Tag Archive for 'os x'

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Getting Your DVDs Onto Your Mac/iPod/iPhone

Published on 2 years, 2 months ago in linux, mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I’d looked at Handbrake a while back but the GUI was far too confusing for a simpleton like me. It seems like it’s been cleaned up quite a bit now and looks rather useful! (The little video giving an overview of how to work things helps too!)

Handbrake is one of those applications that we adore here at TUAW HQ. It makes converting DVDs into a variety of digital files a snap (though only use it with DVDs you own. Don’t be pirates, kids). Chris Breen, of Macworld fame (and an amateur astronomer it would seem) shows us how to use HandBrake like a pro. Breen goes a step beyond ‘use the presets’ and delves into what many of the options HandBrake offers up actually do, and how they impact your files.

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Microformats Plugin for Safari

Published on 2 years, 3 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

microformats.png

I’m a fan of the Tails plugin for Firefox… Now Safari (on Leopard) gets its own Microformats Plugin! :)

Of course, in order to take advantage of Microformats and perhaps bring the information they offer onto your system, you need a browser that will read them - there’s Firefox plugins, and NetNewsWire 3.0’s built-in browser reads them. But what about Safari? Thanks to SIMBL, there’s a small array of Safari plugins available and from the maker of Safari Tidy comes Safari Microformats. Whenever visiting a site with Microformats, an icon appears in the right of the address bar (not unlike the RSS icon). Clicking it brings up a menu of available hCards and hCalendars you can add to Address Book and iCal.

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Quick Look Folder and Zip Plugins

Published on 2 years, 3 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , .

This is yet another example of why I want to upgrade to Leopard…

quicklook-zip.jpg

Quick Look is a beautiful thing, and in my view practically itself worth the cost of admission to Leopard. Unfortunately, the more you get used to it, the more annoying it is when you get to a file format that Quick Look doesn’t support. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to design Quick Look with an open architecture that allows developers to write their own plugins and support more file formats, which Japanese developer Taiyo used to write two excellent plugins.

The first addresses a serious annoyance with the default Quick Look implementation on folders. If you invoke Quick Look with a folder selected in the Finder you’ll get…a picture of the folder icon. Frankly, that’s pretty stupid. Taiyo’s Folder Quick Look Plugin fixes this by displaying the folder’s contents, which is how it should have been done in the first place. Likewise, Taiyo’s Zip Quick Look Plugin displays the contents of zip files.

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IconGrabber

Published on 2 years, 3 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , .

IconGrabber is a useful little application for getting an OS X applications icon for use on the web. It’s also available as a Quicksilver plugin.

It couldn’t be easier. Just drop the file or folder that you want the icon from onto IconGrabber, and choose a place to save it. The extension you choose determines the format, otherwise it defaults to tiff. That’s it!

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Getting Gmail IMAP Running Nicely

Published on 2 years, 3 months ago in snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve just managed to get my Gmail service upgraded to the new version with IMAP support,1 and as such i’ve been trawling the net for information on how to get this all set-up nicely. By this I mean moving my mail filtering rules onto Gmail itself and getting IMAP to play a bit more nicely with Apple Mail…

Here’s how to get Apple Mail to work as expected, thanks to 5ThirtyOne:

Similar steps must be taken to ensure that any emails sent, saved as drafts, or deleted are properly identified by Gmail’s servers. After completing the IMAP setup steps for Apple Mail, instructing Mail is a few simple clicks away. Once your Gmail IMAP account is added to Mail, you’ll notice your [Gmail account] in the left sidebar.

  1. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Sent Mail’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Sent’.
  2. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Drafts’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Drafts’
  3. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Trash’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Trash’
  4. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Spam’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Junk’

Once properly configured, managing email from Apple Mail or the iPhone will be no different from managing emails within the Gmail web client - sent, drafts, trash, and junk properly sorted between your various email clients and web interface.

Read the full article for even more information (including iPhone set-up).

And the best hints for setting up slightly more complex filters in Gmail came from Lifehacker:

I needed to set up a filter that would apply label ‘work’ to any email that came from ‘xyz@workplace.com’ OR had the word ‘workoholic’ in it. Unfortunately, Gmail’s inbuilt ‘Create a filter’ feature’s dialog boxes are connected with an AND operator. Example: if I wrote ’ xyz@workplace.com’ in the ‘from:’ field of the ‘Create a filter’ page, and ‘workoholic’ in the ‘Has the words:’ field, then only emails that came from ‘xyz@workplace’ AND had the word ‘workoholic’ would be picked up by this filter. So, to get the desired result, I needed TWO filters. Unless…

[…]

Incorporate both the conditions in the ‘Has the words:’ field itself! So my ‘Has the words’ field reads as: (from:(xyz@workplace.com) OR (workoholic)). Voila! c’est fini! But the possibilities are endless!

Read the full article for more information.

  1. If you’re a user in the UK like me and are still waiting for your Gmail service to upgrade, simply navigate into your Gmail settings and change your language settings from ‘English (UK)’ to ‘English (US)’. This should make your Gmail switch to version 2 instantly! :) ↩

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Top 10 Quicksilver Plugins

Published on 2 years, 3 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I love Quicksilver, it’s one of those applications that makes working on the Mac really really great. Lifehacker has a quick rundown on 10 of the best plugins to help improve your Quicksilver experience:

Open source Mac utility Quicksilver isn’t just an application launcher—it’s a comprehensive keyboard interface. Launching applications and documents is just Quicksilver’s gateway drug: The more you get used to doing things with Quicksilver, the more things you want to do with it. Out of the box Quicksilver comes with the barest essentials, but once you add the right plug-ins that interact with menus, apps, documents, and settings, you can accomplish more and more complex tasks from that familiar three-paned prompt. After the jump, check out top 10 favorite Quicksilver plug-ins, and how to set them up.

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Stacks Overlays

Published on 2 years, 4 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

This is a great idea to improve the appearance (and usability) of stacks in Leopard.

Stacks is pretty much Leopard’s only non-eyecandy change to the dock, and it had the potential to be pretty handy, but the fact that the icon representing the stack is whatever the top file in the folder happens to be really ruins it (for me at least). However, if you haven’t yet given up on stacks and thrown them off your dock, there is a solution: overlaying stacks icons.

In essence, these are just small-ish semi-transparent icons that are permanently our top icon. This picture explain it best (before & after):

stacks-overlay.jpg

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Massive Data Loss Bug in Leopard

Published on 2 years, 4 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve been reading about this in a few places now.

Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. I first came across it when Samba crashed while I was moving a directory from my desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.

This is why you should NEVER just move data from one drive to another - copy it first, only then delete the original.

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Use Folder Icons in Leopard Stacks

Published on 2 years, 4 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Peter N Lewis:

The Leopard Dock shows folders as a layer of icons, which is crazy for folders as you cannot easily recognize a folder based on its contents. Especially crazy when the folders have recognizable icons already!

Of course, here at Stairways we prefer to find solutions to problems rather than just grumble, so here is a trivial solution. Simply create an alias to the folder, name it to sort as the first icon, and put it in the folder.

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Update: Here’s another way to achieve the same idea, but with icons sorted by date - i.e. the downloads stack.

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Use Leopards Quick Look From the Terminal

Published on 2 years, 4 months ago in mac and snippets. 0 Comments Tags: .

Useful info from over at the Unofficial Apple Weblog:

TUAW reader Shaun Haber sent us a link to his personal blog with a great post about using Leopard’s Quick Look from the command line, which is wonderfully handy for anyone who spends a chunk of their day in Terminal. The qlmanage utility gives you direct access to many Quick Look functions; of specific interest is the -p flag. This option displays the Quick Look generated preview for any file. So if you tell it to qlmanage -p foo.png, the image immediately pops up in a Quick Look pane.

Even better, Quick Look supports slide shows. So if you cd into a folder of images and run qlmanage -p *.jpg, you’ll be rewarded with a full-on presentation of your pictures.

Other qlmanage flags of interest include -h (displays a help message) -t (thumbnail generation) and -f (a zoom factor to display with).

The downside of qlmanage is that it’s full of NSLog-style messages. Haber recommends you pipe the output into /dev/null as follows: qlmanage -p *.jpg >& /dev/null.

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