40Tech » Apple

Help Turn Your MacBook Into a Desktop Computer With the mStand

Evan Kline — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:56:39 +0000

Thank you, Tony Hue of LonePlacebo for helping me spend money. A couple of weeks ago, Tony wrote about the mStand, a monitor stand that almost looks like it could have been designed by Apple. I decided that I needed a stand, so I took the plunge and bought the swiveling version of the stand, the mStand 360, along with an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad.

Tony’s assessment is dead on. The stand looks nice, feels solid, and gets my MacBook Pro to the perfect elevation. Head on over to his review for a thorough look at the stand, and to see some photos. Use his link to order, as I think he has affiliate links on his site.

Don’t have an Apple laptop? As Tony notes,

Although Rain Design says that the stand is designed primarily for Apple laptops, you can fit any laptop with a maximum depth of 10.4″.

I enjoy Tony’s site, but if his reviews get me to purchase one more item, I might need to stay away for a while.

Cure Poor Posture at your Desk with the mStand Laptop Stand | LonePlacebo

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5 Apple TV Remote Commands That You Might Not Know

Evan Kline — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:00:52 +0000

You can learn from a toddler. My daughter, who is 16 months old, loves to play with remote controls. Every now and then, she’ll be playing around with the Apple TV remote, and the Apple TV will do something unexpected. I finally went in search of a comprehensive list of Apple TV Remote commands.

Apple has a fairly comprehensive list of Apple TV Remote commands on its support pages, so some of these commands were gleaned from that site. MacWorld also published an article with a few tips. I’ve indicated after each tip where I found it.

Put the Apple TV to sleep: Press and hold the Play/Pause button for five seconds. [Apple]

Skip forward or back in 10-second increments: Press the Play/Pause button to pause the video, then hold down the Right or Left button (I can’t get this to work reliably). [Apple]

Skip to the next or previous chapter: Press the Down button, then Right or Left to skip chapters (if there are no chapter markers, this will skip 1/20th of the video length, or 30 second intervals whichever is longer. [Apple]

Rearrange the Apple TV home screen icons: Press and hold the Select button (the big round one) until the icon jiggles, and then use the navigation controls to move that icon where you want it to be. This won’t work with the icons in the top row. [Macworld]

Return to the home page: Press and hold the Menu button. [Macworld]

Notwithstanding these commands, the best thing you can do to make it easier to get around on your Apple TV is to download the Remote app onto your iPhone or iPad. Navigation isn’t that much easier, but it does make text entry much more convenient.

There are still some mystery commands out there. For example, every now and then, as my daughter mashes away on the remote, I’ll see a menu option pop up on the screen, asking me to select an audio source. I haven’t figured that one out yet.

One final tip that I’ve haven’t tired: Did you know that you can pair your remote with your Mac?

If you know of any other commands, share them in the comments.

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Plain Cloud Gives You App-Free Access to All Documents in iCloud [Mac]

Evan Kline — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:20:25 +0000

When you use an iCloud-enabled app on your Mac, it may appear that you can only access that app’s documents from within the app itself. Actually, there is a folder structure on your Mac reflecting the location of your iCloud files, with a folder for each iCloud-enabled app that you use. You can find those folders and files outside of their native apps with a bit of effort, or you can make it easy with a free app called Plain Cloud.

Plain Cloud puts your iCloud documents a click away, and gives you a bit more freedom to work with those iCloud documents in different apps. When you have access to your iCloud folders, it’s almost like you have access to segregated Dropbox-like folders, and are free from Apple’s sandbox. You can get similar functionality without the app, but the app is free (the developer does accept donations) and makes it dead easy.

OS X Daily explains the purpose behind Plain Cloud:

Get Easy Desktop Access to All iCloud Files with Plain Cloud for OS X: “PlainCloud serves as a simple front-end to each app that stores documents in iCloud, listing out each app and letting you see just those apps files – no more hunting around in gibberish folder names to find what you’re looking for.”

The Plain Cloud window looks like this:

Click on the name of an app, and a Finder window will open, showing you the folder containing the iCloud documents for that app. I could see this coming in handy when I want to edit a document in a different app than I used to create it. Byword files are just text files, for example, so you wouldn’t be limited to working on those files just in Byword. Have you ever created an iCloud document in one app, and edited it in another?

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Quick Trash Shortcuts [Mac]

Evan Kline — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 13:43:01 +0000

Timesavers that I love, but don’t use enough, are an operating system’s keyboard shortcuts. OS X Daily recently covered four pretty basic ones involving the trash, of which I was unaware. Here is an example of one of the four:

Command+Delete with anything currently in the Trash selected returns it to the original location in the file system. You can also access this by right-clicking an item and choosing “Put Back”

For the rest, head on over to the original article.

4 Useful Trash Keyboard Shortcuts Every Mac User Should Know

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How to Quickly Select Your Audio Input and Output Devices [Mac]

Evan Kline — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 12:36:41 +0000

Prior to Mountain Lion, if I wanted to switch my audio input or output from my speakers to a headset microphone, I used a free app called SoundSource. Unfortunately, SoundSource isn’t compatible with Mountain Lion. Fortunately, there’s an equally easy way to select your audio sources on a Mac, going back at least as far as Snow Leopard.

To select your audio input and output sources, you need to use the Mac’s almighty Option key. Hold down the Option key, and click the volume icon in your menu bar. You’ll be presented with a dropdown menu, where you can select your audio source. I think I might like this better than SoundSource, because it is one less item cluttering my menu bar.

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How to Enable “View Source” In Safari 6 [Mac]

Evan Kline — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:31:56 +0000

Can’t find a way to View Page Source in Safari 6? It’s there, you just have to dig a bit.

No View Source In Safari 6? Oh, There It Is « Lehigh Valley Web Design « J Taylor Design: “Under Safari » Preferences » Advanced, there is a new checkbox option to ‘Show Develop menu in menu bar’ – which is disabled by default. Once enabled, not only can you view the site source, but there are a ton of useful features at your disposal.”

(Via J Taylor Design)

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Swipe to Dismiss Mountain Lion Notifications [Mac]

Evan Kline — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:26:29 +0000

If you’re like me, since you’ve upgrade your Mac to Mountain Lion, even the default four seconds that a notification remains on the screen can bug you. You could disable notifications entirely, or even for a period of time, but that might be too extreme for your situation. Instead, to get rid of a single alert immediately, do a two-fingered swipe on the alert banner, from left to right, and it will disappear from the screen.

This assumes that you have a trackpad, although Lifehacker points out that a single-finger swipe will work with a Magic Mouse. And, as OS X Daily points out, this doesn’t close the notification, but instead moves it off of the desktop.

Tip from Lifehacker, via OS X Daily

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Overwhelmed With Your TextExpander Snippets? Set a Quick Search Shortcut

Evan Kline — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 20:55:05 +0000

Right now, I’m up to 128 snippets in TextExpander. There are several that I have committed to memory, but even more that I hardly ever use. This is because I can’t remember the shortcuts to launch them, so it is just as quick for me to type normally as it is for me to open TextExpander and find a particular shortcut. I recently learned of a quicker solution, however.

If you subscribe to the TextExpander newsletter, you’ve already seen this one. It involves setting a hotkey in order to trigger a search feature. You do this by opening TextExpander and going to the Preferences pane. Once there, look for “Suggest Matching Abbreviation.” Click the button, and set your hotkey.

Once you’ve set your hotkey, start typing a few characters of either your snippet or abbreviation, and then hit your hotkey. A popup menu appears listing all of the snippets that contain the characters you typed. You can either scroll through them and click one, or hit Command + the number of the snippet.

One word of caution – I couldn’t get this to work at first. I suspect that the shortcut I had selected was already in use by another app or the operating system. I switched to another shortcut (Command + Control + Option + [minus symbol), and then things worked fine.

If you have any other TextExpander tips, let me know in the comments.

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The Mac App Store – Doomed to Failure

Evan Kline — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 18:58:26 +0000

Earlier this year, I wrote about the pros and cons of buying your Mac apps from the Mac App Store. Since then, I’ve come to a firm decision – when possible I will buy my Mac apps directly from the developer, instead of from the Mac App Store. I can thank Apple and the far-reaching effects of its sandboxing policies for leading me to this decision.

Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, has expressed his belief that the Mac App Store will become irrelevant. He’s given a few reasons to support his position, but for me, it boils down to just one of them: confidence.

Apple’s new sandboxing rules might be great for security, but they limit what a developer can do with an app. For that reason and others, my confidence in the App Store is gone. I lack confidence in the following:

I no longer have confidence that any app that I buy there won’t be a crippled version of what is available directly from the developer. The App Store version of OmniFocus, for example, can’t run certain scripts that the non-App Store version can run. The previous App Store version of popular mail app Postbox was missing several features (the developers don’t even sell the new version of Postbox in the App Store). Instead of hunting around to find out if the App Store version is fully functional, I’ll just buy it from the developer;
I have no confidence that if I purchase an app with great functionality, that it will keep that functionality going forward, due to App Store rules;
I have no confidence that apps purchased in the App Store will continue to be there. We’ve all heard the stories of apps pulled from the iOS app store. Will the Mac App Store follow suit? Make sure you have reliable backups of your apps, just to be safe;
I have no confidence that I’ll get the benefit of upgrade pricing when a developer releases a new paid version of an app, since the App Store can’t handle paid upgrades for new versions of an app.

Given the choice, where would you purchase your Mac apps? Will anyone but tech geeks think of these issues? Marco Arment thinks that this isn’t just an issue for geeks. I agree with him. If enough customers get burned by the App Store, they’ll stop using it. And if enough developers get burnt or fed up with it, the App Store will become the home of trivial apps.

What do you think? Will you buy your apps from the Mac App Store?

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How to Automate Your Evernote Scanning and Filing System [Mac]

Evan Kline — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Last week I wrote about the World’s Most Awesome Paperless Filing System, which lets you drop a document into your scanner and have it automatically renamed and then filed away into the proper folder on your Mac. That system used Hazel, a Mac app, to rename and file documents that appeared in a folder, based on the contents of those documents. As I mentioned in that post, I had chosen that system over previous systems, one of which involved Evernote. If you want to use the automation of Hazel to speed up your paperless system, but still use Evernote, then you’re in luck.

My initial post was based on a paperless system by David Sparks of the Mac Power Users podcast. His partner for that show, Katie Floyd, is an Evernote user. On her personal blog, she has detailed how she uses Evernote as her document repository. She also uses Hazel to automate the tagging and filing of documents. She mentions on her blog about a piece of AppleScript gleaned from the Evernote forums that helps Hazel automate the process. The AppleScript looks like this:

tell application “Evernote”
activate
create note from file theFile notebook {“Notebook Name”} tags {“tag1″, “tag 2″, “tag 3″, “tag 4″}
end tell

For more details on her complete system, check out her post and follow her links on KatieFloyd.me. While you’re at it, you may want to give the Mac Power Users podcast a try, too. It has floated its way to the top of my listening rotation.

Do you have any tips or tricks for working Evernote into a paperless filing system?