Learning keyboard shortcuts will significantly improve your speed, letting you focus on your work instead of boring mechanical movements. Perhaps even more importantly, though, is that they can help you avoid repetitive strain injuries (RSI).
As opposed to many other lists of keyboard shortcuts, this post focuses on the shortcuts you’ll use the most and that work for all or most apps, so they are well worth the effort in learning. The consistency of keyboard shortcuts across Mac applications is one of the nice surprises if you’re previously used to Windows or Linux
Apple recently announced that there are more than 15,000 apps (applications) in the app store. My iTunes shows I have downloaded and tried 189 of them, but even going through those, there are only a handful that I would actually buy if I had tried them out first.
Based on that, here are 22 apps that I actually recommend to other iPhone users, as well as the reasons why I recommend them.
This video is from our ExoSocial event at Nanshan Ski Village just outside Beijing today. It shows what the few people that went to the top were up to (most people stayed on the green slopes). Fun to see programmers, PMs, and sysadms basking in the snow.
(APOLOGIES: I’ve decided against making the video public, so the video below will not work unless I share the video with you; just tell me your youtube account and I’ll share it with you.)
This was my first edit using the new iMovie. It’s a very rough cut
I’ve been having so much fun listening to songs and watching music videos by Jonathan Coluton, an ex-software developer gone Internet music artist, or “Internet star”. He originally made headlines with his “Thing a Week” project in which he would make and publish a song every week. Merlin Mann has a good interview with Jonathan where he discusses what the process was like.
In his article Jacky explained how to easily drill holes through to ports on machines behind a firewall. What I normally want is to have ssh access to machines behind firewalls, allowing me to do scp, and easily ssh in without a stupid stop-over on the firewall machine.
I came across this solution that does exactly that. After the super-simple set-up I’m able to do:
% ssh rexobox
% rcp rexobox:some-file .
All that’s required is to tweak your .ssh/config. Mine looks like this on my laptop:
With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.
I have good luck with this trick on several Sony Ericssons (including W800i and now K800/K800i):
edit ABDeviceCommandSets.plist in the /Applications/Address\ Book.app/Contents/Resources/Telephony.bundle/Contents/Resources/ directory with the editor of your choice
find K700 and create an identical line underneath it, replacing K700 on the new line with your (hopefully compatible) model number; in my case I added two lines, one for K800 and one for K800i, just to be sure
GMail started rejecting my password when I accessed it through POP from Mail.app. This isn’t the first time, and since I remember how difficult it was to find the solution the first time, I thought I’d document the solution in a blog post for all eternity.
Certain activities will trigger the “you may not be human” alert at Google, causing them to lock your account for non-web access. Very annoying especially since non-web access doesn’t give you any user-friendly error message, and since your account continues to work through the web, you basically suspect your mail application is at fault.
A while ago I discovered that by setting an HTML INPUT tag’s type attribute to search, Safari on OS X would show the OS X search widget instead of the standard boring HTML input field. Andrew Escobar has a good introduction and an example screenshot:
This search widget is extremely user-friendly and space-efficient; there is no need for a “Go” or “Search” button anymore.
It also downgrades gracefully to a normal input field for other browsers, but this is unfortunately not enough:
There’s no placeholder text explaining what you can search for
There’s no magnifying glass or special styling giving a hint that this is a search box
Taken together it means you have to add explanatory text and a “Search” submit button after it for people to understand how to use it, destroying the user-friendliness and space efficiency and offered by the Safari widget.
I’ve noticed that more and more sites were using the Safari search widget without any “Search” submit button, so I figured they must have found a way to make it cross-platform. I spent some time on facebook.com today and noticed they had the Safari search widget… and… sure enough, for Firefox and IE a nice JavaScript version!
Getting MSN display names to appear in Adium wasn’t as easy as I’d first thought. Here’s the recipe I found to work:
Preferences -> Appearence -> Contact List -> List Layout
Make sure “Show Status” is set to “Beside Name”.
Preferences -> Appearence -> Size to fit horizontally
Turn off. Automatic Sizing doesn’t care about the status message.
Preferences -> Appearence -> Width
Set to 250px to ensure there’s space for the status message.
Preferences -> Advanced -> MSN -> “Show display names as status messages”
Turn this on.
Restart Adium.
You can set your own MSN display name in Adium like this:
Preferences -> Accounts -> select account -> Edit -> Personal
Then edit the “Display name” field. Changes take effect immediately when you close the window.
