Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

I just installed this Service on the Mac and selected a lengthy article of text and used the service to create a new contact.

The new contact appeared in Address Book as No Name and the notes field was filled with the text. This could be a great way to take your reading material with you and access it (and edit it) using the iPod Touch.

That’s not its primary purpose of course. To quote the developers:

ContactCreator is a service that will take whatever text you have selected and make an contact in your AddressBook from it. If it’s only one word you have selected, it will automagically dump the word in the first name field of your new contact. If it’s two words, it will automagically dump the two words in the first and last name fields of your new contact. If it’s more than two, it will dump the whole lot in the Notes field of your new contact (which doesn’t have a name). It will also guess that word with an ‘@’ symbol in them are email addresses.

ContactCreator.service 1.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

The “So What” is that up until very recently I was continually bugged every time I accessed the Open With menu because there were two entries each for QuickTime, Safari and TextEdit.

After a lot of Googling and Foruming I found that the fix was to open terminal and enter the command:

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

…All as one line of course. Please don’t try this and then blame me if something goes amiss. It just happened to have worked perfectly for me, so I wanted to pass it on.

Merlin Mann’s productivity website gets a weird update. First question is: “Why?” Answer is multi-faceted, and like most site re-vamps: After a few weeks of the new look the old one really will look old.

43 Folders | Personal productivity, life hacks, and other cool stuff

I have a PC and its sole purpose is to give me a platform for two simulators that I enjoy; one lets me fly planes that I could never otherwise afford, and the other does the same thing with cars. One day I’ll have an intel Mac and I’ll be able to run these on that machine via Boot Camp. For now I set up the PC once a week and have a fly, or a drive, then pack it away again.

I may now be getting a little jaded though, because the weeks are turning into fortnights, and then months. It’s just becoming too much of a hassle to set the thing up. It all comes back to that Mac difference that I’m always trying to put a finger on. Yesterday I read a new blog by Stephen Fry. In his blog he says:

Design matters

By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Let’s go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say “well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do” is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it’s got a kitchen too, and a bathroom.”

Thank you Stephen. I know know what my problem is. I have sick computer syndrome.

Stephen Fry

Just an hour after posting the entry below where I lament being part of a free service, that same free service emails me and explains their technical problems.

So, bear with me while I bear with them, and soon we’ll have pictures to go with the words…

Tumblr is an online service for creating and maintaining a blog. What makes it different from many other such services? Its sheer simplicity. There are no tags or comments or categories.

How can a lack of features be a good thing?

You may want to set up a blog just for your own use, as an online scrapbook or notebook. If you own an iPhone, or the new iPod Touch, you now have somewhere to write notes and store them, and then later access them via your Mac for further editing.

Unlike many other blogging services Tumblr lets you choose not to advertise that your blog exists, so, unless someone happens to stumble upon it by accident, it’s pretty much your own online space…

Tumblr

If you are running a slideshow in either Preview or iPhoto, you want the image being shown to be exactly sized to your screen. Images from almost all modern cameras are much larger in pixel dimensions than your Mac’s display, so they will be interpolated down to fit. When they are resized on the fly through interpolation they never look as crisp or pristine.

When I import images from my Nikon to the Mac, I keep them outside of iPhoto and at their original size, as an archive from which I might eventually produce some prints. From there I choose the best examples that I want to display onscreen and copy those out of the archive for processing. Each one of those favorites that I’ve chosen is then tweaked in an image editor (I use Gimp Shop ‘cause I’m cheap) and the final step before sharpening is to resize it down to match the dimensions of my display.

My iMac is 1440 by 900, so if an image is narrower than that ratio I scale it so the height is exactly 900; if it’s wider I scale it so the width is exactly 1440. After these tweaked and resized images are finished I import only those into iPhoto. Then when I run a slideshow they are displayed exactly at their original size (not stretched or shrunk to fit the screen) and the difference is stunning.

Trust me on this; they really pop!

I love the new iMac, but I’m a long way from needing one. When I tried one out in the store I was just as impressed by the keyboard, so I bought the keyboard without the Mac.

Some folks love it and some hate it. I love it. The short quiet travel of the keys, the low profile, the solidity of the thing; I swear I’m typing about fifty percent faster and more accurately.

And I now have all these extra function keys — waiting for assignment…

This is pretty neat! Jing is a very fast way to select a part of your screen and either capture a Shockwave Flash movie, or a PNG image file.

They are associated with Screencast so the idea is to upload whatever you capture to their servers for distribution, and eventually pay for the service. But even if you’re not interested in that option, it’s still a slick way to record video for your own reference and distribution.

No learning curve, cool interface, an easy way to capture stuff for your own use.

Click here to see a quick and dirty example…

Go to Today in iCal and create a new event. Give it a name like “iCal Quick Alarm.” Bring up the Info window and set the alarm for that event to “Alarm with Sound 0 Minutes Before.”

Now de-select the event and then drag it to your task list (this will make a copy of the event that is now a task). Here’s the trick: You now have a template for any number of alarms that will sound at the exact time on which they are dropped, rather than having to fuss with the configuration each time.

Now, if you need an alarm to sound at precisely 8:23 just drag the iCal Quick Alarm task onto Today at 8:15 or 8:30 (this turns a copy of the task into an event), click on the minutes in the info window and roll your mouse wheel to fine-tune — and you’re done.

When the alarm sounds you can drag it to snooze it, or simply throw it away! Next time you need one it’s right there in your task list as a template.