I wrote a while ago about ditching spotlight in favor of Alfred. However, when listening the other day to Brett Terpstra’s new podcast (Systematic) he mentioned he used both spotlight and Launchbar (which is pretty similar to Alfred) in sort of different ways.
photo by flickingerbrad
The title of this entry is anything but simple. Trying to teach your child skills that will be useful, not necessarily today, but in the world he’ll have to live in the future sounds great. However, this is probably the holy grail of education plans and curricula, and is for certain no easy feat. Continue reading
If you haven’t heard already OS X 10.8 (AKA Mountain Lion – ML) was released this week. For an in depth review I recommend John Siracusa’s review. One of the things that struck me, as I’ve been reading on the new features of ML, was that X11 is no longer included in OS X. Continue reading
Marco Arment on the future of the Mac App store:
The Mac App Store is in significant danger of becoming an irrelevant, low-traffic flea market where buyers rarely venture for serious purchases. And I bet that’s not what Apple had in mind at all.
I personally never have had much confidence on the Mac App store. When an app was available both in and out of the Mac App Store, I’ve always bought it directly from the developer’s site.
In this digital era we live in it’s quite easy to get distracted with the incredible amount of things we have at our disposal. And the worse part is that a whole day can go by, while you’re thinking that you’re doing some work (like writing emails[1]), and yet you end up feeling like having done no progress at all on your projects. At this point I might be starting to sound a bit like all the GTD (Getting Things Done) evangelists out there, if you keep reading you might see that I am not, and neither am I interested in writing about GTD nor the ever-increasing number of apps related to it. Continue reading
Today I felt like procrastinating, so I wrote this script for safely quitting apps. The reason for writing this script is the fact that Dropbox (or the other cloud solution I also use SurgarSync) is currently not supporting a merging functionality. If you have the application open in two devices at the same time this could lead to data inconsistency while switching.
In my particular case this translates to the fact that I sometimes forget to close several apps in my Mac at work, so when I get home on occasion I’d like to continue to work or access some files. In the past I’ve had issues with this, and I’d loose some data. For instance, once I was working on a latex document I wrote some new lines and when I went to my other computer, assuming the new lines had been incorporated I found that some were but others weren’t. The worse part was that I tried to restore previous versions of the file via Dropbox but the new lines were nowhere to be found. Continue reading
I was recently in Rome for holidays and I couldn’t help but noticing how in every place we went there were people using the iPad as a handheld camera. I know the new iPad has quite a good camera, but really, is it just me or does anyone else think some (or most?) people are prone to careless behavior while traveling and sightseeing. It’s really no wonder why tourists get robbed so easily in many places.
My camera (an Olympus pen) cost me probably as much as an iPad does, and I try to be very careful with it, especially when traveling. I’ll always put the neck strap around my neck when using it near a balcony or a similar place. However, seeing a guy take an iPad with his bear hands in a gallery of the colosseum packed up with tourists, with no means to safely grab it is something else entirely, and it gives me the shivers. If it were only for that, but he also has to manipulate the iPad with one hand, while it rests on the other, in order to take the picture. This is just my impression, but I feel that they’ll be plenty of people using the new Apple Care+ for iPad for being so obsessed with their gadget, resulting in the tremendous incautious attitude. A final thought, I really don’t think the iPad is really that comfortable to carry around as a regular camera. Well have to wait and see if this is a new trend.
I usually rely on internet sharing for turning my mac into a Wi-Fi hotspot for connecting my iPod or my Android phone. However, it is quite cumbersome to go through System Preferences and the dialog panes if you do it quite regularly. Hints reader BrentT had this same problem and he came up with a clever applescript for turning Internet Sharing On and Off. His script did not Toggle Airport On and Off, so I added this part and I also included a quit system preferences line at the end. Here’s the script. Continue reading
I’m getting ready to write my PhD thesis, and for some time now I’ve been gathering information on tools that can help me get from here to there. This first post is an attempt to organize this material, to write down my thoughts on the approach I plan to take for tackling the beast. This might not be exactly what I end up doing, so I’ll try to update the post on the changes or difficulties I’ve found along the way, to keep this in a sort of live document. Continue reading
I’ve been using Alfred for a couple of weeks now, and not only have I totally forgotten OS X’s native spotlight, but I can’t really see myself without it. Alfred is a sort of application launcher. I say “sort of” because it can actually do more than that. You can search for files, look for bookmarks, browse and play your music, preview documents, perform actions on folders and files, and a whole lot more.
There’s a free version that’s quite nice and functional, but if you want the whole power–and trust me, you do–you’ll have to upgrade and buy the Powerpack. With the Powerpack you can create extensions using applescript, shell scripts, automator workflows, email actions, and a whole lot more. The following extensions are my favorite so far:
Quit all apps Does what the title says, with barely a few keystrokes. I practically just type Alt+Spacebar (the Alfred shortcut) and q and because it has smart autocomplete I can launch the script without hassle.
Wifi Toggle Toggle wifi on or off faster than lightning. There’s Bluetooth Toggle extension as well.
Search files with openmeta tags If you’re all for tagging, then you’re going to like this one. The main advantage against spotlight is that it only searches for openmeta tags. I’ve been developing an Alfred extension for tagging the current selected files in Finder, I will make it available here in a future post.
Thesaurus for Alfred I constantly use the Mac’s thesaurus and dictionary, and I used to launch it via spotlight–not any more.
There are many, many more Alfred extensions, and the user community just keeps coming up with better extensions that will surely make you be more productive. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can write an extension yourself, it is not difficult at all. I think this is a really nice approach that’ll surely save you some serious money if you use several apps for doing all of the wonderful things Alfred can do. Do you use something different?
Between the Candle and the Star 