Quick Sleep

Here's a quickie, but I showed this to Venkat, and it made his day, so chances are good that others don't know about this handy keyboard shortcut. I used to always rely on my PowerBook to go to sleep successfully when I close the lid. But every once in a blue moon, something doesn't work right, and I open my laptop bag to a red-hot laptop. I suspect that it's latch related (and several other folks have suggested that this was the case). Now, I've taken to putting my machine to sleep before closing the lid. There are of course a variety of ways to do that; my recent common one was to hit the power button, which gives you the shut-down options dialog, and sleep is one of them. That's what Venkat's been doing.

But I recently ran across a better combination: Apple-Alt-Eject provides instant sleep (the Eject key is the one that ejects CD's, just above the delete key). One keyboard chord, and I have a sleeping laptop. I love it when I can cut a 2-step process down to a single keychord!

Mmmmmmmm...Fresh Apps

One of my ThoughtWorks colleagues turned me on to this one. Most Mac OS X applications check for updates on startup (so many, in fact, that I'm surprised when I let something that doesn't do this get out of date). But each application has to do this on their own. That's where AppFresh fits. From the site:


AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.


Not only does it find the applications you need to update (which they mostly do themselves...mostly), AppFresh also handles the chore of downloading the DMG file, extracting it, mounting it, installing the application, and unmounting. No muss, no fuss. You just tell it to update an application and Voila...it's updated.