Caffeine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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