Discovered a neat shortcut in System Preferences. Click and hold the Show All button and this drop down menu will appear. This is useful because I’m often moving between Preferences and this shortens the time I take to do that.

Mostly, I still use SizeUp and Mercury Mover for driving my screen layout in OSX. But the last couple of versions of MOOM have started to catch my eye because it merges that functions of both of these apps  and adds a few more. Here is the configuration of MOOM and my keystroke / keyboard shortcuts.

At the bottom you will also see that I have setup some layout for commonly used software and tasks.

I use Launchbar to maintain my Clipboard history with 30 items in the buffer. I’ve been using this for at least a couple of years and it’s a staggeringly productive feature.

With a single keystroke, I can see the contents of the last 30 copy/paste actions, use the arrows to move between them and then paste that into my current activity. It shows some useful info about where the copy data came from (useful for when your mind goes wandering).

Today, I accidentally pressed the space bar and got a surprise when QuickLook was invoked.

I thought that this was neat enough to tell you about it.

In OSX Lion, Apple has provided a sleep and hibernate capability. In fact, one of my favourite features is the sleep/resume works reliably and quickly. I can open and shut the lid on my MacBook for weeks without needing to reboot - that’s something that never works properly on my corporate Windows machines. SmartSleep is a small utility that enhances the power save functions on your MacBook.

Feature 1 - Smartsleep

From the SmartSleep website:

SmartSleep lets you select each sleep state. Additionally the new SmartSleep state lets your notebook just sleep while the battery has a high level. If the battery level drops below a certain point (default is less then 20% or 20 minutes) it will switch to sleep and hibernate. So you have the best of both worlds. Furthermore it will expand the lifetime of your SSD (if you have one) as your MacBook won't write a hibernate file as often.

Feature 2 - Force Display ON when Lid Closed

Feature 3 - Insomnia (disable screen save)

The EtherealMind View

Note: I recommend that you buy it direct from the website and NOT from the Mac App Store. . The Mac App Store already prevents this utility from having certain features and this will be a problem later in the year as Apple implements sandboxing.

SmartSleep

I noticed that the latest version of Dropbox has added an Upload Rate feature in the preferences. In a house that has limited Internet and four people sharing a limited amount of bandwidth I need to control how much bandwidth I use. I often need to upload large files for podcast editing and it can take hours.

I noticed this Preference Setting when I downloaded the latest Dropbox version

Not sure how the algorithm works but it sure makes a difference. In this screenshot the upload is proceeding at 4 kilobytes per second or 32kilobits. Since this is a 256 kilobit upload and there are three other people sharing the Internet that’s pretty good going. I can use the Internet connection and not have to worry about $daughter2 complaining about poor access to some website.

Remember, the Dropbox app for Mac OSX doesn’t update automatically. You will need to download it yourself at Dropbox

Please use my referral link if you haven’t signed up for Dropbox already http://db.tt/CQeFw4d - I could use a little more space.

Lets start the process by pointing out that I have a 17" MacBook Pro that I purchased in August 2009. That’s three years of heavy usage including constant travel including international and without any significant problems. I haven’t had to reinstall my OS or perform any major work in the lifetime of this machine except to install some upgrades. About 18 months ago I upgraded to 8GB of RAM and six months ago installed a 256GB flash drive and fitted a DriveBay to hold 500GB HDD instead of the DVD drive.

If I’m really honest with myself I don’t truly need to upgrade but my working life would certainly be improved with some more speed. I run a lot of applications to accelerate my regular activities and the CPU is baselined at about 15%. Three years is long enough for a laptop and it’s time to pass it on to a family member.

Lifetime

So I’ve done some careful checking about what upgrades are possible - Answer ? None. In this article from iFixit it describes that none of the current models are user upgradeable. RAM and SSD is soldered directly to the motherboard.

I currently have 8GB RAM and this is constantly swapping so it’s not enough for my needs. I have a 256GB SSD which is full. And there is a lot of data on the 500GB HDD. Therefore the 256GB SSD isn’t enough to last the three years and I need the 512GB.

Conclusion: Have to buy 16GB memory to last the cycle. Have to buy at least 500GB SSD. I don’t need to explain why SSD is such awesome sauce.

To Retina or Not to Retina

There are four models of 15" MBP shown on the Apple Store.

1. The 15" MBP with 2.3 Ghz has a max of 8GB RAM. Can't consider this unit.
2. The 15" MBP with 2.6Ghz Core i7 with 8GB RAM/ 512GB SSD is £2519.00
3. The 15" MBP Retina with 2.3 Ghz intel Core i7 16GB RAM doesn't have an option for 512GB SSD. That counts that unit out. £1959.00.
4. The 15" MBP Retina with 2.6 Ghz Core i7 with 16GB RAM / 512GB SSD is £2459.00

The CPU upgrade to the 2.7Ghz Intel Core i7 is £240 which is about 10% of the unit price. That’s a lot of upgrade that I can’t justify since I can’t work out what the different CPU chips are. I’ll go smaller on CPU since I’m heavy on RAM and SSD.

Size and Weight

I’ve found that the 17" is both a benefit and weakness. I appreciate the size when working at a desk and editing audio or using multiple windows, but the weight and size means that it’s hard to move around. I have to great care not to impact it against train/plane doors (and people).

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“825”] The MacBook Pro Retina and MacBook Air are much smaller. Probably since the SSD doesn’t need the extra space.[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“429”] The MacBook Pro with standard screen and hard disk drive is much thicker and heavier than the Retina model.[/caption]

AppleCare Protection

Accessories

I’m seriously considering a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display. When purchased at the same time as a MacBook Pro the Apple Care includes the screen. And I’d like to have a bigger screen because my eyes are getting old. In the back of my mind is that Apple may release a Retina quality display in the year ahead.

I’ll Wait a bit Although Apple rarely has problems when shipping hardware on day one, this has happened in the past. My entire business depends on my computer and having a flaky systems 1 doesn’t work for me. I’ll usually wait a week or two before ordering after then announcement.

The EtherealMind View

[caption align="aligncenter" width="595" caption="Caption Text.(Click for a full size image)"] [/caption]

Nice. I want one.

But they are sold out.

Now I am sad.

Site: Space Bar

Via Swiss Miss

In OSX ion, Apple voted to make simpler for normal users and hide the Library folders. But that’s OK, you can make is visible again.

Applications > Utilities > Terminal, Launch Pad > Terminal, Spotlight > Terminal — open Terminal and then copy or paste in the following command:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Alternately, if you want to hide the Library in your home directory, type or paste this command:

chflags hidden ~/Library

Whether making the Library visible or hiding it, takes effect immediately — there’s no need to log out or restart.

and then you get:

I use Fantastical on my MAC to help with scheduling appointments. However, I find that on even the simplest of syntax it doesn’t register properly and fails miserably. What I realised today is that feeding in dates in American format of Month/Day or Month/Day/Year works alright but the global standard of Day/Month/Year it seems to fail miserably.

Here is classic example.

This is a shame because when it work sit works well. But it simply doesn’t recognise date formats properly. See this screenshot for a month / day format.

I could grumble about lack of attention to detail but I’d rather they fix it in a soon to be released.

Update 20120116

This will be improved in our next update, 1.2, which will be released before the end of the month. We actually do handle month/day structure, but the exact format you were using was a bit non-standard. Still, this should work in the next update.

Well, I was talking about day/month but here’s hoping.

You can create two objects, one on top of the other. By default the top object has no fill, so that you can see the object underneath and put a border around an object, or group multiple objects together. However you cannot click the object “underneath”, the top object blocks selection.

There is a global setting in Preferences:

And now you can select through:

Example usage for Network Engineers:

Thanks to Carl for the tipoff (you know who you are!)

It’s not a cure all, but it’s not a bad place to start. Professionalism starts with better language.

www.youtube.com/watch

You might think that OSX would have a decent clock application but it’s does not. Recently, I’ve started using the Pomodoro technique of timing my concentration bursts on a specific topic. Partly to retrain my habit of constant attention shifting and partly to find a smarter way of working. I have two apps on my Mac that I use to help with this process.

Awaken

Awaken show a simple clock at startup:

I have setup four timers for attention spanning: Pressing the play button starts that timer:

And Awaken will keep your Mac awake (prevent power sleeping)

This is the alarm clock setting, I’ve not used this much since my iPhone is more suitable for this:

I fyou do like using your Mac as an alarm clock, Awaken can play your favourite music / playlist from iTunes:

App Store Link

Timeboxed

TimeBoxed is a floating window with the typical shaded black box:

You can easily resize it ( or even make it vertical) :

And the preferences for configuration are disturbingly simple:

One thing I like about TimeBoxed is the ability to speak a message at the end of the timer and send an alert to Growl (since sometimes my audio is turned off).

I sometimes change the message (when I'm in my home office where no one can hear) to put motivational messages, or reminders to go for a walk, when the time is up (guilty pleasure).

Summary

Recommend both apps.

In Lion, many applications will automatically resume to last know state. If you want to start clean i.e. not auto-resume and then press the Shift key when opening the application bypass Lion Resume Feature

This will help to solve problem with corrupt files or program state.

The latest version of Google Chrome for MAC has this new TAB spam. When you open a new page or tab, Google wants to try and sell you something (you are the product) :

While you can hide this by clicking the link there, it’s probably just a matter of time until they do it again. I’m thinking, that new tab is too valuable for an ad display to leave it blank.

Using an old trick from Firefox you can configure the Preferences to open a blank page ( or any other page for that matter) by filling in this field. Less likely to get more google spam in the future.

For various reasons, I use three different email clients. OSX Mail is the native program, Postbox for more enhanced functions, and Sparrow for when I'm monitoring email but not really processing it. That is, most email I simply delete immediately. The rest I will look at later with my OmniFocus to do list at the ready.

This is how my Sparrow mail client looks in normal operation ( and actual size from my desktop)

When I double click an email, it opens a new windows:

The advantage of this method is that I do not have the distraction of the email messages/content on the screen. I can quickly filter for important messages or from key people, without having to look at the content.

it's all about suppressing the "squirrel" reflex.

I was recently given a promo code by Brett Terpstra on an App called Yoink. First thing I Tweeted in response was “Why bother when you have Path Finder”

Product Description

Every time you start dragging a file, Yoink fades in a tiny window on the left/right edge of your screen so you can can drag files to it

This frees up your mouse / trackpad actions to navigate between ‘full screens’ or other apps and then resume the drag later

You can click on the image in the bar to expand it - my eyes say thank you because they are old. You can have more than one file in the stack. This is nicely thought out.

Here the options - looks a bit thin but this is a first version at time of review.

Greg's View

When running it uses about 11MB RAM real memory so it seems lite enough for daily use.

I recommend it.

Get Yoink

You can found out more about Yoink at the Eternal Storms - Yoink website.

Since installing OSX Lion I've found that OmniGraffle has been, well, pausing from time to time. Which is odd, since it always used to run quite quickly. After some fiddling around and then an email to the Omni Group support, they pointed this out:

Apparently the QuickLook Preview is generated every time that file is saved. Lion constantly saves the file as part of its automatic save function (you don't need to save files that are correctly using Apple APIs for document save, it saves automatically) and this means that OmniGraffle is constantly updating it's QuickLook image. For large files, this takes a fair amount of time.

Which correlates with my experience, small files didn't have a problem but bigger files did.

This is a set of tips that show how I work with OmniGraffle and get the layout of the Inspector to be the way that I want it. You should note that I’m not a big fan of floating inspector windows (or frames or whatever Apple calls them ), I like my menus and status windows to be in a specific place so I can scan with eyes in the place that I’m expecting them to be.

When you startup with OmniGraffle the Inspector window look something like this:

This isn’t very useful. So hit the ’twisty’ to expand the drop down and you will see something like this:

As you can see we are looking the at the text menu because tray background is “highlighted”. This is OK, but we really need more of the menus to be visible. Having just one of menus available is not really enough.

It’s not very convenient to keep switching from the tab to other all the time. But I just found this feature in OmniGraffle. If you double click the icon when it is unselected then the green padlock icon will appear (if it is selected the double click doesn’t work, don’t worry just keep clicking)

Now, lets repeat the same thing for some of the other menus. Click on the Title Bar of the Properties, Connections as shown, drag it up

Lock some of the menus (according to your liking) - my layout looks something like this:

We want to save this layout so that it comes back - fortunately OmniGraffle has a feature for this to save our layouts. Select Windows, Workspaces, Edit Workspaces like this:

Then click on the little camera to save the current layout of OmniGraffle (and OmniGraffle only). Anytime you want to return to the layout just press F2 and the OmniGraffle will return the remembered layout anytime in the future.

OmniGraffle continues to impress me by finding new functionality and ways of doing clever things. This tip looks at transferring shape properties from one shape to the other.

First, head into the *Customise Toolbar and copy this piece of toolbar from the menu to the toolbar as shown.

Select the shape that you want to copy from and you will see the toolbar shows different settings.

Now click and drag from the box on the left:

onto the shape that you want to receive the properties.

Right, that’s hugely awesome right ? But, what about all those other icons — what do they do ? They are sub-properties for the object eg. Text Format, or Fill, or Line handling

Lets reset the left block to default:

Now, lets say we just want the text properties to transfer, so I can select the Text icon and drag that:

onto the block and the text changes!!!

In OmniGraffle 5.3 update that was released July 19, 2011 , the multi-touch settings have been disabled even though they were working previously.

From the release notes:

• Multi-Touch gestures for trackpad and other input devices are now disabled by default.

You can change the setting back to enable multitouch gestures in the preferences:

The company that runs the Diginotar CA was breached sometime in the last 3 months.

The company that runs Diginator CA has not yet admitted to the breach even when presented with clear breach evidence.

Google has acted to block all Diginotar certificates that have been known to impersonate other people’s domains. Thus, the Diginotar CA issues valid certificates for other people domains including Google’s.

You can’t trust any certificates signed by Diginotar - and there may have been thousands of illegal certificates issued for common domains. Therefore you must stop your operating system from trusting anything signed by Diginotar to keep yourself safe.

1. Open Keychain
2. Search for DigiNotar
3. Select Root Certificate for Diginotar
4. Right click and select Get Info
5. Mark certificate as untrusted.

When you first install BBEdit, any new file will set to “none” for language - that is, Perl, PHP, AppleScript are recognised by the first line automatically, but a blank text file will still be “none”. Since I use Markdown for text most of the time, I want to set BBEdit to default to Markdown - and you can do that like this:

note : This preference screen is from BBEdit 9.

When working in OmniGraffle, you need create non-symmetrical objects and then use them again. For example:

And you need to flip the shape to use it on the other side. The shape can’t be rotated (using CMD-Mouse and drag) to make this happen, it needs to rotated 180 degrees on the vertical or horizontal axis.

Locating this in OmniGraffle is a bit tricky. Yo might expect it to be Edit, Shapes menu but it’s actually in the inspector.

In most things OmniGraffle is sublime, but maybe it’s a MAC thing for it to be in the floating menu.

The system Dictionary in Mac OSX defaults to American English - which isn’t very useful if you are British, European or Asian ( India and throughout the middle and far east) since they mostly use British English.

So I did a little digging and realised, as always, that there are options in the dictionary program.

By default the dictionary is American:

If you open the Preferences (from the menu bar)

And scroll down a bit, you can select the British Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus:

As you can see in the toolbar, you now have many dictionaries available. Of course you don’t want the American dictionary at all if you live in England.

You can click and drag the dictionary up to the top, unselect the American Dictionary.

And now the toolbar shows the dictionaries you have selected.

Pro Tip

System Language

You can edit which languages are available by clicking the Edit List button and selecting the language you wish to use.

The sidebar for a given document is constantly corrupted when switching views.

I loathe Microsoft Office 2011. It just doesn’t work well at all. I’m still restarting it every four hours, I have a timer on my desktop to remind me.