Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

I have an iPod nano and I usually charge it up using the USB connection to the Mac; only thing is, this only works while the iMac G5 is awake. I rediscovered just recently though that I can also charge it from the Mac via firewire, while the Mac is asleep.

Hooray!

I may have heard also that one of Leopard’s 300 new features is that they turned on USB charging while asleep as well…

Here’s one of those situations that takes a lot of time to explain, a little time to set up, and the blink of an eye to implement.

Step 1.

Use Sogudi to create a very short name for a website that you regularly visit. An example might be assigning NY to the New York Times site. To recap how Sogudi works, once you have assigned such a shortcut it’s simply a case of typing NY, followed by a space, in the address bar – then hitting return to go to the site.

Step 2.

In Butler, make a new Keystrokes Smart Item and in the Keys section: Press the Command key as well as L, followed by a delay (from the + menu) of 0.5 seconds. Follow that with the keys N and Y and then hit Return. You now have a little macro that opens the address bar ready for entry, waits a moment, types in NY and hits Return.

Step 3.

Go to the Triggers tab and give it a simple trigger like Opt-N. When you assign the trigger, make sure it’s only valid in Safari.

So, you’re in Safari looking at, whatever, when you decide you want to check up on the New York Times site; Opt-N and BOOM, you’re on your way.

A second here, a second there. It all adds up.

Have you ever gone to send the URL of a webpage to a colleague via email, only to find that the URL that you paste into the message is about 150 characters long? Sometimes the URL wraps to the next line in their email client, and when they click the link it’s broken. Sometimes the URL gets passed around until it loses it’s initial meaning; someone looks at it and thinks, “Where in hell is this going to take me?”

To resolve those problems there are several free online services that offer shorter URLs that link to the original. Most however, like tiny URL will generate short addresses but those addresses tend to have rather cryptic names.

The beauty of Notlong is that you can prepend your own name to the shortened address that it creates. Use it with your own hosted URL and it’s like having your own domain name, only with .notlong.com instead of simply .com. What’s more it’s permanent and free!

It took me all of five seconds to get mactipslog.notlong.com as a shortened URL for this site.

Notlong is also great for creating your own easily remembered name for a site that you just might like to access while you’re on the run.

At the Notlong site you can also grab a bookmarklet for your browser that enables you to simply click when you’re viewing a site with a long name — a window pops up with a field where you enter your preferred short name. If it’s available you are given the name, along with a secret address where you can manage the name, track the number of people who navigate via the shortened URL etc.

Go to Notlong

Mac applications tend to keep all of their components in one place; namely, their application packages (the icons you see within the Applications folder). You can normally discard an unwanted application simply by dragging it to the trash. However, there are normally some small configuration files left behind on other parts of your drive, like preference files. They are mostly harmless and quite tiny.

If you are really fastidious though, you might like to try AppDelete. When you drop an app on AppDelete’s icon in the Dock, it takes that application and any associated support files that it can find and moves them to the trash.

Afterwards you can leave AppDelete running while you check that other apps haven’t been affected by the file system changes. You can then simply press the Undo button to reverse the operation.

Even in the unlikely event that you encounter glitches further down the road — you will find when looking in the trash that AppDelete has stowed the suspect files in neat folders that represent where they were removed from.

All in all, a handy and safe method of removing all traces of an un-wanted app.

Learn more about AppDelete

FolderGlance has a really helpful often overlooked feature that I thought I’d mention here. Its main party piece is the way you can “Glance” inside folders and other packages such as applications. The often overlooked feature is that if you right-click on documents and other such files, FolderGlance presents you with an extended “Open With…” Menu.

The standard OSX “Open With…” menu shows apps that are officially registered to open the selected file type. FolderGlance lets you populate its menu with any app you choose; you simply designate an “Open With…” folder and then for each of your favorite apps, you make an alias and then drop it there.

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — FolderGlance

Below is an example of the sort of iTunes controller menu that can be created using Butler, the donationware do-almost-anything software from Peter Maurer.

With this pop up menu I can manipulate iTunes, even when it’s hidden — calling it up with a Butler universal hotkey. In Butler you make new containers (essentially folders), and within those containers you add, among other things, so-called Smart Items; you then assign the new container a hotkey and choose for it to open as a menu, and you’re done.

Clicking on Leo Laporte in this menu will show all of his albums and tracks; clicking on MacBreak Weekly will show all the tracks in the current album. The Back and Forward entries with the squiggly icons are a little different — they’re applescript code. All of the actions in the menu can be assigned their own hotkeys that will be invoked regardless of the application that you currently have in the foreground.

I’ve seen a lot of apps that control one or two aspects of iTunes, or apps for app launching, or clipboard management and my first snarky reaction is always the same…

Butler already does that.

Convert To MP3 is another of those handy “Well” applications where you drop a file on its window and it processes it without asking for parameters.

In this case you are dropping a movie file (MOV, MP4, whatever) and it is extracting the audio from the file and converting it into an MP3 file.

It then saves that MP3 file with the same name as the movie, and in the same folder.

It actually uses the power of iTunes and QuickTime to accomplish this, so it pays to have the latest versions of those apps installed. When you drop the movie it opens iTunes which imports it and then converts to MP3. The MP3 file is then moved back out and the movie is deleted from iTunes.

If you are wondering about those non-standard icons seen above: The MP3 icon is achieved by hacking the default iTunes MP3 icon, with the help of CandyBar. While the film-clip icon is achieved by copying a frame from the Enzo movie, with the help of the Quick Play contextual menu plugin, from Pixture Studio.

Learn more about Convert To MP3

I’ve just been doing some brain storming. Never mind what it was about. Some whacky business idea. I want to talk about the tools that I used.

I wanted to get the ideas quickly out of my head so I used Scrivener Gold. I love it because it’s free and it capitalizes sentences. This is great when I’m jotting down ideas because I can just write and press Return and write some more, and it’s nicely cased without any shift-pressing on my part. If an idea is immediately and obviously a sub-set of the previous one then I just press tab at the beginning of that line.

When I’ve got enough to be going on with I select all and copy, then I open Deep Notes and make a new document; I deselect the default entry and then paste. There are all my ideas as an outline where I can drag and drop them to nest and re-arrange them into a more logical order.

Why didn’t I just jump straight into Deep Notes? Because in order to stay on the keyboard I would need to remember the unique key combinations for creating all the specific types of new entry. Back in Scrivener all I had to remember was Return and Tab — freeing my feeble mind for the more creative stuff I was working on.

Although Deep Notes displays each entry as a single line, that line can contain an entire paragraph of imported text, so it’s a snap to re-arrange paragraphs (say, for a blog post) and then export the whole package as plain text.

Different strokes for different folks and all that, but I’m a firm believer in — whenever possible — getting rid of the extraneous. Here are some things that I do to keep what I see on my Mac as pure and clutter-free as possible.

Change Your Appearance Scheme from Blue to Graphite

I recently watched a video of Steve Jobs introducing the Next Step operating system. In the video he created some sample emails and in those emails he chose the typeface 26 point Stencil because he said it was his favorite. I’m sure that now he wishes he could buy up all copies of that video and burn them (figuratively speaking). Come forward 15 years and tell me that it isn’t past time to retire the traffic light colored buttons at the top of every window in OSX. Fortunately, by switching to the Graphic scheme we can choose to do just that, giving the OS a more unified appearance.

Hide the Desktop

I like to use Screenshot Helper to hide my desktop. It provides a layer of color (or an image) covering the entire screen. It can be whisked to one side with the help of exposé, or by hiding it with a Cmd-H. It’s also great for bringing to the front of all other applications and then (using Witch) bringing just one window to the front of Screenshot Helper.

Pluck the Text from Cluttered Web Pages

Tofu is an extremely clean way to view text: No toolbars; white space around the text; scroll bar at the bottom etc. When installed, Tofu adds a Paste into Tofu entry to the universal Services menu. So, if I’m looking at an article on a webpage that’s full of peripheral distractions I just select the body of the article and zap it over to a new Tofu document.

Tofu is clever enough that the pasted text is in the font, font size an colors that YOU prefer, but it also keeps any hypertext links active from the article.

Learn to Toggle

Memorize the shortcuts for toggling toolbars on and off, and for showing and hiding the Dock, and use them. You might find that in an app like Mail you’re only using three commands from a toolbar of perhaps ten, so learn those commands and lose the bar. Not only will things be cleaner, you’ll gain some real estate as well.

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.

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — Butler