Category Archives: Mac Applications

Highway to the Danger Zone

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Maybe it was accidentally thinking that I deleted my entire music “collection. It’s probably more because of finding about how awesome Rdio is. Netflix only added to this desire of transitioning more and more into a cloud-centric lifestyle. (Heck, Hulu Plus might have pushed me into it, too, if the terms were just a little bit better.)

My Dropbox usage only grew with time. Recently, I’ve been using it heavily to share tabs for my band, adding and removing songs as we close in our Halloween (10.30.10) gig. (Yes, I know something else important happens that day, but you can take a flight here after it, right?) More or less, my entire reference library is on there, as with my important pdfs and docs.

// Which reminds me, I have to transfer all my Omni* files to a more open format. I wasn’t thinking in college when I started using OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle for things, and not exporting them to more durable formats like .txt or .pdf/.png.

Notational Velocity. Only after I used Simplenote on the iPad did I find this gem, and have never let go of it. For now, though, my MarsEdit drafts have been moved into NV, and will stay up in the Simplenote Cloud for the time being, while it’s also being backed up into the Dropbox Cloud just in case.

The “Mac Applications” category is going to start looking empty from now on, since my full-time job is heavily a Windows shop (with a healthy scoop of VMs running all over the place) I’m going to have to become even more one with the Clouds.

Dotfiles. So important. Github and Dropbox is where they will reside, until I can pull them down using Homesick. I haven’t gotten around to implementing this, but it will have to happen soon enough.

And I’m going to love it that way.

  • Local external backup: External FW800/USB2/eSata drive (Probably could use another drive), SD Cards, USB Sticks
  • Local box backup: Physical HDD, SSD
  • Cloud backup: Dropbox, Simplenote, Mozy, Github (Future: Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files)
  • Cloud media service(s): Rdio, Netflix, Hulu

In some way or another, my stuff is backed up at least twice. And that makes me all the warm inside.

// Please read the title as a reference to Archer. I’m looking forward to the return of this awesome FX show.

Interaction With The PowerMat Ad In Wired

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I got this month’s issue of Wired yesterday. After removing all the random bits of Subscribe To Wired ads (seriously, I like you, Wired, but it’s kinda annoying to do this with every issue), I came across a very interesting advertisement.

And no, not the tobacco ad which was anchoring in this I’m talking about the insert for PowerMat. The ad itself was made out of some seriously stiff paper. I was intrigued, so I went on.

PowerMat Ad (1/3)

What was even more interesting was that the next page seemed to require a bit of pulling to get it open. It read “Introducing PowerMat.” Looked like there were three power cords going into the BlackBerry, iPhone, and Nintendo DS.

PowerMat Ad (2/3)

I realized that there was a bit of adhesive in play here, forcing the me to actually have to pry the pages apart. And then I read the words: “Lose The Cords.” Aha!

PowerMat Ad (3/3)

I just thought that this was worth sharing. Now go to your nearest newsstand and start tearing things.

Newsstands? What are those? Such a 20th century idea.

Delicious, Quicksilver, And You

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Yeap, I’m still using Quicksilver. And yeap, I’m still in love with it.

And mixed with Delicious … it gets even better.

Note: There’s a note on the Delicious plugin page;

Plugin not compatible with Intel based Macs yet (does this mean “does not work with Intel Macs”, or that it’s not “universal”?)

It’s worked before on an Intel Leopard machine, as well working currently on the Snow Leopard one, so don’t worry about that.

The Goods

Bookmark your pages, just like you would, but just remember to rename the titles for those pages. Little did I know, the plugin only uses the title of the page, not the tags.

Delicious

You’ll notice that there are three “WebFaction Control Panels”, even though they all go to a different page. So I went ahead and named those something more useful for each page.

Also, I decided to lead the human-readable titles with something shorter to type. For example, I have it so that wfa goes to WebFaction’s Apps page.

Changes to Delicious Bookmarks

One caveat: After you’ve done all your messing around in Delicious, don’t forget to go into your Quicksilver preferences and refresh the Delicious catalog.

Refresh The Catalog For Delicious

Bonus: Bookmarking Via Quicksilver

Quicksilver uses the bookmarks you have locally, in bookmarks folder and your bookmarks tab.

If you already have the Delicious bookmarklet “installed”, then you already can invoke the Quicksilver action for creating a bookmark by typing out “Bookmark”.

Bookmarklet in Quicksilver

But who has time to type out “bookmark”? Time to go make it yours.

By The Way

My delicious page is at http://delicious.com/joshkim.

Caps Lock, VI-esque Keystrokes, And Other Obscure Keyboard Fun on Mac OS X

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In an effort to reduce the pain I’ve been having in my wrists and forearms, I’ve been trying to pick up Dvorak again. Little did I know, there is yet another keyboard format called Colemak. It seems like it’ll be easier to pick up than Dvorak, and seems to offer a better experience than Dvorak in some ways.

Apart from this desire of switching an entire key layout, I started rethinking about the Caps Lock key. Colemak actually maps it to be Delete by default. Since I don’t use Caps Lock all that often, and I’m a crazy person about efficiency sometimes, I decided to follow through with remapping not only the Caps Lock, but other keys as well. (One side effect of this is that in certain programming languages, Caps Lock is nice for typing out constant names. Not a big deal, though.)

Anyway, digging around the Colemak site, I got to this page on how to remap Caps Lock. got me to these two wonderful Preference Panes.

Disclaimer: Yeah, you saw this coming. This might cause your computer to erupt in flames, but that doesn’t mean you should come over and do the same to my apartment. Moving along.

To get your Caps Lock to function as Delete, first install: PCKeyboardHack. There will be a checkbox to change Caps Lock to 51 (Delete).

This will make it work, but you won’t be able to hold it down to insert multiple deletes. To get this working fully, install: KeyRemap4MacBook. Go into “General” and turn on “Enable CapsLock LED Hack”. However, for me, I’m unable to turn off the Caps Lock light. It decided it’s going to stay on forever.

In summary, PCKeyboardHack seems like it’s used to just turn on the ability to map the Caps Lock to delete, and KeyRemap4MacBook seems to do “everything else”.

Which brings me to the next point.

vi/vim Fun

I’ve been looking into getting a system-wide way to mimic the modal input style that vi/vim offers. Short of writing a kernal extension (because I’m not that awesome), I found the “Vi Mode” in KeyRemap4MacBook fairly useful.

You won’t be able to hit escape and move around with hjkl, but you will be able to move around with Right Command + hjkl. This means, of course, you will be sacrificing the application specific shortcut keys involving the Right Command, but I’ve actually gotten used to using the Left command for most of my shortcuts.

More Keyboard Silliness

There are so many things you can mess around with using KeyRemap4MacBook. I started thinking about some of the keys I rarely use, and thought about how to remap them to be more efficient.

Like the tilde, for example. I mapped that to be the Escape key if no modifiers were pressed. (Command + ` after Command + Tab cycles through applications backwards, so other than that case, now the backtick is escape. I don’t have to stretch as much.) I don’t know if I like this, but I’m sure willing to try it out.

Oh, and remember to mess around with the “[Key Repeat] Initial Wait” and “[Key Repeat] Wait”. I lowered those to fit my ever insane need to move around faster on the keyboard. I keep trying to get those values lower and lower as time goes on.

And that ends yet another weird entry about a very weird obscure topic that I care way too much about. Thanks for reading.

Wiki-riffic

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Rather than go and pay for something as huge and as feature-laden as Confluence, I’ve decided to go the open source and free route.

I ended up using MediaWiki for HanMeta, but I’m not fully satisfied. Lacking in AJAX and using Dreamhost to host this wiki really doesn’t make it too responsive. I am however, enjoying relearning the insanity that is MediaWiki markup (Wikipedia uses this).

TiddlyWiki is an amazing feat of ridiculous JavaScripting, but seems to be missing some features… one of which is extremely important to me: history. I feel like a wiki isn’t without this feature.

Anyone know of any desktop Mac applications that does change history? I looked at VoodooPad, but that doesn’t seem to have that feature.

Seriously, anything that’s stable and exportable will be awesome, be it online or off. Change history is huge for me, because, as always, I need to know and be prepared for everything.

MarsEdit Feature "Comments"

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I’m definitely favoring MarsEdit over Ecto. But as I’m on the subject, I felt the urge to bring to attention some features that would make me love MarsEdit even more. I’m not calling these feature requests, because I can live without most of these. I’m using the app just fine right now.

In No Particular Order

Flickr Uploading/Image Manipulation * Not a big deal, but it could streamline the process. * I’m loving Quicksilver’s Flickr plugin, anyway.

Default “Preview Text Filter” Refer to this tweet. Fixed. * Saves me a couple clicks per post. * All I do is write in Markdown anyway.

Larger Tag Field * One line isn’t enough, and I don’t want to stretch the post window wider than it has to be. Can it grow horizontally?

Default Category Selection * Not a big deal, because I know what is the default one, but I have a feeling xmlrpc.php doesn’t give this information.

Opening Multiple Posts * In the Local Drafts Folder, I want to go back to my workflow quickly by opening all the posts I’m working on. * Also, each post should remember where it was… but I don’t know much about Cocoa… * Heck, implement shortcut-able tabs like TextMate. Then again, this just might be the TextMate user in me.

Better Handling Of Previous Posts * I’d love to be able to have my entire blog locally and have it be stable… I’m very very afraid of hitting refresh right now. * I did it just now to prove a point. My CPU is getting hammered, most likely parsing through all the posts. * and this leads into my next request…

Ability to have a local database of ALL tags * I’ve pulled down 10000 posts to grab the tag data, but it doesn’t seem like tags are not saved from posts that were not posted through MarsEdit. Bummer.

Random Tag Feature Request * If I tagged a post that was not saved or posted, it shouldn’t remember it. Or maybe it should… I feel like this should be modifiable.

Portability * I want to be able to edit on-the-go. The actual drafts are located deep within ~/Library. I would much rather have it saveable to a certain location so I can get at the text files, if needed.

And that’s all for now. I hope Jalkut’s reading, heh. I just used MarsEdit for a week or so, and I’m loving it.

All this Mac application reviewing is making me want to do something in Cocoa. Maybe next week.

TextMate: Desktop Blogging Software for the Mac (vs Ecto and MarsEdit)

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In an effort to streamline the blogging process, I’ve been looking at some alternatives to my current usage of TextMate. I hope by doing this that it’ll save a lot of time and reduce the friction required to get a post up here.

Instead of using the web interface provided by WordPress, I’ve been using TextMate as my main blog editor (blogged about it here). I’m pretty sure a whole lot of you developer kinds have heard about TextMate and the ridiculous extensibility of the bundles, but it seems as though the Blogging bundle has been gone largely unmaintained for some time. (Maybe a year or so, but I may not be looking hard enough. I even looked through the public list archives, but couldn’t find anything… If anyone knows of the status of this project, let me know.)

Previous Workflow

When I get the desire to write, this is normally how it goes:

  • Open up a new blog page using shortcut I crafted (ctrl + opt + cmd + n)
  • Fill out the text for “Title: “
  • Write the post
  • Create keyword field (“keyw” + tab), fill out keywords
  • Create category field (“cat” + tab), wait for server, select which blog I want, select the blog AGAIN in a second dialog box(for some reason, this never got fixed)

Then I’d fill out the title, and start writing. After I was done, I would type “keyw” + tab for the keyword field, then type my keywords, cmd + opt + ctrl + p for preview, and post using ctrl + cmd + p to post online.

Problems With This Workflow

  • Timezone Bug: Talked about this before. I don’t know if this is ever going to be fixed, where if you reupdate an old post, you will continuously subtract or add the difference from your time zone and the GMT. For example, if I fetched this post and reposted it, it would be 5 hours behind. I didn’t realize this for a long while until I started posting in intervals faster than 5 hours when I noticed that certain posts were written earlier than I had thought.
  • Double Dialog Boxes: There’s also a strange bug requiring a blog to be selected twice on the drop down menu before looking up categories or posting to the blog. If you’ve got multiple blogs, this is just a little annoying.
  • No live preview
  • Image Handling: It’s cool that you can tell it to upload to your blog, but there’s no image manipulation… nor is there a way to get some Flickr integration.
  • File Creation And Saves: The file that you create while posting should have the filename of the post title. If there is no title, then ask them with a dialog box. (I love this feature in MarsEdit and Ecto. I don’t have to worry about making up crazy permutations of “asdf” and numbers.)

Features That I Hope To Keep

  • Linking: Creating links from the clipboard (ctrl + shift + L) and from the top Google search (ctrl + cmd + shift + L) is a feature I don’t want to let go.
  • Snippets: There’s something to be said about TextMate’s ability to do so much with so little. The ability to type a few characters and hit tab to create a data field is ridiculously handy.

And so, I have started to look at Ecto and MarsEdit, to see if I can become a little faster. But of course, I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of TextMate for everything else. So many lovely shortcut keys… the delicious snippets… everything, but for this specific domain of blogging.