Git has plenty of great features. Using all of them can be difficult if you only

A fast and clever open source hex editor
for Mac OS X.

{Less} extends CSS with variables, nested rules, operators and more. If you're still building websites without it, you're an idiot. This app makes it dead simple to use {Less} by automatically compiling *.less files into standard CSS.

Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X that makes web automation simple. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction. The Fake Workflows you create can be saved, reopened, and shared.

Uses for Pastebot, which I have and rarely use.

My primary home machine is a 2011 27″ iMac. Prior to that I had the first edition MacPro that was loaded with internal drives and 8GB of RAM. I also have a 2010 MacBook (not a MacBook Pro). My post about my backup system pretty well describes the overall setup but I will add some details below.

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Hazel watches whatever folders you tell it to, automatically organizing your files according to the rules you create. It features a rule interface similar to that of Apple Mail so you should feel right at home. Have Hazel move files around based on name,

When I set up my new MacBook Air late last fall, I wanted it to have a better Finder toolbar than the iBook G4 it replaced. The iBook’s Finder toolbar had accreted some utilities that I never used anymore and some that didn’t work too well—they just sat in the toolbar as a testament to my inertia and laziness.

While I’m dispensing simple TextExpander snippets, I might as well make available my set of Mac keyboard symbol snippets. If you ever have to write down instructions on how to use a Mac, these make it easy to describe keyboard shortcuts. They’re distinctly faster than scrolling through the Character Viewer.

At home I’m on my Mac with Notational Velocity and Omnifocus close at hand. However, at work, I use a windows machine with Resophnotes. Resophnotes is a wonderful Simplenote client that is as close as you can get to Notational Velocity on Windows.
On the ipad, I primarily use Simplenote but I also love some of the new text editor apps that are available.
Lucky me! I have a lot of options for taking notes when away from my Mac. However, I have limited options for creating tasks when I’m on Windows. The only real option I have had is to email myself a task and wait for my Mac to process it. That’s fine, but I wanted something even more simple. That’s where Applescript comes in.

AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.

Tired of those bland looking chemical reactions diagrams? Well now you can use this stencil to make spectacular looking diagrams instead. Each element in the table has a magnet count equivalent to its valence so you can easily create bonds between elements. This stencil contains elements 1 through 117, each with identifying colors.

These are instructions for compiling and installing Git, a free, fast, and efficient distributed version control system, on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

One feature missing in my precious however is the ability to create project templates. Everybody has some little group of tasks that gets repeated. For instance, I had a set of tasks that got repeated for each chapter of The Book. So how do I use this unsupported feature in OmniFocus? The answer is Applescript, that ubiquitous tool (that almost nobody uses) that lets you add features and bolt applications together like so many pieces of a digital erector set.

Keyboard shortcuts are so much more efficient than using the mouse. Only problem: They're hard to remember, especially the ones you don't use all that often. Same goes for things like Terminal commands, Twitter search syntax, multitouch gestures or anything else you can't simply point and click a mouse at.<br />
That's where dashkards come in. Dashkards are cheat sheets you can add to your Mac OS X Dashboard and have them handy at the press of a button. Click on a thumbnail below to view it in full size and add the dashkard to your Dashboard.

You’re smart, so you probably already know about the “New from Clipboard” feature of Mac OS X Preview. Exactly: if you copy an image to your clipboard from any source, open Preview, click File -> New from Clipboard, Preview will create a new image using the contents of your clipboard. That’s cool.

Markdown Service Tools is a collection of OS X Services to make creating Markdown-formatted text that much easier. Services work in any Cocoa based application (which is most of the apps on your Mac). These Services were tested on Snow Leopard, but should work fine on Leopard… maybe even Tiger. They’re each prefixed with “md” to keep them together in your Services menu, and you can assign your own keyboard shortcuts (see last section of this document) to make accessing them convenient while typing. The following Services are included:

Masters of the Void is a tutorial for Macintosh users interested in learning to program their Macintosh using Xcode and the C programming language. It assumes no prior knowledge of programming.

I'm getting back into OmniFocus. I was turned off GTD by the proliferation of dubious websites offering how-to/productivity tips; I've recently invested the time in getting 'back on the horse' and it's been all the better for it.<br />
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"The following AppleScript are those which are extremely handy and I use on a daily basis. There are many others available on the forum and other places, but many of them didn’t really add much value to my workflow, which is a pretty standard one, or solve problems I never encountered."

BetterTouchTool lets you define tons of gestures for your Macbooks Trackpad, your MagicMouse and your MagicTrackpad. In addition to that it brings lots of new stuff to MacOS like Windows 7 like window snapping, window switchers etc......

Although we recently took a look at some major players in the word-processing world and marveled at their fancy features, if you’re into having a minimalistic work environment and making the best of what you’ve already got, then it will interest you to know that TextEdit, OSX’s native text editing application, is a lot more powerful than you might have given it credit for.

Word Counter is a Macintosh OS X application that performs a word count and a character count, but it can do much more. It can be used independently or in conjunction with other applications such as TextEdit, Microsoft Word, Pages, TextWrangler, and others.

If you've shot a video on your camera but have no idea where to go from there, then open up your eyes and ears and prepare to be enlightened! This lesson is for Mac users.

After getting the kinks ironed out of my workflow, I wanted to have the ability to simply drag a MultiMarkdown formatted text document to a Mac OS X application, and have it spit out a formatted document.

My intention with this blog is providing clear, not-so-geeky explanations and ideas on using technology to improve your life. However, I’m going to momentarily shift toward the geeky end of the spectrum in this post and talk about my writing workflow with MultiMarkdown. I’ve noticed that a significant portion of the traffic I get from search engines are people looking for information on MultiMarkdown, which I wrote about in an earlier post.

Plainview is a full-screen web browser.<br />
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We Barbarians give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. People want to see our work. And the work we do is on the Internet. And, until now, we really had two options for showing our Internet work: we could capture it all to Quicktime, and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote, so we could present in a nice full-screen mode that looked professional, or we could try to show it in the browser, and have all that ugly chrome distracting people from our beautiful sites. Both of these options had their pros and cons – full-screen looks sweet, but you lose the interactivity of the site, everything has to be canned. And showing things in a browser lets you show the site’s interactivity, but, again, that ugly chrome.So now we have a third option. Fire up your full-screen browser and let your audience focus on the work.

Notational Velocity ALT is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and some interface modifications. It is a work in progress. I’m not listing it as a beta, as that would imply that it was on its way to being its own product. It’s an experiment, and I hope you enjoy it!

For Mac & iPhone users to make lists and stay organized. TaskPaper is a simple to-do list that’s surprisingly adept. Unlike standard organizers, TaskPaper gets out of your way so that you can get things done. Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or iPhone OS 3.1

A follow on from my pie-chart making script for OmniGraffle, this one makes bar charts.
Really just quickly thrown together, but it produces the results I was hoping for. Obviously, use at your own risk, and maybe save any OmniGraffle documents you have open before you run it.

Hold down the Command, Shift, and 4 keys, then press the Spacebar. Instead of a cross-hair cursor, a small camera icon appears. When you move this camera icon over the element you’d like to capture, that element is highlighted. Click your mouse or trackpad, and you’ve captured a screenshot of just that element — no further cleanup required.

It happens to all of us eventually (except for the Mac collectors). At some point, we decide that it's time to take that old Mac that we've just replaced and try to get a few bucks out of it. Some of us donate our machines to schools or other worthwhile organizations, and if we have really old equipment, we may just recycle it. In any case, there are some things you'll want to do to prepare the Mac for sale or recycling.

The only thing I miss from Firefox is the Merge All Windows function. You could hit “⌘-SHIFT-M” and all your windows would be gathered in one window with tabs. (Though, now I can't find this feature and I'm wondering if it was a plugin I'd used.)

The best way to write, preview, and publish your blog.

Recently I was looking for a lightweight image editor. After auditioning great candidates like Acorn and Pixelmator, I realized that Apple’s own Preview offers nearly everything I need. Here’s why and how I’m using Apple’s built-in PDF file viewer.

Do you know any hidden or little-known nice feature of Mac OS X? It doesn't matter what it is—maybe just a short terminal command. Share your experiences on hidden OS X features here.

Here’s the good news: setting up a new Mac still gives me a pretty awesome feeling. The fully charged computer, the sound of the boot, the Welcome sequence with that song, the way that fades as you fill out the forms… It all still works its magic.

Writing a novel, research paper, script or any long-form text involves more than hammering away at the keys until you reach the end. Collecting research, ordering fragmented ideas, shuffling index cards in search of that elusive structure - most writing software is fired up only after much of the hard work is done. Enter Scrivener: a word processor and project management tool that stays with you from that first, unformed idea all the way through to the final draft. Outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing and compose the constituent pieces of your text in isolation or in context. Scrivener won't tell you how to write - it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application, leaving you free to focus on the words.

The command line isn't just for wise Linux beards. It's actually an awesome tool with almost limitless functionality. Here's a primer on how it works, and how you can do almost anything with it.

An Everything Bucket, since you’re probably wondering, is what I call applications that encourage the user to throw anything and everything into them. They’re virtual scrapbooks, applying a lightweight organization system to (often) unrelated data of varying types. These applications typically employ a proprietary database, or at best, build atop the SQLite database technology that Apple ships with Mac OS X. They usually default to storing information in Rich Text Format (RTF) or Portable Document Format (PDF). They are Not A Good Idea.

Opacity is an easy to use program for drawing graphics for the screen. It's great for making resolution independent images and icons for applications and the web.

I'm Neven Mrgan, a designer at Panic Inc. I design whatever needs designing.

text editor | file transfer | svn | css | terminal | books | more = whoah.

Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 8 is the leading photo-editing software for Mac, combining power and simplicity so you can easily go beyond the basics to tell great stories with your photos. Make your photos look extraordinary, share your life stories in creative ways, and easily manage all your photos. Works great with iPhoto!

Disc Cover is a slick and intuitive Mac OS X software for creating CD/DVD labels, cover art and more. A variety of professionally made designs give you a quick start. This program imports data and images from iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, iDVD and many other sources. You can easily experiment with styles and graphic tools. Disc Cover will serve to bring you more and more design ideas.

Once you use Apple’s Keynote for wireframing, you’ll roundhouse kick your other wireframe tools in the face.

"Say you download a document from your company’s intranet to proofread. You look up a few words as you go, and you make some edits before sending it to your boss. If you’re anything like me, the task involves Safari, Pages, Dictionary, Finder, and iChat; with every application relying on the ability to take a file or a snippet of text from your current work context and send it elsewhere. On iPhone OS, where every app lives in a sandbox and dedicates itself to a single task, this kind of work isn’t a walk in the park. Copy and paste make things possible if you take the time to switch between apps, but the experience sucks, so developers add convenience features, web service integration, and custom URL schemes. Apple provides some great APIs for integrating with the system utilities, but they’re slow moving. There’s no standard MFTweetComposeViewController, and there probably never will be."

John Gruber's Mac and iPhone setup.

Reference material for beginning iPhone OS development.

Great alternative to OneNote - excellent for ubiquitous capture, as it runs on Mac, PC, iPhone, Blackberry etc.

I've had Quicksliver installed for eons but need to learn how to use the darn thing beyond opening applications.