Mac4Construction

I can remember from way back in my pre-OS X days (Systems 7, 8, & 9) how perhaps the most important utility and add-on to my system was a program from Now software that was part of the Now Utilities group called Boomerang and eventually Super Boomerang.

When I moved on to OSX it was one thing I really did miss however after a few months without it I found a replacement in a program from St. Clair Software called Default Folder X.

What was I missing and what do I get from DFX? DFX is an application that takes the OS X save and open dialogs and adds features to them that improves and enhance your navigation through all the places your computer has access to for file storage. The first or primary thing that the program does is it installs a toolbar to the open and save dialogs that puts the folders you commonly use or want to specify within easy one click access.

• The Utility button, the first of 5 buttons on the toolbar, allows you to assign a default ’save’ folder for any applications you have and also rename, move, archive, and delete files from within the save and open dialogs.
• The Computer button allows you to navigate through your mounted volumes via hierarchical menus.
• The Favorites button allows the user to create and navigate through a list of favorite places on their Mac to save and/or open files from.
• The Recents button, probably my favorite and most commonly used button, just as the name implies can contain up to 100 of your recent folder locations organized by date or name.
• And the Finder button will give you a list of all the open Finder windows you may have at any one time.

One that I don’t use much but that I know a lot of other do is the program can be set in the Preferences to show you how much available disk space you have in your open volumes too.

You can also assign shortcuts to actions and save/open locations you commonly use and create different sets of Favorites for different projects and task that you do. And there is still much more that the application can do that I haven’t mentioned here.

In short and in conclusion it a very easy to learn ‘enhanced productivity tool’ and well worth the $34.95 shareware fee.

by: J. Jerrald Hayes

I’ve been following what goes on at Google in the way of new products and services that they offer by reading The Offical Google Blog for quite a while now. It was in reading that blog last October that I caught the announcement that Google had created a new blog specifically for Mac Users called The Google Mac Blog.

Well today as I was reading The Google Mac Blog I found out that Google has released a ‘beta’ Google Desktop for Mac. It’s not just a port of the Google Desktop for Windows product in that the two file systems are fundementally different but it does carry over some features such as the capability to index Gmail and web history but it is very much a Mac program in look and feel.

If you’re at all familiar with QuickSilver you’ll see similarities in the way the interface is designed, where it appears on the screen, and where they are triggered on the keyboard (QuickSilver is Control-Space whereas Google Desktop is Command-Command) it is not the “launcher” utility that QuickSilver is. It comes off functionally to me as an enhanced Spotlight.

Certainly it is very much worth the look.

by: J. Jerrald Hayes

One of my favorite Safari hacks or add ons is free piece of software from Pozytron called Acid Search. Acid Search is a little enhancement that when installed it takes the Google search field in Safari and gives it more search options and search channels.

Through a pull down menu that appears in the Google field you can specify if you want to Google to search the whole web, just the site you are googling from, or it can Google for images. And if you not too nuts about Google you can even change the default search channel from Google to any one of a number of other search channels too.

In addition to all that is also allows you to choose what type of search you want to conduct with key board shortcuts and through Safari’s contextual menu when you in the body of a web page.

One word of caution though. Keep the uninstaller around because I recall when Apple’s Safari went from 1.0 to 2.0 all of a sudden a bunch of things started to go wrong for me an it was related to Acid Search which hadn’t been updated for that version change yet. That kind of thing can be expected from something that’s being offered out of the sheer generosity of the developer as freeware. But I also recall I hated being without it and couldn’t wait for the fix to happen so I could get back to using Acid Searches tools.

by: J. Jerrald Hayes

About two weeks ago my brother Phil brought to my attention a really neat piece of shareware called TextExpander from the people at SmileOnMyMac and while I am just beginning to use the program I’m seeing tons of way it can help speed up the things I do on my Mac.

I’ve been using iKey and before that QuickKeys to automate or speed up text entry on my Mac for years and while I’m going to keep iKey around to use for things like launching programs and opening documents from my keyboard (I am considering switching to yet another new application I’ve also just discovered but that’s going to have to be another post) but for text entry I’m switching over what used to be iKey tasks to TextExpander.

What does it do for me? Where here’s an example.

When The Journal of Light Construction switched over to vBulliten to power their forums I discovered I could bold and italicize text and set up links to terms in my project management glossary and other stuff too by utilizing these tags they had called vB code. While yeah, that was great I wasn’t too enthused at now having to learn and remember another set of tags. The problem was from working on web site development I was used to writing and working with HTML tags and whenever I wrote a post over there I would without thinking write an HTML tag and then when I previewed the post discover that I had used HTML instead of vb Code.

So what I did was I wrote a bunch of Ikey shorrtcuts that when I pressed a certain key combination I would get the vB Code automatically typed in to my document with the correct syntax. For instance hitting the command-/ combo would enter in ‘[b][url=•]•[/b][/url]‘ and I would then just replace the bullets with the URL and the text I was making a link and I would have a bolded link in my post.

That was great but this TextExpander tool does the same thing for me only even better. With TextExpander now I type the letters ‘llin’ like I’m trying to write ‘LLINK’ and TextExpander sees double L and then I-N combo and it then replaces that with ‘[b][url=•][/b][/url]‘ only instead of that bullet I used to use to tell me where to write the text I wanted linked, I programmed TextExpander to insert a blinking cursor there instead. That’s what I like about it over iKey. You program the insert cursor with a ‘%|’ and TextExpander know that means you want a blinking cursor there so you can just continue typing.

In writing this blog which I just switched over to using WordPress which I think is a really really great blogging tool there are tools to automatically insert the HTML code in to what you’re writing but when WordPress creates a link for you it doesn’t create the link with any attributes.

I often want the links to open in a new window so the reader doesn’t get taken away from what I was writing so I need the ‘a href’ tag to have the attribute: ‘ target =”_blank” ‘.

So I set up TextExpander so that whenever it sees me starting to write ‘ttar’ it replaces ‘ttar’ with ‘ target =”_blank” ‘. So now after WordPress has inserted the HTML code to create a link I click where I want the attribute inserted type ‘ttar’ and I get attribute I wanted to open the link in a new window.

So with those tricks right there I’m already pretty well hocked on TextExpander after just a few days but I’m thinking of all the other places I can use it too. If you’re someone who does a fair amount of Excel programming you can use TextExpander to insert the common formulas and variables that you use over and over again.

I’m already using text expander to enter comment code for me when I’m scripting in FileMaker along with date and time stamps for when the comment was written.

I’m going to use it to enter the different closings and signatures I commonly use in my email correspondence plus some of the other things that I find myself writing over and over again.

I just discovered that you can download a file they have of 100 common typos and get TextExpander to auto-correct those typos for you.

And I’m sure there’s lot more I can do with it as I become more and more familiar with it too.

If you’re interested in seeing it work there is a short little net cast MacBreak weekly video in which Merlin Mann demostates how it works you can view too. (MacBreak63: Textexpander)

by: J. Jerrald Hayes

If you’re an OmniOutliner user and are one of the many people out there that’s read David Allen’s great book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity then you really need to check out Kinkless GTD which is a free set of Applescripts that work with OmniOutliner Pro to help you implement the Getting Things Done methodolgy.

There a good movie on the Kinkless GTD site too to show you how it works (kGTD Introduction Video)

I found out about kinklessGTD via Merlin Mann’s excellent 43Folders.com personal productivity web site.

by: J. Jerrald Hayes

Galerie is an absolutely great fast and easy tool for creating web page albums with pictures and QuickTime media files.

It will build index pages with thumbnails linked to the respective page in the gallery and you can use it working with collections from iPhoto and you don’t need to know any HTML to use it. Launch Galerie and it will in turn launch iPhoto (or another image browser that you can select in the preferences such as GrahicCoverter, iView Media, or Extensis Portfolio) and you can assemble the collection you want to use.

If you do know HTML you can build your own templates and have Galerie work building pages from them. If your a Macromedia Dreamweaver user like me and you’ve discovered the Create web Photo Album function doesn’t work on an IntelMac (still waiting for the Universal Binary) then this is the replacement solution you’ve been looking for and in some respects I think is ever better than the DW extension.

And to make a good program great it’s entirely free.

by: J. Jerrald Hayes

Ovolab Phlink – Combined with the Ovolab Telephone Adapter, can answer telephone calls and identify the caller using Caller ID and Apple’s Address Book. After answering a call, Ovolab Phlink records a message and stores it on your Mac for later retrieval.But there is even more to it than just that….

by: J. Jerrald Hayes