The odds are good that you have to keep track on how much time you spend on any individual project for billing reasons or what have you. If you’re anything like me (and why wouldn’t you be) your fantastic right hemisphere of the brain makes you profoundly sucky at performing this dreary task.
Enter On the job, a quite wonderful little app that’ll do the job for you. However; If you are afflicted to the degree I am with this complete and utter incompetence at important but boring chores, you have difficulties even remembering to open the app to let it do it’s thing. ‘Why Martin, it’s simple’, I hear you exclaim, ‘you just put it in your start-up items, so that every time you start up your work computer it’ll launch the app!’ Well, no. You see, I use a MacBook which I carry between the office and home, and my innate loathing of shit starting up each time I start up my Mac would annoy me to no end. Besides, a more than likely scenario would be me quitting the app when going home and then forgetting to start it up again when I’m back at the office. Yes; I’m that terrible.
I considered this while in the shower, as these things are wont to happen, and came up with the idea of trying to make my laptop sniff out which wi-fi I was connected to and thusly be able to perform certain tasks based on that information. I started trying to work out whether it’d be possible to AppleScript a solution, or whether I’d have to try and apply my nigh-non existing Cocoa skills to pull this off.
Ask and ye shall receive. Of course, if there’s a good idea to be had, most likely someone beat me to it. Enter Marco Polo.
This absolute gem of an app promises (and in the 30 mins I’ve used it; Delivers) context awareness for your Mac based on a whole load of criteria. For my purposes all I had to do was to make it sniff out the SSID of my office Wi-Fi and launch On the Job whenever the rule matched. I’ll also be setting it up to launch MediaLink when at home so that I’ll instantly start streaming media to my PlayStation. Yet these examples are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The possibilities are, perhaps, not endless but certainly numerous. I highly recommend checking out this killer combo, or just Marco Polo if your short term memory is better than mine (not hard) but context awareness might be interesting for you anyway.
On the job is shareware ($25) and Marco Polo is free as in speech and beer.
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