Ever since Alex pointed me to Keyboard Maestro, I’ve been thinking up new ways to use it to shave a few seconds – or minutes – off repetitive, mundane tasks. The latest: switching Bluetooth on and off from the keyboard.
Tag Archives: os-x
Traversing the Mailbox Hierarchy: the lost journals
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Recently, a team of skilled Internet (small-e) explorers set out to find some trace of well-known adventurer, bon vivant and conversationalist Mail.app. After chasing down several false leads (one of which ended with a grisly discovery: the frozen, lifeless body of Eudora for Mac OS X Lion), they found this tattered journal, buried under a simple cairn of stacked BCC messages.
July 15: Setting off today on greatest adventure yet: traversing the fabled Mailbox Hierarchy. This mighty peak is the tallest I have scaled yet, and is known for its treacherous queries and unnavigable tables. Can’t wait to change the flags up at the top!
July 17: Slow moving so far. But I’ve just found a lost message, and I really think I should try to recover it.
August 2: Still trying to recover that message. I know I can get it, but it’s wedged into this crevasse really tightly.
August 16: Just replenished supplies and updated to 10.7.1. I wonder if I wedged my penknife in between this outcropping and that message if it would come loose?
August 19: Discouraged. Instructions relayed from user at base camp say to stop trying to recover that message. Fine.
August 20: User has now told me seven times to stop trying to recover the message. OKAY. WHATEVER. Moving on.
September 4: High enough now that I’ve finally crossed the spamline. Huge drifts of the stuff. Just spent three days rerouting to avoid a cornice of weight-loss messages.
September 9: Will have to connect with that Exchange server on the other side of this neve field. Checking all my equipment three or four times over. Nervous, but excited.
September 10: Incredibly frustrated!! Connection to server failed, and I slid down about 60 metres over rough ice and crashed. Filters are broken, and this inbox is getting jammed.
September 16: Supplies are running low. Many obstacles in way that aren’t marked on the IMAP. Altitude sickness setting in, and occasionally delusional. Maybe I should try to recover that message again?
September 25: Maybe footwear is the problem? Will reboot.
October 18: Have subsisted for more than a month on thawed spam and old phishing messages. Weighed down with mailing lists and Facebook notifications. Can’t go up, can’t go down, and can’t go on like this much longer. Shrouded in the Cloud for days.
October 21: For a few minutes, the Cloud went down and all was clear. Magnificent – beautiful – found myself meditating again for first time in years. Revelation: seems my whole life has been a struggle to free myself from attachments.
October 24: Decision made. Will attempt last-ditch maneuver: rebuild mailboxes while deleting everything older than two months. Could lose everything. Will let you know if I make it. Either way… see you all at Inbox Zero. 221 Bye.
We can only assume Mail.app’s desperate risk ended in a painful and most likely fatal bounce.
Focus, please: a plea to Apple to fix an OS X productivity sinkhole
Dear Apple,
There’s a long list of things I love about OS X. In so many ways, your engineers, designers and usability geniuses have anticipated my needs – even those I didn’t know I had.
But there’s one area where OS X is driving me absolutely bat-spit crazy: the way applications jump to the foreground.
Say I’m launching an app that has a lot of work to do to get started – Photoshop, for instance; pretty much anything from Microsoft Office; or, at times, Firefox or even Safari.
Do I sit staring blankly at the screen? Take a minute to speed-meditate? Stretch out the kinks in my neck? Well, sometimes – but usually, I switch to another app for a little while. Case in point: I’m working through my email inbox, and discover that Alex has sent me a Word doc to review. I’ll queue it up by launching Word, then go back to Mail.app to finish clearing – ha! – my inbox.
And I’ll start typing away, maybe using that time to compose a reply to someone instead of staring at Word’s splash screen. Meanwhile, in the background, Word is chugging away, and after a while finally opens the document.
But that’s not all it does. Word seizes focus away from my email window. With no warning, I’m suddenly typing in the open Word document. My train of thought is derailed (and as those who know me can tell you, the casualties when that happens can be appalling); my workflow suddenly hits a logjam; Bad Things Happen.
Or a background utility will suddenly jump to the foreground with a dialog box alerting me to some desperately dire condition – usually one that actually could safely wait a few hours, days or years. This time, those keystrokes vanish into thin air… or trigger the wrong button. (I had that happen with “Restart” a few minutes ago. Reeeeeally not helpful.)
I can respect the need from time to time to get my attention – although most programs drastically overestimate their own importance – but that doesn’t mean an app needs to steal the focus from whatever you’re working on in any but the most urgent cases. (And in those urgent cases, for god’s sake, either don’t feed keystrokes into the dialog box until the user explicitly selects it, or disable keyboard shortcuts.)
Look, Apple, this isn’t the end of the world. But one of the most amazing things about OS X is how seamlessly it works. This spotlight-grabbing behaviour is obnoxious; it’s anything but seamless; and it detracts from what users are trying to do.
Please: make it stop.
NetworkLocation rocks… and so does their support
Some applications are revolutionary, changing the way you do your work (or making entirely new kinds of work possible).
Then there are the smaller, less-celebrated applications that just make life a little bit easier. And the thing about them is, when the part of life they make easier is something that comes up a lot, they can actually have an impact that rivals their more heavy-hitting cousins.
Meet NetworkLocation, an OS X (Leopard and Tiger) utility that makes it much, much easier to stay connected when you move around with your Mac. Your wired network at work has different settings from your home wireless network? No problem – NetworkLocation changes IP settings, adjusts the volume, turns Bluetooth on or off, swaps the default printer, and much more… all automatically.
It’s phenomenally useful, affordably-priced ($26 and change in Canuck currency), and very well-supported; when I sent an email question, I not only got the right answer within an hour, but heard back from developer Rick Fillion a few days later to make sure my problem was resolved.
Go. Download. Try. Enjoy.
OS X applications constantly asking permission to accept incoming connections? Here’s a fix.
I opened my favourite collaborative editor, SubEthaEdit, and braced myself. Argh – there it was: that dialog box asking me if I wanted to allow this application to accept incoming connections.
I’d already followed Apple’s instructions for “whitelisting” applications: adding them to the firewall’s list of apps that are allowed to answer when the outside world comes a-callin’. I’d done it, not only for SubEthaEdit, but also for iChat, iTunes, iPhoto and iCan’tRememberHowManyOthers.
And yet every time I’d launch them, OS X would helpfully ask me one more time – just in case I’d changed my mind since the last hundred times I’d opened them.
Thankfully, the Apple support forums come through again… this time, thanks to one Ralph Johns who knew just how to fix it.
Here’s what you do:
First, open System Preferences and click on “Security”.
Now follow these steps:
- Make sure “Set access for specific services and applications” is selected.
- Select the top application in the list.
- Click the “-” button to delete it. Repeat until there are no applications in the list.
- Select “Allow all incoming connections”.
- Re-select “Set access for specific services and applications”, and quit.
From now on, you should be asked once and only once whether you want an app to accept incoming connections… and the iApplications may well not bother you at all.
(By the way, if you had specifically selected some applications where you wanted to block incoming connections, you’ll want to do add them to the list again.)
For more Apple goodness, check out Rob’s Noise to Signal cartoons about life as a Mac user!
Guidance needed. Apply within.
I’ve been tinkering with OS X 10.5 Leopard, and played with its virtual desktop feature, Spaces – but just tinkering. And I’ve only just realized what it is I’m waiting for before I really commit to it:
I’m waiting for Merlin Mann to tell me how to use it.
That’s how you know when you’ve arrived as a productivity guru: people aren’t productive until you tell them to be.
(Anyway, now that I’ve realized what I’m waiting for, I’ve embarrassed myself into taking on some more serious experimentation.)
Doodle: I figure he was mauled by a Leopard
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A lorem ipsum generator for the 21st century
Corporate Ipsum widget for OS X Dashboard
Oh, very nice: a handy little device for whipping up reams of dummy copy at the click of a button. And not just your basic lorem ipsum greek text, either (although that’s an option). This puppy happily spits out a screed of utterly baffling corporatespeak for your next annual report design job. Here’s an example:
Competently expedite standardized services vis-a-vis multifunctional interfaces. Dramatically communicate distributed ideas whereas exceptional solutions. Competently provide access to state of the art action items after business technology.
Rapidiously negotiate multifunctional leadership through scalable manufactured products. Credibly leverage existing optimal total linkage before scalable meta-services. Authoritatively formulate enterprise leadership for value-added portals.
Appropriately facilitate 24/7 mindshare rather than covalent results. Proactively extend flexible portals via inexpensive outsourcing. Compellingly evisculate pandemic web services and virtual ideas.
Globally leverage existing standards compliant mindshare for pandemic infomediaries. Objectively brand cooperative leadership skills without just in time niche markets. Holisticly leverage existing equity invested web-readiness without mission-critical growth strategies.
Authoritatively impact resource maximizing processes whereas sustainable opportunities. Intrinsicly reconceptualize maintainable experiences without cooperative value.
Authoritatively impact resource maximizing processes? I swoon.