Eddie Smith writing on Practically Efficient:
The inherent speed and stability of OS X over Windows—and Quicksilver, the way it flattened my digital world—changed the way I worked with computers on a very fundamental basis. On a more meta level, I’d found a community that I could identify with. The passion of the people using these tools made everything feel more like an experience rather than a means to an end.
Hazel is one of those apps that runs in the background and ruins my expectations for any Mac without it. It’s so perfectly subtle that I forget it’s constantly making my work easier.
HazelHazel is a folder and file automation service for Mac. It runs in the background and executes user defined rules on specified folders. It does things like cleaning up old files, archiving photos, and keeping my desktop organized.
There’s a ludicrous number of ways to manipulate windows on a Mac. Moom is still my favorite (2011 review, Some Moom Tips).
Some of these commands may be different for you because Moom allows you to change the shortcuts. The spirit is the same.
Ctrl+Shift+m activates the primary Moom menu (this is user defined).
There are several built in commands that can be swapped for the keyboard shortcuts in the preferences menu.
FastMail is a great email service. One of the things that makes it so great is the excellent web app. It’s so good that I occasionally use it over a dedicated email client. It’s also crazy awesome on an iPhone. It’s practically a native app.
Sure, there are the standard keyboard shortcuts like j/k to move between messages or n/p to move between conversations. FastMail also has a bunch of compose, delete, send, and mark as spam shortcuts that are common.
Patrick Welker is producing a wonderful series of tutorials over at RocketINK.
I particularly like how he walks through the installation of the various packages in detail, adding in troubleshooting tips along the way.
The goal of downloading all these binaries is to have a versatile collection that exactly mimics what ImageOptim and ImageAlpha do and bring it to the command-line for easier scripting and macro building.
ImageOptim and ImageAlpha are great (I use them every day), but they mostly just simplify the command line tools.
Sure, ⌘+\ in 1Password will fill a login for the current web browser page. Sometimes auto-fill doesn’t work so well and I just want to copy the password out.
⌥+⌘+\ to open the 1Password mini menubar search. Search for an entry and use the up and down arrow keys to select a record.
Right arrow into the record and then tab to move between fields. Hit return on the field to copy it.
TextExpander is great but it becomes less useful as the library of snippets grows beyond my memory to recall them all. Fortunately TextExpander for Mac has two very useful keyboard shortcuts for finding snippets when I most need them.
In the TextExpander preference pane, select the “Hotkeys” setting and enable the Suggest Matching Abbreviations and the Search Snippets keyboard shortcuts.
The Search Snippets shortcut opens the TextExpander menu bar search field.
Color palettes can be hard for tasteless amateur like myself. Luckily technology continues to make me look better than I am. Spectrum is an iOS and Mac app for generating and syncing color palettes and I think it’s great.
There are two primary ways to get started with creating a new color palette. First there is the Harmony system where you decide on the number of colors and then adjust them across a color wheel.
This may be the single greatest improvement in the iOS TextExpander experience in years.
That’s not sarcastic. There is a distinct difference between the snippets I use on my Mac and those I use on my phone. This also gets to a useful recommendation: Organize your TextExpander snippets.
I have three categories I use for snippet folders. I have global snippets organized by general function. My “Time” folder contains snippets that have to do with generating date and time text.
What a great overview of someone that made an indelible mark on computer interfaces and user expectations.
Kare was subsequently offered a fixed-length, part-time job designing fonts and icons for the Apple Macintosh; her business card read “HI Macintosh artist.” She’d never worked on computer graphics before Apple, but quickly made strides to adjust to her new medium. “I remember I didn’t really know anything about digital typography, but I got as many books on it as I could,” she recalls.
