PragMactic OS-Xer

Building Growl 1.3.1

2011-11-07T13:10:00.000-08:00

The new release of Growl is distributed in the App Store and is no longer free. The source code still is, and there are instructions on the Growl site to explain how to build it. Personally, I found the instructions a bit wordy. So, here the short version on how to download, compile, and install Growl from source:

1) If you don't have it, get and install Mercurial from this page: http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/

2) Open a Terminal window and enter the following commands

cd /tmp
hg clone https://code.google.com/p/growl/
cd growl
open Growl.xcodeproj

3) In the Xcode window that should have popped up disable code signing for the Growl project, as shown in this screenshot:

4) Back in the Terminal window enter these commands: (Don't enter the backslash, it's just there to indicate that the command continues on the next line.)

xcodebuild -project Growl.xcodeproj -target Growl.app \
               -configuration Release
open build/Release

5) The Finder window that should have opened contains Growl.app, which you can copy to a folder of your choice and run.

Remember, due to the App Store Growl no longer checks for updates itself.

Really removing Google updater

2010-05-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

If you have tried some of Google's software, Chrome for example, chances are that you have Google's updater on your system now. You might not even know this because the notices during the install process are easy to overlook, and the updater gets installed in places that you normally don't check.

Whether you want this background process running on your system is a different story, but at a minimum it should disappear when you uninstall the last app from Google; and this is what should happen in theory, but it's not what I've seen in practice.

So, here are the steps to manually uninstall the Google updater.

1) Check the "LaunchAgents" folders in the Library and ~/Library folders for a Google "keystone agent" and remove that.

2) Make sure that the system's launchd doesn't waste time looking for the (now deleted) keystone agent:

launchctl remove com.google.keystone.user.agent

3) Delete the actual updater from either Library/Google or ~/Library/Google.

This should be it. You might have to tweak step 2 depending on what kind of admin rights you had when you installed the Google software as the agent might have been installed on a system rather than a user level.

As a side note: I find it interesting that the installer seems to prefer to write to the system-wide library folder, and only if it doesn't have permission falls back on the user-specific folder. It doesn't ask you, like the system's font, widget, or pref pane installers, where you want it. Surely, only a suspicious mind would assume that this is to avoid making it obvious to the user that some form of background software is installed in the first place...

Batch converting HTML files to PDF using OS X and 'convert' utility

2009-12-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

At work we are converting content to a new website. As a part of that conversion, some older content will be archived on the new site in the form of PDF documents.

I needed something to convert HTML documents to PDF. We own Adobe's software and there is an option to convert entire web URLs to a single PDF, but that's not what we needed.
I could convert single URLs using the same Adobe software, but that wasn't an optimum solution either. My boss, through a Google search had found a utility on the Mac called 'convert' which does this.

I automated this through a Bash script call, but we still had problems because the pages were truncated. I went to the directory where the "convert" application was, and found it links to 'cupsfilter' in /usr/bin.

By figuring out what cupsfilter does, I was able to determine the parameters necessary to make the PDFs landscape, and use the page size of A4, which was enough to have it work properly.

The great thing about this is if we would have used the "Save As" feature to save each page to a PDF it would have taken hundreds of hours. Using a Bash shell it took an hour to convert three directories of HTML files with about 150+ files per directory. Even though I used 'convert' I suspect you could do the same thing by using the cupsfilter directly on any UNIX variant.

The key parameter was "landscape" but when using "convert" it wasn't obvious how to specify the parameters correctly. Through cupsfilter man pages I found out what I needed; in cupsfilter it's with a "-o" option, but in "convert" it's using -a. For media format options were "Letter" "Legal" and "A4" but A4 worked best. Letter was a little too small and ended up truncating some of our documents.

Here's my Bash Shell Command that walked through the current
directory finding HTML files with the extension HTM, and for
the output file name used SED (Stream EDitor) to convert the
HTM in the filename to the output file type of PDF.

for name in `ls *.htm` ; do /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert -f $name -o `echo $name | sed s/htm/pdf/` -a landscape -a scaling=75 -a media=A4; done

I have to point out that if I was still using a PC I could have probably done this with CygWin but the articles we found on Google indicate the people that did this used convert and I don't know I would have figured out to use cupsfilter instead which is what Mac OS X linked to.

Firefox like Shortcuts in Safari

2009-11-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

I've been a Firefox user for years. It was leaps above the other solutions available when I first discovered it, but as of late, the general slowness and high crash frequency have had me wondering once again what else is out there.

I like Safari for the most part, but really hate the default shortcut combinations--opt+cmd-f does not speak to me. Thankfully, I finally stumbled across a wonderful post that details how you can setup Firefox like shortcuts in Safari. It does require a small external app, but I haven't noticed it yet, and the speed of the shortcuts feels as if they're native Safari commands.

Take a look at Roberto's post here if you're interested. Enjoy!

Encrypted mail storage without FileVault

2009-10-28T19:22:00.001-07:00

If you want to or, like in my case, have to make sure that email is stored encrypted on your laptop the easiest option is to turn on FileVault. This has two disadvantages, though: you lose much of Time Machine's transparency and access to all files in your home directory is slowed down; nothing you'd note when just looking at documents but a slight annoyance when building code. So, what's the alternative?

Apple's Mail.app stores its local data in ~/Library/Mail so all we really need to achieve is encryption of this folder. There are a three simple steps to follow that do exactly that. If you are unfamiliar with the command line this might not be for you, though.

First, you need to create an encrypted disk image. The easiest way to do this is with the DiskUtility application. Make sure that you choose an encrypted read/write disk image with enough room for all your mail. I chose 4 gig as this has a fair bit of room left for me but will allow me to make easy backups onto DVDs. Note that it's not advisable to create a sparse image because these have a tendency to become corrupted on hard resets. Regarding the name for the image, if in doubt use "Mail" as the name. The following screen shot summarises my settings:

Next, mount the image by double clicking it and use Finder to copy the contents of your ~/Library/Mail folder to the disk image. You might want to quit Mail and iCal before doing this.

Then drop into a command line and replace the Mail folder with the disk image: (The trailing dot on the third command is important.)

cd ~/Library
rm -Rf Mail
ln -s /Volumes/Mail .

And that's it! Now all your local email is stored in an encrypted disk image.

When you restart your computer or log out and back in, the Mail volume gets unmounted. If you forget to remount it no harm is done, Mail.app will just crash. So, just mount the image and restart Mail.

There are different opinions on whether it is safe to store the password for the encrypted image in the keychain. If in doubt, don't. This means you will get prompted for the password whenever you mount the image but if you mostly keep logged in and don't restart your computer often this isn't much of a problem.

Update: If you follow the steps above full-text search will not work because that uses Spotlight, which isn't enabled on disk images by default. The following command fixes this problem:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Mail

It is probably safer to quite Mail before running this command, and it can take a few minutes before the initial index is built; the command returns immediately but you should see activity for a while by a background process.

Building a Hackintosh

2009-10-19T21:25:00.001-07:00

Just a quick note to say that I've successfully built a Hackintosh. The full report can be found here.

QuickLook for Markdown Documents

2009-10-06T05:02:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of the Markdown simplified markup language and try to use it for most of my prose. There are lots of tools out in the world to transform Markdown into other formats: Markdown itself does HTML, but you can also get a tool like Pandoc with a huge number of output formats for Markdown.

However, one piece I was missing is the ability to "Quick Look" Markdown documents within Finder. Be default, it shows the generic "I'm a file" icon when you do Quick Look, and I would like either just the text or the rendered results.

Found it! QLMarkdown is a utility that you add to your ~/Library/QuickLook folder and gives you the rendered rich output from your markdown source document (and it works with either the ".md" or ".markdown" extensions). One more piece of the puzzle solved.

Tidying up Finder's "Open With" menu

2009-06-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

Many applications can open common file types such as HTML or JPG, and they all, conveniently, get an entry in Finder's "Open With" contextual menu. Under many circumstances this is even true for applications that are installed in VMware Fusion or Parallel Desktop. Unfortunately, when you delete these applications, or you decide that you don't want applications in virtual machines to open files, the context menu items remain. In my case some context menus became cluttered to the point of being unusable.

This is such an obvious problem that I expected to find an answer using Google straight away. Maybe my search skills failed me but it took me a good while to find the right answer for Leopard, which is why I want to share it here.

There is this article on Lifehacker. However, the article itself has it wrong; the real solution is in a response by "mtts" halfway down the page, and even then the command doesn't work as described on Leopard. What did the trick for me, on Leopard, was the following command:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

There is no manpage for lsregister but invoking it without any arguments will display some help.

Mac Boot Mysteries

2009-05-26T06:37:00.000-07:00

This is long, digressive story about diagnosing a hardware problem on a Mac; if you dislike such stories, feel free to leave now.

About a week ago, my wife Candy complains to me that her Mac won't boot up. This is my hand-me-down Mac (we have a new policy in our house: Candy gets my hand-me-down computers, and I get her hand-me-down cameras), which means that it's about 2 years old, but it has a relatively new hard drive that I installed last November. A long time ago, I had set the startup option to always run in Verbose startup mode (on demand by holding COMMAND-V upon startup, or permanent by issuing the following command:

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Anyway, I could see from the startup porn that she was having a kernel panic with 2 likely suspects: the fan control daemon and something about Cisco VPN. Now, Candy doesn't have a Cisco VPN, but given that this was my hand-me-down machine, that explains why some of that stuff is there. Candy hadn't installed anything in the last week or so, leading me to think that one of these two was the culprit. She had been complaining that her machine was getting slower and slower, including things like window resizing, which had me puzzled. Perhaps a dying fan was causing the processor to overheat and thus slow down?

I tried safe boot (no joy), and at this point I suspect the fan. I'm certainly not afraid to crack open a Mac (with proper respect), but replacing a fan isn't high on my list of fun things to do, so we made an appointment at the Genius bar. To Candy's credit, she had a SuperDuper! backup that was just a couple of days old, so virtually everything was safe.

We went to the genius bar where the GenX slacker (this is a compliment) booted the Mac from an external drive. I hadn't tried this (even though I have several bootable drives laying around) because I was fixated on the fan problem. After booting it up, his suspicion now lies with the VPN stuff, and I reluctantly concur (especially after he ran some fan diagnostics). Now, though, the question remains: why did this problem suddenly occur? What was his (depressing) advice to fix this problem? Reinstall Leopard and all your applications. What?!? Is this a freakin' Windows machine? I couldn't believe that was real Genius advice. I've never yet had to do a ground-up reinstall of everything, but if that's the only way...hmmmm. He was very knowledgeable, and obviously he doesn't tread in the realm of VPN stuff. He also correctly pointed out that a bad fan shouldn't cause slowness: redrawing windows is mostly handled by the GPU on the Mac. The slowness was as far as I can tell a red herring.

When I got home, the first thing I did was boot Mac OS X from an external drive and get a real SuperDuper! snapshot, getting the real current snapshot. Once I have that, I can play. Candy has already agreed to the pain and degradation of reinstalling everything, but I have to think there's a better way. Then, I had a brain storm: I took the SuperDuper! snapshot I just made and booted the machine from the external drive. Success! That suggests that some part of the internal hard drive that houses the VPN stuff has somehow gotten corrupted, but still allows it to boot using the same image from an external drive. Because I have the SuperDuper! safety net, I decided on an experiment. I reformatted the internal hard drive and ran Drive Genius on it to scan for bad sectors. Nothing of note came from that, but then I overlaid my most recent SuperDuper! snapshot back onto the internal drive.

Success! The internal drive now boots, and everything appears back to normal. I'm guessing that my bad sector theory was correct.

Lessons:

Don't reinstall everything! My record is still clean on that account: I have never had to do that on a Mac yet (and it was a once-a-year chore on Windows because of bit rot).

Always have good backups. This would have been a tragedy rather than a comedy if Candy hadn't been using SuperDuper!. It has yet to let me down, and it has saved my bacon on several occasions.

I immediately latched onto the fan because it seemed to support other observed phenomena. I should have booted it myself from an external drive and run Drive Genius, but I thought I had it figured out.

Stop and think. It was a good thing that we had dinner plans with a neighbor when we got back from the genius bar. It was over dinner that I had the idea of just overlaying the snapshot again. If I had started on it as soon as we got back, I would have been creating a lot of movement without a lot of forward progress. Sitting and thinking about it opened my mind to alternative options.

SuperDuper! rocks. I can't imagine life without it.

SmartSleep Preference Pane

2009-01-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

A while back, Erik blogged about the Unsafe Sleep setting for Macs, allowing for ultra-quick sleep and wake up. The only two problems: 1) it takes a little terminal magic to set new defaults for your machine and 2) you can't change the battery when the machine is only asleep (thus, "unsafe" sleep).

Now that's changed with the SmartSleep preference pane. It allows you to set all the possible settings plus a new one. From the preference pane itself:

smart sleep: sleep if battery charge is above the sleep & hibernate level. Hibernates only when battery charge is below 5% or less than 5 minutes.
sleep: machine will go to sleep only (saves state in RAM only, battery keeps RAM contents)
sleep & hibernate: machine sleeps and hibernates. (default)
hibernate only machine will go to hibernate only. (saves state on disk, battery will not be used)

The first one is new: it dynamically allows the machine to do "unsafe sleep" until the battery gets low, then switch to "sleep + hibernate", allowing changing the battery while the machine is asleep. Very nice: best of both worlds.

MenuMeters & Text

2008-12-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Lots of OS X geeks I know use Menu Meters to monitor the goings on for their machines. But here's a nuance that remembered last week, watching one of my colleagues give a presentation. I can't remember exactly where I heard (overheard?) this, but apparently it's quite relatively expensive to paint letters and numbers on the task area of the menu bar as opposed to graphics. Not sure why, and it may just be a rumor, but in any case, I tend to keep the graphical version of the CPU meters up, not the numeric one, just in case.

Open in Terminal (4 Ways)

2008-11-19T11:12:00.000-08:00

One of the cool little helpers I talk about in The Productive Programmer is "Command Prompt Here" or "Bash Here": little context menu items for Windows that allow you to select a folder in Explorer, right click, and open a command prompt (or bash shell, if you are using Cygwin) at that location. Someone recently asked me if you can do this on the Mac, and it turns out you can, in a surprisingly large number of ways.

The first way leverages Automator to create a little script that makes an Automator plug-in for Finder. This trick appears here. The cool thing about this tip is the stuff it teaches about building Finder extension via Automator, which is a pretty cool subject unto itself. However, the bad thing about the final solution proffered by this tip is the location where the context menu appears: 2 levels down in the right-click menu, under Automator. Too much clicking.

Not being satisfied with the above, I found an alternative, which creates a toolbar icon at the top of Finder that opens the current selected folder (or the folder of the currently selected file) when you click on it. This trick appears here. The only downside of this version is the number of windows it spawns: one per request, instead of opening new tabs (it was created before Terminal supported tabs in Leopard). So, not to be outdone, the author describes the steps to upgrade it to tabbed terminal in Leopard here. One gotcha exists in his instructions: he says to replace the original script with the one found on this page, but I assumed you could do that with a text editor. It turns out that you need to use the script editor that launches when you double-click the main.scpt file. Otherwise, it works like a charm.

The reason I haven't pursued this before on the Mac? I generally use PathFinder, which includes not only a context menu for "Open in Terminal", it also has an embedded Terminal, which opens in the current folder. Highly recommended, but it you don't want to spend the money, you can get the same effect by harvesting the links in this entry.

The New Backup Strategy

2008-08-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

Before Leopard, I had a specific backup strategy for both my volatile content (things like source code, documents, etc) and my entire hard drive, which was a snapshot backup. The volatile documents solution was Subversion, kept on a remote, universally accessible machine. The snapshot backup was handled by SuperDuper, which backs up your entire drive in a bootable state, essentially creating a complete snapshot of your hard drive. A couple of problems reared up because of this setup.

I had to handle the "package" files (the ones created by Apple iWork, like Keynote and Numbers) files specially, because Subversion didn't like the way the applications managed the contents. Basically, I had to zip/unzip them for version control. This wasn't terrible (I automated the process to a large degree), but still a little annoying.
My Subversion repository was huge, because I had my entire Documents folder in it. However, most of the documents were there just so that I could have a backup, not because I wanted to version them. The only files I really versioned where the source files and related content.

The advent of Leopard and Time Machine changed my strategy. First, I separated out the Documents stuff for which I really only wanted backups and let Time Machine handle them. I put all my versionable files (like source files) in a new, much smaller Subversion repository. And, even though I have Time Machine, I still use SuperDuper to create backups. The reason I use both:

I want the hourly, behind the scenes backup provided by Time Machine.
I want to be able to browse backwards in time to look at previous versions of those files, and the Time Machine UI is gorgeous for that.
Time Machine alone isn't sufficient. To restore from Time Machine, you have to boot your machine from a startup disk, then restore the backup. Yuck! I still like SuperDuper's snapshot approach, which I've proven to myself works flawlessly (see Don't Crack Open Your Mac for the story).
SuperDuper and Time Machine can share the same drive, so I have a single 500 GB drive that has all my backups on it.
It's now easier to replicate the source code in more places (IOW, more machines) because it's much smaller.
You can tell Time Machine to only backup certain directories (or, more specifically, exclude directories you don't want backed up). Because I only use Time Machine for my Documents folder, it takes only a little space.
Because SuperDuper creates a bootable drive image, and my external drive is FireWire, I can boot another MacBook Pro with the external drive. Yes, it's slow, but if the worst happened while on the road, and I've got to present at a conference, as long as I can borrow/steal another machine, I can boot into my machine from backup and do my presentation.

I've been using this approach for a while, and it works nicely. I leave the external hard drive hooked up all the time, and start a snapshot backup at bedtime every night. SuperDuper has a nice option that will sleep the computer when it's finished it's work. So far, this it working out really well. I haven't had to restore the whole drive from SuperDuper yet on this machine (but I know that works -- I've done it on other machines), and I have used Time Machine to grab a file that accidentally got deleted.

Keyboard Zoom

2008-08-11T17:39:00.001-07:00

This is a re-blog from Jack Dempsey, setting up a keyboard shortcut to Zoom.

This works well because almost all Mac applications include the Zoom menu item on the Window menu.

Thanks, Jack.

Quick Blank

2008-08-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

This was left by Emilio as a comment to the Quick Sleep entry from before, but I'm afraid not enough people read the comments so I'm promoting it to full-blown entry.

The keychord CTRL-SHIFT-EJECT instantly blanks the screen, without invoking the screen saver. It's just instant blank. Note that it will not lock the screen if you have passwords turned on for the screen saver, it just makes the screen blank. Still, pretty cool.

Keynote Mode for Keynote

2008-08-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

Several people have asked me how to turn on Keynote mode in Keynote. Keynote mode is where the presenter sees a different view from the audience. In Keynote, you can set up a mode that allows you to see the current slide, the upcoming slide, the time of day, the elapsed time from when you showed the first slide, and the "ready to progress" bar (a red/green bar at the top of the screen that lets you know that all the transitions have completed successfully). To get Keynote mode to work, you must set a particular set of options in Keynote preferences, and getting the combination is just rigth is tricky (especially if you aren't connected to a projector). To show the magic combination, here are the settings I use. First up, the Preferences dialog that controls what you (the presenter) sees:

The other settings appear on the the Slideshow Preferences dialog, shown here:

This is the dialog that controls Keynote's projection options. The important options here are the Allow Epose, Dashboard, and others to use screen, which allows you to see the mouse cursor and interact with the screen even when slides are showing, and the Present on secondary display, which uses the projector (i.e., the external monitor) to show the slides.

There are a couple of caveats to using Keynote mode. First, you must un-mirror your display (found on Display Preferences, under System Prefereces). I usually use the option in Display Options to place them on my menu bar, so that I have easy access to the Display Prefereces. When you un-mirror your display, it is exactly the same as using an external monitor. That means that you can't really do code demos and such unless you want to look over your shoulder. That's why most of my slides how have source code embedded on the slide, so that I can use Keynote mode.

Quick Sleep

2008-07-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Pimp my shell

2008-06-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

When I switched over to Ruby development, I said goodbye to Eclipse and IDEA. I was never one to shy away from a terminal so the transition back to a text editor (I tend to use TextMate and ViM) and iTerm was an easy one.

At ThoughtWorks I worked on one client project at a time, and maybe one or two open source ones. Now at Relevance there are weeks when I work on four client projects and a half dozen open source projects (thanks to open source Fridays). To make things more difficult, I've got a mix of Subversion and Git projects.

To ease the transition back and forth between projects I:

Got scm information in the bash prompt. This is something the git folks have been doing for long time.

Abstracted out the scm commands I use most frequently. In other words, I can now type up or commit instead of svn up / git pull vs svn commit / git commit && git push.

Created an alias that takes me back to the root of my project by guessing it from the SCM structure.

Showed the current project in iTerm's tab title.

Displayed the previously executed command in the tab title (next to the project).

Rounded out the tab title by alternatively showing the currently running command if one was currently running.

Made it notice new projects as I checked them by implementing automatic aliases to project directories.

None of these was especially difficult but each of them has improved my shell environment. Thanks to Alan Cooper and Edward Tufte, I am beginning to understand that good usability doesn't necessarily require difficult technical solutions. Indeed, coming up with each idea and a seamless UI for it was harder than implementing it.

The features described above came down to making my shell environment:

Tell me about my current context.

Adjust based on the context.

I think that part of the reason we use MacOS is because it does some of this for us. It changes the menus based on which app is in focus. CoverFlow gives us a visual indication of where we are in the stack of files we're looking at. Maximizing a Safari.app window only maximizes it as far as it needs to in order to horizontally fit the content.

What else do you think your shell environment should do for you? Why?

Opening emailed Office documents

2008-06-25T21:48:00.000-07:00

How hard can it be? I upgraded to Office 2008 SP1 on my work laptop (I only use iWork on my home machine) and now I can't seem to open Microsoft Office documents that have been emailed to me. How could they break this? Well, long story, and I'm actually more interested in fixing it. So, following these steps did it for me:

* Download MisFox, then double-click on "MisFox.prefPane" to install
* In the MisFox system preferences pane pick the File Mappings tab
* Scroll down the list till you find "Word Document" and the .doc file extension
* Double click on that line to open the editor
* Set the Creator Code to MSWD and the File Type to W8BN
* Check "Resource Fork is Significant"
* Repeat last steps for Excel, setting the code to XCEL and the type XLS8
* Repeat for Powerpoint, setting the code to PPT3 and the type to SLD8

Thanks to my colleagues at ThoughtWorks for figuring this out.

Unexpected utilities

2008-06-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

There are many things on the Mac that just work so well that you hardly think about them, never mind looking for a utility that improves them. And then you stumble across a utility and after a short while you wonder how you lived without it before...

One of these areas is unarchiving. You just double-click the archive file in Finder and something runs in the background that opens it. What else would you want? Turns out you want The Unarchiver. Not only does is support more archive formats, including the dreaded StuffIt ones, but it also deals with the already supported ones better.

Another area is software update. Apple's Software Update works well, the big packages from Adobe and Microsoft have decent updaters, and, more surprisingly, most application written by indie developers have good and consistent update functionality. The latter is actually thanks to the excellent Sparkle framework. If you are a developer check it out. That said, what else could you ask for? Download and use AppFresh for a while and you'll know.

Widening Columns

2008-06-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

One of the things I find myself doing all the time is making columns wider in Open and Save dialogs. I have a bunch of file names that are really long (the downloadable names of my presentations), and I find myself grabbing the little handle at the bottom of the column a lot to widen the column. Last month's MacWorld to the rescue. You can double-click on the little abraded area at the bottom of the column and it will resize the column to accommodate the longest file name.

Going one step further, you can right-click on the abraded area and get a pop-up menu that lets you choose one of three options: Right Size This Column, Right Size All Columns Individually, and Right Size All Columns Equally, as shown here:

Try as I might, I couldn't get a keyboard shortcut to stick for this (normal keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work in Open and Save dialogs). If anyone can, I'll be grateful. But this is good enough: rather than resizing by hand with the mouse, I can let if figure out the correct size (alas, still with the mouse).

Scrial Consistency

2008-05-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

About a decade ago, I worked with a colleague (named Terry) who was obsessed with finding the right way to organize his day. He and I had long digressive conversations about how best to manage tasks, calendars, email, etc. During that time, I studied things like the Covey method heavily. One of the enduring things I took from the Covey stuff was the distinction between the urgent and important. Lots of things are both, but there are some things in life that are urgent but not important and others that are important but not urgent. Terry and I discussed this category a lot, because busy people tend to ignore that quadrant the most.

Fast forward to today. I don't use the Covey system any more because it does not match my work habits well. I've struggled for a while putting together an effective way to handle my increasingly complex ToDo lists. I keep finding some applications that handle parts of what I need well, but fall down on other parts. For example, I've been using TaskPaper for a while, which I like because it's very simple, text based, and lightweight. But the thing that TaskPaper doesn't do well is handle the semi-recurring stuff, like haircut or dentist appointments: recurring appointments that fall into the "I need to do this 6 weeks after the last time I completed it" category. For that, I've been using a special purpose tool called Sciral Consistency (commercial, with a "try before you buy" option). It's not really a ToDo list manager so much as way to handle that specialized relationship between semi-recurring tasks and calendars. The Sciral Consistency site says that it handles the following types of conditions:

They don't have deadlines or rigid time intervals associated with them.

In order to gain and retain their benefits, you must perform them on a regular basis over a long period of time.

The ideal amount of time that elapses between completions of a particular task are unique to that task. To gain the maximum benefit you shouldn't do them too frequently or infrequently.

They can be carried out by you with minimal or no coordination with other people.

They are often “routine” tasks for which you have not firmly established a habit of carrying them out as second nature.

They are (in the words of Stephen Covey) “important, but not urgent.”

Sciral Consistency handles these things using a unique calendar view, which looks like this (also from their site):

You create tasks with threshold values: after I finish this task, I need to do it again between 10 and 14 days from the finish date. You can have a bunch of these calendars. Like the last bullet point says, it is great for handling recurring "important but not urgent" tasks. I've been using Sciral Consistency for a while, and it serves me well.

I'm still on the lookout for a comprehensive solution. Recently, I've become mostly addicted to OmniFocus, a great GTD inspired task manager, which somewhat handles this special case. I haven't succumbed to the GTD religion, but like the Covey stuff before, I've assimilatedwhat I consider the good parts and made them part of my routine. I'll say more about OmniFocus once it has sunk into my work habit.

Unsafe Sleep

2008-05-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

One thing I really liked about my PowerBook Pismo was its instant and super reliable sleep/wake functionality. In contrast the new MacBooks are slow as molasses and sometimes fail to wake up at all, at least for me.

One feature that is responsible for the MacBook to take a long time to sleep is SafeSleep. Basically, whenever you put your MacBook to sleep it saves the entire contents of its memory onto the hard drive, usually into /var/vm/sleepimage. It does so to ensure that no data gets lost even if the battery runs out while it is asleep. This hardly ever happens to me, and even if it did I wouldn't mind because I generally don't keep unsaved documents open. So, for me SafeSleep is a waste of time and energy, because it does cost battery to write all that memory to the hard drive, as well as disk space for the sleep image file.

If you haven't seen the wake up progress bar you might also be interested in turning off SafeSleep. But how? Apple decided not to repeat the Vista sleep fiasco and chose what would be the most useful functionality for 95% percent of their users; and not to confuse anyone, they decided against offering an obvious way to change it. That said, OS X is extremely modular and of course there's command line access to configure how you want your MacBook to sleep. Without further ado:


[499 ~] pmset -g
Active Profiles:
Battery Power  -1
AC Power  -1*
Currently in use:
 sleep  60
 sms  1
 acwake  0
 displaysleep 30
 autorestart 0
 hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage
 hibernatemode 3
 womp  1
 halfdim 1
 disksleep 10
 lidwake 1
 ttyskeepawake 1

You can see where it keeps the sleepimage and you can see that hibernate mode is set to 3, the default for new MacBooks. What I want is for my MacBook to never write its memory to disk.


[501 ~] sudo pmset hibernatemode 0
[502 ~] rm /var/vm/sleepimage

Now I have 2 gigs of disk space back, and I have near instant sleep; at the price of losing some work under circumstances which are unlikely for me.

More details and more fine-tuning possibilities are described here.

Secrets!

2008-03-19T18:46:00.000-07:00

The creator of Quicksilver has created a new little power-user goodie called Secrets. It allows you to tweak a bunch of internal settings for Leopard all from one nice, consolidated place. It reminds me of TweakUI for the Mac, but with slightly more fundamental control. It is basically a UI for user defaults for all sorts of applications.

Better Menubar Shortcut

2008-02-10T19:27:00.000-08:00

It seems that Leopard broke one of my favorite Quicksilver magic tricks, documented here, which allows you to access the topmost application's menus through a Quicksilver trigger. It seems to work only with a few applications now, and intermittently at best.

The next best thing is the incremental search of the menu bar, where you get the cursor up onto the menu bar and type the first part of the menu you want, hit enter when it highlights the correct target, then incrementally search for the leaf item you want. Rinse and repeat. The only problem is the shortcut key to get up to the menubar: CTRL-F2, which is cumbersome on my laptop.

I'd rather light a candle than curse darkness, so I remapped it to CTRL-ALT-APPLE-SPACE (which are all together). This sounds like a horror, but it's really easy, and that combination wasn't taken by anything I can find. Until Quicksilver fixes the application proxy stuff, this is the next best thing.

Virtually instant update: Apparently Jason was sitting with his computer on, hitting the refresh button over and over on this blog, because he posted this comment almost before I finished the first entry. This link shows how to use a help hotkey for an alphabetized, incrementally searchable list of menu command in Leopard via the new help system. I added it here in case the comment didn't get read by everyone. Thanks, Jason!

Path Finder

2008-02-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

For simple file manipulation, I tend to use Quicksilver (the universal solvent). However, when it comes time for heavy lifting, I turn to Path Finder. This is a hugely useful Finder replacement, even the new, improved Finder in Leopard. It has tons of useful stuff. The cookie trail of where you are in the directory structure? Path Finder has had that for a while. And, you can right click on it and copy the path in a bunch of different formats (UNIX, HFS, Terminal, Windows, etc). And you can click on it to get to the underlying contents of the path. It's tabbed, so you can drag and drop from one tab to the other.

It also has the best (which is damning with faint praise) Subversion client on the Mac (still no Tortoise for the Mac -- rats!). You still have to do serious stuff from the command line, but the Subversion client in Path Finder is great for simple stuff. And yesterday it saved me about 15 minutes of bash hacking because of the "Change Extension" command, which allows you to bulk change extensions of files.

My wife moved (evolved?) from Windows to Mac, and she found Finder too limiting compared to Windows Explorer. But she loves Path Finder. It's one of the first things I put on new machines.

Leopard Spots: Paste from Finder to Terminal

2008-01-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

Actually, I don't know if this is a new Leopard thing or not, but it's massively useful. The other day, I needed to move some JAR files from one place to another, and I already had my trusty terminal window open on the destination directory. I wasn't sure which ones I needed in the giant pile in the source directory, so a wildcard expedition in Quicksilver didn't seem like the right way to go. So, I went to Finder and visually sighted the 4 files I needed. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just copy and paste them into the terminal? Why not try? So I did. Now, it didn't copy the files, but it did give me fully qualified path names to each of the files, separated with a space. A quick "cp" added to the front and an " ." added to the end, and they're copied. I don't know if Finder has always allowed you to copy and paste fully qualified file names, but it sure does now.

Heist!

2008-01-15T17:41:00.000-08:00

Once a year, the MacHeist web site comes out with a bundle of a bunch of Mac software, with a bundle price much lower than the sum of the individual products. And they only offer it for 2 weeks. We're already 1 week into this year's MacHeist, and it has come great software in it (including 1Password, which I talked about in an earlier post). The applications this year:

1Password
CoverSutra
Cha-Ching
iStopMotion
Awaken
Speed Download
AppZapper
TaskPaper
CssEdit
Snap Pro X
Pixelmator

I use 1Password, Speed Download, AppZapper, and Snap Pro X all the time, and the combination of those applications alone is worth the heist price of $49. Check it out -- it's a great deal.

Drowning in Receipts

2008-01-14T19:34:00.000-08:00

This is probably only useful to those who travel a lot with expense accounts. I generate lots of receipts. One of my former co-workers was diligent about scanning or copying all his receipts and keeping the originals, so that he never had to worry about the US Postal service eating them. Good idea, but too labor intensive.

Recently, I was talking to another of my colleagues this very topic. He had a clever trick: he carries a portable scanner with him. That allows him to scan the paper receipts as soon as he generates them, then he has multiple copies; he can send them in with expense reports via email, and he always keeps a copy. Sold! The only problem was that he was using NeatReceipts, a hardware/software combination that only works on Windows.

After a little research, I ended up buying this light, portable scanner from Amazon. For software, I use either Preview (yes, it can act as a TWAIN device to capture scanner input) or GraphicConverter, my preferred Swiss-army chain-saw for image manipulation. I scan the receipts as PDF, then combine all the files (using Acrobat, the full blown version) to create a nice little receipts package for expenses. This is great for me because I have a terrible time keeping up with the little scraps of paper.

One Password

2008-01-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

Generating and keeping track of hundreds of strong passwords is a giant pain. I've used several different schemes in the past (and software to manage it), but haven't found a good alternative for the computer + iPhone situation...until now. When I got my new laptop, I tried 1Password (commercial), based on a review I read somewhere. I was hoping just for good password generation and browser plug-ins, but it has one great trick up its sleeve that I hadn't anticipated: synching with the iPhone.

No, it doesn't hack the iPhone and install an application. It writes a password protected web page to the file system on the iPhone, and you access it through the browser. So, the URL you look at starts with "file:///", but it acts just like a web page on the phone.

I haven't tried many of the other similar applications, but it seems to have a pretty killer combination of password storage, strong generation, and synching. And, they are beta-ing a service to securely keep passwords on their site so that you can access them across machines. I'll have to see what that looks like when it appears, but I'm pretty happy even without that.

Scary Screen Mode

2008-01-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

One of the joys of using a laptop is portability. But as anyone who has tried to use a laptop outside in the sunlight knows, the screen is hard to read.

Which brings up this keyboard shortcut: CTRL-OPTION-APPLE-8, which switches to "inverse" mode. Basically, it inverts all the colors on the screen. Try it -- I'll wait. Notice this this is "8", not "F8".

See? Scary, huh? Great for using your laptop outside, though.

Calendar Madness

2008-01-02T10:48:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to coordinate my calendars for a long time. My wife has her calendar and of course I have several of my own for all the traveling I do. For a while, I had iCal files hosted in a protected part of my web site. But that wasn't sufficient: several other people (who don't use Macs) also need access to some of my calendars, and I don't want to be in the business of permissions, software, etc. to make the old system work.

Then I found what I'm looking for: Spanning Sync. This is a commercial piece of software that automagically synchronizes iCal calendars with Google calendars. You can have as many calendars synchronizing as you want. It's licensed by Google account login, so now I can use calendars from any one of my machines and ensure that they all get synced (and that includes my wife's computer, which is using my same Google calendar account). And, I can selectively expose which calendars I want through the sharing mechanism at Google calendars.

The initial synchronization takes a long time, but after that it just runs in the lint bar, syncing on a regular basis (which is configurable). I've used it for about a month now, and it meets my goals: invisibly synchronizing all my calendars so that I have a single source of schedule information.

Now, if dopplr would only subscribe to Google calendar...

DRY: now for updating your status

2007-12-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

A quickie: Statz let's you update your status on a variety of IM clients as well as Tumblr, Twitter.

And remember: Don't repeat yourself!

Some not so obvious Leopard features

2007-12-12T15:57:00.000-08:00

I've now had some more time to play with Leopard, and I've found a few features that aren't immediately obvious, at least they weren't to me. So, in no particular order:

The slideshow feature in Finder isn't gone. It looks like it has been replaced by Quick Look but holding down the Option (Alt) key when opening the context menu brings back slideshow. I like this much better for viewing a set of pictures or browsing through some movies.

Some Apple applications have special support for Time Machine. This must be described somewhere prominent but I missed it for a good while. Just click on the Time Machine icon in the dock while Mail or Address Book are in the foreground... I like the feature but I don't like the way it is invoked. So far, clicking on an icon in the dock made the application active. Nothing else. Now, however, the result of clicking on an icon in the dock becomes contextual, depending on which other application is active.

Preview now has support for annotations and other markup. Just use the customize toolbar function and have a look around.

There are a few new visualisers in iTunes. And they look good!

Last but now least, change the timezone in one of the dashboard world clock widgets and observe how the hands are animated. I guess, we'll see a lot more gratuitous animations now that core animation has been released.

Don't worry about TimeMachine partitions

2007-12-02T15:19:00.000-08:00

When I upgraded to Leopard I also bought an external harddrive for TimeMachine backups. Now, I want to use the drive with two different laptops and because it's quite big I also wouldn't mind keeping some space for a Tiger install to test my software on that. Reading the forums it became quite obvious that each TimeMachine backup should get its own partition, and here's where the agony began: How large should these partitions be? Yes, you can change partition sizes but if you want to keep the contents intact there are severe limitations. So, you starting thinking about the ordering of the partitions, too.

Luckily, I stumbled across another forum thread, in which people discuss copying TimeMachine backups. Somehow, maybe because of all the hard-link magic, I had assumed this wasn't possible but it turns out that the restore facility in Disk Utility can handle it. This means that even if you get your partition sizes wrong initially, you won't lose your backups when you change them later. You obviously need some temporary space somewhere else, though.

Oh, and if like me you did at some point delete that funny .000d8322fed6 (or similar) file in the root directory of your TimeMachine partition, help's here.

Leopard Spots: Quick Look at ZIP Files

2007-11-28T00:58:00.000-08:00

The first of the Leopard-specific entries. This site has a Finder plug-in called "Zip Quick Look". You download it, copy it into ~/Library/QuickLook or /Library/QuickLook. Then, in Finder, when you have a ZIP file selected, you can press the SPACEBAR and see something like this:

Way cool.

Leopard Customization Command Line Reference

2007-11-27T06:05:00.000-08:00

Just stumbled across this list of command line ways to customize Leopard. Not all are useful (IMO), but others might be interested. I don't believe most of these will work on Tiger, so don't bother unless you've upgraded:

http://macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/terminal-commands-for-hidden-settings-in-leopard.html

Neal's Lint: The Giant Lint Ball

2007-11-15T05:44:00.000-08:00

I've been writing about lint recently, and my co-worker Eric showed me this site full of useful lint. There's lots of cool stuff here -- enough to fill your menubar with enough lint to start crowding your menu items off!

Neal's Lint: Delibar

2007-11-15T05:40:00.000-08:00

I use del.icio.us to keep track of my bookmarks, and I've installed the requisite buttons in my browsers. But there's a little piece of lint that provides even better access: delibar. It creates a lint item that give you ready access to your bookmarks and, more importantly, instant keyboard access to the list. It also has some handy stuff like the "recent posts" to quickly grab the stuff you've added recently.

Don't Crack Open Your Mac

2007-11-10T20:10:00.000-08:00

OK, repeat after me: I must never open my MacBook Pro...I must never open my MacBook Pro. I recently decided to replace my hard drive because the old one was making a scary sound (partially chronicled here.) You have to unscrew about 20 screws (including some Torx screws, so pay attention to the required tools list). The installation went fine, and I had a new, bigger, faster hard drive. I used it blissfully for a week, sitting on the iCurve stand next to my monitor, using my KVM switch with an external keyboard.

Then, I had to hit the road. When I got to the airport, I pulled out my machine to do some stuff, including starting a document I had to write. Time to get on the plane, so I just shut the lid, put it in my bag, and off to the plane. Once I got on board, I wanted to make a few changes to the document, so I popped open my machine. It was off. That's odd. It should just be asleep. Anyway, I rebooted it. Then, as I was typing, it just quit. No crashing, no complaint, just on one second and off the next. Oh, crap! I'm on my way to give a presentation to a company: this isn't good.

When I landed, I prayed that this was an intermediate problem. I went to a coffee shop and started typing. I noticed that every once and a while, my screen would kind of blink/fuzz out, but just for a split second. While I was typing, I was getting black and white rectangles (little tiny ones) every once in a while, and then the machine locked up hard. Then, using my best forensic debugging skills, I noticed that the fuzzy/squares problem happened when I hit the 7 key. And now I knew what is going on: in the course of replacing the hard drive, I pulled out a ribbon cable or got some junk that's laying on my motherboard right under the 7 key. When I type, it's causing a short. OK, the presentation doesn't require much typing, and I can hit the 7 key very gingerly to avoid the problem.

When I got home that night, I pulled the 20+ screws out again and found the culprit: a little screw (it must have come from the new drive because I had replaced all the original ones) was laying nicely on the top of the motherboard, causing the short every time I hit the key. I de-screwed it, and it's been fine ever since. I'm lucky that it gave me symptoms: if it had just locked up the machine instead of giving me clues, I never would have figured it out.

Repeat after me: I must never open my MacBook Pro...I must never open my MacBook Pro...

Neal's Lint: JumpCut

2007-11-06T18:49:00.000-08:00

One of the must-have utilities for developers is a clipboard history tool. There are a couple of good ones for the Mac. The one I use is a freebie called JumpCut, which gives you a clipboard with 100 entries.

Another option is iClip, which gives you history on more than one clipboard. I used to use it (it's commercial but cheap) but they recently updated it and went overboard on the eye candy. And, I found after using it that I'm fine with a single entry, simpler one.

Whichever you choose, it's worth spending the time to start using it regularly. Using a clipboard utility changes the way you work. You stop worrying about copying stuff that you might not need, and you stop use the clipboard as a data transfer for batch operations (copy, switch, paste, switch, copy, switch, paste, ad nauseam). In fact, I now proactively put stuff on my clipboard in case I might need it in a few minutes.

Tasks Bundle for TextMate

2007-10-28T04:44:00.000-07:00

I keep my To Do items in a simple text file, for lots of reasons (including the Prags advice to "Keep knowledge in text" from the Pragmatic Programmer). Because I'm a developer, I have lots of tricks to manipulate text, especially in TextMate. Thus, my to-do stuff consists of loosely categorized lists.

The other day, I found a simple but very cool TextMate bundle that provides a couple of commands and syntactic eye candy (the visual equivalent of syntactic sugar) for simple to-do lists. Now I can keep my to-do list in plain text and still get the pretty categorization and other stuff I want. More support for my contention that TextMate is the Swiss-army chain saw of Mac OS X.

Tweaking TextMate Groovy Bundle

2007-10-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

When using TextMate to work with Groovy code, I use the Groovy Bundle. When you run your code, the default behavior of the bundle is to popup a window and display the results in it. This can be a minor inconvenience to problems at times. For one, to quickly see the output especially during a presentation, I find the popup window annoying. Furthermore, the output may not be what you want to see. Take the example of the following Groovy code (saved in sample.groovy):

bldr = new groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder()

bldr.html {
body {
h1('foo')
}
}

When you press Apple R to run it, the popup window shows "foo" instead of the actual HTML output.

A little tweak to the bundle can fix this problem and make things more convenient. In TextMate, go to Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Show Bundle Editor and navigate down to the Run command under Groovy.

Change the exit_show_html to exit_show_tool_tip. Close the Bundle Editor and back in the TextMate editor, press Apple R to see the output appear as tool tip.

Buying a New Mac

2007-10-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

Most of the people reading this already know this, but to those who don't, here's an important public service announcement. I just bought a new Mac. No, wait, that's not the announcement. The way I bought it is.

Instead of just going to the Apple site and buying it, I joined the Apple Developer Connection first with a Select Membership. This membership gives you preview software, developer tools, and some other cool stuff. It also gets you a hardware discount for 1 system per year. Aha! The membership cost me $499. But, the discount on the laptop I bought saved me around $750. Not only did I get a bunch of extra stuff for year (the ADC goodies), but it saved me money in the end. I tend to buy a new laptop every 18 months, so even with a yearly subscription to ADC, I come out exactly even with the money, and I get all the Apple software goodies to boot. Sounds like a good deal to me!

Edit in TextMate Option

2007-10-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

A cool trick that appears in the excellent TextMate book from the Prags is the "Edit in Textmate" menu item. If you go to the TextMate sub-menu under "Bundles", you'll see an option to Install "Edit in TextMate". The ensuing popup walks you through the steps to do this. Now, in some applications (like Safari), when you go to a textbox on a web page, you can issue the added Edit | Edit in TextMate command from Safari. TextMate will pop up, and now you have the full editing power of TextMate for your entry. When you hit "save", you'll see the browser's textbox update.

What's even better is that you can make it understand custom syntax. The popup that walks you through installing this option tells you how. So, for example, I'm typing this entry in TextMate, using HTML mode, but it is being automagically saved in the entry field on Blogger. By creating a simple ".plist" file in a special place, you can create custom bundle associations based on the URL you typed in the browser. Or, if that's too much work, the first time you launch a file from a particular web page's textbox, manually set the mode and TextMate will remember it for you. This is the way I type stuff for web pages anymore.

iPhone iPod Trick

2007-10-27T02:15:00.000-07:00

Last week I was listening to music on my iPhone when I wanted to quickly pause the music to hear the announcement at the airport gate. Sure, the quickest way I found at that time to stop was to remove the earphone from my ears! I said to myself, there's got to be a easier way to pause the music than pressing the home button (my iPhone is locked most of the time), sliding the bar, pressing iPod key and pressing stop.

Last night I discovered a feature accidentally! When the iPhone is locked, press the home button twice. While it remains locked, the iPod play music slide bar pops up. You can start/stop music, switch to next/previous song, adjust volume using slider (though I prefer using the switch on the side to adjust volume). Now I can easily and quickly pause the music and resume after the interruptions!

iPhone Keypad trick

2007-10-27T02:03:00.000-07:00

Switching between the alphabet keys and number/symbol keys on the keypad can be a bit annoying, especially when you want to quickly insert a number or symbol and continue typing text (alphabets).

You can avoid a few extra keystrokes if you press the ".?123" key and then without releasing drag over to the number or symbol you want.

Assume you are typing an email. You want to type "Let's meet at 3." You can type the word Let, then press and hold the key ".?123" and drag over to the single quote and release. The keypad will return back to alphabets after the single quote is inserted. You can type the rest of the message and when you're ready to insert the 3, repeat the same steps this time selecting 3 before you release.

Neal's Lint: TextExpander

2007-10-25T09:14:00.000-07:00

I've been asked several times about the prodigious amount of "lint" I have on my menu bar (those are the little application icons to the right, in what would be the task tray in Windows). So, I'm gonna tell everyone.

First up, TextExpander. This is a key macro utility. Think live templates for your entire operating system. You save whatever text you want to type under an abbreviation and TextExpander automagically expands it for you inline. For example, I type the words "No Fluff, Just Stuff" a lot, so I have a shortcut for it. I'm genetically incapable of spelling the word "Selenium", so I have another for that. I also have chunks of command-line goodies that I used to have as bash aliases, but I got tired of fighting the single-double quote war with bash. Now, I just type the abbreviation to get this:


svn st | grep '^\?' | tr '^\?' ' ' | sed 's/[ \t]*//' | sed 's/[ ]/\\ /g' | xargs svn add

What's even better is that you can determine where you want the cursor to end up by placing a magic marker there. For my Ruby on Rails talk, I need to create a database keyed to the city I'm in, so I use this TextExpander goodie, which leaves my cursor right before "_development".


/opt/local/bin/mysqladmin5 -u root create %|_development

What's more, you can create abbreviations for stuff like dates. Life's too short to be typing the bloody date all the time, so it looks like today is 2007-10-25.

TextExpander is a great example of a "$20-ware" Mac OS X utility (see, I just typed "Mac OS X" with an abbreviation). There are some others like this (like Typinator), but I prefer TextExpander.

iFixIt

2007-10-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

My 2-year old MacBook Pro's hard drive started making a really scary sound a couple of days ago anytime I try to put it to sleep (and sometimes just locks up). Bad news! But, hey, it's 2 years old, and I'm getting a new one in literally a week (and my wife is eying my current one with a scary look in her eyes).

So, I bought a replacement hard drive for it and installed it today. Turns out, it's pretty complicated (and verboten by Apple; you void your warranty if you crack your computer open). Along the way, I found this great site: iFixIt. This site walks you through each step for common upgrades, with pictures. I could have figured it out, but this site made it much easier (and let me know that I needed a Torx 6 tool before I started). A lifesaver.

The Quicksilver Files: Emacs(!) Keybindings

2007-10-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

As we all know, emacs is the One True Editor. And, if you've used it, you know that you spend lots of time holding down the CTRL key. Many hard-core Mac/emacs users have re-wired the CAPS-LOCK key (which is useless anyway) to be another control key, saving wear and tear on the wrist and little finger of the left hand. (This by the way can be accomplished in the Keyboard preferences pane.)

The other day I accidentally used the emacs "down one line" command (CTRL-N) while using Quicksilver to navigate the file system...and it worked! Now, I use CTRL-P (up one line) and CTRL-N all the time because it's easier when typing to not have to move to the arrow keys.

Quicksilver: wysiwyg asap

vi Command Line

2007-09-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

If you ever spent any quality time in the vi editor, you can't shake off at least some of the keyboard stuff. Of course, vi isn't the friendliest editor in the world (in fact, may in fact be the least tameable). But it is probably the most efficient mechanism for editing single lines of text.

Which brings me to this tip: you can turn on vi keyboard shortcuts for your terminal (either Terminal or iTerm) by adding the following line to your ~/.profile file:

set -o vi

Now, you can happily use that vi knowledge that you can't get rid of otherwise. If you're muscles can't remember the keystrokes, you can refresh your memory here.

More Going to Directories

2007-08-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, Muness posted a message about using APPLE-SHIFT-G to use filename completion with tabs to go directly to a directory in Finder and Path Finder. Here's a related tip. The same keystroke combination works in standard Apple Open and Save dialogs. You can navigate more quickly to your destination via the keyboard, especially with the ability to tab-complete entries.

Proxy Icons in Finder

2007-08-10T06:58:00.000-07:00

Mac OS X is generally easier to use than other operating systems, but it does have its hidden little secrets that you cannot find accidentally. One of those features is proxy icons. In any Mac OS X application (including Finder), you can access the icon for the file you under edit by clicking on the icon in the title bar. Now, you can drag the icon somewhere else to move it to a new location.

The other handy thing you can do it [APPLE]-click on the title bar icon, which shows you where the file lives in the directory structure, as shown here:

Very hidden, but also very useful: no more guessing where a particular file lives or where you are in the directory structure.

Unparalleled Evil

2007-08-06T00:46:00.000-07:00

This happened a couple of weeks ago when I was giving a talk. I could not nail it down until today (actually yesterday, but I am still in airport with flight delays) when it happened again, in the middle of another presentation.

On the Mac, when I asked it to open an IDEA ipr file (using quick sliver), it suddenly came up with a dialog asking me if I want to open the application within Windows. "Heck no" was my response. Then it started asking this question for all kinds of files I was trying to open.

First, what seems to trigger this? I upgraded to Parallels 3.0 a few weeks ago. Every thing seems to be normal until I start IDEA within Parallels. I use IDEA mostly on the Mac, but when I give my "Java 6 Features" talk, I bring it up within the Windows Vista in Parallels. Right after this, when I try to launch applications on the Mac, it wants to open them in Windows.

I am not sure if this is the only action that causes this "feature" to be activated. Here is what I did to perform a quick fix. In Parallels, I click on "Applications" menu, and select "Reset Windows Application" menu item. This is only a quick fix. I hope to find a better solution for it.

Microsoft RDC 2.0 Beta

2007-08-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has finally updated their Remote Desktop Client to be more of an OS X app and less of a shell around a protocol. It is now a Universal Binary, supports newer versions of the protocol, allows single sessions with one app installation, screen resizing and better support for printing to Mac-connected printers.

The download can be fetched here.

I haven't tried it yet, but they have also released a plug-in to better support Open Office documents in Word here.

The Quicksilver Files: Create New Files from Templates

2007-08-01T19:48:00.001-07:00

Those darn Quicksilver guys just won't quit coming up with cool new stuff. Here's one that I read on LifeHacker today. One of the "missing" features in OS X is the ability to create new files from a template from Finder (you know, in Windows, you can right-click and say "New Word Document", for example). You can do the same in Quicksilver, but you get to/have to create your own document templates. The procedure is described here. The advantage is that you get to decide what types of documents for which you want templates, unlike Windows, which spams all kinds of new types onto your right click menu.

Quicksilver: no safety in numbers

Oblique Strategies

2007-08-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Back in 1975, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a creative thinking technique they called "oblique strategies". It was a deck of cards designed to spur creative thought at times when you are blocked because of pressure or external factors. You can buy Oblique Strategy decks at this site. From the introduction to the 2001 edition:

These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.

They can be used as a pack, or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear...

You can also download a Dashboard widget that includes several generations of oblique strategies here. These are a great way to spur out-of-the-box creative thinking when you think you are stuck.

Caffeine

2007-07-31T15:16:00.000-07:00

One of my presenter buddies turned me on to Caffeine. It's a tiny little application on the menu bar that, when invoked, keeps your Mac from drifting off to sleep, prevents the screen saver from kicking in, or any other behavior that might disrupt your presentation. When done, de-caffeinate your machine by clicking it again.

On a bright day, Nocturne

2007-07-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

I travel a lot, and often find myself using my Mac and Verizon EVDO card in cabs or shuttles to/from airports to get a feel for the area I'll be at. During bright days, the screen can be hard to read. BlackTree to the rescue: Nocturne.

Nocturne provides a much improved version of the "White on Black" display in the Universal Access preferences pane. It works much better though - I've been told by a friend who's been having vision problems that it works much better for high contrast display.

I'd post a screenshot, but I can't figure how to take one that shows the inverted colors. ;) Try it.

Go to directory in Finder and Path Finder

2007-07-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

Simple Finder and Path Finder short cut I didn't know about: cmd-shift-g. It pops up a go to directory dialog with tab completion. The Path Finder version is quite a bit more powerful (as most things are when comparing Path Finder to Finder):

Tip courtesy of Neal.

Alternative Drawer for TextMate

2007-07-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

I use TextMate a fair bit. The standard file drawer makes resizing it a pain, especially when you're using it full screen.

The other day, at erubycon, Chad Humphries was showing me some of the plugins and bundles that he uses. I just got around to trying out Missing Drawer and it solves that problem - instead of the standard drawer, it modifies TextMate's interface to an Xcode-like project window interface without the drawer. This makes it really easy to resize the file tree.

Mandatory screenshot:

Keyboard shortcut to start application/open file in Finder

2007-07-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

If you're using Quicksilver, you won't need this much, except occasionally
when Quicksilver quits unexpectedly.

To open a file or start an application, you may be tempted to hit
the enter key. Sadly, this would let you modify the application/file
name instead of starting or opening it.

To open a file or launch an application in Finder, you can either hit
apple - O or apple - down arrow.

What if you want to open a file using some other application other than
the default? See the related post: The QuickSilver Files: Grabbing the Universe

Visor

2007-07-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

Boy, those Blacktree boys write some good software (you know, like Quicksilver). The latest gem I've found is Visor, which mimics the console found in lots of video games, but for the entire OS, using Terminal. If you spend a lot of time in Terminal, Visor allows you to drop a terminal window down from the top of the screen with a hotkey, then use the same hotkey to slide it away again. It takes a couple of steps to install it, but man is it cool.

cd to Directory within Terminal

2007-07-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

When using terminal, if you need to drill down to different directories, you don't need to type the entire path. You can use tab key to expand file/directory names. For instance if I type cd P and tab, it expands P to Presentations which is a directory I have under my current directory. If there is more than one file or directory that starts with a P, then it lists them all so I can be more specific.

I discovered by accident a related feature. If you hit escape before hitting the tab, it expands all the way to the most recently navigated directory (from your history) that matches what you've entered. For example, since I use Parallels, I have a need to navigate to ~/Documents/Parallels/shared directory on my mac to exchange some files with my Windows Vista (As of this week, I will need this less on recent Parallels 3.0 since the Windows directory is fully exported/mounted on the mac!). I could type cd ~/D and tab, and then P and tab, and then s and tab. Instead, when I type cd ~/ and escape and tab, it expanded straight to cd ~/Documents/Parallels/shared. Very convenient.

One last thing. If you want to open a terminal on any directory, there is a easy Quicksilver way to do that as well.

Go to Quicksilver (ctrl + q on my machine).
Start with the home directory and type first letter or two of the directory you're interested and type forward slash to drill down to that directory in Quicksilver. For example, to go to ~/Documents/Parallels/shared, I type the following characters in sequence ~d/p/s followed by a tab to select an Action in Quicksilver. For the action, type t and it brings up "Go To Directory in Terminal." Hit return and it opens the directory in terminal window.

Related Posts:

The QuickSilver Files: Grabbing the Universe

The QuickSilver Files: Quick Folders and Select All

The Quicksilver Files: Triggers

Command line tips

2007-07-07T08:16:00.001-07:00

One of the things I like the most on the Mac is I can open terminal and
play at the command line. I seem to spend about 40% of my time on the
command line.

As you are typing a (lengthy) command, you may find a need to go back and
change it. You can use the left and right arrow to move one character at a time, but that's painful.

You can quickly navigate through that line of command by using some shortcuts.
ctrl-a takes you to the beginning of the line.
ctrl-e takes you to the end of the line
ctrl-w eats the word to the left
ctrl-h eats the character to the left
ctrl-d eats the current character
ctrl-k eats everything to the right of cursor

When I make presentations I find two other tricks very useful.
I often want to clear the screen.
ctrl-L clears the screen. You can type it even when you're in the middle of typing commands.
ctrl-+ will increase the font size (need to hold shift to reach the +).
ctrl-- will decrese the fond size.

Quickly locking your computer using keyboard shortcut

2007-07-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

In the previous post, I mentioned how you can use the mouse to lock your Mac.

On Windows I can type Windows + L and lock my computer quickly. It would be nice to do the same on the Mac, right.

You can do that by setting up a trigger in Quicksilver. Neal has talked about Quicksilver and triggers.

If you are still not using Quicksilver, stop reading this blog and go download it right now.

Bring up Quicksilver (I have ctrl + Q setup to activate it, so I type ctrl + Q). Press Apple-' (Apple + single quote) to bring up the Triggers window.

Click on the + in the bottom to create a new trigger. Select Hotkey. Type a dot (period) and enter the following for "Select an Item":
/System/Library/Frameworks/
ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app
Hit tab and leave the Action as "Open." Hit return to save.

Now we're ready to assign a keyboard shortcut/trigger. Double click on "None" for the trigger item you just added and type in your trigger key (for instance Alt and L).

Go ahead the try it out. Press Alt-L (or Option-L) and see if this bring up the screen saver. Of course, I generally like to password protect my computer when I walk away from it. Yes, it is a pain to enter the password several times a day, but that is less painful than compromising the computer.

You can ask your computer require password when you return. Under Security System Preferences (Alt + F4 and type Security and hit return) turn on the check box "Required password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver."

Quickly locking your computer using one mouse stroke

2007-07-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

How do you quickly lock your computer screen on the Mac?

Yes, you may use iAlertU, but sometimes I simply want to lock and not arm my Mac.

You can lock quickly by using the Dashboard and Exposé settings. Press Alt + F4 (or fn + Alt + F4) and type dash in the search window and hit return. This will bring up the Dashboard and Exposé System Preferences dialog. Under Active Screen Saver, select one of the four corners and set it to "Start Screen Saver." For instance, I've chosen the top left corner. Now, close the dialog. Anytime you run the mouse to top left corner, the screen saver should kick in.

You can also configure this under the Screen Saver preferences by pressing the Hot Corners button.

The above steps only started the screen saver. In order to make this really a lock, you need to turn on one more setting (which you may have done already). Under Security System Preferences (Alt + F4 and type Security and hit return) turn on the check box "Required password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver."

Quick access to System Preferences Dialog

2007-07-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

Every time I connect to an external projector, I need to modify settings (depending on projector I am using). I am too lazy (some call it efficient) to be clicking on menus. So, I wanted to get to the settings dialog without any effort.

Press alt + F1 (if you use function keys to control software like I do (see previous post), then press fn + alt + F1) to get to the Display settings quickly. Similarly, you can press alt + F4 (or fn + alt + F4) to get to the Sound settings. Now, what if you want to modify some other settings? Simply press alt + F4 and start typing what you're looking for. For example, to go to Network settings, type "network" and as you type, you will see the relevant items are highlighted (brightness determines the probability of a match for each item). Hit return if the bright match is what you're looking for.

Removing Function key conflicts

2007-07-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

This tip may be useful to avoid other conflicts than the example I give below.

I use Parallels to use Windows. I use Visual Studio, to execute my .NET (C#) program. When I typed Ctrl + F5, it ended up conflicting with the Function keys on the Mac (every time I tried to run, it would try to increase the volume of my speaker—not very helpful).

On the Mac, in the Keyboard settings, I turned on the option "Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features. When this option is selected, press the Fn key to use the F1-F12 keys to control hardware features."

Now, if I really want to change the speaker volume, I press Fn + F5 (or Fn + F4), and Ctrl + F5 within Visual Studio (in Parallels) runs my C# program.

Zoom in/out

2007-07-02T13:31:00.001-07:00

While giving presentations, I often find it necessary to zoom into the directory structure in the TextMate Drawer window or other parts of the window. I also find a need for this when I want to show some part of the window to someone a couple of feet away. It is very easy to do. Here are two ways:

1. Hold the Ctrl button and run two fingers (index and middle) on the track pad up or down. Alternately, you can hold the Ctrl button and use the middle button of your mouse to move up or down. Then let go and simply move the mouse to areas of windows you like to view while the window is zoomed in. You can modify the settlings for this (like ability to navigate the window while zoomed in) by changing the options next to "Zoom using scroll ball while holding" under the Mouse tab in the Keyboard & Mouse settings.

2. If you're like me and don't want to touch that mouse (or track pad), you can achieve the above operation by holding Applet key, alt key, and pressing the = button. You can then zoom out by pressing Apple + alt + - keys. Again, to configure this, go to Universal Access and check out the "Zoom" options under the "Seeing" tab.

The Quicksilver Files: Quick Access to Quicksilver Preferences

2007-06-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick one. To customize Quicksilver, you must go to the preferences pane. You can get there by launching Quicksilver and clicking on the gear in the upper right corner. But that's not very Quicksilver, is it? The easier way to get to Quicksilver's preferences is to launch Quicksilver, then hit the -' (that's APPLE + single quote). Instant Preferences pane.

Quicksilver: universal solvent

The Quicksilver Files: Accessing Application Menus

2007-06-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

My friend and co-worker Muness turned me onto this trick the other day (documented here). It allows you to access the menus from the frontmost application through Quicksilver. You have to do the following to turn it on:

Turn on "Enable Advanced Features" in Quicksilver

Enable proxies in Quicksilver preferences: Under Catalog > Quicksilver, turn on “Proxy Objects”, “Internal Commands”, and “Internal Objects”.

To access menu items (and enable the Show Menu Items action), go under Plug-ins > All Plug Ins and scroll down to turn on “User Interface Access (+)”.

Make sure you have “Enable access for assistive devices” turned on in System Preferences for the entire OS

Once you have this set up, you can get to the menus by choosing Current Application as the noun and Show Menu Items as the verb. It gives you a list of all the leaf menu items in the current application.

That's sort of cumbersome, so I set up a trigger to make it easier. I created a Quicksilver trigger (for me, keyed off the ALT-ENTER key chord) that automatically launches the list of menu items in the current application. Now, as I'm Mac-ing along, the key chord gives me Quicksilver access to all the menu items, which is even easier than the CTRL-F2 trick shortcut that used to be my favorite.

Quicksilver: access granted

The Quicksilver Files: Triggers

2007-06-08T07:56:00.000-07:00

Triggers are one of those categories that I haven't stumbled into much until recently. They allow you to take a Quicksilver noun and verb combination and bind it to a key chord. For example, I issue the noun ~/work/PRDPRG, verb Open with..., and adverb Mate a lot (this opens my Productive Programmer work directory in TextMate). The only problem is that it's a little cumbersome to do that over and over. So, I set up a trigger for that noun, verb, adverb combination and bound it to the CTRL-ALT-1 key. Now, when I hit that keyboard combination, it issues that sequence of Quicksilver commands automatically.

Quicksilver: sleight of hand

Auto Un-starting Parallels

2007-06-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

I found myself in an interesting rabbit hole the other day. I have a Parallels image set to automatically launch when I open the image and automatically kill Parallels when it's done. Very convenient because you start the VM, it runs Windows, and when you kill Windows, it kills the VM. Very convenient, that is, until you need to make changes to the VM configuration, which you can't do while it's running. After playing Whack-A-Mole for a few minutes, trying to get to the Edit menu before it could start (unsuccessfully, by the way), I did a little digging. It turns out that if you have those settings and you choose your VM from the Parallels catalog, you can hold down the APPLE key as you select it to prevent it from starting.

Grand Perspective

2007-06-02T20:43:00.000-07:00

This is a great little utility that Brian showed me.

Tonight, my wife Candy was trying to print something, and had to download a new print driver. Suddenly, her hard drive was reporting full, and there's no way that should be. We couldn't figure out why, so we downloaded Grand Perspective. Grand Perspective scans a folder (up to the whole hard drive) and shows a graphical representation of how much space each file occupies, like this:

We pointed it to her root directory, it trundled away for a few minutes, and made it easy to spot the culprit: an aborted attempt to add a whole bunch of images to iPhoto that had copied them locally. Delete them, and 65+ Gb free again.

Highly special purpose but, if you need it, you need it badly. I'm about to use it to trim my Subversion repository to something a little more manageable.

Address Book Tips

2007-05-29T06:56:00.000-07:00

Another quick post with a few tips on using the Address Book. I knew a lot of it, but didn't know about merging the cards.

I had printed an envelope to someone the other day quite accidentally, but was amazed at how easy it was.

http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/address-book-tips.html

RubyCocoa

2007-05-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to point out that RubyCocoa has been updated. It is still probably not ready for building much production software, but it has clearly come a long way since the earlier releases. Check out the demos for examples of using OpenGL, interacting with the Address Book, wrapping WebKit, etc., all from Ruby:

http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net/HomePage

iAlertU

2007-05-19T04:55:00.000-07:00

A lot of you already know about this, but I wanted to get it out here just as a convenient place to find the link again. iAlertU is on the slappingturtle.com web site.

iAlertU is a great example of synergising the parts of the Mac. It uses the gyroscope (for parking the hard drive) and any key/mouse motion to trigger it. When you run iAlertU, it appears on the menu bar. Using the remote that comes with the machine, you hold down the MENU key, and you'll get the familiar car alarm "chirp-chirp". The machine is now armed (you'll also notice that the camera turns on). If anyone (like Jay) touches it, it sounds a car alarm, blinks the screen, and snaps a picture of the perp. Closing the lid on the machine silences it, but as soon as it is reopened, the alarm continues.

To turn it off or disarm it, use the remote and hold the MENU key down again. You'll get the single car alarm "chirp", and you're back in business.

Whenever I wander away from my machine around my hot-dogging prone co-workers, or at a conference, I arm my machine now so that it causes a ruckus when disturbed.

The TextMate Files: Cool Snippet/bash Interaction

2007-05-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, TextMate snippets are really just a wrapper around a bunch of serious bash-fu: most of the really cool stuff you can do in snippets is actually bash code (with some helpers). I found a great web link that offers a really good tutorial about some of the fu here, along with some of the helpers.

Here's an example of one of the helpers. The problem: I need to annotate a bunch of Ruby code in RDoc, and I want to add a link to the bottom of the RDoc in every file that points to the source directory of the file in question. But, it needs to be a relative path. There is probably some really much cooler way to solve this, but here is the snippet I created:


---
source: link:../${TM_FILEPATH/\/Users\/jNf\/Documents\/dev\/ruby\/meta-programming\///}

This says to add a horizontal rule (the "---" in RDoc), then do a substitution for the built-in TM_FILEPATH variable, substituting the full path stuff (up to the file name) with nothing. The general syntax for the substitution is ${VARIABLE/pattern/substituion}. The resulting link looks like this:


---
source: link:../16.delegation/forwarding.rb

Which is exactly what I want.

The Quicksilver Files: Clipboard History

2007-05-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

Quicksilver plug-ins can add some cool functionality. One great one is the Clipboard History plug-in. Install it from the plug-ins page (which also allows you to set the history size via the plug-in's propteries). Then, when you invoke Quicksilver, hit APPLE-L to get to your clipboard history list. From this clipboard history list, you can paste by either using the arrow keys or using the number that shows up in the left-hand column.

One of the tips in The Productive Programmer is to use clipboard history tools so that you can start copy and pasting in batches, rather than the wrist-achingly inefficient copy-switch-paste-switch-copy-switch-paste operation most people do.

Quicksilver: just your type

The QuickSilver Files: Quick Folders and Select All

2007-05-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

When spelunking the file system with QuickSilver, you can use the "/" key to navigate one level down on a folder and "SHIFT-/" to back up a folder. The combination of this with smart incremental search for names makes QuickSilver more efficient than most Finder operations.

One other file/folder related trick. If you want to select all the files in a folder, navigate into the folder and hit "APPLE -A". This is the standard "select all" keyboard shortcut, but it took me a little while to realize this worked in QuickSilver too.

QuickSilver: let go

Pesky hidden files, beware

2007-05-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

I was doing some spring cleaning on my hard drive this morning ("rm -Rf *" -- no, NOT in my home directory...). As an afterthought, I did a "ls -al" to verify that, indeed, everything was gone. To my surprise, there were a couple of StuffIt droppings left behind. ".$$ StuffIt Temp 1143648937" Big 'uns, too. Almost a gig worth of dead air. Them files needed killing.

Strange, though, that they wouldn't die. "rm -Rf *" is the command-line equivalent of "slash and burn, take no prisoners". I was the owner of the files, yet couldn't delete them. Perhaps it was a permissions problem. "sudo rm -Rf *" foiled my all-powerful alter ego, Root, as well. Apparently these files were laced with kryptonite.

The leading "." makes the directory or file hidden, but it shouldn't tattoo it to my hard drive. I'm pretty sure that it was the dollar signs that was slipping bash a mickey. Surrounding the file name in single quotes didn't help -- "rm -Rf '.$$ StuffIt Temp 114364'". Neither did letting the bash shell tab-complete the file name -- "rm -Rf .\$\$\ StuffIt\ Temp\ 114364". This was really beginning to harsh my mellow.

So, I pulled out the big guns. TinkerTool, among other things, gives Finder x-ray vision. It is, refreshingly, a free utility in a sea of $20 Mac add-ons. The very first checkbox on the very first tab of the utility is what I needed -- "Show hidden and system files". Once Finder could see 'em, Finder could delete 'em. Odd that the GUI came through when the CLI failed, but I'm not asking questions.

As TinkerTool rode off into the sunset, I heard him mutter under his breath, "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning." Me too, TT. Me, too.

Keyboard Access to Menus and Trays

2007-05-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about the Mac is the pervasive keyboard support. When I first started with the Mac, I was kind of annoyed that it doesn't have as much consistency between applications for keyboard shortcuts, and the ALT-key combination style from Windows isn't as well supported (most applications primarily do APPLE-key combinations).

Then I discovered two key keyboard shortcuts: CTRL-F2 and CTRL-F8. CTRL-F2 sends focus to the menu, highlighting the Apple logo on the upper left-hand side. Then, you can start typing the name of the menu you want to invoke. When you hit the one you want, hit RETURN and it opens the menu, ready for more incremental search typing. This I find is even faster than the ALT-key style combinations in Windows because it is consistent across all applications (well, except for abysmally bad applications like Lotus Notes), and you can type the first part of the menu item you want very quickly. Incremental search is a powerful way to get to stuff in a very few number of keystrokes.

CTRL-F8 focuses the task-tray portion of the menu bar, allowing you to highlight some of the icons (like the AirPort icon) and turn on AirPort from the keyboard. CTRL-F8 + some arrow keys gets you into the icons that allow keyboard access.

I recently found another great use for this. I use an EVDO card for ubiquitous Internet, and I've been starting the Verizon Wireless little application to start the Internet connection. I was talking to Jason Hunter this weekend, and he just turns on the modem display (found in the standard Apple utility Internet Connect, you check the "Show modem status in menubar"). This allows me to CTRL-F8 up to the menubar, pull down the list, and get online with EVDO faster.

The QuickSilver Files: Grabbing the Universe

2007-04-29T04:30:00.000-07:00

The first of many, many posts on the subtleties of QuickSilver.

When you have something (anything, really) focused on the screen (i.e., a folder in Finder), you can drag it into the QuickSilver universe by hitting the CTRL-ESC keystroke. That opens QuickSilver with the selected object ready for action.

QuickSilver: pb2au

Speaking of iTunes

2007-04-28T18:57:00.000-07:00

One the examples of serendipitous non-browser mashups from my Data Integration talk features this gem. del.icio.us allows you to specify persistent queries to be exposed as RSS feeds. Now that iTunes supports podcasts and enclosures, you can set up your own free video content (e.g. Quick Time movies tagged as being funny).

Find out how, here.

iTunes + Upcoming.org = iConcertCal

2007-04-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a new iTunes visualization plug-in to Neal today at the Reston NFJS show. He got very excited so I thought I would post a link for other folks as well.

There is a visualization plugin called iConcertCal that looks to your iTunes music library for artists that you like and then searches upcoming.org for events with those artists. It goes a couple of months out and does a great job. I've found all kinds of shows that I wouldn't have otherwise known about.

For peripathetics like Neal (that's a pretty good nealogism[sic] for Mr. Ford), this would be a fantastic way to survey shows in the area of wherever you find yourself. It didn't get my address *QUITE* right, but once I fixed it, it has kept up.

It apparently works for the Windows version of iTunes as well.

http://www.iconcertcal.com

What the Hell is This?

2007-04-24T01:07:00.000-07:00

I was thinking the other day about consolidating all my Mac OS X downloads, tricks, tips, etc. on a wiki somewhere so that I could remember this stuff. I know that Scott Davis and Brian Sletten already have web pages where they have their list of Cool Mac Stuff. It's nice to have when you re-install or move to a new machine. Then, I started thinking "Wow, I'll bet Venkat would like to contribute to that", since we love to pass around Mac goodies. Then, I thought "It would be cool if all the Mac guys I know could contribute, then send me notification when new stuff got added." Then, I realized: I'm talking about a blog!

Welcome the The PragMactic OS-Xer. This is the place where I'm going to post all the cool stuff I find out about a Mac. And I'm inviting others. Anyone who wants can join the posters on this blog and make their own entries. I'm trying to create a nice public forum where all the OS-Xers I know can put cool stuff. And, because it's here, I can get to it when I need to remember all the stuff I need to install on my next Mac.

Hazel

2007-04-24T01:01:00.000-07:00

I was just in the process of writing a Mac OS X automator to delete all the files in my downloads folder if they are over a week old (one of the Productive Programmer samples) when I found this: Hazel. It's a cheap-ware preference pane plug in that allows you to set up rules (kind of like a mail reader) for folders and maintenance tasks. I just set up a rule that deletes all downloads that are over a week old (I'm terrible about downloading stuff, unzipping and installing it, but forgetting to get rid of the downloaded archive).

Looks pretty cool, costs $16, and has some nice configuration options.

Keyboard driven Right Click

2007-04-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

Go to Universal Access and turn on Mouse Keys. This the the accessibility option that allows you to drive the mouse strictly from the keyboard, using the embedded keypad. Once you turn that on, you can use the FN-I key to click the mouse, which means that you can use FN-CTRL-I to right click. It's not perfect (it clicks where the mouse current resides, not where the keyboard focus lives) and it precludes using the embedded numeric keypad for doing 10-key entry (which I never do anyway). You can turn it on and off by clicking the OPTION key five times (this is a setting on Universal Access as well).