walkah: mac os x

I spend a lot of time routinely tweaking various tools and configurations on my desktop environment. Frankly, I think those of us who spend our days in front of a computer owe it to ourselves to make it a pleasant experience. I tend to write about various tricks here, but feeling inspired by merlin's desktop tour, I may try to do so more regularly. Here's a quick rundown of the apps I've added lately:

• 1Password has had the most impact in terms of daily use. Fix your password habits. Seriously.
• To stay focused, I've been using using a combination of SpritedAway and Isolator - the former hides apps I'm not currently using, while the latter let's me focus on a single app (usually writing a document).
• I've been keeping an eye on noisy fans and run-away processes with iStat menus (hat tip: @jjeff).
• Mail is probably my biggest area of tinkering... I'll try to write up my current setup in more detail, but MailActOn 2 and DockStar are working well for me.

Probably my biggest change recently, is to switch back to much heavier use of emacs... more on that later ;-)

How about you? What are you using to make your (computer) life a little bit better?

My love affair with Fluid.app continues. The latest release (0.9.1.4) includes support for running your SSB as a Menu Extra (i.e. something in the OS X (check out the video).

As shown in the video, I think the best use for this new feature is in conjunction with iPhone sites. In the video, Tod shows creating an app for http://i.brightkite.com/. I've been using this to check-in on BrightKite. It's nice, unobtrusive and easy in lieu of BrightKite's own, native desktop apps.

My other favorite (pictured) is http://i.rememberthemilk.com/. Remember the Milk's iPhone app has a nice feature that the "Today" tasks list also shows overdue tasks (which I haven't figured out how to do in the standard web app).

More and more of my webapp usage is moving to fluid these days. I can't say enough good things about this app. And google gears support is coming!!

I spend a fair bit of time talking on Skype (whether I like it or not). I am also a big fan and heavy user of quicksilver (the ultimate launcher and more for mac os x). Now, I generally keep skype contact list hidden to keep my desktop clean - and was thinking "Gee, it'd be great if skype was integrated with Quicksilver". But.. it's not... directly

However, I found this tip and can now initiate skype-to-skype calls directly from quicksilver:

Here's what I did:

1. In quicksilver's preferences - I enabled the "Services Menu Module" plug-in
2. In Address Book, I added a 'custom' phone field with the label 'skype' where I can keep skype contact names (It would be really awesome if Skype did this for me...
3. Now, I can do the following: invoke quicksilver, type a contact's name, hit '/', find their skype name (down arrow), hit tab, type 'sk' (to get the 'Skype/Call' action) and hit Enter. Skype will then make the call to that user.

Ok... so typing quicksilver commands doesn't *look* pretty... but it's one less thing I need to switch my right hand to the mouse for, and I like that. :-)

(I should probably post more tricks like this)

Matt turned me on to a new app for OS X (Leopard only) called Fluid. Essentially, fluid lets you create website-specific applications - really just little webkit browsers as their own applications with their own icons. It's really simple to use and (so far) has worked phenomenally well.

I have two web apps that have become an absolute core staple of my daily routine: Remember the Milk (for TODO management) and Google Reader (for RSS feeds). Both of these are pretty "heavy" web apps (containing lots of JS/AJAX/etc) and I had been running Firefox extensions for both which ultimately weighed down my main browser (which is where I do primary development, etc). Having them as separate applications lets me keep Firefox running (a little) leaner, and I also get pretty icons and the ability to "cmd-tab" between them.

The coolest part, however, is that Fluid has implemented icon updating on a few sites (google reader being one of them) to show the number of unread items. Check it:

Now, if I can just get Google Gears for Webkit working (for offline support for google reader & RTM) I'll be one happy camper.

The desktop / web app convergence continues...

Dear Apple, I love you, but sometimes you drive me up the wall.

I've been playing around with a little project to set up sandbox drupal sites on a mac mini (more details on that later) ... that's easy stuff, but the annoying part is: I'd like to share directories via Samba which needs system accounts. The trick is, I want to add all of this via a simple little shell script. No problem right? Simple one line call to useradd... right?! Noooooooooo. Not in OS X. No, in OS X this is how you add user accounts from the commandline (which, of course, is under "Porting unix/linux applications"):

dscl / -create /Users/portingunix dscl / -create /Users/portingunix UserShell /bin/bash dscl / -create /Users/portingunix RealName "Porting Unix dscl / -create /Users/portingunix UniqueID 503 dscl / -create /Users/portingunix PrimaryGroupID 1000 dscl / -create /Users/portingunix NFSHomeDirectory /Local/Users/portingunix passwd portingunix

I dunno... I think that's just annoying. Perhaps NetInfo has some beauty that I'm just don't understand, but, couldn't Apple at least ship with some standard useradd wrappers or something?

As I've lamented here before, I have had a hard time finding a successful, efficient way to keep all of my personal data (largely calendar and contact data) in sync across my systems and devices. Well, I had registered for a service known as Plaxo a while back to check it out. I can't exactly remember why it didn't stick at the time, but when I first saw Scoble talking about a "Big 3.0 release", I thought I'd give it another shot. Here's the good news...

Plaxo is currently successfully keeping my Mac OS X address book (for subsequent syncing to my phone), iCal, Thunderbird and Google Calendar in sync! I have to say, the Thunderbird support is pretty huge... Thunderbird LDAP support has never been what I would like, so this is a great intermediary.

However, the news that pushed me to blog about my Plaxo usage is this: (as of it looks like yesterday) Plaxo is OpenID enabled!! Awesome! Nice addition to Basecamp and Blinksale in services that I actually use heavily that are OpenID enabled.

Thumbs up for Plaxo. Now... if I could just figure out how to get it to sync my address book pictures...

In setting up a new mac os x machine for development, I seem to fiddle with the various choices out there. In one respect, I really like linux for having 'one way' (per distribution of course) for installing all of your system packages. On the mac, however, there are a couple choices:

• Install everything from source: most control, biggest hassle
• Install things from various binary packages: least control, hassle monitoring updates & upgrades from different sources. Packages like MAMP lessen some of this burden, but I still need other tools like subversion, etc.
• Fink : installs a debian-like apt-get system
• MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts): uses a freebsd-like ports system for managing packages.

Traditionally, I've used Fink - as I generally use Debian on servers, so I'm very familiar with apt-get, dpkg, etc. However, fink, perhaps like debian proper, seems to lag with packages in stable, and you typically have to use the ports-like fink command anyway.

This time around, too, I noticed that MacPorts is now hosted by Mac OS Forge: making it a (semi-)official Apple project. This probably bodes well for it's future and longevity. There's a port for php5, apache2 and mysql5... so I've decided to give it a whirl.

What are others using?

Well, I must say... 30 is off to a great start. I have spent this birthday week feeling overwhelmed by love and support. Thanks to everyone involved :) To cap what is has been an utterly fantastic week, I'm now the proud new owner of a shiny macbook pro. Check a huge one off the ol' wishlist. I'm excited - *very* excited - to be in the land of intel. Parallels here I come!

First impressions? Um, this thing is fast. So much faster than anything I've owned so far. Wow.

So, like any self-respecting geek.. I belaboured the machine naming process and finally settled on "mingus" (yes after the Jazz great). Let the games begin!

I finally experimented with a neat feature in one of my favourite apps for mac os x, growl. There is a very promising looking "Networking" tab in the preference pane for growl. I've often thought that this could be a cool feature, but it was non-obvious how to make it work. Essentially, I have found that it's easiest to play my music off of my mac mini - it has my 100gb collection mounted locally and is directly connected to my speakers - but I'd still like the song-change notification from growl when working on my powerbook (silly, perhaps, but I like it). So, with a little help on IRC from The_Tick, here's how:

• On my powerbook (the growl "client"), I checked "Listen for incoming notifications"
• On my mini (the growl "server"), I checked "Forward notifications to other computers"

That's it. It is that easy. The part that had me stuck was I was expecting the "Add computer" button to do something on my mini. Not true. It's all automatically discovered via bonjour. I was warned that it can be buggy and you can create infinite loops if you try to do two-way notification, but otherwise it's pretty cool if you ask me.

OK. This might seem silly, but I *really* want my n91 to pair with the Mac OS X address book. Why? Because this would allow me to send and receive SMS messages without picking up my phone, as well as making calls. Trust me, it's a nice feature - especially since the n91 has a nice charging cradle where I could just set it and leave it. Sadly, it appears it just doesn't work.

It looks like these Address Book Phone Plugins from Nova Media claim to fix the problem. However, they want my hard earned money before I can even try to see if it works with my phone. Can anyone confirm that they work with the n91? Or should I just wing it? Are there other options?