TheAppleBlog

I’ve had a crazy couple weeks and the time to do screencasts has really not been available to me. I apologize to all 1 of you who may have felt that awful void in your life because of it. But I’m back baby.
So today I’m going to show you one of my favorite [...]

I think we’ve covered a lot of ground in the past 4 weeks, talking about Metadata in OS X. While it’s clearly a large step in a new direction, attacking that new way of thinking can really pay dividends as you hone that system to your own needs. In this wrap-up post about [...]

The Metadata Screecast that I posted yesterday generated enough questions that I felt it necessary to address them in a post, rather than a HUGE comment, buried at the end of the comments. So here it is. Each Answer references the number of the comment it relates to.
I will continue to update this [...]

A dead drive created a minor slow-down in getting this out, but an extra drive and a quickly restored backup and I’m back in action. (Along these lines, an answer to a question: The tags – Spotlight Comments – do in fact survive backups and such. Everything’s in perfect order post-backup/restore.) [...]

Last week I began talking about using metadata effectively in OS X. I think I stirred the honey pot a bit by leaving things hanging – eg, not explaining my process – but felt it would be better organized and prepared in a series of posts. So here we are with Part Deux.
Q [...]

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 [...]

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 quick reference, [...]

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 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 [...]

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 a 13″ [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]