Recently in Hacks Category

First and foremost, I'm not a fan of the dock. I think it's very distracting and takes up too much real estate. I happened upon a tweet by Shaun Inman last week about Mail Unread Menu and how he's using it so he can hide his dock. I've tried to adopt this practice in the past but was never really keen on the results. That is until now.

I followed Shaun's tweet over to loganrockmore.com and downloaded Mail Unread Menu which allows you to see how many unread mails you have waiting for you on your menu bar, switch to mail.app from the icon and has some nice configuration options. I played around with it and noticed the Logan also has an identical tool -- NNW Unread Menu for Net News Wire users. Click. Download. Sweet. Since I am in a habit of looking at the dock to see how many new feeds I had, I can now look in the menu bar and not rely on the dock.

After a few hours of using Apple+Tab as an app switcher I was completely annoyed by the huge icons. Not able to find a way to make them smaller (speak up if you can), I downloaded Witch. Witch lets you customize the appearance and icon size of the app switcher which was just what I wanted.

Combining these three apps, I now have a nice dockless workspace and can max out my windows with the extra real estate I've gained.

Now for a completely distraction free experience, I added Isolator to the mix. Isolator will cover your desktop and all windows except for the application in focus. Mapped to a hotkey I can quickly turn it off. It's currently in beta for Leopard users but seems to be very stable for me.

Ingredients
Mail Unread Menu
NNW Unread Menu
Witch
Isolator
Hide your dock!

Note: All these apps are great apps so if you like them, consider donating to the developers.

Caveats
I had an issue with using Mail Unread Menu's switcher to jump to mail.app where it would fire off one of my FastScripts that was mapped to the keys Apple + 1. Logan tells me that command + 1 is the same key combo that Mail Unread Menu uses to switch to mail.app. I changed my FastScript key combo and all is good.

If you have curl installed, it's easy to post updates to Twitter from your Terminal.

curl -u yourusername:yourpassword -d status="Your Message Here" \
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

[ Via Digital Streets ]

Open source System Prefs pane by Quicksilver author 'Alcor' that gives you a GUI for tweaking secret preferences, both for software that ships with Mac OS X and for third-party apps, with the information about the secret prefs coming from a publicly accessible database. Even if you don't install the prefs panel, the database is a terrific resource.

[ Via Daring Fireball ]

Ciaran Walsh has released two textmate quicklook plug-ins that will highlight Perl, PHP, Ruby, Shell, C headers and Obj-C(++)

Since upgrading to Leopard, I've been 'trying' to use spaces like I used to use virtual desktops but it just wasn't working, until today. With Jesse Newland's new applescripts coupled with quicksilver, I can now do some of the things I used to do in the pre-leopard days; namely quickly sending an app to another space.

Load these scripts into your quicksilver actions directory and you are good as gold.

Notice the trick he links to; hold down a window and switch spaces, taking that window with you. Ya learn something new everyday!

Graeme Mathieson: links for 2007-11-18: "Add a ‘recent things’ stack to the Dock Neat trick for having ‘recent applications’, ‘recent documents’, ‘favourite servers’ and others as stacks in your dock.

The Pug Automatic has put together a nice little script and narrative on how to hide the leopard stack overlays in finder.

If you like to keep track of your calls for billing purposes or just because you're anal retentive then iPhonelogd is for you. It's a little ruby script that when run from the command line will log your calls into iCal. Give it some extra parameters and it will put them into a particular calendar.

In my A.D.D. RSS travels this evening, I ran across a cool post/idea at instructables.com about consolidating bonus cards into one credit card sized card. How stupidly-simple-ingenious is that?

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I recently aquired a refurbed MacBook for my wife. She also owns a 30 gig iPod for her workouts. In addition, she's a spin instructor and has a constant need to burn CD's for her classes. I've always kept our music library of 70 gigs on a portable hard-drive connected via USB to my MacBook Pro; when required. Since my lovely wife is not as macnerdy as me, it's been a drag on her to access the music library. If she needed to update the ipod she obviously used my mac.

Now I've updated our network to accommodate her needs. Here's how we are sharing the music library and how I did the updates to the existing setup.

Essential Hardware

I picked up a 350 gig NAS which is formatted as fat32. I kept that as the format in case any shmuck (Jim) wants to access it with a PC.

Library Update

With the NAS connected to the wireless router, I hooked up the 120 gig external that housed the library for the last 3 years and copied everything over to the new drive.

I renamed iTunes Library and iTunes Music Library.xml located in ~/music/itunes to old and opened iTunes on my MBP. This gave me a clean slate to work with; a blank library.

Next, I changed iTunes preferences to point to the network drive for the storage location. There's a few steps I'll discuss later to help assure the drive is mounted all the time.

With the preferences changed, I chose "add to library" and pointed to the new drive's library and walked away for about 2 hours for it to update the 11k songs (1200 cd's) on the drive. It actually took almost a full day for iTunes to determine the gapless play and update the artwork library.

Problems when you sleep

One problem presented itself almost immediately and made me realize my wife would have bigger issues with her Macbook. It would just be a pain-in-the-ass for me -- when I close my MBP (sleep), obviously the network drive connection dropped.

To get around this I setup a automator script that would mount the drive for me on startup. In automator, drag over "Get specified servers". Click the plus to add a server, choosing the network drive. Drag over "connect to server" and then save it as an application to your desktop or somewhere safe. To automagically mount this when you startup the computer, open your system prefs and drag the application you just made to your login items (located in system/accounts). Now when I startup the mac, the drive is ready for use.

That still didn't fix my sleep problems. So I downloaded Sleepwatcher and installed both scripts. With Textmate I created a file in my home directory named .wakeup and added in the following.

#!/bin/sh

#Wake 10 seconds before connecting to the network drive

echo 'sleep 10

logger -t sleepwatcher "connecting to the network drive"

open ~/Desktop/connect_to_server.app' | /bin/sh&

Sleep is set to 10 to allow for the lag in the network on startup. With this script and sleepwatcher, I am now sure that my network drive is always mounted and ready for use. Cool thing is you can add anything you want done on wake to that script to save you some time.

Setting up the wife's Mac

I fired up the wife's Macbook and installed sleepwatcher for her computer, copied over the automator script I created earlier and the .wakeup script, and added the automator to her login items. Now I know she never has to mount the network drive.

I copied over the two files, iTunes Library and iTunes Music Library.xml located in ~/music/itunes, which were recreated when I rebuilt the music library earlier on my MBP to the wife's macbook, letting them overwrite the files that were on her mac.

A Happy Wife

I fired up her iTunes and instantly saw our library on our network. She's now able to access all music, burn cd's and update her ipod from her mac as am I. So far, I'm not getting any conflicts with this setup at all.

A Probable Flaw in the Setup

The only foreseeable problem could be with purchasing new music from the iTunes store and/or adding new cd's to the library from a rip. If I purchase a song or CD, I more than likely won't be seen on the wifes computer, so what I plan on doing is symlinking the ~/music/itunes folders on both macs to one folder on the network drive. I haven't tested it, but in theory, it should solve that issue. If not, there is software available that will sync the two libraries. I'll update this post when I cross that bridge later this week.

Update

I changed the wording in this narrative. The .wake script should be named .wakeup unless you edit your rc.wakeup file located in etc/ to reflect a different name. Also, very important, you must have execute permissions set for the .wakeup script to work properly.