November 13th, 2012
Good tip from Rob LeFebvre on Cult of Mac:
You might notice that your hard disk is constantly spinning on your Mac. If you check Activity Monitor, you might find out that the CPU is also being used up by the Finder, which typically doesn’t use a lot of CPU.
Turns out that the culprit could, in fact, be video files on your desktop.
I had two video files on my Desktop as I read this tip. I removed them and within minutes my Mac’s fan spun down. Coincidence? I think not.
October 10th, 2012
Slate is a free, open source window manager for Mac OS X. In short, it binds key combinations to make it a bit easier to manage your application’s windows.
An example is: ALT + Left Arrow will move the current focused window left 10% (by default). This is the default configuration file and you’ll more than likely want to begin editing it right away. You can simply place this file in ~/.slate and begin editing it with your preferences. The very first thing I had to change was CMD + Arrow because I, like everyone else on planet earth, use that to move my cursor to the beginning or end of a line. Slate hijacks that and has you switching windows. I do not know why that is in there by default as it is a bit jarring but the application’s author must prefer that.
I don’t know if Slate will stick with me but I tried it because he said so.
October 8th, 2012
Wedge is a Mac client for App.net that I really like. It just hit 0.3.3 with a slew of updates.
The rapid development of these clients, the feedback loop, and the growth of App.net is all very compelling and fun to be part of once again.
June 26th, 2012
John Gruber wrote:
I’m guessing a lot of people don’t know about this feature.
I sure didn’t. Excellent tip.
April 12th, 2012
Speaking of backing up your Instagram photos. InstaBackup is a free Mac application by David Smith that makes it simple to download all of your Instagram photos to your Mac.
January 17th, 2012
This Dashboard widget post (see the others) is more for developers and designers than the average person.
Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.
There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.
One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.
Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.
Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.
January 12th, 2012
The post on GAget was mildly popular. I’m happy about that. It means that more people are seeing a useful Mac OS X Dashboard widget than may have otherwise. Especially since Apple hasn’t updated their Dashboard widget directory since very early in 2011.
Well, here is another widget I suggest taking a look at. Whenever any of us geeks order something online we’re feverishly refreshing the delivery status page of our shipper of choice to see where the package is. Well, not anymore. Now you can use Delivery Status.
Delivery Status is a widget for Mac OS X that makes it pretty simple, and dare I say sexy, to track a few packages at once right from your Dashboard. Junecloud has also made an iOS application for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch so that you can track your packages on the go.
I really like how the widget color-codes the statuses based on the shipper. A nice touch.
See, there are useful Dashboard widgets out there. They’re great. And you should know about them.
January 11th, 2012
Let me just admit this right off the bat; I don’t use services in Mac OS X. I’ll use an Alfred extension or two in order to make my life a little easier but I’ve never really tried to get services to stick in my workflows.
I’m going to change that.
This article by Kirk McElhearn at Macworld on How to use services in Mac OS X has pushed me over the edge. What are services? McElhearn explains them this way “Simply put, OS X services let you borrow features from other programs.”
December 28th, 2011
Last night I needed to transfer an EPUB file to Eliza’s Kindle from my Mac. It turns out that Kindles no likey the EPUBs. (I didn’t know this, I’ve never really used one.) So, after a bit of searching I found Calibre that, while it doesn’t have the best looking UI, is sort of the Swiss Army knife of e-book management.
December 25th, 2011
Alex Knight proposes a pretty painless way of sharing screenshots using Apple’s built-in screenshot utility, Dropbox, and an Alfred extension. I think I’d still prefer Skitch but if you don’t this seems like a nice workflow.
December 22nd, 2011
The Mac OS X Dashboard is something I seem to use less and less. I think the Dashboard widget is a fantastic way to build small applications or utilities to help people keep track of something, do some quick math, etc. but these widgets don’t seem to get as much attention as they deserve. There are still some really great widgets out there.
I want to change that.
I’m going to start featuring well-designed, still in-use Dashboard widgets from time-to-time here on the blog. My personal blog is relatively obscure in today’s tech web but – hopefully – one or two people will find these posts about these widgets. If you’ve run across, or built, any Dashboard widgets you think should get some attention – feel free to email them in.
So lets start out with GAget – a well-designed Google Analytics Dashboard widget by Zoltan Hosszu. (Side note: Zoltan is an awesome name.)
I don’t know about you but logging into any Google Account or any Google product has been troublesome over the last few years. I’ve got personal accounts, Google Apps accounts, work accounts, etc. I get sick of switching. GAget allows me to quickly take a look at any of my site’s statistics by simply swiping (with three-fingers on Lion) over to my Dashboard.
GAget’s HUD shows you exactly what you need to see at a glance; number of visitors today, the trend over the last week, two weeks, or month, the bounce rate, time-on-site, and how many hits were new visitors. Very, very good information if you’re striving to bring up the overall audience for your site.
If you happen to need more information, perhaps for advertising purposes, you can always log into Google Analytics and drill down further.
I have two feature requests: a way to see the top 10 search keywords that people are finding the site with, and the top 10 URLs on the site (besides the homepage). But overall this widget does just enough to keep the stat addict in you well fed.
September 14th, 2011
Chris Coleman on Twitter last night:
“All of the things that are great on iOS are the same things that are absolutely worthless in OS X Lion.”
Since upgrading to Lion I’ve come to love many of the iOS-lessons-learned that Apple had decided to bring “Back to the Mac” and so I was puzzled by what Chris said. So I asked him to explain further and this is what he said.
“launchpad, full screen apps (annoying implementation), infrequently used safari tabs reloading, I’m sure there’s more”
And…
“I should probably have said some of the great things in iOS make no sense in Lion. Love the reverse scrolling.”
I don’t agree with everything Chris tweeted and I thought I would go over these things here rather than via a few replies on Twitter. I’ll take these one-by-one.
I’ve already wrote about why I think Launchpad could be confusing to new and inexperienced users. On Lion applications are able to be installed using the App Store as well as by-hand and it creates a combination of circumstances that make it harder to understand why you can uninstall some applications via Launchpad and not others. That being said, the rest of Launchpad makes perfect sense for new and inexperienced users. I launch applications using Alfred but my mother would love Launchpad. At the time I wrote that post Kyle Slattery tweeted that he rarely removes applications from his Mac and so many people may never experience that confusion. If true, then Launchpad seems like a great addition to Mac OS X.
Although not every application supports Lion’s new full-screen feature yet I’ve been able to put it to good use with Terminal, Mail, Aperture, and Parallels. I’ve used full-screen browsing in Safari a few times and in a few circumstances (which was very handy at the time) but for the most part I only use this feature in those four applications. Could I live without it? Yes. Is it a got-to-have? No. Do I like it? Yes.
To be honest, I’ve never noticed unused tabs in Safari reloading for me. I’m not a tab-hoarder as some are so my experience probably differs from those of you that keep 40, 50 or more tabs open at a time. I’d drive myself crazy with that many tabs open. My connection to the Internet is normally fast enough that I can open a web page and access it fairly quickly. I don’t need to keep them all open. So, perhaps this is annoying for some but for me it goes unnoticed.
Something I do agree with Chris on is Lion’s reverse scrolling. I love it. Like everyone else it took me the better part of a week to catch on and retrain my muscles and brain – but after that it has been very enjoyable to go back and forth between the iPad and my Mac and scroll the same way. One thing I have found, however, is that this particular change has caused me to begin to use some of Lion’s multi-touch gestures on the iPad. So now I’m beginning to wish that some of these gestures move over to the iPad (such as three-finger swipe between apps, two-finger swipe to move forward and backward in my browser, etc.)
Two more features that I adore in Lion; Resume and Versions. Resume is a feature that allows you to resume any application where you left it after you’ve closed it. This is one of those invisible features that once you have it you can not imagine giving it up. Accidentally close a window on Lion with some work in it, open it back up, and you’ll immediately see the value of this feature. Versions, while I have only needed it once, makes it dead simple to go “back-in-time” on a specific file without having to use Time Machine. I don’t know that this came from iOS, perhaps it is simply an extension of the lessons that they’ve learned from the use of Time Machine, but as more and more applications make use of this feature in Lion the more utility it will serve.
For me the best update to Mac OS X was Snow Leopard. It was the update that made my computer much, much faster and much, much more reliable. It was like buying a brand new computer. Lion doesn’t quite feel like that to me but it does do something very important – it begins to bridge the gap between my use of the iPhone and iPad with my Mac. I use all three of these devices every single day and having them all come together has meant that I’m more productive. And that is a very good thing.
August 31st, 2011
As I outlined in Recent software problems:
“Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.”
This problem continues. However, I ran across this solution via a few Google searches.
I’ve confirmed that this works. I’m still looking forward to a Lion update that addresses these and my other issues.
August 19th, 2011
I’ve switched to using MPlayerX (App Store) since upgrading to Mac OS X Lion because it can play many more formats than Quicktime and is, in many ways, much better looking than VLC.
Today I’ve stumbled across a slew of hidden settings that you can’t find via the UI.
August 11th, 2011
When I switched to the Mac I was surprised how easy it was to install and uninstall applications in OS X compared to the horrible installer workflow and the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel of Windows.
For those that are unaware, prior to Lion installing an application on the Mac went something like this; download a .DMG file which would mount to your Mac much like putting a CD in the disk drive and dragging the application icon into your Applications folder. That’s it. Drag, drop, installed. To uninstall an application you just delete the application from your Applications folder. Done.
The caveats to this process were the need to unmount the DMG after you’ve installed the application and then trashing the leftover DMG files in people’s Downloads folder.
However, with Lion came the promise of simplifying this process even more. Why? Because, although the above process seems simple it wasn’t nearly as simple as Apple had managed to make installing and uninstalling applications from iOS. On iOS you open the App Store, click Install, the application’s icon shows up on your device’s Home Screen. If you’d like to uninstall the application you tap and hold the icon, an “x” shows up, click it and confirm that you want to uninstall the app. Very simple.
Lion wanted to bring this very same workflow to the Mac. The workflow goes very much the same; Install applications directly from the Mac App Store, the application’s icon shows up on Launchpad, click and hold to uninstall the app from your Mac.
However, on Lion not all applications are created equal. Some applications were installed prior to, or without the use of, the Mac App Store. Perhaps you downloaded the application from the web or you simply have it installed from long before Lion. Either way, these applications still show up on Launchpad – they just can’t be uninstalled from Launchpad.
Which is why I think uninstalling applications on Lion is arguably more difficult for some people because the workflow for one application is different than the workflow for another application. If Apple could have allowed for applications that were not installed via the Mac App Store to be uninstalled using the same workflow they would have. There must be some very good reasons why they can not – however, I thought that they should have at least showed a dialog to instruct the user on how they can uninstall the application anyway.
For instance, if I’ve got Launchpad open I can drag the application’s icon to Trash on the Dock. Shouldn’t this uninstall it? If I was in my Applications folder and did the very same thing it would. So why not from Launchpad directly to Trash? Why even allow me to drag it over the Trash? Why not show a message when I do this: “Sorry, but you’ll have to open Finder, navigate to your Applications folder, and remove the application from there manually.”
I’m not sure why Apple didn’t find some way to either make this easier or to inform the user how to accomplish this simple task. But a few years from now, when 90% of all installed Mac applications have been installed directly from the Mac App Store, Apple will no longer need or care to worry about this issue. And perhaps that alone is reason enough for them not to care about it now.
June 7th, 2011
Yesterday I tweeted that you may not need to reboot in order to upgrade to Lion. That isn’t exactly true. After watching yesterday’s Keynote from Apple I realized where the Engadget editor made the mistake.
Typically when you insert a disc to upgrade Mac OS you need to reboot to the disc for the installation process to begin. This means that during the entire upgrade process (even though this process gets shorter and shorter with each update) you’d be effectively without a computer. The upgrade to Lion, it would seem, doesn’t require this step. The update happens just like any other installation process. However, you’ll still need to reboot when the upgrade process is complete.
Notable, but not as notable as not having to reboot at all.
May 15th, 2011
My favorite launcher application, Alfred, has been updated to version 0.9. I suggest buying the Powerpack but it is free if you want to kick the tires.
Calling it a launcher application is sort of limiting. Alfred can help you play music, give you quick access to your clipboard’s history, and even help you attach files to your emails. Its absolutely great and version 0.9 is packed to the gills with new features and updates.
February 11th, 2011
Now that I have Notational Velocity on the command line perhaps I need to map Notational Velocity to a Github wiki too.
February 1st, 2011
I’m not sure why but I’m on a command line kick lately. Not just the Tron Legacy style for Terminal but I’ve now begun using iTerm2 as my Terminal application of choice. I have it in a second Space on Mac OS X fullscreen with 3 shells running.
The first shell is 50% of the screen split vertically. The other two are each 25% of the right-side of the screen split horizontally. This way I can edit files in the left hand pane via Pico or Vim, use Git in the lower right-hand corner and be SSHed into my server in the top right. Here is a screenshot.
The inspiration for this came from constantly seeing my fellow Viddler team member Todd Troxell rock the command line exclusively. Dude is hardcore and seldom uses any UI save for the Web itself.
Today I’ve used Lifehacker’s guide to using Notational Velocity via the command line since I was already using Notational Velocity app on my Mac, Simplenote on my iPhone and iPad I figured I might as well add the ability to edit these same files via the command line. Thanks to Dropbox all of these files are kept nicely in sync between all of my devices. It is sort of like living in the past and the future at the exact same time.
Now I just need to update my Tron Legacy style for Terminal to work with iTerm2 and I should be pretty well set to be about as geeky as I’ve ever been.