Mac OS X Glui

Action Shot - Glui - Click for Larger Image

Screen Capture Applicaton for the Mac that replaces Skitch since Evernote trashed it. Highly recommended.

Best Features:

  • Snaps an image with minimum of fuss
  • Fast upload to Dropbox (Skitch no longer able to upload anywhere useful).
  • Annotations of images are quick & simple
Glui

Safari and Fonts Not Easy to Read

Big fonts are important as my eyes fade away with age. And screens are big enough to let me do this.

Discovered this when I went looking for a way to solve certain web sites that have very small fonts.

Safari-Font-Size-Bigger

Tweetbot has a multi-column mode

I feel stupid. Just realised that Tweetbot for Mac OS X has a mulitcolumn mode.

TweetbotScreenSnapz001

Note To Self: Command Click

Press ⌘ when Clicking a link to open in a new window.

How to Use iTunes DJ in iTunes 11

I use the “iTunes DJ” feature in the side bar of iTunes for many years. The new iTunes 11 doesn’t have it.

However, all is not lost. The feature is still there, it’s just not a separate items. Here is my four step method to use the new feature that replaces iTunes DJ.

  1. Just press play to start the music.
  2. Press the Shuffle  icon (shown in the picture) which will randomly select songs.
  3. You can then press the Playlist icon shown in Step 3. ( or you can press ⌘- ⌥ - U on a Mac )
  4. And the playlist will show the songs all mixed up.
 

Using Two Monitors for Productivity

Using Two Monitors for Productivity

As part of working more hours at my desk/home office, I've been considering ways to improve my productivity and comfort. To this end I now have a 27" and 24" Apple display since some studies suggest that additional screen space allows for the more productivity. Disregarding the opportunities for distraction, having two large screens is definitely more productive.

For example, I am often researching products and technology. As part of this process I commonly use a web browser, PDF files, Data collection (DevonThink) and text editor for notes. Having two screens improves my ability to locate, read and record the information that I need.

When I am mobile, I use a single screen. In a triumph of converse logic, I find that this also works well for certain tasks. It took me a while to realise that a single screen forces me to focus on the task at hand and I get fewer distractions. I’ve learnt from this and I will occasionally, when I’m mindful enough, disconnect the second monitor.

Summary: Two screens are more productive, except for when one small screen is the best way to get something done. I need to be mindful of my work and choose the best way to be productive.

That’s not new, I know.

Bypass "unidentified developer" when Opening App on Mountain Lion

The simplest method for bypassing this is to Control click the application in the Applications Folder and then click “Open”. Then when asked click “Open” again. Done. Like this:

Go to Application, press hold control, and then menu will come up:

Make sure that you really want to open it and that you trust where the application has come from. The purpose of blocking this is prevent ordinary people from installing malware.

 

If you reinstall or update the app, then you need to repeat this option.

noted: Ghostery Mobile Browser for iOS

Ghostery announces a free browser for your iOS device that allow you to block the tracking cookies and avoid the privacy breaches that many websites have.

I use and recommend it.

 

Ghostery Mobile Browser for iOS Update! Faster, Better, and More Trackers! | The Purple Box.

My Favourite Text Editors for OSX - MultiMarkdown Composer

I won’t grow up to be a proper Mac hipster until I publish an article about my favourite plain text editor. Why ? Because writing content in a desktop publishing application is anally retentive. If you are writing content then it doesn’t matter how it looks, it’s about the words, sentences and paragraphs.

Looking/writing inside a “Word Processor” like MS Word is an exercise in clutter, buttons and dicky menus that distract you. Hundreds of useless functions carefully designed to create dirty thoughts about using a baseball bat on your computer. All that extra software makes it unreliable and expensive.

Solution: MultiMarkdown Composer - my absolute favourite markdown text editor.

Seriously, you may never have heard of it. There are dozens of other Markdown ready editors. Byword, IAWriter, WriteRoom, MarkDown Pro are just some of other editors but I always come back to MultiMarkdown Composer.

First of all, check the minimalist styling. No buttons, toolbar or extraneous distractions. Second, I’m using MultiMarkdown to setup the formatting of the piece - headings, links, bullets are all covered using simple text markup system.

The left window shows the table of the contents of the article derived from the headings - this is the ONLY markdown editor that I know of that does this. . How else are you going to be able to validate the structure of your document ?

 

 

Not show here but MultiMarkdown Composer handles MultiMarkdown table formatting the best of any Markdown capable editor.

How can I tell what it looks like when it’s published ? I use the preview function. The following screen shows from my customised Marked. Marked is a partner app MultiMarkdown Composer so that I can see the output of the marked up text.

 

Once I’ve finished writing and previewed the article, I can export into several different formats. that is, Marked is able to export directly into PDF, HTMK or Rich Text. Mostly I use Rich Text to then paste into Microsoft Word and then use the formatting tools to complete the desktop publishing process.

 

 

Go now and buy this app from the Mac App Store - it’s less than USD$10. Learn MultiMarkdown and change your writing technique.

Update or Flush the DNS Entry Cache in Mac OSX

Mac OS X - Clearing or flushing the DNS Cache is regular occurrence for a network engineer.

Once you go to a Web site, or do any DNS lookup, the IP gets cached for quite a while. This becomes a royal pain if youíre a systems administrator who is in the middle of migrating domains from one server to another. Executing the following clears the cache, restarts the caching daemon, and fetches fresh DNS records.

For Mountain Lion / Lion

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

For Leopard

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

For Tiger

lookupd -flushcache

 

If you are an unreformed Windows user, these commands are equivalent to

ipconfig /flushdns

 

Reference: Apple Support Site here

Keyboard shortcut to save directly in iCloud - Mac OS X Hints

Liked this tip. Although I’m not using iCloud for much - doesn’t have a purpose in my workflow.

Many of the "main" folders of OS X can be accessed with shortcuts in an Open/Save dialog. If you don't know these, they are Command-D for the Desktop, and Command-Shift-H for your home folder.

With the advent of iCloud, there is now a new shortcut to save files in that location, for apps that support iCloud: Command-Shift-I.

via Keyboard shortcut to save directly in iCloud - Mac OS X Hints.

My Personal Mountain Lion Review

Overall Opinion

  • Works.
  • Faster.
  • Overall better.
  • nice incremental upgrade with some neat features
  • Microsoft Word is not reliable on Mountain Lion - crashes often and loses data. No other software problems. Can cause complete OS failure and require reboot (several times so far).
  • Having some problems when connecting external monitors. Current thinking is the Nvidia GeForce 650M video can run high resolution external monitors and the video is not switching properly. Manual workaround is possible.
  • Limited number of visible changes.

Apps I specifically updated

  • LaunchBar Version 5.3
  • Dropbox Experimenal Version
  • Little Snitch 3.0 (Paid upgrade. Lots of new features that are worth the upgrade price. )
  • There were App Store updates to Pages, Numbers, Keynote in previous weeks. And GarageBand, iPhoto got updates on the day. No new features other than iCloud support.
  • Apps that failed compatibility - One. Snapz Pro but it's only a specific function that doesn't work (which I don't use) so I'm still using it anyway.
  • Install took 30 mins or so on my fancy MBPr. Painless.
  • Safari looks different on Mountain Lion compared to Lion. The loading bar behind the URL is very good feedback and looks good. Safari 6 overall better.

Retina is stupendously good

The Retina screen is so much easier to work with. The quality makes the usability of the laptop something extraordinary. I find that I'm reading screen easier and more often for research. This is a very goodthing™.

Safari 6

  • Have switched completely to using Safari 6 instead of Chrome after about 6 months of Chrome use. Still use Chrome for Flash playback as needed.
  • When copy/pasting the URL from the Safari URL bar it retains the full URL instead of using the reduced form shown in the bar.
  • The "three finger pinch" to switch between Safari tabs is surprisingly useful. More commonly I use ⇧⌘[ or ⇧⌘] to move right/left in the open tabs I find that the trackpad swipe works well when I'm in a certain mood.
  • RSS Subscriptions have been removed from Safari. I have used this Safari Plugin to provide a subscribe to RSS feature in Safari 6.

Apple Mail 6

  • Apple Mail got a lot of small changes. Nothing that seems to cause me pain. And one huge feature that has improved my workflow - VIP Mail. At any given time I will have a group of about ten to maybe twenty people that I am regularly emailing with regards to my current projects. Otherwise I get a lot of email related to Packet Pushers etc.
To make someone a VIP, you just move your pointer to the left of the sender's name in a message header. A star appears, and clicking the star makes the person a VIP. You can also click the person's name in a message, then select "Add to VIPs" from the pop-up menu that appears. [http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/28/mountain-lion-101-mail-vips/](http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/28/mountain-lion-101-mail-vips/)
  • In previous versions of Mail, if you clicked on your own message in a thread or in the Sent folder and hit reply (⌘-M), the new message would be addressed to yourself, not the original person replied to. Apple fixed this oversight in OS X Mountain Lion. If you select your own message in a thread or in the Sent folder and reply, the new message will be addressed properly to your previous recipients.

Hibernate / Sleep / Power Nap

  • Waking from sleep mode is fast. Visibly faster than Snow Leopard. I hear that power save/hibernate was a big focus for Mountain Lion and this is the result of that. So far, I've had a couple of flaky hibernate problems when I have my dual external displays connected.
  • The Power Nap feature means that when I collect my laptop in the morning, I no longer have to open, sync, wait for the download, before I head out the door to the train. I almost didn't notice this happening.

Notifications

  • I've used Growl as a notification system for many years and Notifications is pretty much the same. Growl has better software support but I suspect that will be fixed as developers as Notifications support to their apps. I would prefer to have Notifications use the top-right corner of my screen. I can only have Apple's choice of top right.

Notifications Pause / Delay

Notifications: Pause display of notifications by press the Option key while clicking on the Notification icon in the right end of the menu bar. Reactivate by

  1. Option-click the same icon again;
  2. display notifications at the right of the screen by clicking on the Notification Center icon, then toggle the Show Alerts and Banners switch from Off to On;
  3. or just wait until tomorrow, when they’ll go back on automatically.

Notifications Gesture

  • There is a gesture you can use on a trackpad to view Notification Center: swipe with two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad to the left. This works on a laptop, but with a Magic Trackpad, this really isn't easy to do, since your fingers can't slide from a surface next to the trackpad. http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120802023204534

Time Machine

  • I have two drives for Time machine backups. A 1.5 TB 3.5" drive in a SATA-USB cradle and a 1TB portable USB drive. I use the portable drive when I am travelling and the SATA drive when at home. Time Machine now supports two backup drives at the same time. Now with more backup than every before.

Changes or Problems or Concerns

  • Apple Mail is no longer able to read RSS feeds. I've always used Reeder or NetNewsWire to read RSS so this doesn't matter at all.
  • Harder to accidentally delete icons from the dock. You must drag the icon about 6 cm off the dock and hold before the deletion cue (a little trash cloud) shows under the icon. (grumble about people sitting on my home office desk…..)

Onyx / System Adminsitration

Get the latest version of Onyx from http://www.titanium.free.fr/download.php. Best software for managing the grumpy bits of Mac OSX and avoid using commercial tools. Does things like clean log files, boot caches and other nerd knobs.

Best Online Reviews

John Siracusa’s review at ARS Technica (epic), http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/

John Gruber’s review. (targeted, succinct) http://daringfireball.net/2012/07/mountain_lion

OSX Disk Space: Save space after Mail upgrade

Good tip:

 

Migrating Mail from Lion to Mountain Lion leaves behind a folder containing previous attachments.

Attachments in Lion were saved to ~/Library/Mail Downloads, but under Mountain Lion, Mail is now sandboxed, and the new path is ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads.

During the upgrade, the folder contents are copied from the old location to the new, so the old location can be deleted to save some space.

Mac OSX hints: Save space after Mail upgrade

Mac OSX Keyboard Tip - Find or Search Within Application

Most Apps have a search box that lets you search within the app. The obvious thing is ⌘-F and the text search box opens, like this:

Only, problem is that I really want to get to the Application Search bar that searches for words within the entire applciation.

 

Then I noticed that ⌥ - ⌘ - f will open the app search for almost every application.

Now that makes my keyboard workflow a lot faster. ⌘-F for searching for text in the existing mode, and ⌥ ⌘ F will quickly move the cursor up to the application finder.

Microsoft Word for Mac Annoyance # 2090 - Mountain Lion Incompatible

Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 is not compatible with Mountain Lion. I’m getting constant problems with copy/paste, table formatting and screen display.Microsoft claims that it is Mountain Lion ready but it’s the worst performing app on my installation.

This is a common, easily reproducible artifact:

Of course, I  recommend that you do not use MS Word. I’ve switched to Pages while I wait for Microsoft to patch and improve the compatibility for Mountain Lion.

29/07/2012 18:35:02.329 Microsoft Word[5842]: find_shared_window: WID 2677 29/07/2012 18:35:02.329 Microsoft Word[5842]: CGSGetWindowResolution: Invalid window 0xa75 29/07/2012 18:35:02.329 Microsoft Word[5842]: error [1000] getting window resolution 29/07/2012 18:35:02.329 Microsoft Word[5842]: find_shared_window: WID 2677 29/07/2012 18:35:02.329 Microsoft Word[5842]: CGSSetWindowResolution: Invalid window 0xa75 29/07/2012 18:35:02.330 Microsoft Word[5842]: Error [1000] setting resolution to 1 29/07/2012 18:37:28.861 Microsoft Word[5842]: find_shared_window: WID 2677 29/07/2012 18:37:28.861 Microsoft Word[5842]: CGSGetWindowResolution: Invalid window 0xa75 29/07/2012 18:37:28.861 Microsoft Word[5842]: error [1000] getting window resolution 29/07/2012 18:37:28.861 Microsoft Word[5842]: find_shared_window: WID 2677 29/07/2012 18:37:28.861 Microsoft Word[5842]: CGSSetWindowResolution: Invalid window 0xa75 29/07/2012 18:37:28.861 Microsoft Word[5842]: Error [1000] setting resolution to 1 29/07/2012 18:37:41.887 Microsoft Word[5842]: find_shared_window: WID 2677 29/07/2012 18:37:41.887 Microsoft Word[5842]: CGSGetWindowResolution: Invalid window 0xa75 29/07/2012 18:37:41.887 Microsoft Word[5842]: error [1000] getting window resolution 29/07/2012 18:37:41.888 Microsoft Word[5842]: find_shared_window: WID 2677 29/07/2012 18:37:41.888 Microsoft Word[5842]: CGSSetWindowResolution: Invalid window 0xa75 29/07/2012 18:37:41.888 Microsoft Word[5842]: Error [1000] setting resolution to 1

Review: Bookle for Mac OSX - ePub Reader

I’ve got a collection of ePub books that have no DRM so I COULD read them on my computer. I regularly buy books from O’Reilly, Cisco Press and other publishing houses - that’s how I learn a lot of stuff.  They come in ePub format which makes great reading - on an iPad. Mac OSX does not have a native method of reading ePub books and the only way to read them is to forward them to Amazon Kindle (by email is easiest for smaller files), or move them into iTunes and read them on an iPad (not so great).

The Kindle app doesn’t make me happy. Can’t put my finger on it but it’s probably the fonts that I don’t like. I have specific font that I use for almost everything and renders well in all situations.

About three months ago, Stairways Software released Bookle which I bought immediately. Stairways has collaborated with TidBits and both companies  are well known in the OSX community. This is a super simple app. you just drag & drop the file onto the App, it will import the file into it’s database.

Bookle is stable, work reliably, has no fancy page turning or skeumorphic silliness. It good all round. I recommend it.

 

[caption id=“attachment_1424” align=“aligncenter” width=“595”] Screen Shot of Bookle - Click for Larger[/caption]

As you can see, I’ve got quite a collection of ePub files including Juniper textbooks and Cisco Nexus 7000 documentation.

I’ve looked into the open source app from the Calibre Ebook project but that app didn’t work for me. It didn’t feel right.

Also, now that I’ve got a MacBook Pro Retina, I find that I’m spending a lot more time reading from the screen because the quality is so good.

Summary. All round good. Go and buy it if you want to read ePub files on your Mac OS X. It’s about ten bucks on the App Store or £6.99 in the Queens currency.

Tip: Automagic Enhancement

I use Hazel to automate the import into Bookle. All I have to do is download the ePub and it will be automatically imported into Bookle. Here is the Hazel setup for that:

 

 

More about how I use Hazel is here

 

Dropbox - Mountain Lion Compatibility

Retina Ready and Mountain Lion support for Dropbox in the beta build (experimental) Dropbox version.

(7/23) - Experimental Build - 1.5.10 - Mountain Lion Support! « Dropbox Forums.

Hat tip: Mac Drifter

Multi-volume Time Machine and Backup Planning

This changes my backup planning for OSX.

Time Machine has gained full support for multiple listed target volumes; just add the additional backup drives in System Preferences. Time Machine will automatically rotate backup targets, using all drives alternately — or if only one is available, it will target that until the other drives come back. Restores default to using the most recent available backup set, as they should.

Today I have a SATA cradle (more on that here and a 1TB drive and a 1TB portable USB drive. Being able to use both at the same time, or just one when I am travelling makes good sense.

Mountain Lion 101: Multi-volume Time Machine | TUAW.

Noted OSX:Turning Off Ads in Parallels

Parallels, a division of Citrix, on Mac OSX is my preferred choice for Windows emulation. I’ve tried VMware Fusion but found it slower, less reliable and kind of flaky. HOWEVER, Parallels shoves ads which is REALLY annoying in a paid for product that costs USD$80. I’ve seriously considered ditching the product for this alone - truly offensive.

defaults write com.parallels.Parallels\ Desktop ProductPromo.ForcePromoOff -bool YES

Paste this in the terminal and it will disable the ads.

Michael Tsai - Blog - Turning Off Ads in Parallels.

Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/x0qgs/using_parallels_hate_the_popup_advertising_heres/

Apple MacBook Pro Retina - Personal Review

This review will focus on my personal experiences of using the MacBook Pro Retina ( MBPr) since I received it a few weeks back. I talked about my decision making process previously.

Overall, I’m well pleased with the system. Despite some minor problems with the graphics card and occasional reboots, I would highly recommend the MacBook Pro Retina for the Retina display, overall speed and portability.

Migration Assistant is still the Ducks Guts

One of the greatest features of using OSX is the Migration Assistant - connect your new Mac to the Ethernet, boot and create a temporary user, run the Migration Assistant and import all the configuration from your previous Mac. Takes a couple of hours and then you are running - all data, all apps, all settings in one move. I had some problems with recertifying about 25% of my applications from the App Store and direct downloads (adding the Serial Numbers again). I'm told this is due to the license using the hardware UUID for validation). I haven't installed (or reinstalled a "bare metal" OSX since 2006 when I bought my first Mac.

The Retina Display

I didn't buy this laptop for the Retina display. What I really needed was the 16GB of memory in the hope of having 3 years of useable hardware life and this is the only current model that supports that. I have the iPad 3 and iPhone which has Retina and it's never seemed like a critical thing.

In practice though, the Retina display is astonishing. Truly. It’s visually stunning and has completely changed the way I look at computer screens. Seriously, no other computer monitor will ever be the same again. At a more personal level, I use a Windows machine at $work and find reading the Lenovo screen quite difficult. Add that to differences in font rendering between Apple / Microsoft and the Windows experience is very unpleasant.

Eye Strain and Improved Reading

In 2008 I've written Musing: On Reading and Learning From a Computer Screen where I discuss how I'm striving to read more from a screen instead of printing and overcoming learned habits. And I've also written about the quality of computer displays Rant: Screen Reading – Comparing Windows and MAC and attempted to explain the difficult of using poor quality screen to effectively read and absorb information.

Personally, I’m finding that the Retina display makes an enormous difference to my personal experience of readability and eye strain. In the two weeks I’ve come to really appreciate the value of a very high resolution display. You would think that someone who remembers 80x25 colour monitors in the mid 90’s would remember this.

I’m also sure that the Retina is something that you need to experience so I won’t attempt to describe it any more.

Dual Screen Greatness

I'm lucky to be able to purchase a 27" Cinema Thunderbolt display at the same time (I've been working two jobs to pay for it). I'm often reviewing material, making notes and diagrams simultaneously and the larger screen dramatically improves this process. A good investment for me.

The Thunderbolt has an Ethernet adapter built-in so it also acts like a laptop dock for me.

My greatest surprise is that my 24" Cinema DisplayPort monitor works directly. There are two Thunderbolt ports on the MBPr and connecting the Mini-DisplayPort connector into either of the Thunderbolt ports works. Thus, my final ‘setup’ is with the MBPr closed and a dual monitor setup 27" and 24" Apple Cinema displays. Which feels very lush, I must say. If I open my MBPr I could have three screens but that doesn’t work for me since I mount the laptop in a TwelveSouth BookArc.

MacBook Pro Retina Thunderbolt connectors 2

Desktop Mounting of MacBook Pro Retina

I don't have a lot of space in my office to start with, and dual displays means even less. I use a Twelve South BookArc to 'holster' my MacBook Pro and have owned this since mid-2009. Although overpriced, and the rubber feet don't last for long I haven't found anything better and I'm still looking to improve on this product.

SSD and Usable Impact

It's hard to overstate how much difference the SSD makes to overall system performance. It seems that I never have to wait for an application to start, or a save to happen. Having previously upgraded my mid-2009 MacBook Pro with an 256GB SSD about eight months ago, the performance increase isn't as dramatic for me. I can say that the MBPr is faster and smoother is every respect.

Hibernate

As always, the move in and out of hibernate means I rarely (weekly ?) need to restart OSX. This laptop goes in and out of hibernate even quicker than before.

Problems I've Experienced

There are no major problems I've noticed but I can comment on a few minor problems.

Niggles and Annoyances

I've had some minor niggles with USB ports not recognising Plantronics headsets. This is usually resolved by reconnecting. Annoying but not critical.

I’ve had some Bluetooth problems on wakeup from Sleep mode. I run my MBPr with the lid shut when at my home office. When resuming from sleep mode, I infrequently get some delays.

I’ve had small problems when disconnecting from the external displays. Occasionally the screen graphics will get a bit a ditsy. So far, I’ve been able to solve this by using gfxCardStatus to force a switch between Integrated and Discrete Graphics and this came good.

I’ve had several reboots happen - I can’t determine a cause although it seems to happen when the power cable gets bounced off the MagSafe. My gut feel is that the graphics drivers are flaky when power save is invoked. This don’t worry me much at this stage for three reasons

  1. My previous two laptops were also purchased soon after the release announcement and had similar problems. Both times, updates with the next month or two fixed niggling problems.
  2. because OSX Snow Leopard automatically saves open files, and opens them at reboot my machine state is not lost.
  3. The reboot takes about 15 seconds. Which doesn't impact me much.
So it's annoying all right but compared to my corporate laptop (which crashes hard, often and with data loss) the MBPr is not much worse and the impact is almost zero. Again, Apple has fixed this problem with updates in the past so I'm confident of a solution shortly.

Update: The USB patch on 20120719 does seem to have improved this.

MagSafe 2

I'm having some problems with the MagSafe 2 connector. It's much thinner than the previous version and it easily breaks contact with the power socket in the vertical direction. When this happens the default action is for OSX to go into sleep mode.

MacBook Pro Retina Thunderbolt connectors 1

Other Observations

Power Button

Apple has replaced the separate power button with a keyboard button. This photo will explain what I mean:

MacBook Pro Retina Power Button 2

Screensize from 17 inch to 15 inch

The 15" Retina display shows the same amount of real estate as the 17" version. In other words, my MBP 17" has the same resolution as the Retina 15" and therefore I can continue to have Byword and Safari open at the same time as a left/right.

Speed

It's fast. Very fast. Podcast conversions now takes less than a minute, previously it was three or four. In fact it's so fast I don't notice delays. Probably due to SSD and 16GB of 1333 Ghz DRAM but I'm sure the CPU is making a difference.

Size, Weight

Since my previous laptop was a 17" MacBook Pro that weighed about 2.5 kilograms, the MacBook Pro Retina is MUCH lighter and easier to carry around.

Final Stuff

In my personal view, this is great upgrade. The quality of the Retina display caught me by surprise. The speed is undeniably an improvement over my mid-2009 MBP (even though it had an SSD upgrade). As always, it's physically beautiful especially when compared to my corporate laptops from HP and Lenovo.

Also, nearly all of my apps are Retina ready and show up in high res on the screens. I’m looking forward to Mountain Lion and getting some more stability on the graphics drivers.

The 27" Thunderbolt dispay has certainly improved my productivity for researching and writing. Have both the 24" and 27" displays at the same time from a laptop is completely unexpected benefit.

OSX Disk Space: Compress Parallel Volumes

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, Parallels allows the disk images to grow beyond their needed size. You can compress these “soft disks” and save gigabytes of space. If you are running a spindle disk then this will take a long time while an SSD will take a few seconds.

The Parallels guest OS (usually Windows) will need to be shutdown before you can start so this is a safe operation.

Saving disk space parallels 1

Note that these volumes will expand again when you use them so this is only a temporary saving. If, like me, you have Windows systems that are not used often then it might be more useful to you.

Moom - Snap to Edges Feature

Wherever possible, I try to use a keyboard to control my computer. I’m opted to lifting my hands off the keyboard and using the mouse or trackpad because it’s slows me down and breaks my concentration (I’m easily distracted). In the past I’ve written about using OSX: Sizeup – Screen Layout Using the Keyboard and Mercury Mover bit I’m tempted to change to Moom as it gets more features in a single utility.

One small problem with Moom is memory consumption. Using both SizeUp and Mercury Mover uses much less RAM than Moom (eternal problem) but maybe that’s less of a problem as useful features emerge.

Anyway, here is the Snap to Quarter menu from Moom:

Moom edge snap 1

That’s reasonably easy to understand. So here is an action shot of the top right corner:

Moom edge snap 2

Although I prefer to use keyboard, it’s also useful to manually set the layout with the mouse, and Moom supports that as well via the Green Toolbar button which lets you size according to grid. Moom snap edge 3

As Moom gets more features, I’m getting more tempted to use it full time and replace SizeUp (My review here). And the company behind Moom is also the maker of Desktop Curtain and the latest version 3 has some new features I’m very fond of. More on that later I think.

Note for Multiple Screen Users

In OSX you can drag Applications between screens and this takes precedence over the Snap to Edges features. Check out How-to: Fix the Moom snap and Desktops issue for a workaround.
The workaround is to change OS X’s activation delay for the ‘drag to new Desktop/Space’ feature. Do this by opening Terminal, pasting the following line, and then pressing Return:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-edge-delay -float 10

You won’t see any output, just the cursor on a new blank line. Once you see that, paste this into Terminal, and press Return:

killall Dock

These two commands work like this. The first sets the delay before OS X’s ‘drag to new Desktop/Space’ feature activates to 10 seconds. The second line restarts the Dock, as otherwise, the change you’ve just made won’t take effect (the Dock controls the feature). You can experiment with values other than 10, but you want a delay that’s long enough to let you use snap-to-edges without moving to another Desktop/Space. Personally, I find that 5 works well.

OSX Disk Space: Reduce Java Preferences Caches

If you do have Java installed, then it has a cache of files that are downloaded. These are usually small but can take up a lot of space. It seems that by default, Java is able to have up to 1GB of space so I reduced this to 100MB.

Saving space osx java preferences
Note: Java is serious security risk for desktop computers and you shouldn't install it. If you do need to use Java on the Mac, make sure to keep it disabled. I do not recommend installing or enabling Java.

OSX: Sizeup – Screen Layout Using the Keyboard

Sizeup - Screen Layout using the Keyboard

SizeUp is a utility that provides keyboard shortcuts that layout the applications on the screen by "breaking" a screen into four quarters (top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right) or two halves (vertical or horizontal) and then assigning shortcut keys to each area. With the currently selected window, a keyboard shortcut can assign that window to the selected area of the screen.

Consider the following screen shots (at low resolution so that they can fit your screen)

Top Left

Sizeup qtr 1

Bottom Left

Sizeup qtr 2

Right Half

Sizeup qtr 3

All four quarters.

Sizeup qtr 41

Mixed Layout

There are no restrictions on placements. For example, my most common layout is below.

and I have placed each of these windows with a single keyboard shortcuts. NO CLICKY CLICKY with the mouse. This means that my workflow is very fast to get to this layout.

Various Options

Menu Bar

Sizeup 1

For the first few weeks I need to refer to the keyboard shortcuts. now they ae part of my muscle memory and I don’t have to think about it anymore.

Preference Pane

SizeUp can be configured to your personal requirements.

Sizeup pref pane 1You can change the keyboards shortcuts (but I don’t)

Sizeup pref pane 2This preference can set margins between the edges and the windows. I have a configured margin of 3 pixels between the windows because I couldn’t see where some application windows ended e.g. The terminal window is black all the way to the edge, and multiple terminal windows means it was solid black every where which I found confusing.

Sizeup pref pane 3This allows you to create an asymmetrical layout. I tried this for a while but I found that having a “major window” and “minor window” sizing didn’t work well because of the highly dynamic layout of the screen.

The Etherealmind View

Because I tend to use a lot of programs at the same time and blend different combinations of programs according to the each job, this is my MOST USEFUL OSX utility. I understand that other people have fixed screen layouts but I have never been able to reduce the software tools that I use to a number that can fit on one or two screens. Workmates have always been impressed when seeing this tool in action.

My workflow is hugely improved because I can rapidly redeploy applications aournd my screens according to the task at hand. I have been using SizeUp for about a year and have never had any compatibility problems or crashing.

SizeUp is available from Irradiated Software and costs USD$13.

My Menu bar looks like this

This is one of a series of articles that look at my Menu Bar after colleague asked what software I am using.

Menu bar 20100321 1

OSX: Monolingual, Saving Space on OSX Lion

I’ve been using Monolingual for a long time to save space on my machine but I haven’t tried to use it on OSX Lion since I’ve always had plenty of space. Now that I’m moving to a 512GB SSD ( I’m going to be short on space with my Retina MBP) I need to be more aggressive about managing the free space on my laptop. This tip is about using Monolingual to remove languages in your applications - most applications support many languages, which you probably don’t use. Deleting the unused languages won’t impact the software but will save some disk space.

Warning: You can seriously break your software. If you are not able to restore your machine from a backup then don't do this. Accidents do happen and you should be prepared before you do this. Note that some applications get upset when the language files are removed. Can't help you there.
Monolingual 20120622 2

In my current setup I was able to save 3.5 Gigabytes of space.

Monolingual 20120622

I also remove the keyboard layouts. Note do NOT select the Apple Keyboard Layouts or bad things may happen.

Monolingual 20120622 3

I do not recommend removing Architectures. I had a lot of Apps detect this as corruption or malware so I don’t bother with this anymore. Monolingual 20120622 4

Note that you will need to run Monolingual on a regular basis. Everytime an update to an application happens, the language files will be replaced.

Again, do not do this if you do not have and know how to restore your computer from a backup.