Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Different way of shopping on Amazon.com
Browse and search Amazon.com online stores using intuitive and straightforward interface of this desktop application. You can easily find your favorite books, electronics or other items.

Mac Amazon Browser

Omni Group have been working on this app for a very long time, and in the new year it will finally be for sale. Right now you can download a beta version that’s very stable, and newer versions are being released almost every day.

I’ve always been a fan of outliners, ever since I could collapse and expand lists in the built in MessagePad stationery, so I’ve tried my share of the current spate of super-outliners, otherwise known as GTD apps.

GTD comes from Getting Things Done, David Allen’s book on managing your things to do. My super condensed version of his theory states that if you have somewhere where you can write down (or enter) all of the nagging things on your mind (things to do – things you’d like to do or ponder), then you can free your cluttered brain for other things. Once you’ve assembled all these tasks you can group them into contexts, such as: At Work; At Home; Online; Running Errands etc.

When you find yourself say, at home or, running errands, you filter and handle those tasks related to that context — or if you want to get fancy you also filter just the next steps from more complex projects.

This is just a small part of GTD, but essentially the meatiest part, and OmniFocus handles this part of GTD very well indeed.

It does take a little getting used to, especially the issues of deciding whether to be working within the Planning or Context environments. After a couple of days it all falls into place though; one of its great strengths is that you can tinker endlessly with your naming conventions, views etc. without breaking anything. You’re never “locking yourself in.”

Give it a try. Organizing your chores can be fun!

The Omni Group - OmniFocus

Today I downloaded NeoOffice which, in short, is Open Office after it’s been extensively modified to fit right into the Mac environment. I already have an earlier copy of Open Office. It worked in a sense, but I could never get past the fact that here was an application running on my Mac that looked like it was channeling Windows 3.0.

NeoOffice fixes that. It’s not quite Cocoa quality, but it’s close enough. What really got me excited though, are a few features that it has, that take me back to my days with Office on the PC. I used Word so much that over time I trained it to auto-correct and auto-complete an enormous number of words and phrases that I tended to use over and over.

I didn’t care about 80 percent of what Word could do – just the remaining 20 percent that was those automation tools; I even hid all of the toolbars and rulers, leaving Word looking more like Notepad (but with nicer fonts).

Now I’ve jumped right into doing the same with NeoOffice. It’s every bit as useful to me as Word once was, if not more so, and it’s free.

I am one happy chappie!

NeoOffice 2.2.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

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

OSX is famously proficient at keeping itself in good running condition. I’m not an expert on these matters, but I’m told it’s so efficient as a result of having been built on the very robust UNIX core.

Part of this UNIX legacy is a set of Cron scripts that run every day, week and month, completely in the background. They do things like clear away temp files, rebuild databases, free up memory; stuff like that.

Only problem is, they run at, like, 2:30 in the morning. It is possible to jump start these scripts and run them any time you like though. Why would you need to? A case in point might be when you rip a DVD using HandBrake; after the job (which is very CPU intensive) your CPU fan might be humming away and you’re left with only 30 megs of free RAM, instead of say, a gig of free RAM. This RAM will free up eventually but if you want things ship-shape now, you likely have three choices.

You can press Ctrl-Eject and choose to restart your Mac; do this though and you then need to launch all those apps you always like to have running and then re-open your documents.

You could invoke the necessary Cron scripts using the Terminal. When I was a Windows user, Mac people would scoff our DOS prompt, and I did too. When I switched I swore that I’d never look at a jaggy font with a flashing cursor in a command line window ever again.
 

 
Or, you can use something like MainMenu. As you can see, it does all of those arcane system chores, through a nice clean menu. To be honest, I’m scared to try most of the commands that it offers, but I do get great mileage from my Mac by running the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts — from that menu — while my Mac is running (which it almost never is at 2:30 in the morning).

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