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I took a break from Emacs this weekend to give the new version of BBEdit a spin. The first thing I noticed was that it doesn't have snippets (clippings are the accurate term) for Django. Personally, I use yasnippet in Emacs so I took an hour and converted the library I use to clippings for BBEdit in the hopes someone finds them useful.
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.
Connect Flow has released FlickrExport 3 as a public beta for Aperture and iPhoto users.
New in this release is the ability to add your image to multiple groups. This is a time saver and will be a must have plugin if you're a power flickr user. It has saved me hours of work over the past several weeks alone.
Other Notable Features Include, but not limited to:
Connected flow has announced FlickrExport 3 will be a free upgrade to those who purchased FlickrExport in 2008. Pricing for FlickrExport 3 is yet to be announced.
A Beta group has been opened at Flickr for those who want to ask questions or chat about FlickrExport 3.
Check out the screencast to see what great new features have been baked into FlickrExport 3.
Hot on the heels of Aperture 2.0
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!
As some know, I'm a faithful Aperture user and anything to stay productive is always a good thing with me. This morning I created some Aperture cheat sheets for myself and even though I'm pretty used to the shortcuts I can always use a refresher.
For you Aperture users I'm providing the cheat sheets for you to use. Download the ApertureCheatSheets.zip file which contains the desktop image and a printable pdf. Currently in wide screen format. If standard sizes are needed I can quickly adjust and provide a new version.
Kudos:
Thanks Richard for your help in proofing and giving design ideas!
If you find them helpful, discover an error or want something changed, post back. I'd like to hear how you're using them.
(Via I am rice.)
I installed it on Safari 3.0.4 (Leopard) and it works great. You can find out more about Microformats at Microformats.org, and while you're at it, check out Mofo, a rails plugin to work microformats into your project.
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.
