The Proverbial Water-cooler

  1. A bunch of (mostly) free Mac stuff for design studio productivity

    By Christopher Lobay on Mon, 31 Mar 2008

    One of the reasons why we choose to work on Apple computers is that they allow us a large amount of options as far as organization and collaboration are concerned. Here is a brief list of the techniques and applications we use to keep on top of our busy schedules.

    First lets start with the big ones.

    Mail.app & iCal – These two are as free as you get. If you’re running a Mac, you have these. ToDo’s and Notes are fantastic organizational tools when used with iCal, Anxiety (Which I talk about below.) and Apple’s sweet open source CalDAV server. (Again, mentioned below.) And, with the release of Leopard, Apple also included ToDo management in Mail.app that make life a lot easier around the office. It allows us to sync all of our tasks and calendars to our entire team without any third party apps getting in the way of the sexy OS X goodness.

    CalendarServer – Believe it or not, installing this CalDAV server is a breeze, even if you’re a total Unix newbie. Just follow the quickstart tutorial that they provide, and make sure to use ./run -d to run the server as a daemon and you’ll be golden. There is bad news, however, about the servers standard XML based implementation of directory services. It fails to provide the usability that OpenDirectory provides by not allowing proper delegation, group, or LDAP access, which is a major bummer. It is, however, free and does allow you to collaborate with a group by using a single user account, so I can’t really complain.

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  2. Jewels: T-minus 5 days and counting

    By Adam Friesen on Sat, 22 Mar 2008

    The last month has been quite busy in various ways, Raymond and I enjoyed two weeks in Maui while Elbert, Chris and Jeremy stayed in Winnipeg and worked on the Manohar Jewels Project. Before leaving Raymond spent all of his time leading up to his holiday editing and after a week of continuous work day and night he managed to get it all done before he left. During our holiday Chris and Elbert began working on the special effects and title sequences for the films, creating the unique look for each one. It is sure to be the most effects intense project for Ambient to date…

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