Now that I have made the jump to a single Mac setup — well not completely, but more on that later — I am doing things very differently. I recently got a new Apple MacBook Pro 15″ to replace my oldish 15″ PowerBook and my desktop G5 at work. I was getting sick and tired of the constant syncing issues between the machines and just wanted to simplify. My new MacBook is great other than a few annoyances. At any rate, I am slowly taking advantage of a single environment to migrate to a new set of tools to help me manage my digital life … here are three things I am trying to do differently:

• RSS Feeds: My feeds are now (and once again) powered by NetNewsWire Pro. I did this once before after bloglines ate my subscription list, but went back because I was just on too many computers to make it work for me. I am now using NetNewsWire (I am even paying for it) as my primary RSS reader. I have it hooked up with Pukka to allow me to quickly post sites to my del.icio.us account (a critical piece to the puzzle for me). It syncs with my new NewsGator account every-time I quit so my feeds are updated if I am on a different machine. So far I am really liking it … a few issues, but those are for a separate post.
• Blog Posting: Another Ranchero deal … this post is being created in MarsEdit. Again, I figure since I am on a single machine I can go this route. So far so good, but there are some formatting issues I am trying to figure out. Again, it is hooked up to my NetNewsWire app so I can blog any site instantly from within my NNW. Easy and sweet … oh and it has spell checking, is Intel native, and gives me a local view of my stuff (the image upload has never really worked for me in WP 2.0, so I really like that feature in MarsEdit).
• Email: Not Ranchero … I use Apple’s Mail app … I like it, but it isn’t perfect. What is? But I do like the way it looks and feels. I have added MailTags to it and it is changing the way I get things done. Between keywords and projects I finally have an idea of where messages go. I get about 125-150 messages a day with at least 80% of those needing attention. So now I have folders that automatically move messages around based on tags. It is working so well!

So there it is. By going to one machine I am learning how to take advantage of software to do the work of the web. In the case of the Ranchero stuff I am very happy. Time will tell, but for today I am a happy camper.