. News, video, and music is carefully arranged in newsreaders, bookmarks, and playlists. Plug GTD into the mix and there is no such thing as overload because everything is out of your head and into those very gadgets and an old-fashioned filing cabinet.

Young people grow up with technology and they assimilate it into their lives - there is no overload. Not-so-young-people fall back to that “we’re too old to change” story and blame technology for making their lives more complicated. Rewind the clock to the 1940s when science was on the verge of jet engines, nuclear bombs, and ENIAC. People were saying the same thing: wary how those new-fangled devices would change their lives for the worse and longing for the good ol’ days before The Great Depression. A more carefree time when children worked in mills, the same factories dumped sewage into the waterways that powered them, and people didn’t live past their 60s. Those “good old days” don’t sound so appealing any more.

Learn, adapt, seek simplicity, and don’t be a victim of change.