iphone minimalism

In a fit of impulsiveness and frustration at my inability to instill some self-discipline in myself, I went ahead and deleted ALL the games in my iPhone. Including all the paid ones like street fighter, cut the rope, flight control… My favourites like cut the rope, zombie highway (new addition), veggie samurai etc. I don’t usually play the games but if I get really hooked on one I usually end up sacrificing sleep and productive hours playing it.

Apparently cold turkey works best for me. And in any case, it’s not hard to find something to occupy me on the iPhone.

I find myself doing alot more reading on it now - especially long form articles (rather than books-still prefer the holding the physical copy). For those interested, the apps I use to save articles (and also syncs with the web service) are instapaper and readitlater. I shelled out money for readitlater pro but actually there really is no need to. The free app does the job just as well with unlimited articles and offline saving (incredibly important for places with zero wifi or 3G connectivity). But I suppose paying for the full app is just my way of saying thank you to the makers for a great product!

Other things that I do in replacement of playing games -
 Watching videos- I managed to grab vlc before it went off the AppStore so I transfer videos to watch before converting. But I recently discovered player x which provides subtitle support so I might switch over from vlc pretty soon. I also blog alot more now because I find that usually by the time I get home I’ve pretty much forgotten all that i wanted to say.

Rss reading- I do alot more RSS reading on the iphone now. I don’t like having to visit each site individually so I hook up the RSS feeds with my google reader. If you haven’t tried using an RSS service, I highly recommend this as a tool to save you lots of time scrambling all about the interwebz. MobileRSS still provides one of the most complete RSS experiences for me because of the number of web services tie-ups - email, evernote, readitlater and instapaper. MobileRSS hooks up with my google reader account which has 400+ feeds so I have enough of a field day wading through all of them.

So that’s it really! I don’t really miss the games that I’ve deleted (yet)! I’ve given up doing any sort of work on the phone because the screen size just makes it impractical to open, view and edit documents. I prefer to highlight PDFs anyway which I can’t do on the phone so I have to end up reading the file on the computer anyway.
 

spentmoments:

workspace

(Source: laura-coombs, via digitalops)

Photo: 

(Via Minimal.)

mnmal:

onminimalism:

Padfoot

A fantastic and simple idea.

Decluttering your dock

If you haven’t realised, I’m abit of an OCD nut (although I realise this may be an understatement). I can’t stand clutter, although god knows why since I practically live in filth of my own making every day. 

One of the easiest ways to declutter your dock (i.e. prune it of all the unnecessary icons and make sure it doesn’t look like an entire eco-system of applications and documents live on it) is to minimize open application windows into the application icon itself. 

The default setting is to minimize application windows (e.g. word documents) into the right portion of your dock, but I dislike seeing my dock have so many icons open since I tend to have about 5 windows open when I am working.

The default setting:

Note that the application icon at the bottom right to indicate which application it belongs to.

to change your settings, just go to system preferences > dock and work from there.

Check ‘minimize windows into application icon’. To see all the windows of that application at once, click and hold the application icon, and you should see an expose of all the windows:

This is a decluttering tip that may not be useful for everybody especially if you need your windows to be displayed all at once.