Productivity Tools & Tips - Episode #183 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 183rd episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the third, maybe third or fourth week of July 2014. This episode is titled Productivity Tools and Tips. CloudFocus Weekly is brought to you by Compliance Locker by Ar- arcus. Capture all chatter posts, deletions and files I'll be I'll be available for free on the app I'm I don't see Justin, how you doing today?

Justin Edelstein: 183 times in a row, fourth week of July, in case you were wondering. Is it the fourth week? It sure. It sure is.

Jason Atwood: Alrighty then. I don't know, the doc doesn't get. It's a long week. I will say we some very exciting safe harbor news

Justin Edelstein: We just came up with our new product. Oh, we did. Yeah, we just yeah, we did it and so much thought was put into it. So much thought is so thoughtful. Logos will happen. Well, now let's be clear. What we thought of was the name of the product. Oh, yeah, the name and the logo and the logos. We did the marketing stuff. Yes. All the others. And like five minutes on the whiteboard couple of weeks.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, anyway, I was I was thinking that because we were I was reading off the compliance locker, which we love It's a great app But you know like can't wait to

Justin Edelstein: Know and can't read you can't read to talk about the new one which we are now harbor Targeting dream force we're targeting dream force and it'll also be free.

Jason Atwood: Yes. It will be our third free app Speaking of Dreamforce, before we get into our big topic of the week, if you're registering for Dreamforce and the price keeps going up, up, up, up, you can take $100 off, off, off, off by using the code EC14ARCUS. And that's like $100 off your registration for Dreamforce. Dreamforce is going to be crazy. Going to be a lot of fun stuff. I'm really looking forward to it. Especially now that we might have a new product to show and a demo, which will be kind of fun fun. So we are not going to talk about our blog this week. But we're not going to talk about it because we're going to, we have a, this is our special episode, special episodes. We just do, we go into one special things.

Jason Atwood: So, this week I thought, actually this was, I was listening to another podcast that went deep into one of the things we're going to talk about. And I thought, Oh, it would be fun if we kind of went over the, some of the productivity tools and tips we use in and around the operating system or what we do. I will first of all say, and this is, although I guess nowadays it's not as bad as it used to be, this is going to be a little bit Mac specific. Pretty much Mac specific in terms of the tools.

Justin Edelstein: Now there are other tools like them. That's because we use Mac. Yeah,

03:13 Jason Atwood: Mac computers. You had to touch it in order to say it. I needed to. We went, he had to literally touch it. Love tap. So it is going to be pretty Mac specific. We apologize in advance a little bit. But not really So we're gonna talk about and and again not just sort of not pick of the week And we're just gonna pick of the week because these are kind of all of our picks Although I had a really good one sitting right here, which I can pick it next week. Okay pick next week But I think but I really want to talk about how we use it like some real Disfinding examples or unique examples where people might bet Ooh, I know of that tool. I never thought of using it that way. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: So, let's get into them. Let's get into it. I think we should leave that one to the last. That one last. Yes. Because it's kind of the best one. All right so let's let's leave that one last. Right so let's so let's do which one you might be asking. Yeah so the first one I want to make.

Justin Edelstein: These are productivity tools we love and we're gonna have quick hitters at the end. Like easy stuff that everyone should already be using. Yes, you should already be using.

Jason Atwood: But I'm going to start with this one.

Justin Edelstein: That one. So you're telling people on the... That are listening.

Jason Atwood: That is the one you... So there is a tool, and this is a freebie. There is a tool in... It stalls with OS X, Mavericks, whatever the newest version. It's been around for years. but the tool has just gotten better and better and better. It's free and it does so much stuff. I want to talk about one specific use case, which if you don't know about, this will save hundreds and hundreds of hours of your time. The app is called Preview.

Justin Edelstein: Do you know this tool? Of course. So there's no Adobe Acrobat on your Mac, is there?

Jason Atwood: There probably is somewhere, because I've installed it. But Preview basically started as an app that would open up like... JPGs and GIFs, but over the years it got into opening up PDFs. Okay, so it's an app, it sits on very fast, it's very light. You can find it on your Mac. Neat, right? So you can open up and preview things. That's what they use, the default preview. It can open stuff. But it's got a couple things that make it super, super, super awesome. the first is annotation.

Justin Edelstein: As you know, cause you work with me. I am the recipient of many an annotated, image.

Jason Atwood: So one of the great things about it is when you use preview, you can, click on this little icon on the top that then allows you to annotate the document and this can be a PDF or a jpeg. So my favorite thing to do, and I do this with clients all the time. I call this getting red arrowed. Red arrowed, yeah. Is where I'll take a screenshot, right? So I'll hit shift command four, which allows me to take a section screenshot, right? And that drops to my desktop. And then I double click on it, open up in preview, and then I hit shift command I, which opens up this little inspector. and it gives me the red arrow tool, where I can then just drag red arrows all over the JPEG, pointing things out.

06:13 Jason Atwood: You don't want to be red arrowed. I'll tell you, it's useful for people. So for you Salesforce people, it's a great way. You just screenshot the Salesforce screen, like in somewhere in setup, and then you show them red arrows. Setup up in this corner. here menu item here and usually in one screen you can explain an entire set of navigation without having to say how to go to

Justin Edelstein: It so much quicker you can also add other types of annotations so you can block things off with circles or ovals and rectangles you can also write or like type in text so you click here first click here second Why is this here? That kind of stuff.

Jason Atwood: It's, it's, it's an awesome, awesome tool. So that's like, it's number one.

Justin Edelstein: Why do we love it so much? So what's, what's this big super time saver? Two other things I want to say that, that about, yes.

Jason Atwood: Second is that you can merge and split PDFs. Yes, you can, which is amazing. Yes. So you can sort of save as well as splitting, but merging, you can actually have two PDFs together and merge them back together, sort of create the pages constantly and rearrange the pages of a PDF. So like another great feature of this app, you Knausch and you know, you get two PDFs and you or you get a PDF, you want to rearrange the pages. Again, a lot of the times I'm getting a PDF because I'm printing something as a PDF. And that's a huge time saver so I don't I save everything in PDF in my life now. I'll talk about one of my other tips at the end. And if I have to rearrange pages, whatever, I save as a PDF.

Jason Atwood: And you can rearrange in preview.

Justin Edelstein: So the last one is the most awesomeness of awesome tips. It is pretty awesome. I love me some electronic signing of documents.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. So this has been around for a while. It's actually been in the app for I think a couple years. I think it was the previous operating system. It was two ago. It was delivered in. So there's an app, so you go into that same place in the app where you can sort of annotate and there's a little sign that says, Sig, S-I-G. And you say, oh, so that's cool. You can click on it and then basically it will seek out lines. and they'll highlight it, and you I think it's preferences, signatures, and you hit the plus. And what it does is it opens up your video camera. And so you a draw your signature on a piece of paper and you hold it up to the camera. And it takes a shot of it and then puts it inside a preview.

Jason Atwood: Not only is this awesome, awesome, awesome. I have multiple signatures. I have my signature. But also I have my initials. So then on the paper you get, you want to initialize things. So I'll give you an example. A good friend of Salesforce sent up something that we need to sign the other day. and I go to, he sent it as a Word doc, I save print as PDF to my desktop, open it up in preview, drag the signature on it, throw a date on it with the date with the thing, hit save, and send it back to him. He was like, thanks, like he couldn't imagine how fast I sent him a signed piece of paper. So I did this.

09:37 Justin Edelstein: For me, as the, as the big one that saves me tons of time is, filling out those insurance forms, the 1500 forms, the red ones that usually you print and then you write your name and your insurance number number and, and all that, I have one saved with all of my information already typed into it using, just using preview. Right. And then. My signature is also saved on it and the only thing I ever have to do When I print it is just write the date That's it. Also just put a date on it. I'll save myself tons of time filling out insurance forms Which is just I? Just never Yeah, found the reason why I had to actually like print that thing out. I'll save the paper. I mean, the thing is you print it out just to scan it back in.

Justin Edelstein: No, you have to send it in. Oh, you have to print it. But like blank. I never understood why the insurance companies couldn't figure out like, you know who I am when I'm signed into this thing. Right. Getting the form from your website. Just fill it out for me.

Jason Atwood: No, they need conga-ga. All right, so preview is awesome. There's so many in preview. It literally can do a bunch. It's what's going to be in the next operating system, the ability to allow you to annotate in line in email, and then my red arrows are going to go crazy. So that's going to drive everybody crazy. I don't know this next tool. So this next tool, you need to get to know this. So if I've not already picked this on some episodes, it's probably... So this is how I know this is a It is very, very fast. So there's text edit which comes with Safari or comes with Mac and I'm sure there's a million others but this is like, I guess for people on the Windows side who use notepad plus plus or something, this is the equivalent.

Jason Atwood: It is extremely powerful and it has every little bell and whistle you The of- the second and even more important is it has a feature that like you find in files you can say give like a save a like thirty all with you trying to find the word Jason in ubiqu, in them and then it opens up each one and we'll search for it and then we'll show you line by line where it is in a little preview screen. Then you can click on it, open it up and throw you right to where that thing is. It is, again, it's the thing I have it defaulting to everything. Whenever I get a log file and never get anything, I use text mate. I open it up. It is unbelievable. I think they're on text mate two.

13:28 Justin Edelstein: And It This is a I guess it's the standard Apple browser because it's the standard Mac browser. And you're talking civic feature, read I later.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, two features that I really never really read later. So here's what I read later. So here's what I read later. you and this, really, stems from other places.

Justin Edelstein: Read It Later is, is a feature of Safari that allows you to sort of bookmark stuff in the future. Yeah, I'm in Safari, so I'm like kind of following along a little bit.

Jason Atwood: So it's on the side. It's that little thing, and there's, It looks like bookmarks. A little bookmark deal. And then there's three of them. Show side by. Bookmarks, reading lists, and shared links. Yeah, I see that. I must use this at some point. So here's what this is really cool. So what I do is I'm reading things in Safari on my iPad. And I'm like, oh, I need to remember this or go do something. Maybe it's like I need something to purchase or I want to think about it. So I'll just click. It's anywhere in Safari. there's a little thing that says, you know, like a little..., icon you click it and it says add to read it later. First of all it actually makes it download it actually downloads it so you can actually read this offline so you could throw articles into read it later and then read it on a plane without Wi-Fi so that's a neat feature of it.

Jason Atwood: It is a good feature. But it also syncs across your mobile devices so if you're on your iPhone you hit read it later then the next time you're on your Safari you go to that list it's sitting there for you. So here's how I use this. First... I bookmark a bunch of quotes pages that I use because I put quotes into our scrum, our weekly scrum. So, I have them all there because I don't want to bookmark them. I have them in my read it later. But if everyone were interested in something or I'm reading something in Zite maybe in the morning and I'm like, you know, I already read this. I want to read this later. I'll mark it. And then part of my thing during the week as I go through and I just make sure there's anything in there that I left myself Sometimes it's a cool toy that I saw somewhere that I want to...

Jason Atwood: But what's nice is I go back and I like two days later, I'm like, ooh, is that something I actually still want to buy or is that something I was just interested for four seconds? Maybe I want to forward it to somebody. So it's read it later. It's a great feature. The best part of it is it just syncs across all platforms. So then it's always available and you can kind of get to it. So it's kind of like... bookmarking it but not without the commitment.

16:43 Justin Edelstein: Does that make sense? Yeah, well, I mean, Chrome has the, you know, the, you're logged into Chrome, so it has all your stuff. Yes. On all the different devices. So there's a similar feature. I don't know if there's a,

Jason Atwood: This thing takes it so you can read it. anywhere. I think that's more of a bookmarking thing. But anyway, it's a great feature. And what's nice is a lot of apps, third party apps allow you to throw things in to read it later. So like you're on somewhere and you can throw it there and then just kind of come back to it. So the second one is my third, my most favorite. And I use this 1000 trillion times a day. It's a very simple little trick. But in Safari, if you have bookmarks up on your bookmark bar, the first whatever, the first 10 or so I guess, they're all available under Command, the Command key. So if Command 1 will bring up the first one in the order, Command 2 will bring up the second one, the Command 3 will bring up the third one.

Jason Atwood: So I have in that list, I have like the five places I go to 300 million times a day. The first one is Google My Starred in Google Docs. So I hit Command and want it brings me right there. Command 2 brings me to WebEx. Because that's where I go constantly. 3 brings me to my personal password and Google Docs for now brings me to for now brings me to pictures from my because that's where I'm going now check for her pictures I think where it keeps going 5 or 6 really cool and this works in all browsers this is in Chrome 2 to. So, that's all I have to say. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I think it will always So if you're always constantly going someplace, you can either make it your start page.

Jason Atwood: I don't like when things load when I start-up my browser because I'm usually going somewhere else. But I love this is an easy way to and then one two three four and it'll bring the first four of your bookmark in your bookmark. So while we're talking about browsers.

Justin Edelstein: Yes. Does Safari have the notion of pinning a tab the way that a Chrome does? Because I love pinned tabs. It makes them much smaller. That's a great feature. It's a great feature in Chrome. Yes, I always have the same like three things just to constantly open in Chrome and then pin them and they go to the left and they stay to the left and they're the first three tabs. And they're always there for you whenever you need to get to get to them. They're just the first three and they're smaller. They're a little iconized and they're really easy to get back to. You know, it's a nice feature. That is the great, great feature.

Jason Atwood: I think since we want to get and spend most of our time b. puppy. I'm going to, well, I guess we'll put these down into the, into the, It is one of the things that I heard someone talk about. I think it was Merlin, Merlin Mann, productivity guy, not book writer, who he must have talked about this forever. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, it takes things and expands them. It takes things, expands them. You write little snippets like how it, you know, such a pain. Once you get into using TextExpander, or again, there's many versions of it, I know the Windows version so you can input your TextExpander thing. All it does is as you're writing out something on your operating system, anywhere in your operating system, and you're writing out little, little words, it can take, it's constantly looking at what you're writing and then.

20:34 Jason Atwood: It's waiting for basically a stop, like a space, and then it evaluates it, and if it matches against something it's supposed to expand, it takes that and expands it out to something bigger. So more tech. So I'm going to give the very simplest example, the one that I use 9,000 times a day. Let's just give a number of examples. Go ahead. Well, I'm going to give the simple one, then we can go how you can go deep on it. Go ahead. So. TJMA. TJMA. I write TJ, which is not a word, so it's not whatever. It's thanks, JMA. It will then expand out thanks, comma, space, next line, JMA, which is the way I answer emails. It's your signature. Yeah, it's the way I put at the end of emails when I'm writing emails.

Jason Atwood: So a very, very easy one. I use that a billion times a day. But it's much more advanced now. So, we want to get into like the deeper ones you can do or give some examples. So, give me a couple examples of one. We have a vibe at Conquers. The ones I use like the most is one called JEGTM. JEGTM. Correct. Can you guess what my little codes are? Yeah, wait, wait, JEGT, Justin Edelstein, GTM. Go to meeting. That's right.

Justin Edelstein: So, that is my... Justin's recurring go-to meeting which never ends. It's an all-day event. It ends. And whenever I need to do a meeting invite, I just in the description say JEGTM and boom up pops an enormous snippet of text with the go-to-meeting link, the dial-in, the access pin. the mobile dial-in, everything that I've put in for joining a GoToMeeting, as long as I just type in those five simple character strokes in that order, we'll go ahead and WebEx.

Jason Atwood: WebEx pops my WebEx thing. And then for the conference, I do, I have two. CCN1, which brings up one of my conference lines, which is our sort of like more corporate line. It's very snazzy. It says, welcome to the Arkus conference line. And then CCN2, which brings up my reoccurring go-to meeting conference line, which is always a three. So those are... so on this level I only give you one oh

Justin Edelstein: Well come on back and forth you know you just gave me one you just gave me one alright, you got me alright

Jason Atwood: So my well I'll give you the one that I know that that you want to talk about which is n u N-U-S-E-T-U. That's mine.

Justin Edelstein: And you set up. And you set up. So this one's a little advanced because it has a fill in it.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. So this is like go with the next level. So now only can they have pre-done and they can be long, long text, it can be formatted text. This one has a, is a preset of text, but then you can create a fill. Meaning... it pops up in advance and says, what do you want to put into this one spot in it before you submit it? So like in this one, I use NU at setup and then it pops a list. One, login to Salesforce, two in the top right screen. It's the instructions of how to add a new user. Right. So but the seventh step, it says glared my username as and it always gives. Thank you. We'll be right back. you set because I put in a different domain every time because I can't use the same domain because it's being copied.

23:55 Jason Atwood: And so I put in whatever and it has a little thing in it that tells me what I'm supposed to be putting there like that I put in, I hit OK and then it pops that in right into the email or wherever you want it. And you set up unbelievably.

Justin Edelstein: It's a good one. It's a good one. I have another one along those lines. Give me another one. Comma. org ID so comma o RG ID see if it works on mine nope five five steps to tell somebody how to get their org ID to tell me what it is ship that to me I want that's one like that you just use all the time let's see I have another one it's called intro LS Oh, that means I am the ROL ass. Yeah, which is if someone emails me about an inquiry about Arkus I had this is my soft introduction to The partner shall remain nameless who has a initial Ls. It's the I've CC'd my partner and he will get back to you. It's like a two line thing about

Jason Atwood: Me sort of kicking it over to him. Even more advanced, the one I use a lot and I'll use today when I publish this is I use a CFWP.

Justin Edelstein: You don't have to remember these all by the way. There is like a menu. Yeah, you can just hit and just click on the one that you want. So you don't actually have to remember all your little has three fills.

Jason Atwood: And is HTML, so it fills out all of the CloudFocus Weekly stuff for me. And all in HTML, even, and it puts, it has dynamic stuff in it, so it always puts the date of the podcast, which is the date that I'm doing it. So then I, it's like pre-filled. That's the other thing about them. They can fill in things for you, like date and time. So I have a couple, I think, time. So my two most favorite ones are DDate, D Date as well. And then I have Capital D. Date. So D. Date gets you 07, 4 slash 25, 4 slash 200,

Justin Edelstein: Capital D. Gets you 2014 dash 07 dash 025. Let me give some more like utilitarian ones. Okay. So I have one L O R I P S lore IPS. Just has two paragraphs of lorem ipsum just for when you're doing demos and stuff just to fill things out wait I got one same thing FM FF

Jason Atwood: FF and one FFN to FFN three

Justin Edelstein: Fax number fake phone number one number good one no, so I put in I have real phone numbers AFN Arkus fax number. Yep. AON Arkus office number things like that. Yep CFN Cell phone number. I have my cell actually all one word my cells Tons of stuff. I mean it's just very useful. I have one called CT Li CTOI. Yeah, click to log in and what it does is it gives me the For those of us who log into many many earls But like to store sort of the username and the password in the URL So that when you click on it, it just sort of logs you right in So if you store them as bookmarks or in documents somewhere, so the the it has two fills the username and the password Which is a nice one.

27:37 Jason Atwood: I have some of my most special one as we get towards the end. We'll go over quick hits here. My most special one is my newest of my one, which is an AppleScript. So you can even tell a command then go do an AppleScript. So this one I use for, I sometimes am signing a lot of things on the end of the week and I need to... I usually say, have a great weekend or enjoy the weekend or whatever. So I have one called ETW, which says enjoy the weekend. But it actually then goes into a folder with tons of them and it randomly picks one. It's kind of funny. So in the folder I then have. In the folder, I have enjoy the weekend. I have holiday weekend.

Justin Edelstein: I have like some out of office ones that I change. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Jason Atwood: So that's when you that one you change a lot. So again, you can't be things that you use a lot and it can be things that you use once in a while. LMQ. Yep. Questions. So those are so Texas Vander, I swear. Hit on your hit on your statistics and tell me how your staff. GLA SFTC. See?

Justin Edelstein: Grant me login access. Oh, that's good.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, we've done one for the permissioner and the client software.

Justin Edelstein: TPURL. Yep. The permissioner URL.

Jason Atwood: Open your stats and tell me what your stats are. Where do I find that? It's in text expanded at the top. It says statistics. There's a button.

Justin Edelstein: I don't have that. Oh, I do have that. There it is. Statistics. How many expanded? 3,351. Oh my god. What? 19,400. Wow, more than I do. Character saved. about 500,000. Oh, 718,000. So I must be doing much smaller. I've saved 31.81 hours at 50 words per minute. I've yeah, at 65,

Jason Atwood: Which is my speed, I'm 36.84 hours. s go quick hits while we wrap this one up. Again, no, no, no picks because we just before throwing a bunch of picks. My favorite favorite FTP client in the world talking about productivity. I use this all the time. Transmit, it is it made by a company called Panic, I think it's 20 bucks. Unbelievable, I've picked it before. It's just the best FTP client. Every time someone's like, oh, I'm having trouble connecting, I'm like, I just go get Transmit and it gets me through. It can do any kind of FTP ever. You have another one, why don't you pick this one? Because you like this one. Which one?

Justin Edelstein: PDF pen? Oh it's made by the same people who make text expander. Yeah. So smile software. So PDF pen is kind of like taking preview which we talked about to the next level. Yeah. So really going in and redoing a lot of stuff in PDFs so you can find or place words in PDFs you can fix You can basically change the words inside of a PDF. Full editing. Full editing of a PDF. So anyone who's tried to do that in the past will know that's no simple task. So PDF pen is kind of like your Swiss Army knife for PDFs to re-edit them, reorganize them, add logos. All sorts of fun stuff. Add page numbers. Tons and tons and tons and tons of features.

31:00 Jason Atwood: I'm going to just do one little tiny little one. For tweeting, I use Tweetbot. Don't know why, but I use Tweetbot. And then I really like it. It's just small and easy and starts up quite fast or whatever. And then my other one, Hazel. I love Hazel. It's a it's almost too much to go into on this podcast, but just as a thought here's what it can do It's a app that sits there and can watch folders and then as things happen it can do stuff to those files in the folder So glared it throws a copy into a folder. So if I delete it by mistake and I'm doing something, so it just throws the copy. It can do amazing stuff. I haven't even used it. It has the ability, I think I've even made it one of my picks once.

Jason Atwood: It has the ability to read the doc, read into the document and like pick the date of the document and make it the name of the file.

Justin Edelstein: You know, I knew that we were doing this today. Yeah. There was something I was thinking of that I wish Siri could do. Which is what? So people have, I know we're cutting it close on time, people have all this information in their emails. Yes. In their signatures. Yes. Their phone number, their mobile phone, their facts. So true. So someone had sent me an email and I really wanted to call them. I didn't have their phone number in my. phone in my contacts, but I knew that I could either go into Salesforce 1 and get it, or I can open up the email that they had just sent me because I know it's in their signature. I wish I could have just told Siri, and I hope that phones get this smart one day. Open up the last email from this person.

Justin Edelstein: Find the phone number that says office phone and dial it.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I wish you could have done that for me or call Person and they say I don't find this person your dress book. Should I search it? Yeah, go through my email and find it I found it.

Justin Edelstein: However, however, you have to do that workflow. Just I want you to be able to do that. Very cool for me I was thinking about it on the way.

Jason Atwood: So there are a ton of these I mean we We love around Arkus, we love giving these to people, and we have docs where we say here, all the stuff, there's tons for the Finder, and for Macs, whatever. If you have great ones, put them in the CloudFocus Weekly.

Justin Edelstein: Which one did you just want from me? You wanted one from me, which one did you want? Oh, I wanted the- The org ID one? Yeah, the org ID, that's a good one. So nice, right here.

Jason Atwood: I will say you can save text expander, and you can import them, so it's kinda nice. You should throw yours into a folder. All right, so that's it for this week. We'll be back next week. We'll get back to some more Salesforce talk. We'll talk about chain sets. We have a new blog post coming up this week on blog.arcasync.com on wellness. Kinda interesting, a different topic for us. And we will discuss banner begun. My favorite summer 14 idea that's rocking. the world. Maybe by next week it'll be even more. So we'll be back next week. Until then, as always, Justin, Jason saying, Enjoy those cloudy days.