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Posts tagged with osx

“  If you want to see the pinnacle of Apple application design, spend some time in Keynote.” — Michael Lopp on The Setup

Safari Reader will apparently stitch together (in some circumstances) pages from different articles. Pictured above is today’s Future Shock and Under the Knife from Baseball Prospectus. Maybe the stitching was triggered by the link at the bottom to the previous article along with the sequential article ID numbers in the URLs? I assume 3 other people besides me find this interesting and 1 of them is on his way to Portugal. I still mostly prefer Readability.

Safari Reader will apparently stitch together (in some circumstances) pages from different articles. Pictured above is today’s Future Shock and Under the Knife from Baseball Prospectus. Maybe the stitching was triggered by the link at the bottom to the previous article along with the sequential article ID numbers in the URLs?

I assume 3 other people besides me find this interesting and 1 of them is on his way to Portugal.

I still mostly prefer Readability.

I Don't Care About Last Week Either

Marco complains about state of calendering software. Like me, he settles for the month view in iCal, generally finding the daily and weekly views too myopic and information sparse.

I’ve found the List view in the iPhone calender to be very useful and the similarly formated iCal Events Dashboard widget.


Insert Date

So yesterday I listened to most of the Mac Power User Podcast with Merlin Mann. It’s long. I walked for over 5½ miles and I didn’t get through the whole thing. Hearing about different ways to do Mac things is useful and distracting on a long walk.

Listening to the podcast, I decided to stop using VoodooPad for my to do list and quick note taking. It works great as a sort of notebook to keep track of projects and as a How-to manual for my life. However, without an editable mode in the iPhone app, it’s not really well-suited for use as a to do list.

I’d already started using Simplenote as a to do list and Seth has been insistent on the usefulness of syncing Simplenote to Notational Velocity on the desktop. But Seth is just Seth. He didn’t sell me. But Merlin was in full carnival barker mode on the Simplenote-Notational Velocity combo. Hell, he almost – almost – sold me on TextMate too.

Anyways, I quickly set all of that up. I still needed to be able to automatically insert dates into the note titles just like Merlin. He uses TextExpander, but that sounded like one too many new apps to adopt in one week. I figured I could cook-up a little AppleScript and assign a keyboard shortcut in FastScripts. FastScripts is already how I manage to live with Mail.app and it feeds soothes my OCD in iTunes too.

A little Google fu turned up a hint to get me pretty close to what I wanted. So I started with that, but I couldn’t seem to get the keyboard shortcut to work. A very quick and helpful email exchange with Red Sweater Software fixed what was wrong with my script. And now I can insert dates into text fields with a flick of a few fingers.

It’s always amazing to me how great the customer service is from so many different Mac developers. I think we should be great users too. So more or less because of the great software and insanely fast email responses (and hey also because I was approaching the limit for the free version) I purchased FastScripts. I guess I’ll need to throw Merlin a bone and buy his book when it comes out too. Nice things cost money and nice people need to eat.

Anyways, here’s the AppleScript I used. It will insert a YYYYMMDD style date.

delay 0.5

set {year:y, month:m, day:d, time string:t} to (current date)

set date_format to (y * 10000 + m * 100 + d) as string

set reformated_date to (text items 1 thru 4 of date_format as string) & (text items 5 thru 6 of date_format as string) & (text items 7 thru 8 of date_format as string)

tell application “System Events” to keystroke (reformated_date)

This might be useful in Finder too. It should replace the Automator action I have now. This was just going to be a short post celebrating Red Sweater Software, but I guess it took a lot of moving parts to get even a small but hopefully incredibly useful thing (a date inserted into a note that will sync all over) to work. “Small pieces loosely joined” indeed.

Gonna be a while?

Gonna be a while?

Cocoalicious

I don’t know a great way to back up Delicious bookmarks. But an okay way would be to download Cocoalicious and then use iCal to launch it in the middle of the night. Then your bookmarks will be backed up in your Application Support folder.


Spotlight is My Calculator

Spotlight is Neven Mrgan’s calculator. It’s mine too.


Safari 4 and Bookmarklets

Invoking the Delicious or Instapaper bookmarklets with the mouse creates a pop-up window. When invoked with the keyboard shortcut (command - #) the popup window is shunted into a new tab.

With Instapaper the behavior is welcome since no interaction is needed. With Delicious it is kinda annoying since I probably want to add tags and click to save.


Setting up a Mac

I need a place to put this. It might as well be here. When recent switchers ask for advice I typically send some version of this list. I should write more about software later. Note that the information here might be dated as well.

Setting Up A Mac and Os X
———————————————————
1. Make an admin account then add user account (use your user account for everyday usage).
2. In Safari (turn on tabs, turn off start safe apps).
3. Clean out some of the RSS feeds that Safari has already subscribed too

Software to Get

Internet Applications
NetNewsWire (feed reader)
Firefox and Opera (alternate browsers, also camino)
Cyberduck (free file transfer app, ftp/sftp, WebDav, etc.)

Productivity
TextWrangler (best of free text editors, allows vertical/column based text selection)
VoodooPad Lite (a notebook wiki type thing for your computer, very useful and free)
MS Office (or OpenOffice.org)
iWork (Apple’s MS Office alternative)
Skim (PDF reader and annotator)

Audio/Video Pluggins and Players
Real Player
Flash plug-in (get latest version)
Perian (plays flash right in QuickTime and then all other apps like Keynote)
Flip-4-Mac (plays WMV video files right in QuickTime)

Utility
Stuffit Expander (free, some archives still use this format instead of zip, etc.)
Applescripts (turn on GUI scripting, get the Safari ones from apple’s page, etc)

Backup/Sync
SuperDuper! (back-up software that clones internal HD to an external HD, or Free CarbonCopyCloner)
ChronoSync (for syncing two computers)

Widgets
iCal Events
Scoreboard widget (baseball, still works a little)
Ta-Da Lists widget (broken spring 2009)

Image Editors
Acorn (decent image editor for $50)
LiveQuartz (simple free image editor)
Image Tricks (for messing with photos mostly)
Gimp.app (free and clunky)

Music/Video
Amazon music downloader
eMusic download manager
xAct (free, shn/flac de/encoder)
Audacity (free, simple audio editor)
iMovieHD (also called iMovie06, free from apple website)
Sentui (free, get songs off iPods without syncing to iTunes)
VLC (free, video player of many codecs)
iSquint (flash video converted to mp4)
ScreenFlow ($99, makes screencasts and video lectures)

Stats
Stata
R (stats, free)

Optional:
TeXShop via MacTeX (LaTeX distribution with bibdesk, also get eqn ed/serv like TeXFog)
Xcode (Apple’s development IDE, needs to do installation)
Chicken of the VNC (login to remote computers)
RDC (remote desktop connection from MS for logging into windows)
EagleFiler (archive email, organize PDFs, recipes, webpages, etc.)
PDF to Keynote (small utility does what it says)
Taco HTML Edit (new version no longer free)
Quinn (tetris clone)
Adobe Reader (Preview is better; sometimes nice to use though)
Skype (free)
Bittorrent
DarwinPorts and Fink (for installing UNIX applications)
VPN (get from your school/company to log into their network)
AppDelete
CombinePDF (with new Preview.app this isn’t really needed, less good was join_PDFs [http://homepage.mac.com/jonn8/as/html/Join_PDFs.html])

Services
thisservice (markdown)
service scrubber (clean up the services menu)
wordservice(from devonthink)

More Information

Info on using Windows with bootcamp or parallels:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2006/06/27/parallels-desktop-for-mac.html

Useful webpages:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ [database of downloads]
http://www.macworld.com/ [news]
http://www.macosxhints.com/ [help and hints]
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars [news+rumors]
http://www.automatorworld.com/ [all about automator]
http://daringfireball.net/ [mac nerd blog]
http://www.dougscripts.com/ [itunes and applescripts]
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~benhdj/Mac/unix.html [unix tips for os x]
http://osx.iusethis.com [reviews of top applications]

I update this post from time to time.