My Favorite OS X add-ons: Quicksilver

Last but certainly not least in my short series of favorite OS X add-ons: Quicksilver by Blacktree. Quicksilver is a perfect example of a piece of software that I use all the time without paying attention to it. The only times I notice it is when it doesn’t work the way I want (which doesn’t happen a lot). I wrote an article about Quicksilver before which describes why I love it so much: How Quicksilver Streamlined my Computing Experience.

Quicksilver can’t be described in a few sentences. It can do so many things for you. It can launch applications, open bookmarked websites, move files around on your harddisk, append text to documents, look up words in the dictionary, and much more. If you don’t use it yet, definitely consider giving it a try. Using it might seem awkward in the beginning, but give it a week, and it might become an essential add-on to your system too Read more

My Favorite OS X add-ons: 1Password

1Password by Agile Web Solutions definitely streamlines the way I use my Mac. It’s a bit different then the other add-ons I recommended so far, as it’s an actual application and the others were just extensions to the OS X user interface, although it greatly integrates with all browsers on the Mac, and you don’t have to keep the application running all the time to make use of it’s functionality.

Every time you enter a password on a website a small window pops up asking you whether or not you want 1Password to save the password. There is one master password which protects your list of passwords, hence the name of the application. In your browser there’s a little button which gives access to 1Passwords functionality. When you return to a website you press this button, select ‘restore form’ from the menu and 1Password will log you in automatically. You don’t even have to push the submit button. Read more

My Favorite OS X add-ons: TextExpander

Did you ever have to type the same word or phrase over and over again? I think we all do sometimes; your name under an email, a piece of code or even a whole email message in reply to a frequently asked question. TextExpander, by Smile on my Mac is a great add-on which will help you whenever you’re in a situation like that, and belongs to my group of favorite OS X add-ons because it’s so easy to use and fits in the system perfectly.

TextExpander resides in the System Preferences. You can create ‘Snippets’ in which you define what string of characters should be replaced by what. So for instance I can tell it to write “Thank you very much for your kind email” whenever I type “tthanks”. It also writes the date or the time when I type “ddate” or “ttime”, respectively. Read more

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

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