Archive for the ‘Walkthroughs’ Category

Using Metadata Effectively in OS X

Written on February 01, 2007 by Nick Santilli and 61 people have commented

A Long Time In The Making
Not quite a year ago I wrote a feature on LifeHacker talking about the use of Metadata in place of a folder-based organization scheme. Since then I’ve received many emails and inquiries asking for more on the subject. Inevitably I’ve responded with short answers and the promise of a [...]

Quicksilver Screencast: Tags & Playlists

Written on January 25, 2007 by Nick Santilli and 23 people have commented

In the comments of last week’s screencast, Aaron asked about a way of creating iTunes Playlists through Quicksilver. So I thought I’d take that as an opportunity to share a couple of great Apple Scripts that have been created expressly for this reason.

You’ll see the websites in the screencast, but just for [...]

How to view the size of EVERY file on your Mac

Written on January 17, 2007 by Eddie Hargreaves and 11 people have commented

As mentioned by Michael Clark in his post Finder Security Bug or Feature?, the freeware application WhatSize is a quick and easy tool for measuring the size of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it. But WhatSize can only measure based on the permissions of the user who launches it, so you [...]

I Hate Transperency

Written on January 15, 2007 by Julian Bennett Holmes and 20 people have commented

I hate transparency. Only recently, though. I used to love it.
And Mac OS X is littered with it. It’s everywhere - in the Dock, in Terminal, in Dashboard, etc.
At one point, you could see about 5 layers of transparency at once on my screen, like this:

Yup, pretty ridiculous.
But recently, I’ve decided that I hate transparency.
Sure [...]

Quicksilver Screencast: Running with Scripts

Written on January 03, 2007 by Nick Santilli and 19 people have commented

Here in The Apple Blog community, there was a mention about the power of using some of the scripts that are accessible through Quicksilver. So I put together a quick screencast showing how to make sure those options are enabled and what some of the more useful items are.

From my perspective (on [...]

Quicksilver and the Command Line

Written on December 18, 2006 by Nick Santilli and 5 people have commented

Got a quick tip for Quicksilver users who also may dabble in the Terminal. If you go to the Plugins portion of the Quicksilver Preferences, there’s a plugin you can install called “Command Line Tool”. Install that, and relaunch Quicksilver if it asks you to.
Now that the Command Line Tool plugin is available, [...]

How to Automatically Generate Application Lists

Written on December 06, 2006 by Jason Guthrie and 11 people have commented

Mac 5:46 - “And behold, every Mac user shall perform system maintenance on a regular basis so that he may escape the wrath that is the occasional hard drive crash. If a hard drive crasheth and a backup is not available, I the Great Mac, shall laugh at the Mac user who is wailing [...]

Search and Replace at the Finder Level

Written on November 29, 2006 by Nick Santilli and 6 people have commented

Text editors are great if for no other reason than that you can execute a search and replace function. This little tool has saved me countless hours of tedious, mind-numbing text replacement exercises. But what happens when you need to alter several items outside of a text editor? Say, files in the [...]

How To Setup Development Domains On OS X

Written on November 21, 2006 by Josh Pigford and 37 people have commented

I do quite a bit of design and development with my company. To keep things streamlined I’ve setup my machine as a local development server to avoid the obvious hassle of having to FTP files every time I make a change that I want to see. Setting up your machine as a development server is [...]

Quicksilver Does Menus Too

Written on November 01, 2006 by Yasser Dahab and 33 people have commented

This may not be the freshest tip for the Quicksilver-inclined, but I find it infinitely more useful than constellation menus and I think it’s something every Quicksilver user should know about.
Using a handy Quicksilver plugin, you can access every menu item in the currently active application. It may not sound useful just yet, but let [...]

Quicksilver Screencast: The Clipboard

Written on October 24, 2006 by Nick Santilli and 40 people have commented

More often than not when Quicksilver is blogged, the topic focuses on simply launching apps or some other pretty basic use. But here on TAB, I’ve tried to show some of the more advanced features of this amazing program. Recently David at TUAW got down with the Quicksilver screencasts too, and did a [...]

Cocoa and Everyone (Part 1)

Written on October 23, 2006 by Michael Marmarou and 7 people have commented

This will be a new thread where I’ll show a tip or trick for Cocoa programmers, and why it’s imporant to everyone. These articles will be geared towards everyone - not just programmers. I’ll hide the code so you don’t have to look at it if you don’t want to see it.

FrontRow Enabler 1.3 Kills 10.4.8

Written on October 17, 2006 by Chris Holland and 23 people have commented

Before Apple disabled FrontRow with its Mac OS X 10.4.8 update, I was a happy FrontRow user on an aging PowerBook G4, courtesy of Andrew Escobar’s fine “FrontRow Enabler 1.3″.
If you’re running 10.4.8 do not run FrontRow Enabler 1.3, and if you just did, do not reboot … Or you won’t be able to boot [...]

LaTeX and OSX

Written on October 05, 2006 by Tina Huggins and 22 people have commented

The vast majority of us use word-processors to fulfill all of our document-preparation needs. It has become the standard in writing our letters, resumes, novels, reports and theses, and most of us have not seen the need to explore alternatives. Indeed, many of us are not even aware that there are alternatives [...]

The Mac Business Workflow

Written on August 15, 2006 by David Appleyard and 5 people have commented

Apple’s products are often very focused on the consumer market, striving to provide features to allow you to manage your personal photos, music, documents and data. The iLife suite is a feature packed bag of goodies which handles anything you throw at it with style and ease. But what about a Mac as a business [...]

My First AppleScript Part 2: The AppleScript Dictionary

Written on August 14, 2006 by Jason Guthrie and 12 people have commented

After reading part 1 of this little series called My First AppleScript, you probably felt fairly comfortable fiddling around with it yourself and have probably tried to write your own AppleScripts. Hopefully your own AppleScripts turned out great and worked like a charm. In my case, however, my AppleScripts crashed and burned. [...]

Quest For A More Mindful Mac

Written on July 27, 2006 by Amos Moses Griffin and 31 people have commented

Give me a community that agrees on everything and you might as well give me a fluffy pillow too cause it won’t be very long before boredom creeps in and I’m sawing a log. Disagreement, debate and non-violent conflict are healthy, entertaining and growth fostering. Without them communities often become stale and flat. [...]

My First Apple Script

Written on July 26, 2006 by Jason Guthrie and 4 people have commented

I’m not a coder – never have been. For some reason my brain just isn’t wired that way. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.
I’ve tried my hand at everything from QBasic to PHP with varying degrees of success. However, ever since joining the Mac community I have heard rumors of a [...]

Keep your paper documents as organised as your iLife

Written on July 25, 2006 by Keith Mason and 37 people have commented

iTunes and its siblings make our digital possessions easy to organise, categorise and search. For years my paper life has lagged significantly behind the organisation that I imposed on my media, with important documents languishing in a drawer just waiting for some impending disaster to wipe them out or even get stolen. This was completely [...]

Classic on Intel Macs, courtesy of SheepShaver.

Written on July 01, 2006 by Rich Trouton and 102 people have commented

I’ve gotten Mac OS 9.0.4 up and working on an Intel Mac, running off of SheepShaver. I can get out to the internet via ethernet or my workplace’s wireless network, so it looks like TCP is working fine. I can’t see the AppleTalk zones of my workplace though, though, so all printing looks like it’ll [...]

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