I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB.
One snag though has been that services created through the new Automator template included in Snow Leopard leave out some vital [...]
My first post on becoming a minimalist with your Mac had great feedback, so I’m back with another round of tips to keep your digital workspace as simple as possible.
Reduce Finder Window Clutter
Right click on the top of any finder window and select “Customize Toolbar…” Drag out any items you don’t need. For example, I [...]
I was playing around with Google Quick Search Box recently and was really surprised by all the functionality it provides. Once I got it fully set up with plugins and services, I realized it can give me just about everything I used to rely on Quicksilver for.
Quicksilver has really become the default interface for my [...]
From what I’ve been reading on support forums, some users of Quicksilver saw no affect from upgrading their machines to Snow Leopard. I however, was not one of those people. And although I am warming more and more to Google Quick Search Box, I still supplement my usage of QSB with Quicksilver where the former [...]
The first week of September has seen a deluge of new arrivals at the App Store. It’s time for me to search through the latest releases for iPhone and hand-pick my recommendations for the past seven days.
This week I’ve been looking at Button, Facebook, BlogPress and Quicksilver.
Button (Free)
One of my favorite sci-fi novels, “Better Than [...]
Originally introduced in OS X Tiger, Automator is a drag-and-drop form of scripting. You can create workflows to easily speed up many tasks. With each version of OS X, Automator has seen some improvements, but with Snow Leopard, it finally realizes its full potential.
It realizes it by allowing you to create your own Services. Unless [...]
I was changing something in System Preferences on a friend’s Mac a while back and stopped for a second to consider the “Other” section and the lonely little Logitech Controller that was in there all by itself. Not many applications install to the “Other” section of System Preferences and this got me wondering about what [...]
The real power of OS X lies in all of the hidden gems beneath what you see at first glance. Technologies like Expose, Spaces, Stacks, Spotlight and others help users tap the power of their Mac, while keeping the experience sleek and elegant. Aptonic’s Dropzone, a third-party application designed to further simplify your Mac experience, [...]
Sometimes really useful software comes in small packages. Just about six months ago, I stumbled upon the developer preview of Google Quick Search Box (QSB) for the Mac, and I’ve been using it ever since. Google should be proud, because generally speaking, I shy away from desktop search applications, including their own Google Desktop for [...]
Sometimes it’s the little things that make your day go more smoothly. One such thing is the cool and elegant freeware utility, Search It.
With Search It installed, when you press a hot key a simple search field pops up (sort of the way the Quicksilver dialog works).
To look something up on the web, instead of [...]
The great thing about using Apple computers (loaded with OS X of course), is that some of the tasks that can be frustrating and difficult on another operating system are simple and possibly even fun. So assuming you’ve got a handle on using that Mac of yours, it’s probably time to step it up, and [...]
An attribute of Apple’s OS X operating system that I love above nearly all others is that there’s so much power beneath the simple and elegant interface. Although there are many undocumented features of OS X, we’re going to look at some that are fairly well publicized, but that you may not be familiar with [...]
Subversion (also known as SVN) is a popular version control system. Accessing SVN repositories with OS X is easy – and there are numerous options to do so. In this article we’ll cover 12 different applications that let you access and use Subversion in OS X.
Version 1.4 of the command-line SVN client ships with OS [...]
Many of us are hip to Twitter these days, and there are a myriad of options for keeping track of the resulting tweets. I personally bounce between the webpage itself and Tweetdeck (while on my Mac). But sometimes I want to trim down my open windows to the bare minimum. Here’s one way to keep [...]
Nowadays, we use tags pretty much everywhere we work and play online. Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, this blog (and any other blog), and on and on. It’s an easy, intuitive way to keep track of things, and an organizational strategy that transcends categories and other groupings, like date and subject matter. It’s such a great system, [...]
Who wants to go to all the trouble of opening a browser window just to search for something? Not me, that’s for sure. Luckily I don’t have to anymore thanks to Google Quick Search Box. The open source app was released today as a developer preview, announced via the official Google Mac Blog. This version [...]
With both shopping days and budgets running short, you may be wondering what to get your friends and family members who have either just purchased or will be receiving a new Mac.
With 1-8GB USB flash drives having a street price of ~$6-$15.00 and a plethora of highly useful free software for the Mac ripe for [...]
Many people use Quicksilver as a replacement for Spotlight, but if you’re happy with the native file search and app launcher in Mac OS X, then why change? You probably know that you can access Spotlight quickly with the Command-spacebar keyboard shortcut, but here are a few more tricks you might not know exist.
Spotlight makes [...]
Not to be confused with Apple’s Remote app for iTunes, iPhone Remote is an application for Mac OS X that puts the contents of your Mac within easy reach of your iPhone or iPod touch. With iPhone Remote, your Mac is in your iPhone.
Developed by Telekinesis, the folks behind the ubiquitous Quicksilver, iPhone Remote brings [...]
Hot on the heels of Apple’s new MacBook line — which among other things, offers a multitouch trackpad –coming to market, we’re seeing the first third party applications which support multitouch gestures. Mozilla is the first to the party, and has now made available an experimental build that will support multitouch gestures from within [...]
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