My Favorite OS X add-ons: Hazel

Next in this series of my favorite OS X add-ons: Hazel, by Noodlesoft.
Hazel really is one of those things you install, set up and then never have to pay attention to. It just does it’s work for you while you’re doing more important stuff. It cleans up places, moves files around and sorts things out.

Hazels preference pane resides in your system preferences. Here you can make settings and set up rules. The main thing I use it for is to clean up my desktop. My desktop background is plain black and I like to keep it empty. So I tell Hazel to move everything that accidentally ends up at my desktop (like downloaded or saved files) into a specified folder. I use a general inbox on my computer where all new stuff goes. So Hazel drops everything from the desktop in the inbox folder. Read more

How To Use The Internet to Communicate Effectively

We might assume most students use the internet regularly these days. For work as well as social activities it’s a tool that we rely on a lot. But how to use the internet to communicate effectively? Let’s look at the different tools we can use and especially how they can be used to communicate in an educational setting, and what are their advantages and disadvantages?

In the past we had few options if we wanted to communicate with people over a long distance. We had telephones and we had letters, that was basically it. Right, I’m forgetting about telegrams and faxes, but let’s focus on widely spread, mainstream tools everybody has access to. The phone was the way to communicate directly to a person and sending a letter was the indirect way.

Nowadays phone calls are still made, and the mobile phone allows us to talk with each other whenever we want. Letters are still sent too, though way less often. And if we look at how we use computers to communicate we can roughly make the same distinction between direct en indirect communication: Read more

My Favorite OS X Add-Ons

As I wrote in my review of Default Folder X it’s wonderful when developers make software that fits perfectly in your operating system and that you use all the time without even being aware of it. Default Folder X is definitely one of my favorite OS X add-ons. I didn’t know about it since a while a go though. Now let’s have a look at a few other software programs I have on my computer and use everyday in a similar streamlined fashion! Read more

How Fear Can Hold You Back

You might have heard these before: What you’re doing right now, is that what you would be doing if you had only one day to live? Are you happy with your studies, your work, your free time? If you had a choice, would you do the same you’re doing this very moment? Do you have a choice?

Asking a person questions like these can cause a feeling of slight unease, that’s why a lot of people don’t dare asking them, because they don’t want the other to feel bad about themselves, they want to preserve a pleasant atmosphere. Yet those questions are important, as the answers might reveal new possibilities and inspire you to make your dreams come true. Read more

Software Review: Default Folder X

As my previous post was about using tags to organize your documents, I would like to take a closer look at one of the tools we could use to do this: Default Folder X by St. Clair Software, which provides a smart extension to the basic features of Mac OS X. And it’s much more then just a tagging tool.

Default folder X is a utility which integrates with the system nicely. After installing it, it will show up as a preference pane in your System Preferences. Each ‘Open’ or ‘Save’ window is accompanied by the Default Folder X panels. To the right of the window you see the panel with navigation options, and at the bottom of the window you see the panel with a field for spotlight comments. There is even a handy comment history to recycle often used comments, or tags, like I prefer to call them.

By clicking on the Default Folder X logo in the right panel, you can actually set a default folder for the application you’re in. Did you ever have to save a lot of files in a row, and have to navigate to the same folder over and over again? Read more

Use Tags to Organize Your Documents

Using a computer for our work and in our everyday life we generate a lot of digital material, which all gets stored on our computer’s hard disk. The ordinary way of doing this is by using a nested folder structure. But is that the only way to organize things?

In my documents folder I usually have a few main categories like ‘Projects’ or ‘Administration’, in which a whole tree structure of folders resides. The ‘Projects’ folder contains a folder for every year and in those folders I put a folder for each project.

There are always folders I use more than others, and most of the time I make a shortcut to those folders (in the OS X Finder ’sidebar’ for instance) so I don’t have to browse through the whole structure to find and open the document I want. But as I’m working on quite a lot of different things at the same time, those ‘favorite’ folders change often so I have to keep those shortcuts up to date manually. Read more