TheAppleBlog

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. [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I knew that once everyone put in the time to get Quicksilver setup according to the last screencast, they’d be chomping at the bit to do something that was actually interesting. So I wanted to get this next screencast out sooner than later. As long as you followed The Setup, then you’re in [...]

Well, I’ve finally gotten the next Quicksilver Screencast put together. I’ve changed gears a few times, and it’s prolonged the release. Sorry about that. But hopefully we’re on course to start this the right way, and build upon it.
Instead of doing a back to basics type of screencast, I’ve chosen to do [...]

Well, I’ve been quiet for a while here. There was a lot of good feedback concerning the Quicksilver Video Demos idea. It sounds like – while I hadn’t planned on it – everyone wants more of a tutorial style video. Fair enough.
So I wanted to announce that the next Quicksilver Video Tutorial [...]

Let’s try this again.
Here’s the full video, starting with the setup and an explanation.
Then you’ll see a demo of selecting a file in the Finder, launching Quicksilver with the selected file loaded, selecting the Email Directly action, and typing the name of the recipient.
Full Size mp4 (Quicktime) 9.8mb
I realize this is really small. I [...]

WordPress sucks. major posting issues. This is truncated big time – sorry.
Watch for a nice, full featured video download to come… In the meantime:
THE DEMO
(Sorry, YouTube kinda skewed my movie a bit…)

THE SETUP
(Starting at the top of the Preferences items)
Application: First off, make sure you’re running Quicksilver with the most advanced Beta [...]

Here’s the deal people. Quicksilver (get over it, Quicksilver owns me, and I will forever write about it) is one of those apps that totally changes the user experience on a mac. Stop me if you’ve heard this before… But it’s also one of those things that is pretty difficult to really [...]

I’ve been able to confirm that it is in fact possible to boot an Intel Mac and a PowerPC Mac from the same external hard drive, something that had been previously held to not be possible. The boot disks for the Intel and PowerPC versions of OS X do need to live on separate partitions, [...]

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Quicksilver coverage. Periodically I start to ‘pen’ new pieces on Quicksilver here on The Apple Blog – but then I compare it to some of the other things I’ve read across these great internets and I bow to their superiority. So rather than bore everyone with [...]

My man Raz asked some questions about how to tag your files for use with Spotlight. I don’t believe there’s truly a right or wrong way to do it. (Except for the way I do it. That way being the right one of course…) Here are some ideas that hopefully will [...]

Since the release of Tiger, Automator has gotten a lot of press. In comparison to AppleScript, which is a true scripting language, Automator is a graphical environment for automating your Mac, and it’s much easier to use.
Still, Automator’s power is limited, since you’re restricted to automating “actions” that other people have already designed. That’s why [...]

Now, before you all go dancing around the room, know that this is still technically not supported. Apple has make the Front Row 1.0.1 update available from their site. Andrew Escobar, Mac hacker extraordinaire has figured out an easy way to get the new version to work on any Mac. I just installed it on [...]

A couple of months ago, a coworker of mine showed me Tiger’s really cool “mouse over” dictionary. Hold command control and hit d. Then mouse over just about any word in any Cocoa app, and a definition of the word pops-up below it. I can’t seem to snag a screenshot of it. It keeps [...]

I’ve continued working with 10.4 Server’s blog server since my earlier entry. Since then, Apple’s updated the blog server with some neat features, including the ability to embed podcasts along with individual entries, as shown below in the screenshot. Apple has also updated the admin console with a newer (and much more visually appealing) Blojsom [...]

One of the cool little upgrades that came with the new PowerBooks is a feature called “Safe Sleep”. Essentially, every time you put the machine, the contents of the RAM (your unsaved documents, the status of your open programs, etc.) is saved to the HDD. If for some reason or another the machine totally looses [...]

Hardmac has a step-by-step how-to on taking a base level iBook into something with (sorta) equivalent innards to a 12 inch PowerBook. It seems that this might be cheaper than buying a PowerBook, but you are still stuck without some of the special features that make a PowerBook what it is. In any case, its [...]