Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and searches iOS, Mac, Man Pages and custom docsets. Included docsets: ActionScript, Android, C++, Cappuccino, Cocos2D, Cocos3D, Corona, CSS, Django, HTML, Java, JavaFX, JavaScript, jQuery, Kobold2D, Lua, MySQL, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sparrow, SQLite, Unity 3D, WordPress, XSLT, XUL. You can generate your own docsets by following the instructions here. Dash is currently free while in beta and is available on the Mac App Store.

These two files should help you to import passwords from mac OS X keychains to 1password.

A treasure trove of OS X defaults write tweaks.

Want to stop people from walking off with your iPhone charger? Ever had to take your best guess on which Earbuds are yours? Buoy Tags will help you keep track of your cables and stop unwanted sharing.

Just snap each of the specially sized tags on your Earbuds, USB Dock Cable and Magsafe Adapter to quickly identify your cables at home, in the office, or on the go. The sleek low-profile design and solid feel of Buoy Tags compliment the look and feel of your Apple gear.

Learn about common Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts. A keyboard shortcut is a way to invoke a function in Mac OS X by pressing a combination of keys on your keyboard.

File Vault 2 and embedded 'Recovery HD' disk are new additions to OS X in Lion release.

A fresh OS X Lion installation creates 'Recovery HD' by live re-partitioning 'Macintosh HD'. The recovery disk is 650MB in size (as of 10.7.2), of partition type Apple_Boot, and therefore, will be hidden during normal usage by OS X user interface. It does not show up in Finder, and not even 'Disk Utility.'

If the recovery disk 'Recovery HD' is proper, booting up a Mac without File Vault 2 while holding down the Option key will result in listing 'Recovery HD' as an alternative to 'Macintosh HD' for booting the machine up. For Macs with File Vault 2, only holding down the Cmd+R key combination will boot 'Recovery HD.'

The 'Recovery HD' of a Mac without File Vault 2 contains 'Base System Install', which is a minimal OS X kernel plus useful utility applications (Disk Utility, Time Machine, Network Utility, Pasword Utility). The main purpose is to allow partitioning a hard disk and restoring the system from a Time Capsule via the Time Machine application.

The 'Recovery HD' of a Mac with File Vault 2 does not contain 'Base System Install,' but only CoreStorage components and a minimal kernel for authenticating a user to Core Storage, to get a File Vault 2 (Whole-Disk-Encryption) protected disk mounted. Therefor, once File Vault 2 is turned on, your Mac will loose the ability to boot 'Base System Install'. The only way to start a Time Capsule restore is to boot from a Lion Installation DVD (or USB), if you had one made from the downloaded Lion installation app from the AppStore (instructions are widely written in web articles, please search the web).

When a Lion Mac is restored from Time Capsule via the Time Machine application, as of 10.7.2, the 'Recovery HD' will NOT be recreated. A Mac with File Vault 2 previously enabled will also be restored with File Vault 2 disabled; i.e. the disk will NOT be encrypted (this is right thing to do IMO). Without 'Recovery HD', File Vault 2 cannot be enabled anymore. This is a BIG problem for Mac owners who need stronger assurance of data security.

This article is a collection of my experiences in fixing this plight I had to face after restoring my Mac after my Seagate Momentus 500GB (G-Shock) crashed badly.

CodeKit automatically compiles Less, Sass, Stylus, CoffeeScript & Haml files. It effortlessly combines, minifies and error-checks Javascript. It supports Compass. It even optimizes jpeg & png images, auto-reloads your browser and lets you use the same files across many projects. And that's just the first paragraph.

Create Mac apps.
Use HTML5 for the UI.
Script it with anything.
Can not possibly be simpler.

2011 Session documentation.

Rotating Time Machine backups has never been easier as of 10.7. Apple included in Lion a command-line interface for Time Machine which makes it completely scriptable. For the complete details on the command-line interface take a look at the man page for tmutil.

I use two Time Machine backups (see my backup strategy below for my complete backup solution) one at home and one at work. Using MarcoPolo you can set triggers and actions to automatically switch your Time Machine destination.

At home, and at work, I have 10.7 Server setup running the Time Machine service. Using MarcoPolo my laptop can determine its location, work or home, and set the IP address for my server appropriately. The following are the details on how to set this up for a Time Machine destination of an AFP share point. With small changes, this will also work for a Time Machine destination of an external hard drive.

Mac OS X 10.7 includes a new facility to make Time Machine backups on the local disk. You can make use of this feature to create snapshots of the current disk status, allowing you to recover instantly from disaster.

A quick tip I just found after too much digging in Google:

Deleting an email address from Mail.app’s autocomplete list can easily be done from the Window, Previous Recipients menu. Nearly every search for autocomplete adjustments says this.

But I wanted to do the opposite: add addresses to it, since I rely so heavily on autocomplete when composing mail, and my new clean installation started with an empty list. I still can’t find any way to bulk-add — I’d love to just autocomplete every recipient’s address from every message in my Inbox or folders.

Cinderella is a fully managed development environment for open source hacking on Mac OSX. It's powered by homebrew and chef. You only need Xcode to get started.

Cinderella builds everything up in ~/Developer. It won't stomp on any of your current installations so you don't have to commit your entire machine immediately. It's simple to rollback if you really want to.

If you are a Unix admin and also have to maintain Windows servers, you will find winexe a must command line utility to have in your arsenal.

EvoCam is the ultimate webcam software for Mac OS X. Use EvoCam to publish a webcam with streaming video, view and record video from network cameras and video servers, create timelapse movies, or use it as part of your home security system with its configurable motion sensors - these are just a few of the things you can do with this easy-to-use yet incredibly powerful webcam software!

Today, I’m going to teach you how to build a plugin for the popular Mac productivity application, Alfred, with PHP. As you’ll find, it’s a lot easier than you might expect! Even better, this allows us to extend Alfred to provide any additional functionality that we require.
For this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the process of creating your own extension that will retrieve Lorem Ipsum text from Lipsum.com, and copy it directly to your clipboard with a few simple lines of PHP.

Lion Disk Maker is a small application programmed with AppleScript that you can use with Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.7 to burn a DVD or build a bootable USB key from Mac OS X Lion’s Installation programm.

An important aspect of creating video content for distribution, is the encoding of source videos to meet the hardware requirements of various computers and mobile devices. The Encode Media action makes the encoding of video content an easy process, done without requiring the user to have technical knowledge of compression and audio settings.

Need to know exactly when your Mac was last booted, put to sleep, or woke from sleep? You can get precise information directly from the command line, which can be invaluable for anything from troubleshooting various Mac problems to scheduling scripts.

Apple has announced that with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the operating system will be available only via download from the Mac App Store. Past versions of the Mac OS X operating system have always been available for purchase on a bootable DVD and with some systems like the MacBook Air, they’ve been included on a bootable USB drive. To create your own bootable USB device using your own flash drive (note that the device must be at least 4GB or larger), follow the instructions below.

Being device independent means being able to code in any device or platform. One of the things you might want across devices is access to your code libraries. One way to do it is using a couple of macro tools combined with Dropbox.

So you’ve heard about all of the excitement going on about MacRuby? Great! Want to learn how to start developing with MacRuby and create your first application? Wonderful, let’s get started.

A small collection of command line tools for Mac OS X

This lists the keyboard shortcuts used in Scrivener 2.0, organised by menu name.

After seeing this Daring Fireball entry, this Kottke article, and then Alex Kerin’s original post, I had to write a script for generating Twitter sparklines via Unicode block characters.

Sparklines are an Edward Tufte idea, little inline graphs that let you visualize data within the text you’re reading. Twitter sparklines aren’t exactly true to Tufte’s vision, because they’re chunky and low resolution, but they are clever and fun.

You can see the Unicode block characters by opening the Character Viewer and clicking on the Geometrical Shapes category.

Have you ever wondered exactly where all your time goes while you're working away at your Mac? Wonder no longer…Time Sink will show you exactly what you've been working on.

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

By default in Mac OS X browsing to Windows 2008 and 2003 Servers is extremely slow, navigating from one directory level to the next can take a minute or longer. I utilize my Mac to access the office Windows 2008 and 2003 file servers and the speed to access these shares makes it almost impossible to work from a Mac.

Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute.

One of the most basic types of backup is the folder sync. Folder A lives on your Mac. Folder B is on an external hard drive. You want to make Folder B look exactly like Folder A.

Granted, anyone could make this happen by dragging and dropping the contents of A to B. If you have a lot of data, that’s going to take a while each time, though.

Fortunately, there’s a really easy, free way to make this happen with almost no effort (or geekery) on your part using two tools that are already on your Mac: rsync and Automator.

These services and Automator actions are provided as free examples of the design and use of Mac OS X automation technologies. All service workflows are fully editable and can be customized as need requires.

Instapaper (www.instapaper.com) is an excellent bookmarking service on the web (and related mobile applications), designed by Marco Arment, which allows you to quickly gather items to read later. It provides a text-only version of saved articles, as well as folder organization and archiving of read articles.

`pmset schedule` wrapper to easily schedule OS X to sleep, shutdown, etc

Many technologies we use as Cocoa/Cocoa Touch developers stand untouched by the faint of heart because often we simply don’t understand them and employing them can seem a daunting task. One of those technologies is found in Core Animation and is referred to as the CATiledLayer. It seems like a magical sort of technology because so much of its implementation is a bit of a black box and this fact contributes to it being misunderstood. CATiledLayer simply provides a way to draw very large images without incurring a severe memory hit. This is important no matter where you’re deploying, but it especially matters on iOS devices as memory is precious and when the OS tells you to free up memory, you better be able to do so or your app will be brought down. This blog post is intended to demonstrate that CATiledLayer works as advertised and implementing it is not as hard as it may have once seemed.

When I have a large deadline looming, I like to keep track of how many days I have left.

I've tried Dashboard widgets, iPad apps, and just about anything else you could think of, but they all have failed for one simple reason: they require me to check them. I can go days or weeks without triggering the Dashboard, and an iOS countdown app still requires that you check it. I could use something like Due app but I really don't want something actively distracting me, I want something passively reminding me. Nor do I want these cluttering up my iCal.

I found my solution by cobbling together several bits of free Unix utilities that are essential to any true geek's tool belt.

OmniFocus Essential Training

Simian is an enterprise-class Mac OS X software deployment solution with App Engine-based hosting to scale with the needs of your growing enterprise, and a future proof client based on the Munki open-source project.
Here are some example features of Simian:
Deploy new or updated software by targeting a single Mac or tens of thousands.
Push security patches, whether the Mac is on an internal network/VPN or not.
Force mandatory installation of some packages, while allowing others to be optional.
Tightly manage Apple-provided updates.
Scale without deploying and maintaining additional server infrastructure.
Obtain reports on all of this and the fleet overall.
Much of this and more is due to the outstanding work of Greg Neagle and the Munki community. To read more about the other features Munki offers please visit the Munki code.google.com project page.

munki is a set of tools that, used together with a webserver-based repository of packages and package metadata, can be used by OS X administrators to manage software installs (and in many cases removals) on OS X client machines.
munki can install software packaged in the Apple package format, and also supports Adobe CS3/CS4/CS5 Enterprise Deployment "packages", and drag-and-drop disk images as installer sources.
Additionally, munki can be configured to install Apple Software Updates, either from Apple's server, or yours.
munki is currently in use at organizations all over the world, managing software for thousands of Macs.

People put linux on their flash drives all the time. They also get hackintosh on their hard drives quite often. However, it'd be nice to be able to get the same live experience we get with Linux using OS X. With a distribution of OS X 10.6.2 called iPortable Snow, we can.

Built into Mac OS X, but often neglected, is the concept of 'services'. They are small and targeted tools you can use in almost any program to insert text or do something useful with the current selection. Select text and Google it or look it up in a dictionary. Select a mathematic expression, like "6 * 7", and calculate it. Just select text (or place the insertion point where you want it) and pick a service from the Services menu in the application menu.

Normally, you have to write services using Apple's Carbon or Cocoa frameworks, using languages like C, C++ or Objective-C. ThisService lets anyone with a basic handle on programming choose their own language (like AppleScript or Ruby) to write a service in, lowering the bar for entry, and making certain tasks easier by letting you use the right tool for that task.

I like to figure out the fastest way to do things. I hope these shortcuts will help you become the power user that lies within. These keystrokes should work on Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.5 Leopard (many also work on 10.4 Tiger). I add new shortcuts as I find them, so check back!

Please note that Cmd is short for the Command key (otherwise called the Apple key).

Alfred custom search URL for Mac App Store (App Store has to be running).

PastieService is a service provider for Mac OS X (10.6 only) written by Samuel Mendes in Objective-C 2.0 and released under BSD 3-clauses license.

This service provides a quick way to paste any selected text in Mac OS X to pastie.org. Once pasted the paste's URL is automatically placed in the system's clipboard.

StarDeploy is software that installs packaged and unpackaged application and files to Mac OS X clients. StarDeploy has be developed to deploy under many network condition allowing for onsite or cloud deployment off site. StarDeploy is simple to setup and use just point the client at a network share then drag and drop applications or packages to the share StarDeploy will do the rest.

Keyboard Shortcuts - Alfred App Help

Many Mac OS X users lament the lack of sophisticated network analysis tools, often prevalent and seemingly prolific on Linux systems. What many don't know is that Mac OS X comes with a built-in command-line tool to do all sorts of nifty things with Wi-Fi networks, from packet capture (traffic sniffing) to scanning nearby networks' signal to noise ratios.

Mac OS X ships with a command-line tool called airport that can do all sorts of nifty things with Wi-Fi networks. Unfortunately, it's so squirreled away that most people don't seem to know about it. The utility is part of the Apple80211 Private Framework used to power your Mac's Airport menubar icon.

Note: this procedure requires an .img file that you will be required to create from the .iso file you download.
TIP: Drag and Drop a file from Finder to Terminal to 'paste' the full path without typi...

The fabulous Patrick Rhone from Minimal Mac instructs Mac users how to make their e-mail program less cluttered in his guest post today. Thank you, Patrick, for sharing your talents with us!

Back in 1993, Apple Computer introduced a truly clever innovation: a way for ordinary users to write little programs (scripts) that would tell applications what to do. Tasks that would be repetitive, boring, calculation-intensive, error-prone, or virtually impossible if performed by hand suddenly became available through a single quick and accurate step — namely, running a script.

Homebrew is the easiest and most flexible way to install the UNIX tools Apple didn't include with OS X.

This page provides a product summary for each Apple model. The intent is to provide our best recommendations regarding current product cycles, and to provide a summary of currently available rumors for each model.

Extra information and recommendations are available for each product on their individual Buyer's Guide pages, which are linked to at the top of that product's section on this page.

Google released Chrome for Mac, finally, but the extensions don’t work. It’s actually Google’s fault, because the latest Chromium built already supports extensions. And then they release this great-looking Speed Tracer tool, something Yslow and others have not gone before. However, it seems you can’t install it on Mac (although in the example screenshots on Google Code you can actually see Chrome for Mac, oh irony). Well, guess what – you can :)

The install for Macintosh OS X bundles Tor, Vidalia (a graphical interface for Tor), Torbutton, and Polipo (a web proxy) into one package, with the four applications pre-configured to work together. Download either the stable or the experimental version of the OS X bundle for Intel, or look for more options on the download page.

We would encourage Mac users to download Ubuntu Desktop Edition by burning a CD for the time being. But if you would prefer to use a USB, please follow the instructions below.

Note: this procedure...

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.

Ok, I have an Intel X-25M 160 GB SSD coming and I’m on a VERY GEEKY mood… so I decided to poke around a little on what could be done to tweak Mac OS X in order to, at least minimize the write amplification problem and also optimize the space used – yes you know the €/MB ratio is high on SSDs. Most of these tweaks, besides providing for a longer lifespan for SSD disks, should improve overall system performance even on an non SSD disk. Of course you will use them at your own risk…

Getting Erlang installed on your Mac isn't really all that difficult. You can just download it from http://erlang.org/download.html and build from source. But if you want to plan for future lazyness, then Homebrew is the way to go. Homebrew is quickly becoming the package manager of choice for OSX, so it will not only get your Erlang installed quickly and easily, but many of your other *NIX-y tools of choice. Go here http://wiki.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/installation for download instructions. I strongly suggest reading the whole page before you start. Once you have it installed just go to the Terminal (yea you are already there if you installed Homebrew) and type 'brew install erlang'. After it completes downloading and making the source (yes Homebrew just automates the available .configure/make/make install process) you are ready for the next step.

Managing software packages on Unix has always been, to put it politely, a giant pain, and most Linux distributions are built around the different ways we’ve all been trying to alleviate that pain. In this post, I’ll walk you through Homebrew, a fantastic new option for package management made simple.

Use your other computer as an additional display for your Mac.

Recycle your old iMac, PowerBook or even Windows PC now.

CouchDBX is the simplest way to get CouchDB running on your Mac

OS X has a built-in sandbox feature for applications, which can restrict their access to certain parts of the system. There isn't a lot of documentation available on the sandboxing system, but I've successfully been able to sandbox Firefox. It has some limitations, but my plug-ins and add-ons work though yours may not.

icalBuddy is a command-line utility that can be used to get lists of items (i.e. events and tasks/todos) from the OS X calendar database (the same one iCal uses.) It requires Mac OS 10.5 or later. See my blog post about it for more info.

Frequently we need to clean a directory before zipping it or copying it to an external USB drive to be used by Windows or Linux users.

If you’ve ever Control-clicked (also known as ‘right click’) a file, you’ve seen a listing of actions presented to you that can be carried out on that file. This menu is called a contextual menu, but that’s not the point of this exercise. What is the point, is the item called ‘Get Info’. Today, I’d like to show you some of the hidden gems that can be found within this screen.

Days Left sits in your dock, telling you how many days are left to a certain due date. That due date can be set in its preference window. Thanks to Stéphane Sudre's WBCalendarControl you can enter it nicely. If you want the same in the menu, you can use the Countdown menu extra, which can be found on Britta's excellent super OS X menubar items list. However Days Left only counts full days, and switches at exactly 00:00 hours. (It does so with a timer to not waste usefull CPU cycles, and updates on wake and sleep). I put this little thing right next to iCal and let it show me the Days Left until my next most important day. Use it for whatever purposes you want! It's free... take it!

This page contains the rest of the tools. They don't fit on any specific category.

These little open source tools were coded when I needed a specific solution for a specific task so they are very minimal and focused on only one thing. They are mostly quick hacks that I put together fast, so the code is not very beautiful or optimized.

They are all released with the full source, under the GPL. If you make changes or enhace the tools I'd love to have a copy.

Flux is an advanced Web design application, capable of creating stunning sites from scratch. Flux isn't a template based solution, it's a creative design environment.

Run Windows Applications on your Mac -- Without Windows

Tips and add-ons to make Apple Mail even better.

Pimp My Safari

Build layouts by simply dragging tracks from the libraries to the plan! Plug them together, arrange them and try different variations, create fully three-dimensional layouts with heights and grades, preview them with automatically generated terrain in 3D and finally print your layouts in full scale!

When you have more connections created in Navicat, sometimes it may not be easy to find a particular one in the navigation panel. With Virtual Grouping feature which is supported in Windows, Mac and Linux version, you can manage your connections into logical groups upon your preferences. This feature also applies to tables, views, functions, events, queries, reports, backups and schedules for your database. Thus, you can view connections and database objects in the navigation panel more convenient.

Did you experience any difficulties to find out a table or a view in a large number of connections and databases? If you have many connections and databases and need to access some tables or views frequently, you simply create Navicat table or view shortcuts in your desktop to open your tables or views directly. Both Navicat Windows and Mac versions support this feature. It can reduce the number of clicks to reach your tables or views, such as open Navicat, open connections, open databases and open schema, etc.

Navicat supports to import data from various file formats such as text files, excel files and CSV files, etc. To simplify the import steps, both Windows and Mac version can allow you to drag and drop a file to Navicat to launch the Import Wizard automatically. This feature applies to the import formats supported by Navicat. If an existing table is selected in Navicat, Navicat will import the file to the selected table; otherwise, it will import the file to a new table.