TomArra.com

I started using my Mac full time (work and personal) and while most things just work right out of the box unfortunately there are always a few quirks. One of these quirks happens to be the notifications from Outlook.

When Office 2011 was released Notification Center on Mac wasn’t out so Microsoft went and implemented their own notification system. At the time this made a lot of sense but fast forward to 2014 and Outlook now looks a little out of date. The notifications are the old Aqua style UI and they don’t collect in the Notification Center drawer.

After doing a bit of searching around I found this AppleScript that does exactly what you would expect. Only real change I had to make to the script (which was also listed in the comments) was to change

tell application "Microsoft Outlook"

to

tell application id "com.microsoft.Outlook"

Seems like this was due to some changes the Microsoft made in the latest office update. Either way, after enabling this script and turning off the Outlook specific e-mail notifications things are working as they should. I’m betting on the fact that this will be the default functionality in the next version of Office for Mac but until then this stopgap works just fine.

I bounce around from machine to machine and even device to device but I always like to have software on all of them that I am used to and allows me to get my work done. Sometimes these features are built into the core of the OS that I am using at the time but that seems to be the exception, not the rule.

Here is the software I use to make the most of out Mac.

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It used to be that only the professional’s and hobbyist’s that lugged around big SLR camera’s were the one getting great shots while out and about. Over the past few years though photography has moved out the hands of professionals thanks to many different things, the chief one being smartphones. If you take a look at the Flickr Camera Finder you can see that 4 of the top 5 camera’s are not only smartphones but specifically iPhones.

Having a decent camera at all times in your pocket has changed the photography world but it has also opened up the door to a new market, cloud backups. Over the past couple years a few different companies have been making interesting products but I think one is a clear winner.

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I was having a conversation at work and as usual the topic tends to wrap its way back to work related things. Specifically Git command line versus any Git GUI apps out there. There was an intern that was unsure about how to get his repo back into the state he would like so of course in a room full of engineers (and the fact you can do many things many different ways in Git) everyone had an answer. After a couple minutes of everyone telling them what to do I asked the question, “Your using the command line aren’t you”. That sparked a bit of contest from everyone else in the room as I expected. After calming the group down I said the same thing we just spent a few minutes talking about would have taken only a few button clicks in a GUI. At that point we quickly moved to a new subject as the intern’s went back to work.

I thought about this whole exchange a bit more on the train ride home. I understand that everyone has their preference when it comes to tools. Usually more seasoned engineers prefer the CLI while younger engineers seem to prefer newer tools which usually end up being GUI based. At the time that you learn a new tool or program using the CLI really does make sense. You can take the time to really understand what it’s capable of doing. But as you start to know the nuances of the tool why not use it in a matter that will help you get things done faster? Most of the time this ends up being a GUI or sometimes its a set of scripts that sits on top of the tool. Either way, you know how the thing works so why not get the most out of it.

Image Credit: SourceTree, Chris Sainty

Over the years Lenovo has been churning out perfect business style laptops for a whole range of employees but with their latest model I think they have really nailed it. If I was running an IT division within any company I would be ordering the Lenovo T440s for every employee I have. I spent the last month with the T440s as my main work machine and after the initial setup the experience has been great.

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