Annoyed of "Flash Player.prefpane" as well? Hide it!
"To reduce the number of icons shown in the main pane of System Preferences, choose View > Customize.”
Nice addition.
via TidBITS
The Apple Tree
See the full tree at Mashable
"To reduce the number of icons shown in the main pane of System Preferences, choose View > Customize.”
Nice addition.
via TidBITS
Lion adds a “new” feature where it moves files by copying and then “pasting” them. When you hold down ⌥ while having the Edit menu activated the Paste entry changes to Move Item Here.
So to Cut and Paste in Finder you just have to remember the pasting bit, as opposed to the “first cutting out” bit like on Windows.
via TidBITS Macs and Mac OS X: Our Favorite Hidden Features in Mac OS X Lion
"Never linking to sites referenced in stories."
Hipstamatic, the absolute best vintage camera app for iPhone, just had an update, which includes:
Thank god this feature has been added! Ever since I have Hipstamatic I wished for this feature. I’ve ssh’ed into Hipstamatic’s app directory remotely to delete all images from a terminal or used PhoneView. It was so frustrating to delete every image separately1.
Don’t forget to check out all the different lenses, flashes, cameras as well.
I can’t never get enough of “Do you really want to delete this image?”. ↩
This looks great. Brett has written a Bash function that allows you to open a specific file by typing its extension, rather than its filename. This is helpful when you have tons of files in a directory and can’t remember a files’ name, but know there’s only one file with that extension. Brett writes:
My most obvious use case is Xcode projects, where I may have dozens (and dozens) of files, but there’s only one .xcodeproj file (folder). I don’t always know the name of the project in the folder, but if I run oft xco it will open it without my having to search. If there is more than one result, it gives you a numeric menu to select the file you want to open. You can cancel, select a single file or “Open ALL” from that menu. If you run oft with no arguments, it will read a (partial) extension from a prompt.
Don McAllister explains how to re-download the Lion Installer in case you forgot to create a bootable Lion disk before installation.
Send in your Users from hell stories and photos!
http://usersfromhell.tumblr.com/submit
"Germany’s most successful online-banking-app - been suitable for allmost all german banks and savings banks (incl. PayPal - see prerequisites) - is now available on your Mac!"
Has had a short beta and has now been published. Using the iOS version since its early days. The Mac version is not as good, even though it supports PayPal - a feature I’ve been requesting for ages.
The price is a bit high (€30; this is just the introduction price) for an app that only allows you to do two things1:
Highly popular though and gives a great overview over your bank accounts, e.g. transferred money.
Will Apple allow me to have a romantic date with my extremely tall women in an Apple Store?
via Macoun
/**
* For the brave souls who get this far: You are the chosen ones,
* the valiant knights of programming who toil away, without rest,
* fixing our most awful code. To you, true saviors, kings of men,
* I say this: never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down,
* never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry,
* never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.
*/
A good selection on Java Code Geeks. All source code comments on Stack Overflow.
Don’t forget to buy a copy of one of Daniel’s apps. I personally use, and love, MarsEdit.
I use more Extensions, but most of them are disabled by default. I don’t need to have all Extensions running all the time, e.g. Firebug Lite or ReloadCSS.2
Don’t forget to opt in for YouTube’s HTML5 beta. ↩
Before any stupid comments come in: Yes, I use 1Password, therefore 1Password’s Safari Extension, I didn’t like it in Chrome, and I don’t like it in Safari. *unhappybearface* ↩
"To convert an arbitrary volume to Lion’s whole-disk encryption, you use diskutil’s core storage “convert” command, and provide a passphrase. For example, if you have a volume called “Data” attached to your Mac, you would run something like this from the command line:"
% diskutil cs convert /Volumes/Data -passphrase [yourPasswordHere]
I proudly present you DEVONagent 3.0. A major update to this fantastic Internet research assistant. Why am I so proud? It has, like DEVONthink, a new Support Assistant where you can watch a short tutorial on how to use DEVONagent produced by yours truly. Really, really great clients. Great ideas, no skimping on quality, and, most importantly, enough time to actually produce this kind of quality.1
DEVONagent 3.0 sports these new features:
Maybe I should have added “great products” to the list? ↩
CalendarBar has dropped in price. It’s an app that allows you to display Gcalendar and Facebook alongside. Go grab it at $1.
I received my final grades one or two weeks ago. You can now call me "Master of Sonic Arts". Whatever that means, but, yes, you can congratulate me. I’m going to publish my thesis in a couple of days.
Yes, feels awesome. I mean, highest academic grade you can get, which practically means I’m not as stupid as I thought. Good to know.
Apple support document about FileVault 2. They really were thinking a lot about this it seems. You get a key that you can use to decrypt the drive in case you forget your password. This password can be stored with Apple and you can set three security questions to retrieve this key.
Encryption is done on-the-fly, as is decryption. I wonder how that is working exactly. In the previous FileVault you had to have at least the same amount of disk space available as the amount of data the FileVault data occupied to decrypt. If they allow you to turn FileVault on and off as you like, then that’s another kudos to Apple.
"Owain Weinert, a 9-year-old boy that has been battling with Acute Lymphocytic Leukaemia recently reached out to the Make-A-Wish Foundation to see if he could have his dream of making an iOS game realized. Make-A-Wish inquired and managed to get in contact with the Seattle developer 4th & Battery, which you could classify as a ‘spin-off’ of PopCap (makers of Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies) that focuses on creating more experimental, indie or a “little flawed” games."
What a great story. Read the rest of it at MacStories
The game he created is called Allied Star Police. MacStories says it some sort of tower defense game. Owain says that all of his family can’t stop playing it and neither can he. I love tower defense games and if it’s really that addictive, my weekend is screwed. I hope it’s not based on Plants vs. Zombie, because then I’m in real troubles.
UPDATE:
There goes my productivity.
A painter doesn’t have just one brush. The carpenter has screwdrivers, chisels, and similar tools of every shape and size. As a writer I could make one tool do everything, but I prefer to let the tools do the heavy lifting while I expend the minimal amount of effort to achieve the best result.
Enough for Randy.
Funnily enough I’ve got a similar setup. I also got one client who wants me to have OpenOffice installed for project planning. If I wouldn’t have that client I would delete OpenOffice immediately to get to a bare minimum set of tools. Same client wants me to use Wuala, which is another big annoyance for me.
You find a long page at apple.com about all new features introduced in Lion. This document also lists some of the lesser known features like:
See the full tree at Mashable
When resizing windows from any edge/corner on Lion, use Shift and/or Alt/Option to constrain as you’d expect!
(Just follow this guy!)
In case you want to burn the Lion installer to a DVD or create a separate partition on an external hard drive, which is what I did, follow the instructions provided by Egg Freckles.
This was the easiest and shortest post I’ve found on this topic. Matt Gemmell tweeted this earlier.
Here are some practical tips on Spaces in Lion, which wasn’t abandoned from the OS. Some people seem to miss how Spaces work in Lion. The OS X page for Mission Control says:
Mission Control brings together Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces[…]
Simply go to your Mission Control and at the top you’ll see your Spaces. Create new “blank” ones with the plus symbol on the right or drag apps to the top to create new Spaces instantly.
Our previous tip on how to switch Spaces with a shortcut:
Lion reinvented Spaces. It is now not intuitively possible anymore to predefine which apps should run in which Space, but it’s also not possible anymore to switch directly to a specific Space. The shortcut used to be ⌃1 for the first Space for example.
You have to go to System Preferences and open Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts. Under Mission Control you should see entries for created Spaces. Just enable them and they are going to be available.
Apple has removed this setting from System Preferences and moved it to the Dock.
(First you need to make sure you actually have more than one Space created.) Right click an app and choose Options → Assign to.
Lion reinvented Spaces. It is now not intuitively possible anymore to predefine which apps should run in which Space, but it’s also not possible anymore to switch directly to a specific Space. The shortcut used to be ⌃1 for the first Space for example.
You have to go to System Preferences and open Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts. Under Mission Control you should see entries for created Spaces. Just enable them and they are going to be available.
In case you missed it (how could anyone miss this?) Lion has just been released.
I don’t want to make any comments on the update itself, I’d rather recommend reading John Siracusa’s long (19 pages) review here.
Siracusa also wrote:
A more human-scale Lion review by @jsnell is available at Macworld: http://macw.us/ncVFMK
Buy Lion directly:
Christian has published a dictionary plugin for Dictionary.app. Just install in `/Library/Dictionaries/` for all user access and `~/Library/Dictionaries/` if you don’t want to share this plugin with other users on your machine.
Direct download link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4553669/manpages.dictionary.zip
[via aptgetupdate.de](http://www.aptgetupdate.de/2011/07/12/manpages-im-lexikondictionary/)
1964 Antique Modem Live Demo
I love TextEdit. The fastest launching app on my Mac. Like Bean it can do a lot more than you can see. This 101 gives a brief overview of most TextEdit features. Again impressive.1
I was trying to highlight text in an rtf on Wednesday, which didn’t seem to work so I downloaded Bean. Just as a short explanation why you see these two apps being mentioned here. ↩
Impressive how Bean has evolved. Looks very mature.
Don McAllister (screencastsonline.com) recently reviewed Writing Kit for iPad. I love the ability to move the cursor quickly with single or double-finger taps. The app has just been dropped in price (currently $0.99).
If you haven’t bought it yet, now is a good time.
Writing Kit for iPad 
Don’s full length free screencast on Writing Kit. Subscribe here.:
Why am I not an affiliate?!
I often need to set appointments with my clients (who come from all over the planet). World Clock Pro has served me well. And it just has been updated to a great 2.0.
World Clock Pro allows me to add most important time zones to a list so that I can easily see what time it is where my clients are. With World Clock Pro I can easily compare times in different time zones. For me the most important time zones are:
With World Clock Pro I can easily guestimate when I will be available for clients and make appointments more effectively. WCP 2.0 adds alarms, a split view screen, city list and several other improvements.
Frank, a German friend, originally recommended WCP to me. I love it ever since. Thanks.
World Clock Pro iPad/iPhone
My thanks go to anyone who supports/supported Mac OS X Screencasts with a donation, Flattr, or any comments over the last years. I am always surprised when I open Google Analytics, any affiliate website, Twitter, the comment queue, etc.
The sheer popularity and your support has been one of the most up-cheering things I’ve seen over the last years. I have several other websites and projects, but none of them is nearly as popular as Mac OS X Screencasts. I mean, occasionally I get a random tweet on my personal Twitter feed of someone just saying thanks. How great is that? So yes, thank you, that really means a lot to me.
Record for lowest-scoring Super Mario Bros. run broken
Preparing for John Siracusa’s Review of OS X Lion
Okay. Fine. I still love the internet.
Gold.
Screenflow 3.0 preview
I wonder how legit this is. No DNA, Telestream?
Oh, really? They’re not going to have this security hole hanging around for the next couple of updates? Who knew?
I had 3 blogs reporting this as big news today. What are these guys smoking?
Just a quick note here. For a few weeks now I’ve been working on a project that I call "The Screencast Screencast".
I have two screencasts planned that are off the usual screencasts. The inspiration came from a friend who asked me whether I could do a screencast on how to make screencast. I had that idea a while ago, but I didn’t want to share (all) this knowledge publicly1.
This project currently includes two videos, one of which I’ve already recorded:
The latter is about 8 hours long, I try to play it at 10 times its original speed and add some (hopefully funny) comments. It’s hilarious to watch myself editing by the way. (Apparently I’m not able to use Vim anymore. D’oh!)
My business includes coaching developers to get up to speed with screencasting. It wouldn’t to tell everyone all the secrets, but I decided to share some of them. ↩
Inspired by One Thing Well’s post about Copy Paste Character, here a couple more solution how you could insert characters like →, ⌘, ⇧, ↩ more easily.
Obviously TextExpander is the first thing that comes to mind when talking about “make things easier to type out”. Actually I’ve done this for myself and shared a Symbols.textexpander a while ago. (German)
You can either download these snippets directly or add them via URL.
`http://files.zettt.de/textexpander/Symbols.textexpander`
Mr. @MacLemon also provides something similar. (German) I would recommend to check out these snippets with a proper English description on MacUpdate: Unicode Snippets.
The yesterday mentioned Keyboard Maestro now has a Macro Library with something similar.
Under Text there are to Libraries that you can add. Funky Glyphs and Menu Glyphs. Menu Glyphs is probably more what you want to add. It includes things like →, ⌘, ⌫, etc, whereas Funky Glyphs includes, well, funky glyphs like ▲,☥,❋.
PopChar X is a really great application that allows you to search all special characters by their name. You can add favorites and search for special characters in different fonts. I reviewed it here.
One of my absolutely most favorite productivity tools has just been released in a new major version. Keyboard Maestro is an app that can save you a huge amount of time. Just by opening folders via shortcut Keyboard Maestro… I mean think of it. How much time do you spend every day just by navigating to default folders?
I have about 5 folders set up to open with Keyboard Maestro quickly. Paula’s and my shared Dropbox folder, my Dropbox public folder, Trunk Notes, and my Archive folder where all my client projects live in. They are only available in the Finder, which means I can re-use these shortcuts in other applications.
Yes, I’m excited!
See what’s new here, but be warned, the list is long. Very long.
The sheer ability of this should get you sold:
- Control Flow - Pause Until, If/Then/Else, While, Until and Repeat with extensive conditional tests.
- Variables - permanently stored and accessible in a variety of ways.
- Calculations - based on variables or a variety of functions.
EDIT:
I just upgraded and had a brief look at the new features. Oh. My. God. Control Flow is awesome!
A friend, Bastian (@schlingel), noted on Twitter1:
If you are still whining about FCPX dropping support for playout to stone plates or so, watch this SuperMeet recording http://bit.ly/lzQQH6
I don’t like the wording, though it yields some interesting information.
Larry Jordon speaks at London, SuperMeet, June 23, 2011 (2 recordings)
This app, Final Cut Pro X, is about the future of editing. So that means that if you’re missing something like multi-cam, it is not unreasonable to believe that we would add that along the way. If you’re missing something older like EDL or tape output. We probably aren’t going to focus on that. But there’s definitely an opportunity for third parties to bring that kind of functionality to the table.
That’s exactly how I think about Final Cut Pro X. Apple has abandoned so many old technologies that the movie industry now requires to use new technology. Although that is a terrible decision for older broadcasting stations like those government driven broadcasting stations I mentioned earlier, it is a good technological decision. Final Cut Pro will make it possible for Apple to move things forward.
It’s painful to rely on third parties, but it is an option. An option we can live with. Also remember my second argument in my previous post: Just sit tight and wait! If you’re setup currently works, and there’s no technological reason you need to upgrade, just wait. Apple is listening to us and they currently fix what is borked.
Like I said in the previous post:
Software changes. Remember? This is a 1.0 of a new era of Final Cut. Apple invests a lot of thought and effort making the best experience for their customers.
Now let’s wait. Please.
I’ve received a few emails about Bill S.978, a new bill proposed in the USA, which would make it illegal under certain circumstances to share videos of copyrighted materials over the internet. The problem is that it appears to also make it illegal to upload videos of games, such as let’s plays and…
Bill S.978 apparently is worded in a way where it would include Let’s Plays and Speed Runs to be illegal when gamers upload them to YouTube. (As the games that these videos are based on are “copyrighted material”.)
This YouTube video gives a brief overview of what Bill S.978 is about:
Check out that video’s description for more information on Bill S.978 and how to act. Also make sure to check out the last bits of Notch’s (Mojang; Minecraft) word on this.