Secrets!

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.