I seem to have this strange affin­ity for the menu bar. Well really it’s for little icons in the menu bar. If an app can run in it in some­way, chances are it is doing so on my Mac.

Recently the excel­lent Air­Foil from Rogue Amoeba was upgraded to ver­sion 4.7. It brought with it the abil­ity to run an icon in the menu bar instead of the dock. Instantly I turned it on, Air­Foil is always run­ning and it bugs me to have too many icons in the dock of my MBP¹. It’s a bril­liant idea and one which, in my opin­ion, should’ve been avail­able much earlier than it has been. A simple click shows me what song is play­ing in either iTunes or Spo­tify, which speaker I’m stream­ing too and the abil­ity to add more should I wish. It’s almost like the uni­ver­sal Air­Play icon in the mul­ti­task­ing tray on iOS.

That’s all great, except, it feels kinda half finished.

The greatest thing about Air­Foil is that I can stream from any source on my Mac. I mainly use it for Spo­tify or iTunes, but occa­sion­ally I play some­thing in Safari like the a live 5by5 pod­cast. It baffles me that I can’t select what source Air­Foil is trans­mit­ting from the menu bar. Logic, at least to me, dic­tated that this would be the chief function.

Ima­gine the scene. I’m sat work­ing away, I real­ise via Twit­ter, that the B&B Pod­cast is about to start live on 5by5.tv. I click the link in the tweet I just read and I’m switched to Safari. Since I already have music play­ing from iTunes, using Alfred I can pause it instantly and then I’m free to start the live stream. The only thing is I have to click show Air­Foil, then find the win­dow and click the drop down. Then I have to select my source, and then I can close the win­dow. It all seems kinda long win­ded and like I should be able to switch source on the fly from the menu item. A ‘source’ menu below or above my speak­ers con­tain­ing only the apps I have open and avail­able to be used as my source would be fant­astic. It’d reduce the click­ing and thus the fric­tion in chan­ging a source for my Air­Foil broad­cast. Hope­fully they will add this abil­ity soon, it would com­plete the app as far as I’m concerned.

1. I’m a dock on the side guy (left bot­tom) and so ver­tical space is limited.

man cave 
noun Informal .
a room or other area in a home that is primar­ily a male sanc­tu­ary, designed and fur­nished to accom­mod­ate the man’s recre­ational activ­it­ies, hob­bies, etc.

Dictionery.com

Dur­ing my lat­ter years at school while study­ing my GCSEs and A Levels I began to under­stand the need for a cave. Of course still being at school and liv­ing at home I had a ready made one — my bedroom.

As a teen­ager in the early days of devel­op­ing an interest in design, that cave allowed me to cre­ate the atmo­sphere I needed to work. I had a draw­ing table set up where I would work on cre­at­ive pieces and study for my exams. It had a light that bent over me shin­ing a focused beam on my work space and plunging the rest of the room into dark­ness. I had some of my most pro­duct­ive even­ings at that table. In fact I have long stand­ing memor­ies of work­ing on my graph­ics course­work close to a dead­line with the mas­ters snooker on my little tv and that light beam­ing a zone of cre­ativ­ity onto my table.

Mov­ing to uni I again had my own ready made cave. The room in my halls of res­id­ence quickly became the place for all my cre­at­ive work. Angle poise shin­ing on my desk, laptop on, a dark room and momentum build­ing music on late in to the night. Then the bed­room in my shared house in the final two years at uni and the first year in employ­ment had a sim­ilar feel, but repla­cing my laptop with my iMac.

I miss those caves.

Since I’ve been liv­ing on my own I’ve not really had a cave. A flat with a liv­ing room, kit­chen, bath­room and bed­room doesn’t really lend itself to cre­at­ing one. The liv­ing room is a place for relax­ing, eat­ing and host­ing vis­it­ors. The bed­room is for sleep­ing and relax­ing, I need it to be purely for that else I’ll never shut down prop­erly to sleep.

The quest for a cave

Since I’ve no space for a desk and no closet I could con­vert into a cave I’ve been explor­ing ways to cre­ate an envir­on­ment that can be quickly and eas­ily set up, then eas­ily removed when I have visitors.

I’ve always tried to zone my liv­ing room so that I have a lounge area and a din­ing area. The din­ing area is the only bit of my flat that I can sit down and do work at and so it’s become the centre of my quest for a cave.

The table lamp which used to sit on my din­ing table has been removed and replaced with my angle poise. My laptop now has a home on the table and my wired Apple key­board and Logit­ech mouse have come out of stor­age. All of them can be quickly packed away when vis­it­ors are around and for the first time in a few years I’ve been able to begin cre­at­ing that cave like atmo­sphere as I work by the light of my angle poise. I can even do it with my iPad instead of the laptop should I wish.

Whilst it’s not quite the same as a per­man­ent cave, it’s a step in the right dir­ec­tion until I’m able to afford a place with room for a per­man­ent cave. Most import­antly it’s already hav­ing an impact on the way I’m work­ing in the even­ings on my own pro­jects as well as on per­sonal freel­ance clients.

But the les­son that I’ve learnt, in this little exer­cise is that actu­ally it’s not neces­sar­ily about hav­ing a phys­ical space, it’s about atmo­sphere. In order to foster cre­ativ­ity I need the right atmo­sphere, a per­man­ent place makes that easy to cre­ate but the quest for my cave isn’t really for a phys­ical space at the moment. It’s about a way for me to recre­ate the atmo­sphere of my early and ori­ginal caves. It’s about devel­op­ing a method that allows me to quickly set up at my din­ing table and focus. Events over the last few weeks have caused me to real­ise spe­cific­ally that by my very nature I’m a night owl and not an early bird. Maybe that has some­thing to do with my atmosphere…

I work as a graphic designer. Like many other folks in my pro­fes­sion I find it hard to turn off. I may not be think­ing about pro­jects from work all the time, but I’m always think­ing about pro­jects I’d like to do or review­ing the things I see all around me. I see every piece of design and men­tally critic it, 99% of the time I’m not even aware I’m doing it, but it’s there, almost like a 6th sense won­der­ing what ques­tions the designer faced.

I’ve lost count of the num­ber of times I’ve sat in a res­taur­ant look­ing at the menu only to real­ise I’m not look­ing at what’s on offer but the way it’s been type­set. What font did they use? What does it make me think of the res­taur­ant? Does it make the food I’m read­ing about sound even tastier or does it make me think I’ll be left want­ing more? Does the menu fit the sur­round­ings or does it just feel like a designer some­where threw it together because he didn’t get a proper brief?

It’s a pretty con­stant state of affairs. Right now I’m glan­cing at the empty can of San Miguel thats sit­ting on the din­ing table. Does it look like the taste? Does it make me want to lie on a hot beach in Spain? What the heck has a ship got to do with beer? Why did the designer pick gold as the main can col­our and break away from the green and white that used to be there?

I can’t turn it off, and many a time I’ve amused good friends as I verb­al­ise my critique.

Unfor­tu­nately relax­ing is made all the more harder by it. I read to do my relax­ing, mostly the blogs of a select few but they’re people who I’ve come to trust. I trust that the links they post are to inter­est­ing con­tent, art­icles that can lead me on a chase around the inter­net look­ing at web­sites, new web­sites. Web­sites that start the inner critic on it’s famil­iar chain of ques­tions. Ques­tions that lead me to find another way of reading.

Books.

Mostly made of paper that smell of ink and aren’t dis­played on a screen. How­ever, in this age of con­stant stream of inform­a­tion that feeds a thirst for know­ledge, growth and under­stand­ing, I find I need a book that doesn’t make me think too much. There’s no point going to bed to read only to lie in bed for hours think­ing about the chapter I just read and the chal­lenges or know­ledge it imparts. I need a good story. Some­thing that will make me keep turn­ing the pages, com­pel­ling me to read. So it is with great joy in the last year or so that I’ve dis­covered an author I enjoy, one that draws me to read rather than watch inane tv shows.

It’s not the nov­els that I write this about though, it’s the impact they have on me. As well as help­ing me relax, they force me to use my ima­gin­a­tion. When read­ing about the unrav­el­ling story I’m forced to ima­gine the scene, what people look like and where they are. I’m forced to stop ask­ing the ques­tions I ask all day long as I review and work on the vari­ous pro­jects I have on the go. That time away from ques­tion­ing and eval­u­at­ing can only have one impact as far as I’m con­cerned, that is, to make my work bet­ter. Hav­ing time to just ima­gine frees me from the con­straints that are so often put in place when work­ing. They may be imposed on me by the pro­jects, or by the press­sures I put on my self, but the more I read and use my ima­gin­a­tion in a com­pletely unat­tached man­ner. The more cre­at­ive I feel, the more my ima­gin­a­tion is fed the more eas­ily I find work.

In a time when the people around me seem to read more than they ever did, I seem to be the only per­son among my friends who reads nov­els. I’d like to encour­age you to start. Take a short story and read it. Start small and find some­thing that feeds your ima­gin­a­tion, a story which gives it new life and see what impact it has on your work.