MacsimumNews - Your Leading Apple News Alternative
September 22, 2007The ever-industrious Macsimum News is now also available on You Tube!
Some Cool QuickTime Movies
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Some (actually many) Apple ads downloadabnle as MOVs.
The Butler Did It
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I love Butler. Let me tell you some of the ways I use it.
Most of my function keys are used to launch my most-used apps and documents; I won’t go through them all but as an example: F1 is for browsers. F1 on it’s own launches Safari, Cmd-F1 launches Firefox, Shift-F1 opens my own site etc.
F2 is for all my text editors and viewers. And so on and so forth. F16 through 19 are for Butler menus. One has a zillion text snippets for pasting; things like web page templates, email addresses, HTML code etc. Another is for apps that I consider second-level, that I don’t want to rummage for in the Applications folder. Another brings up my system preferences as a menu.
Butler creates a pasteboard of the last 15 or so things that I copied to the clipboard. Cmd-B pops up a list of those items for pasting.
I use Ctrl-Shift and various keys to control iTunes, even when it’s completely hidden. I can skip back and forward, skip a few seconds (by running scripts), pause, select playlists, see what’s playing, rate, you name it.
I assign the numeric keypad to give single key access to various parameters in apps. For example: there are lots of apps where I want to change the size of the text I’m viewing. I simply assign them all to numeric 2 for smaller and numeric 3 for bigger. That re-assignment only applies when those particular apps are frontmost.
I use Butler to speed typing. Ctrl-Shift-M for “I’m ” or Crtl-C for “.com” and so on. I use the screen corners for closing windows or apps; for opening folders; for hiding windows etc.
I have shortcuts for closing the current edited window without saving; for saving the current window (with selected text as the name) in a particular folder; for selecting all text and opening it in a particular editor etc.
Follow the link below to learn more about the app, and see some illustrated tips.
43 Folders | Personal productivity, life hacks, and other cool stuff
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
Stephen Fry and Sick Buildings
September 21, 2007I 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.
Tumblr
September 15, 2007Tumblr 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…
Jing
August 19, 2007
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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.
PandoCalendar
July 7, 2007
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Generally speaking, OS X has been rock solid for me — with one glaring exception. Some time ago iCal died. One day it launched and immediately quit again, and it’s been like that ever since.
At first I sent off the crash logs to Apple, but I don’t bother now. I’ve searched through those logs but it’s all double-Dutch to me. A little research revealed that I might be missing an important system font — no, it’s there; or that some background tweak is clashing with iCal — no, if I start as another user with nothing loaded it still crashes.
My hunch, and there’s nothing scientific about this, is that I installed a trial version of Photoshop 7 at one stage and that modified the system in some way that killed iCal.
The long and the short of it is that iCal is gone so from time to time I’ve tried other free OSX calendars. One was Sunbird (ugly), one was Google Calendar (works best with Firefox, which I hate, and only when connected), and PandoCalendar.
I quite like PandoCalendar. It’s a little bit funky for my liking, but that’s easily fixed by going into the preferences and changing a few fonts and colors. There are no week or day views, only the whole month is shown; hover over a marked day to see a speech bubble pop up with the day’s tasks and appointments.
I really like how it can be configured to speak the appointments as well. Love that.
Appointments are quite clunky to set; after clicking a date, you click for a new appointment and then manually enter the start time. It would be really cool to be able to select the hour or minute and then spin the mouse wheel to change the value. See, I’m already spoiled by iPhone!
It is subtle enough that I will probably keep it running in the background for reminders related to operation of the Mac itself; I have a (forgive me) Dell VGA PDA for my regular scheduling.
