So, your a neat freak and you want a clean desktop on your mac. Well, there are two ways you can do this. Since I’m a neat freak (only on my computer), I used the first method I’m going to mention of hiding all my drives on my desktop.
The first method is to hide all of your drives on your desktop. The way you do this is by going to your desktop or the finder, then clicking going to Finder>Preferences located in the context menu at the top right of your screen. In the General tab, uncheck the first 3 items - Hard Disks; CDs, DVDs, and iPods; and Connected servers. Now you might ask yourself, How do I go about accessing these items if they aren’t on my desktop. Well, 2 simple ways. 1) Go to your finder and they will show up in the left pane, or 2) use Quicksilver (my preferred method).
The second method is to download a little program called desktopple by FoggyNoggin Software. It is donationware so if you like, be sure to donate to the programmers who work hard on this excellent little software. This software will install a little icon in your system tray located at the top right of your screen. Just click the icon and choose Hide Desktop from the drop-down, its that simple.
Like I said, I prefer the first method, but if you want a simpler, more controllable approach, use method two.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, tips
I’ve been messing around with searching using Quicksilver, and man am I amazed. Any site you can search (google, yahoo, newzbin, etc…) you can setup a quick search using Quicksilver and your default browser. My default browser is Firefox and the search I’ll show you is for my site since google is already searchable by default with Quicksilver.
First off, make sure you have the Web Search Module plugin installed. This is what allows you to do these quick easy searches.
Next, go to your browser and navigate to a search engine or the site you would like to search. I’m going to PHATO Productions Blog (hey, thats mine).
Now do a search in the search field and submit that search.
Notice the url after you submit the search. Your gonna want to copy that url.
Now create a bookmark. In my case the bookmark url is going to be http://www.phatoproductions.com/blog/index.php?s=mac&sbutt=Go. I’m not going to keep the whole url though, I’m going to replace the search query (mac) with three stars (***). When we use Quicksilver the 3 stars will allow us to put our search query in there.
After you have created your bookmark, goto Quicksilver preferences and refresh your bookmarks for your default browser, just in case Quicksilver hasn’t done that yet.
Now invoke Quicksilver and type in the name of your bookmark.
Tab over twice and type in a search and then hit enter.
The search should open up your browser with the site you are searching with the search query, notice the url.
Thats it. Quick, easy, simple… And now your searches will be the same way once you have them all setup. I hope this helps you out, and if it is redundant, I’m sorry, but this tip would have helped me yesterday, hehe.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, Quicksilver, tips, tutorials
Merlin Mann posted some useful smart mailboxes in Mac’s Mail.app, and I thought these were very interesting, especially the one where he separates his emails by location. I have some of my own smart mailboxes setup and he covers a few of them such as recently viewed and recently sent. I also have address book groups setup for friends, business, etc… and I have smart folders setup for these different groups. I also have rules setup and one of these rules keeps my inbox clean. I like a not so clutter inbox so I setup a rule to archive emails that are 1 day old.
Rules and smart mailboxes are an excellent way to keep your emails organized. So be sure to check out Merlin Mann’s post and try setting up your own smart mailboxes and rules.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, tips
I’m not sure if anyone else knew this, but I couldn’t find anywhere on how to do this. I use xampp as my local web server and to start apache and mysql you have to go into terminal, login as the super user an then type the command to start it. Well this started to get tedious and I wanted to run 1 command to start xampp. This is how I did it.
I used automator to accomplish my task. Open automator, on the left click automator under applications an then in the list that shows up to the right, drag Run Applescript in the pane to the right. Once you have your applescript box up, type this in there:
do shell script “/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start” password “password” with administrator privileges
Make sure you tupe it all on one line, if it word wraps for you, that is ok, just don’t manually hit return. Once you have this in the input box, change “password” to whatever your super user password is. After you do this click compile. Now you can click the run button above and this should start up apache and mysql. I then went ahead and saved this as an application in my Applications folder and whenever I need to start it up, I just do it using Quicksilver.
This is a simple process but now I just have to do 1 step instead of 3 or 4. A simple time saver. You could also have this application run at boot so you don’t even have to do anything.
Technorati Tags: applications, coding, mac, tips, tutorials
Todays tutorial covers how to move a selection you have in the finder to any folder of your choosing with a simple hotkey. I show you how to do this by setting up a trigger and using the proxy object “Current Selection.” I ramble on, but you get the idea of what I was going for.
Click Here to view the tutorial - 2 min. 15 sec.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, Quicksilver, tutorials
Just thought I should point out that over at the Adobe Labs you can now download a public preview of Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3, and Soundbooth CS3. I don’t know about all of you, but I have been waiting for a Universal version of Premiere and After Effects for a long time now. I believe these products will be released in Q3 of 2007, but at least we can try these babies out for now.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — April 16, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced free public previews of Adobe Premiere® Pro CS3, Adobe After Effects® CS3 Professional and Adobe Soundbooth™ CS3 software, components of the recently announced Adobe Creative Suite® 3 Production Premium. Video and creative professionals now have the opportunity to test these new public previews on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/ . The final shipping releases will be available worldwide in the third quarter of 2007.
Check these products out here or look below for specific products:
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
Adobe After Effects CS3
Adobe Soundbooth CS3
Technorati Tags: applications, mac
I had a buddy of mine call me up today and his question was, “Why, when I click on my Firefox icon in the dock, does it ask me if I want to mount the image?” Well my first though was, he didn’t know how to install applications on a mac. I had this problem when I first got my mac as well, and since he is a new Mac user who came from Windows, it is an honest mistake and I was happy to help him out.
When installing applications on a Mac, most of the time there is no installer. Usually you get a .dmg file which is an image file. If you double click the .dmg file it will be mounted and usually open the mounted disk for you. Now you should see a file that has a .app extension. For Firefox I’m assuming it is Firefox.app. What you do with this file is not double click it as if it were an installer, but you want to drag this file into your Applications directory. This will install Firefox for you or whatever application you are trying to install. Simple enough for the experienced, but confusing for the Windows user just switching over.
What my friend did was dragged the icon from the .dmg file into his dock and then unmounted the image. Every time he clicked the icon in the dock, sure enough, the .dmg file was mounted.
So, there you have it, my quick run down of how to install applications on a Mac.
I just put together a list of software that I find useful for my mac. You may find them useful as well, so here you go:
Quicksilver
A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.
The Unarchiver
Best uncompressing tool I’ve found.
Parallels
Virtualization Software
Aperture
Excellent replacement for iPhoto, a little more technical, and you have to pay for it, but it is well worth it if you are a photographer.
Google Earth
If you don’t know what this is, I’m really, really sorry…
Google Notifier
A must have if you use Gmail and/or Google Calendar
iGetter
download multiple files with the capability to resume downloads
GarageSale
A program to help you with ebay. It has built in templates and a lot of other cool features.
iTerm
A much better solution to replace the built in mac terminal.
iWork 06
Steve Jobs uses the program Keynote from the iWork package for his presentations. Much better than powerpoint.
OnyX
Use this to tweak Mac OSX beyond what the default capabilities are.
VLC
A must have media player. Plays every kind of media file (that I have found) and has tons of built in codecs.
SuperDuper
Excellent backup software
Toast 8
Awesome burning software
Xslimmer
Xslimmer determines which code your machine needs and removes the rest. This is achieved by removing the code inside the Universal Binaries that does not fit with your machine’s architecture, a code that never gets executed and just wastes your disk space. In addition, Xslimmer eliminates unwanted application localizations. Normally you only use 1 or 2 of the languages in any app. Keep those and let Xslimmer eliminate the rest, recovering your precious disk space.
VirtueDesktops
Multiple desktops (wont need this once leopard is released)
MacTheRipper
DVD Ripping software
FFmpegX
Best compression software for video and audio.
MediaFork
I think it is called handbrake now, it is for dvd ripping too I think.
Adium
Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
Firefox
Pretty much the best browser ever
Transmit
A very well done ftp program
Textmate
TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.
Snapz Pro
Screen Capture and Screen Cast
Azureus
Torrent downloader
UPDATE:
Growl
Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications.
Well there you have it, a list of programs I find useful for mac. I’m sure I have more, but I just couldn’t think of them at the time. If you have any great suggestions, be sure to leave them in the comments.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac
Alright, Google Desktop for Mac finally got release close to 2 years after the windows version has been out. So I downloaded it (its around 1 MB), installed it, used it, an then uninstalled it. Google Desktop would have been a great tool for me, if I wasn’t already a Quicksilver addict. Spotlight is a great search, but somewhat limited, but to be quite honest, it has always served my needs just fine.
So I had GD setup to search my gmail account, well when I typed in one of my contacts, it just brought up all the emails from Mail. This wasn’t working for me and was probably going to be more of a hassle than it was worth to get this working. After all, I can search my emails with Quicksilver. So that is my quick little 2 cents on Google Desktop for Mac. If I’m missing something that you’re not, let me know in the comments.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, google
Check this out, you can create files, folders, etc… with this quick tip. Here is where I got this info from.
The article above shows you how to make a new file using quicksilver, but I wanted to create new folders as well. Here is a quote from the article:
“Basically Alcor (the Quicksilver developer) has included a default action “Make New” which is not usable without a little setup. What you need to do is create a folder called “Templates” in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver. In that folder you just add files of the sort you create on a regular basis, e.g. Word Documents, text documents, spreadsheets, whatever.”
Well, to create a new folder using quicksilver, just add a new folder and name it whatever you like, I called my “new folder” (creative, aren’t I?). Put this folder in the ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver folder. Now when you activate quicksilver, navigate to the folder you would like to create your new folder in, then tab over and type “Make New”, then tab over and select the name of the folder you put in there, in my case “new folder”. Quicksilver has created the new folder and brings that folder up in Quicksilver. Now if you want to rename the folder (I believe it defaults to .untitled) just tab over and type “rename” then tab over again and type in the new name. If you get good at this you can create folders and move files into that folder very quickly.
Just thought that point needed to be covered since it wasn’t cover in the article.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, Quicksilver, tips, tutorials
