As we waltz through our digital lives, we tend to accumulate files and folders, and folders full of files. While a portion of this accumulation is the kind of effluvia that we won’t need next week, much less five years from now, for many of us a large chunk of it is data that will be as important tomorrow as it is today. Think long term business projects, financial files, and databases, for example. If you’re an organized person, you’ve created a logical file structure that allows you to locate files many years from now. If you’re not so organized, you have to search for what you want.

Yes, the phrase ‘text expander’ may sound as boring as mud, but as a blogger and regular computer user I maintain that text expanders are essential bits of software for anyone who spends more than an hour a day typing in to the computer and in the video below I’ll attempt to show you why. A good program, like TextExpander for the Mac will be intuitive and easy to master, and with very little set up it can save you hours of toi

I’m just catching up on my Keyboard Maestro reading. There’s some good stuff happening with it these days. Eugene Gordin has been evolving some really nice macros to fit some unique use cases. This one zips a group of files and shares them on Dropbox for a limited time. Hazel does some file clean up at a set interval to remove the shared files. A really nice way to do it. This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2012 at 6:53 AM and is filed under keyboard maestro, Link. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Nettes kleines und kostenloses Tool von MacPaw, um externe Laufwerke im Blick zu behalten und die von Mac OS X oder Windows generierten Dateien wie DS_Store, Thumbs.db, Spotlight, hidden trashes und so weiter zu löschen.

There are several iSCSI initiators available for OS X, but we’ll limit this example to using the globalSAN iSCSI initiator which appears to be popular. It’s a simple 3-step process to setup access to the iSCSI target on the ReadyNAS. So, let’s get started.

Experience your media on a visually stunning, easy to use interface on your computer or Home Theater PC. Your media has never looked this good!

Time management is incredibly important for many people. We all have busy lives and the more we can get out of our time working, the more time we have for other things. With there being only twenty-four hours in a day it really comes down to being as efficient as we can with the time we have.

PDF has become a worldwide document type standard and you no doubt deal with these documents fairly regularly. Because the file tpye is so common there is a plethora of applications available to work with them. It can be a bit tricky to wade through the large number of choices though, so I’ve attempted to pull out ten of the most useful apps for performing various functions. Everything from simply managing your PDF files to editing, extracting and more.

I use this macro to quickly center my mouse cursor on my main screen. I have two large monitors and embarrassingly, I lose my mouse cursor occasionally.

This macro is also a good demonstration of some of the calculations with Keyboard Maestro variables.

Map tasks and timelines
Turn brainstorming into action plans using an interactive environment that shows overviews and details in a clear format. MindManager helps validate priorities, get buy-in on goals and strategies, and map out timelines.

•
AppleScript
Services
Automator
•

Mac OS X Automation
POWER TO COMMAND

Sooner or later every individual, business, or organization is challenged to perform repetitive or complex procedures on their computers. Whether the task is renaming numerous files, batch processing images, or building documents using data from multiple sources, the need for powerful automation tools is shared by all computer users. Mac OS X is designed, from the ground up, for automation and offers a variety of integrated tools and technologies to solve your automation challenges.

These Automator actions are designed to take some of the tedium out of your work. Many of them were created specifically for web designers and developers. However, if you’re not either of those, you may still find them useful. For information about each action, see below. If you’re new to Automator, you can learn about it here. Formerly named “Automator Actions for Web Designers”.

Junecloud Automator Actions includes: Save for Web, Make Names Web-Friendly, Create Clean Archive, Create Symbolic Link, and Hide or Show Extensions. Change Extensions and Find Finder Items by Label are no longer included.

This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on April 5th, 2011.
Dropbox is one of those tools that spends most of its time sitting in the background, and yet has become an essential app for users on just about every platform. Dropbox as cloud storage, as a syncing solution, and even as a way to host a website is an incredibly useful tool.
That utility isn’t lost on app developers. Software that works with Dropbox is springing up everywhere — sometimes as a built-in function, and other times as a user hack. Either way, it makes life among many gadgets easier to have certain files accessible anywhere, anytime.
Here are some apps that you can start using to take advantage of cloud storage even more.

Academics work with a lot of PDF files—journal articles, scanned ILL materials, and, increasingly, historical documents available through archives such as Google Books. After my first few posts here at ProfHacker, I received a number of emails asking me to recommend a good program for organizing, tagging, reading, and (especially) annotating PDF files. Folks want to be able to store all their journal articles together in a single program, make notes on them as they would on paper copies, and search their both their articles and their notes easily.

To use a keyboard shortcut, or key combination, you press a modifier key with a character key. For example, pressing the Command key (the key with a symbol) and the "c" key at the same time copies whatever is currently selected (text, graphics, and so forth) into the Clipboard. This is also known as the Command-C key combination (or keyboard shortcut). A modifier key is a part of many key combinations. A modifier key alters the way other keystrokes or mouse clicks are interpreted by Mac OS X. Modifier keys include: Command, Control, Option, Shift, Caps Lock, and the fn key (if your keyboard has a fn key). Here are the modifier key symbols you can see in Mac OS X menus: (Command key) - On some Apple keyboards, this key also has an Apple logo () (Control key) (Option key) - "Alt" may also appear on this key (Shift key) (Caps Lock) - Toggles Caps Lock on or off fn (Function key)

I am a regular user of OmniFocus, the Todo-list manager by Omni Group. I am very dependent on OF and unfortunately have sometimes ended up with a corrupt database (typical symptom is that many of my contexts vanish). I therefore have set the backup frequency to twice a day, and I backup everytime I quit the program. Moreover I sync to MobileMe. This however has the result of producing quite a large backlog of backup-files that take up space on my harddrive (my OF files are large, because I often end up storing attachments with the tasks). It is tedious to remember to clean up this directory.

This is where Hazel by NoodleSoft comes in handy. With Hazel you can setup rules that are run on the files in a directory. So for my OF backup directory I have a rule Delete Old Backups, that I setup as seen in the figure.

Have you ever heard of a little preference pane utility called Hazel?

I use it everyday and it just may be the single most under appreciated app on my Mac. It is that good. Hazel basically allows you to preform preset actions based on a set of rules that you create. All of this sounds rather boring – best just to share how I use Hazel.

Dialectic is a highly versatile telephony tool that unites your Mac, data, and phones — mobile, landline, & VoIP — enabling you to be more productive. And it’s designed exclusively for Macintosh.
Dialing Has Never Been So Much Fun
Dialing the phone? Fun? How can that be? Simple: Dialectic. See a phone number on a webpage? Two clicks of the mouse and the Bluetooth-enabled phone in your pocket is main windowconnecting your call — and iTunes is paused & your iChat status is set to “On the phone...”.
Have a number entered into your digital address book? Click & talk. Trust us, it’s so much fun you’ll be calling people just for an excuse to use Dialectic.

The other day I gave a script that uses Open Meta tags to tag files. The trick was that it uses information about the directory structure to create the tags. That way if you have a folder named “Accounting” all files within that folder get tagged “Accounting”. It was a pretty simple script and this workflow works best when you are using an Open Meta aware application. The program I tend to use is Yep from Ironic Software.
I mentioned that it was easy to expand the program to add a bit more sophistication. Here’s my followup going through some of the tricks you can use. The easiest method is just a lookup table. I actually had a simple one last time that looks for particular words in the path.  That way if you have a folder named “Accounting 11″ it would tag it with the tag “Accounting” and not just “Accounting 11″.  This time I’m going to add a small function that looks at the file name to generate some tags.

A couple of weeks back I’d mentioned my Open Meta script. This was basically a script that analyzed path names (i.e. the names of the folders a file was in) and the file name itself to create some meta data. That meta data was added to the file using the Open Meta standard.
I realized that I didn’t explain how this was useful. If you use the Finder you can create Smart Folders that will display files based upon this meta data.  Here’s how to do it.
First let’s start at a low level with mdfind. If you want to search for Open Meta tags then you do something like this:
mdfind "tag:myopenmetatag"
This is mdfind’s technique of using more “expressive” queries rather than the more programming style of query. (See Apple’s docs) I’ve noticed that in Lion you can actually leave out the “-interpret” argument and it’s smart enough to still figure things out properly. (I’m not sure when this was introduced – probably with Snow Leopard)
If you want to do it the more verbose way try
mdfind "kMDItemOMUserTags == myopenmetatag"
Now doing it in the Finder is only slightly more complex. First select from the File menu “New Smart Folder” and click the little plus sign to the right of the save button.  You’ll get a little pulldown menu offering various metadata to search on. Click it and select “Other” to get a dialog that looks like this:
 

At AppStorm we love helping you get the most out of your devices, mostly by giving you the low-down on the latest and greatest apps! Occasionally, however, it’s good to highlight the very best apps available; whether they be old classics, or new gems.
Recently each site has published a massive, and eminently thoughtful, roundup of the very best apps available, and I’ve collected them all together! Our editors and teams went to herculean lengths to ensure that these roundups would be more than worth your time, so without further ado…

Michael Schechter’s Writer Workflow

Editor’s Note: Michael Schechter first caught may attention over at ABetterMess.com with some clever ideas about OmniFocus. He writes smart things about productivity, writing and blogging, which are unlikely topics for me to follow. But Michael writes regularly and he writes well. He writes honestly about things he cares about or is trying to figure out. His articles are generally long reads that say something meaningful without preaching or selling something. I read his stuff everyday. I also follow him on Twitter because he continues to say funny, clever and nice things there too.

If you like, please provide a brief bio

I’m Michael Schechter, the sole blogger over at A Better Mess and one of the two “Mikes” on the 70Decibels Podcast, Mikes on Mics. I also work in our family’s 65-year-old jewelry company and focus on the digital aspects of our business. I live in an insanely overpriced and cramped apartment in Brooklyn, NY along with my tolerant wife, two young girls and our dog.

Technology has done amazing things for music in the last decade. Sure, the large, traditional industry players are making less money, but there are now vastly more players, and the ecosystem that's emerging looks pretty amazing.

Despite all the music streaming services and startups out there, there still exists a major problem: Each one is its own little island of content, disconnected from the rest. This leaves the user in the unfortunate position of having to hunt and peck around the Web to find different music.

No matter how hard it tries, no one individual digital music service is ever going to have a 100% comprehensive library. There are complex rights licensing issues, high costs and hesitant artists, for starters.

Meanwhile, the number of artists is exploding as old structures crumble and record labels become less relevant. A band you've never heard could be recording an album you're going to love right now and upload it to SoundCloud next week, with or without the help of a label. The video they post on YouTube could be so well-crafted that it goes viral and lands in your Facebook news feed next Tuesday. This is the new radio.

So you’re quickly browsing through your Facebook or Twitter feed, taking a short break from work, when you find an interesting article or video that you know is bound to be a huge time-suck. You don’t really want to look it up later when you aren’t busy because you know you’ll forget to do it. You also don’t want to read it or see it right there because you don’t want to get too distracted or you’re not in the right situation for it.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll save it for later by bookmarking it; be it marking it as a favorite on Twitter, sending it to Instapaper, starring it on Google Reader, or any of the equivalents in any social network. But then you’ll likely never come back to it because you’ll forget exactly where you saved it (and the tons of other content that you also bookmarked on other networks for later). That’s where Favs comes in.

SourceTree is a free Mac client for Git,
Mercurial and SVN version control systems.

OmniFocus is one of the best (and most complex) task management applications for Mac (not available on Windows). Here, you’ll find links to all our articles and tutorials about how to use OmniFocus to increase your productivity and manage your time. The ten-part article series introduces a fictional character (Tom Jenkins), and AE bloggers Thanh and Aaron give their perspectives on what the best way is to getting started with Omnifocus. Topics include:

The best way of setting up Omnifocus with structures and areas of responsibilities.
How to apply Getting Things Done (GTD) or how to make your own workflow.
Creating custom perspectives (next actions, today list, and more).
Using Omnifocus on iPad and iPhone in sync.
Cool tricks and advanced features.
Managing email tasks with Mailplane and Apple Mail together with Omnifocus.
How to use OmniFocus with Agile Results.
Soon: Cultured Code’s Things versus Omnifocus.

One of the things I always come across when using OmniFocus is the need to quickly find and open/focus a particular project. While OmniFocus has it’s own search capabilities and of course allows you to navigate to and focus a specific project. However, this typically doesn’t cut it for me since it involves multiple steps and, depending of the perspective setting you are currently in, may not provide the intended result.

AppleScript to the rescue

Thankfully there is a great AppleScript based solution to this problem and I have covered it before in my Top 5 OmniFocus Applescripts post. The original script by Rob Trew can be launched via Launchbar by passing the search string on or from the OmniFocus toolbar asking you for the search string.

Adding in Alfred support

The script itself is basically perfect, like everything that Rob does, but I was missing support for Alfred and so I added it. You can now invoke the script from Alfred as an AppleScript extension (Powerpack required), using for example the keyword ‘ofind’ and add the search string in Alfred itself. If more than one project contains the search string you are presented with a dialog to select the project you have been looking for and a new OmniFocus window will be opened with the desired project in focus. Should you decide to build your own Alfred extension from the script and not use the one below, please note that you need to remove the ‘on run’ block to make it work with Alfred.

One of the most advanced features of OmniFocus are Perspectives, which, in short, allow you to view your actions applying different filters. While Perspectives unleash the true potential of OmniFocus they are equally complex to master. It is one of the aspects where many people that are actually looking for a simple list manager give up on OmniFocus. This series of posts is aimed to help exploring the power of Perspectives and how to make them useful and valuable to your workflow.

In the introduction to Perspectives we will focus on the true basics: Creating, accessing and modifying Perspectives in OmniFocus for Mac. With each post we will also create a new, in some cases modify an existing, Perspective. At the end of this series you should have some key Perspectives available that should help you focus on your work since that is what Perspectives are all about.

While in the last three posts we have looked at ways you can use Perspectives to focus on actions which you want to do today, are on your next action list or are simply due, this time around we want to look at actions you track which concern other people. Unless you are living under a rock in the industrial age (which means your Mosaic browser can’t display this site anyway) your work is very likely project-driven and you are collaborating with a larger set of people on a daily basis. Whether these are constantly changing or you more or less always deal with the same folks doesn’t really make a difference. It’s also irrelevant whether you track actions or items for customers, co-workers, your manager or other freelancers you are collaborating with on a project. The idea is that you have one consistent view on who is responsible to deliver on which action and what topics need to be raised with the team or individuals.

Email is not your main job, at least for most of us. But likely it is an important part of your job. Email has become a substantial part of our communication and unfortunately also a primary source of distraction.

You don’t need to like email, I certainly don’t. But you need to deal with it and since you may not like it and it is only a tool to get your real job done, you should deal with it in the most efficient way.

Time-boxing email activities is one element to make sure email does not take centre stage in your daily work. Finding an easy way to file, archive, track and retrieve email is another.

The Magic of MailTags

Many like tagging in Gmail/Sparrow and ‘topics’ in Postbox as a way to organise email. MailTags by Indev - plug-in for Mac OS X native Mail.app - has been around for a very long time and goes way beyond what Gmail and Postbox provide. The Lion-compatible version 3.0 of MailTags has been released recently and allows me to share how I use (a very small part of) it to get my email done.

MailTags allows you to do lots of things with your email. Key features include:

Assigning tags
Associate your email with a project (MailTags can access your OmniFocus or Things project list, provided the application is running)
Assign a tickler date to remind you of the email in the future
Create a event or task in iCal related to an email
Add notes
Assign different colours and up to five different priority levels (now you procrastinators get really excited, right? Five! priority levels!) to your emails
While you can do all of this without taking your hands off the keyboard, the real magic is how deep MailTags integrates with Mail.app. You can leverage all the functionality in searches, Smart Mailboxes and mail rules. And the OmniFocus clipper also works nicely with MailTags-

OmniFocus comes with a rule that can take a specially formatted email message and transform it into an action. I use this feature running on a Mac Mini to allow me to add actions to OmniFocus from my Windows PC at work.

One things that has always bothered me about it is that it doesn’t do anything with attachments. If you create one of these specially formatted messages and attach a file, you would expect that the attachment would be added to the newly minted action. It doesn’t. I’m sure there are good reasons for it. I can’t claim to know them but suffice it to say I want this functionality , dammit. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I rolled up my sleeves and started hacking.

In the end I managed to modify the mail rule that comes bundled with OmniFocus to attach all mail attachments to newly created actions. You can download the modified MailAction.applescript and try it out for yourself.

With this script installed, any mail messages that OmniFocus would normally pick up will also have their attachments added to the OmniFocus action that is created.

I am on a manager’s schedule as opposed to a maker’s schedule. Whether you think this is a bad or good thing, it certainly means that I have a lot of meetings each day. Given that I work in an international cooperation that has a complex, multi-dimensional and geographical distributed organisation, many of my meetings are either audio, web or video conferences. It comes as no surprise that many of these meetings are poorly prepared with no clear agenda or objective. If you have five of these on a day, you really look back and ask yourself what you have achieved other than burning valuable lifetime on the phone. But you either accept the status quo or the responsibility to change it. Changing it means you need to set an example, independent of where in the hierarchy you sit. For those meetings that I host or which I at least co-host or influence, I have changed my approach from the typical “let’s wing it” to more conscious preparation. It surprisingly doesn’t really take much more time, but delivers significantly improved results.

The TextExpander groups below now use a custom prefix system which allows you to define your own prefix for the snippet abbreviations. Click the link next to a group to get a download or “Add from URL” link with your chosen prefix.

Use the URL by clicking the plus symbol under the Groups panel in TextExpander and choose “Add group from URL.” Paste your custom URL in the dialog that pops up. Set your update settings for the group as desired.

You can also download the .textexpander file directly and install it by double clicking (note that you won’t get automatic updates using this method).

See all of my various TextExpander experiments and snippets under the TextExpander tag.

Snippet titles include the date of the most recent change in italics.

OmniFocus by Omnigroup has become the leader of the pack in terms of Mac and iOS task management. While there are millions of task list apps available for iPhone and iPad, very few compete with OmniFocus across all Apple platforms and qualify as professional-grade task managers. Out of the box OmniFocus does everything a GTD practitioner needs and it’s integration with Mac OS X is very tight. However, there are a few scenarios where you’d like to enrich OmniFocus’ standard functionality or increase the level of integration with Mac OS X. Thankfully OmniFocus offers a very extensive Applescript API, which allows scripting gurus to create some magic. While Applescript is a relative simple scripting language it is obvious that only a fraction of users will actually open an editor and create a script themselves. But that isn’t what you need to do to get some extra out of OmniFocus. The OmniFocus Extras forum on the Omnigroup user forum is one of the great sources for ready-to-use Applescripts. All you need to do is move them into the right directory on your machine and occasionally modify some of the scripts parameters to fit your needs. 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.

Overview
Cauliflower Vest is an end-to-end Mac OS X FileVault 2 recovery key escrow solution. While stock OS X FileVault 2 is consumer focused, the goal of this project is to provide enterprise features.

Cauliflower Vest offers the ability to:

Forcefully enable FileVault 2 encryption.
Automatically escrow recovery keys to a secure Google App Engine server.
Delegate secure access to recovery keys so that volumes may be unlocked or reverted.
Components:

A Google App Engine based service which receives and securely escrows FileVault 2 recovery keys.
A GUI client running on the OS X user machines, which enables FileVault 2 encryption, obtains the recovery key, and sends it to the escrow service.
A CLI tool, csfde, which activates FileVault 2 encryption, which may be used independently of the GUI client.

Wouldn't it be great if there were a tool that could manage your videos and movies as well as Apple's iTunes and iPhoto manage your music and your photographs? Now there is. Meet Usher, your personal movie assistant.

Find and Manage Everything

Usher is the ultimate movie and video assistant because it can see and manage pretty much everything:



Usher can manage the videos you keep on your hard drive, and it will do so even if you don't want to move your videos and movies into Usher's library—it's your choice as to whether or not Usher moves things into its library, or just helps you manage your collection in place.



Usher can see videos stored in iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture, providing easy management for these collections. You can add details to these videos, and then use Smart Playlists (as in iTunes) to quickly filter your collection on those details.



Usher also includes search-and-download capabilities for both YouTube and Vimeo1. Downloading your favorite video is now as simple as running a search (or entering its URL), and then letting Usher do all the heavy lifting—Usher can even auto-convert these downloads for use with the iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV, and copy them to iTunes.

Hazel 3 brings the ability to create custom matching rules using AppleScript or Shell Scripts. This seemingly subtle addition takes Hazel to an entirely new level. I’ve just begun tinkering with this and already I’ve developed some rules that seem almost magical.

MMD Meta Data

MultiMarkdown supports meta data headers in text. These are arbitrary header lines in the file that begin at line 1 and end at the first empty line. The meta data category ends with a colon and is followed by the value. The meta data can be anything but there are some commonly accepted standards. Upon conversion of the MMD file, the meta fields are stripped out. However, they can first be accessed by the MultiMarkdown tools.

Eine neue Variante des "Flashback"-Trojaners ist aufgetaucht, die sich auf dem Mac nur durch das Besuchen einer entsprechend preparierten Website installieren kann. Wie F-Secure in einem Advisory schreibt, nutzt die Malware mit der Bezeichnung "OSX/Flashback.K" eine seit Längerem bekannte Java-SE6-Lücke (CVE-2012-0507). Diese wurde unter Windows bereits im Februar geschlossen, Apples jüngstes offizielles Java-Update stammt allerdings aus dem vergangenen November.

This is a collection of best of breed tools from across the web, from scouring other people's dotfile repos, blogs, and projects.
What is YADR?

YADR is an opinionated dotfile repo that will make your heart sing
OSX is the best OS. MacVim is the best editor. Zsh is the best shell. Pry is the best irb. Solarized is the best color scheme.
Apple-style philosophy: make everything Just Work and Look Good. Don't worry about too many options.
All common commands should be two and three character mnemonic aliases - less keystrokes, RSI reduction
Avoid stressful hand motions, e.g. remap Esc to caps lock key, remap underscore to Alt-k in vim, make window management in vim easy.
Easy to use plugin architecture, no config files to edit.
Pick one tool and use it everywhere: vim-ize everything
NEW Beautiful, easy to read and small vimrc
NEW No key overrides or custom hackery in vimrc, everything in well factored snippets in .vim/plugin/settings

Vagrant wants an up-to-date RubyGems. From experience changing the ruby install bundled with Mac OS X can be a bad idea. I considered using rvm but I don’t think I need all that power here. So I’ll be my usual old-fashioned self, and install my own ruby in /usr/local.

Download latest ruby source code (1.9.2-p180 at time of writing), ./configure && make && make install (this results in a 64-bit only build)
create a new terminal, check gem environment gives the new ruby, run gem update --system && gem update
if you now get a lot of deprecation warnings, follow this advice to get rid of them: gem pristine --all --no-extensions (there are no native extension installed yet so no need to worry about those)
if you get any instructions about running rdoc-data, ignore the instructions, according to this bug report it’s not needed for ruby 1.9.2.
So now we have up-to-date ruby and up-to-date RubyGems. Good. Let’s get virtualbox and vagrant:

The PHP Function Index (PHPfi) is a very fast documentation viewer to look up any PHP function.
Its search offers realtime-filtering of the function list and it downloads and caches the user contributed notes from PHP.NET for instant lookup.
Additionally its AppleScript interface lets you look up PHP functions easily from within your favorite editor.

JewelryBox allows you the freedom to manage your rubies, gemsets and gems from a graphical environment. Take advantage of the native OS X application interface with a 100% pure objective-c code base. Out of the box, JewelryBox runs natively on Mac OS X Lion and Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

This is a modification of an original post for use when you have a corrupt sparsebundle backup on a NAS (as opposed to an external drive attached to a router) and it needs to be repaired. The NAS is likely a hardware product from the likes of Netgear, Synology, Buffalo or QNap – or for those of us with a home-grown backup server running FreeNAS.

The error you may see is “Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.” This can be fixed by following the below.

To create a nested condition:

Hold down the alt/option key. The plus (+) button will change to show ellipses (…).
Click on the ellipses button above where you want to create the nested condition.
or

Hold down the plus button for the condition above hwere [sic] you want to create the nested condition. While holding the button down, you will see an indicator and then a menu with extra options.
Select “Add nested condition”.

This post is the answer to the first question that any new Mac user will ask: which apps are the best? The next time someone asks you this question, don’t think twice, just send them here.
We’ve spent hours and hours browsing the web, combing the Mac App Store and wandering through our own archives for the absolute best Mac apps around and we’ve found a whopping one hundred of them that we think you’ll love. Whether you’re looking for a screenshot utility, a todo list or even a great game to play, we’ve got you covered. We’re not merely offering a mindless list of links either, we took the time to tell you what each app does and why we love it so you can make an informed decision. Happy downloading!

Textexpander link is a great application for OSX. It enables the user to quickly write loads of text by expanding short words, so-called snippets in larger chunks of text. This is great for writing, correspondense or programming. This site is a repository of the best snippets we could find all over the Internet.

Several sites served as inspiration for te-snippets. One of them is wp-snippets, a collection of snippets for WordPress.

My name is Alex Poslavsky, and I am your host here. I hope you enjoy using this site, and if you have ideas or questions, please feel free to contact me here.

The Hague, March 2011

TextExpander: organize abbreviations by context
Timothy in Ohio sent us this detailed tip showing how he organizes his abbreviations into contexts:

I find that using different beginning delimiters for different contexts helps me to remember which ones they are.
1) For HTML shortcuts, I start with “<". For example:
<3 = <h3>%|</h3>
<i = <img xsrc="%|" mce_src="%|" alt="" width="x" height="y" />
<xstrict = XHTML Strict DocType and <head> stuff (see below)
<bq = blockquote

Eine Besonderheit beim Mac liegt darin, daß Daten in vielen Programmen nicht nur fest, sondern auch nach individuellen Kriterien eingeordnet werden können. Am bekanntesten sind sicherlich die intelligenten Wiedergabelisten in iTunes (z.B. „Meine Top 25“) und die intelligenten Ordner im Finder (z.B. „Alle Filme“). Eine solche Liste kann im Gegensatz zu einer festen Einordnung jeden Tag andere Inhalte haben. Dieses Konzept zieht durch viele Mac-Apps, egal ob sie von Apple oder einem Drittanbieter sind. Weitere Beispiele hierfür sind Mail (intelligente Mailboxen), DEVONthink (intelligente Gruppen) oder Delicious Library (intelligentes Regal)

Die Lexikon-App von OS X gehört für mich zu den nützlichsten mitgelieferten Programmen. Ich schreibe viele Texte am Mac, sowohl in deutscher als auch in englischer Sprache. Dazu gehören u.a. Blog-Einträge, Webseiten, Angebote, Briefe und Dokumentation. Öfters suche ich da nach dem richtigen englischen Wort oder einem Synonym, um Wörter nicht mehrmals in einem Absatz zu verwenden.

As always, I like building Emacs for my Mac from source. It lets me live on the cutting edge and have tigher control of the version I’m running. If building software from source isn’t your thing then skip the rest of this article and consider installing Emacs using Homebrew, MacPorts, or Fink

I’ve written about building Emacs in the past, but OS X Lion brings a few complexities to the process.

Before you begin you’ll need to have Xcode installed (free in the App Store).

In the past the best way to get the Emacs source was with CVS, but CVS is no longer included with Xcode. Fortunately, you can now use Git instead.

Here I offer you a plugin that enhances Mac OS X Leopard’s (10.5) or Mac OS X Snow Leopard's (10.6) Dictionary.App to provide the complete German-English vocabulary from the fabulous dict.cc dictionary for offline use. It works great in Dictionary.App and other core Mac OS X services like Spotlight or Dictionary-Widget.

RCDefaultApp is a Mac OS X 10.2 or higher preference pane that allows a user to set the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers (or UTIs; MacOS 10.4 only). MacOS X uses the extension and file type settings to choose the application when opening a file in Finder, while Safari and other applications use the URL and MIME type settings at other times for content not related to a file (such as an unknown URL protocol, or a media stream).

RCDefaultApp also allows setting the application when digital cameras or FireWire webcams such as iSight are connected to the computer. For completeness' sake, there are also settings that mimic the existing "CDs and DVDs" preference pane, which allows setting the action to take when various types of CDs and DVDs are inserted into the computer.

Finder's Get Info panel can be used to set the default application for file extensions and file types, but it's not intuitive. Apple's Internet preference pane in MacOS X 10.0 through 10.2 (Jaguar) allowed you to set the Web and Email applications, but no other URL handlers. In MacOS X 10.3 (Panther), these settings have moved to Safari's and Mail's preferences — meaning you have to run those applications if you want to choose to not use them. Similarly, the digital camera preference is located in Image Capture's preferences, and the webcam preference is a checkbox in iChat's preferences. RCDefaultApp allows the setting of all of this information, and ties everything together in one preference pane.

RCDefaultApp also allows entries to be disabled, such as URL schemes that have security issues ;-)

RCDefault App is a Mac OS X 10.2 or higher preference pane that allows a user to set the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers (or UTIs; MacOS 10.4 only). MacOS X uses the extension and file type settings to choose the application when opening a file in Finder, while Safari and other applications use the URL and MIME type settings at other times for content not related to a file (such as an unknown URL

Platypus is a developer tool for the Mac OS X operating system. It can be used to create native, flawlessly integrated Mac OS X applications from interpreted scripts such as shell scripts or Perl, Ruby and Python programs. This is done by wrapping the script in an application bundle directory structure along with an executable binary that runs the script.

Platypus makes it easy for you to share your scripts and programs with those unfamiliar with the command line interface, without any knowledge of the Mac OS X APIs -- a few clicks and you will have your own Mac OS X graphical program. Creating installers, maintenance applications, login items, launchers, automations and droplets is very easy using Platypus.

Supports shell scripts, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Expect, Tcl, AppleScript or any other user-specified interpreter
Can execute scripts with administrator privileges via Apple's Security Framework
Can display graphical feedback of script execution as progress bar, text window with script output, droplet, WebKit HTML rendering or status item menu
Dragging and dropping files or text snippets on application, which are then passed to the script as arguments
Can create applications which run in the background (LSUIElement)
Set own application icon or select from presets
App bundle configuration for associated file types, identifier, version, author, etc.
Graphical interface for bundling support files with script
Command line tool for automating script application bundling and integrating platypus into your build process
"Profiles" which can be used to save configurations
Built-in script editor, or linking with external editor of choice
Extensive documentation and many built-in examples to help you get started.

Wer sich für das Powerpack entscheidet, bekommt eine Vielzahl an Erweiterungsmöglichkeiten geboten. Mir als Tastaturjunkie springt dabei immer buchstäblich das Herz an die Decke. Und da es schon öfters hier nachgefragt wurde, präsentieren wir euch jetzt in diesem Artikel unsere meistbenutzten Erweiterungen bzw. Extensions für Alfred:

Diese Liste ist ohne Sortierung und Wertung und eher als lose Aufzählung zu betrachten, zeigt aber sehr schön, wie vielzeitig einsetzbar Alfred ist. Die Liste ist nicht vollständig und wird mit der Zeit durch weitere Themen-relevanten Artikel ergänzt. Dazu noch einen Tipp vorne weg: Mit dem “Extension Updater for Alfred“ kann man die meisten installierten Erweiterungen automatisch aktualisieren.

If you have tasks which have to be kept running, the easiest way to ensure that is by using launchd which has an option specifically to ensure that this happens. All you need is a properly formatted plist file in $HOME/Library/LaunchAgents which looks something like this:

January 29, 2005

Tool For Thought

This week's edition of the Times Book Review features an essay that I wrote about the research system I've used for the past few years: a tool for exploring the couple thousand notes and quotations that I've assembled over the past decade -- along with the text of finished essays and books. I suspect there will be a number of you curious about the technical details, so I've put together a little overview here, along with some specific observations. For starters, though, go read the essay and then come back once you've got an overview.

The software I use now is called DevonThink, and I'm sorry to report that it is only available for Mac OS X. (I know there are a number of advanced search tools available for Windows, so I'm sure most of what I describe here could be reproduced -- I just don't know enough about the search tools on that platform to recommend anything.)

I talked in the Times essay about using the tool as a springboard for new ideas and inspiration. Here's what that process looks like in practice. This is the window that shows me an overview of part of my "research library" in DevonThink:

In this installment, the iTunes Guy answers questions about moving your iTunes library, opening multiple iTunes windows simultaneously, finding tracks in playlists, and more.

The world can be a tedious place. Some of that tedium, such as long lines at the market and unyielding traffic jams, is unavoidable. But there are waits that you needn’t suffer, particularly when working with your Mac. Take adding multiple recipients to a single email message, for example. Of course you can add each recipient, one address at a time. But doing so is about as interesting (and necessary) as watching paint dry. With the power of address groups at your disposal you can quickly add many recipients to your message in one go. Here are answers to frequently asked questions:

In the past two years, we’ve seen a lot of specialized photo manipulation apps enter the scene. Apps like Analog, Flare, and Instagram allow people to apply filters that recolor or add texture to photos. Focus is a photo manipulation app as well, but its specialty lies in creating unique blur effects in photos.
Cameras that have an adjustable lens allow you to change the focus of a photo, blurring objects at different distances. However, if your digital camera doesn’t have the ability to change the lens focus, or if you just took a photo without focusing it well, you might feel the need to give photos that effect manually. Read on to see what Focus has to offer.

YADR is an opinionated dotfile repo that will make your heart sing
OSX is the best OS. MacVim is the best editor. Zsh is the best shell. Pry is the best irb. Solarized is the best color scheme.
Apple-style philosophy: make everything Just Work and Look Good. Don't worry about too many options.
All common commands should be two and three character mnemonic aliases - less keystrokes, RSI reduction
Avoid stressful hand motions, e.g. remap Esc to caps lock key, remap underscore to Alt-k in vim, make window management in vim easy.
Easy to use plugin architecture, no config files to edit.
Pick one tool and use it everywhere: vim-ize everything
NEW Beautiful, easy to read and small vimrc
NEW No key overrides or custom hackery in vimrc, everything in well factored snippets in .vim/plugin/settings

Mit CoverScout hatte ich vor einigen Wochen eine App vorgestellt, mit der man fehlende Alben-Cover seiner Musikdateien vervollständigen konnte. Meiner Meinung nach eine sensationelle App, kostet aber auch 23,99 Euro.

Mit Album Artwork Assistant möchte ich jetzt eine kostenlose App vorstellen, die prinzipiell die gleiche Funktion hat, nicht ganz so hübsch aussieht und sich ausschließlich auf die Musikdateien in der iTunes Mediathek beschränkt.

Unsere Menüleisten > 2012

Weil wir gar nicht so selten gefragt werden, was bzw. wieviel sich in unseren Menüleisten eigentlich so tummelt, möchten wir das an dieser Stelle mal zusammenfassen.