Recently in Mac 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.

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:

• Create photosets from within the FlickrExport interface and set the photoset icon, title and description tags with drag and drop re-ordering of the images in the set.
• Presets for group selections and GPS data are also notable additions in FlickrExport 3, allowing you to save your selections for retrieval the next time you upload your images.
• Tagging is changed in this version. FlickrExport 3 will autocomplete tags from your saved Flickr tags.
• Check the screencast for complete details. After all, that's what the screencast is for right?

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 the Apple engineers have pushed a small update that addresses the following issues. This update is available through system software update.

• Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
• Publishing .Mac Web Gallery albums
• Preview generation and deletion
• Creating and ordering books
• AppleScript support
• Keyboard shortcut customization
• Appearance of metadata overlays in the Browser, Filmstrip, and on light tables
• Watermarking of emailed photos
• Highlight Hot and Cold Areas
• Loupe
• Smart Albums
• All Projects View
• Straighten Tool
• Filmstrip
• Drag and drop import
• Thumbnail generation
• Import window
• Export plug-in reliability

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 ]

Uploaded with Skitch!

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.

Note: Lightroom 1.3 Cheat Sheets can be found here.

(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.

As most of you probably already know, Lightroom 1.3 was released along with it's export SDK. What alot of you might not know is that along with this release Adobe has snuck in a few other releases to include Photoshop 10.0.1, Adobe Camera Raw 4.3, Adobe Bridge, and Acrobat 8 Professional updates.

Lightroom 1.3 Update

Newly Supported Raw File Formats:
Canon 1Ds Mark III
Canon PowerShot G9
Nikon D3
Nikon D300
Olympus E-3
Olympus SP-560 UZ
Panasonic DMC-L10

Lightroom 1.3 includes corrections for the following issues:

• Writing XMP metadata automatically has been corrected for performance issues
• Printing with the native resolution option enabled no longer sets the wrong dimension for portrait oriented images
• Prior to Camera Raw 4.3 there was the possibility that artifacts in edge transitions could be introduced through the
  Bayer demosaic and luminance noise reductions algorithms. This has been corrected.
• The Canon sRAW format and the Fuji compressed RAF formats are now supported.
  Lightroom 1.3 includes the following enhancements:
• The import dialog now offers the option to render 1:1 previews as part of the import process
• The export dialog layout has been enhanced
• A Lightroom Preview Export SDK is available for developers to create and distribute Export Plug-ins. Further details
  are located on Adobe Labs

Grab the update for Mac here

Adobe Photoshop 10.0.1 Update

This update does not explicitly say it makes Photoshop Leopard compatible.

The most significant fixes in the Photoshop 10.0.1 update include the following:

• The speed of moving objects contained within multiple layer sets has been improved.
• Converting images to CMYK using certain profiles no longer results in black files.
• The Save for Web feature now includes an option to "Include XMP" (metadata) in the settings menu within the main Save for Web interface, making the existing capability easier to access.
• When using Save For Web with "Include XMP" enabled, all XMP data is now included in the optimized file.
• Print color matching has been improved.
• Images saved as DICOM and reopened in Photoshop CS3 are no longer corrupted on PowerPCﾮ based Mac computers.

Grab the update for Mac here

I'm not going to expand on the other updates. Head over to Adobe to find out more.