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

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

A New Computer: Laptop or Desktop?

We’ve looked at which planner would be right for us, and what is the best way to take notes. We’ve done our research, now it’s time to start working! And another question a lot of students ask at the start of the year is what kind of computer would be best for them to buy.

What are you going to do with it?

The most important question to determine what’s the right computer for you is: What are you going to do with it? If you’re using your computer mainly for internet related things, like checking your email, browsing the web, blogging, using social networks and using Web 2.0 applications like Google Docs or if you use it mainly for writing articles, papers and collecting and organizing research material (using DEVONthink Pro for instance), you don’t need the most powerful computer out there. And if you’re planning to buy a laptop, a Macbook will be just fine. Read more

Speed Up Your Writing: Typing Utilities Compared

Sometimes you stumble upon a piece of software that’s just wonderful, and you wish you knew it before. Software that really enhances the computer interface. The most important piece of software in that category is Quicksilver (also read my recent post about Quicksilver).
Another thing I discovered about a year ago was a tool that finishes your sentences. It’s like a fully customizable version of predictive text input for your computer.

What do those little tools do? They help you type. By setting up a list of sentences you use a lot and connecting those sentences to an abbreviation that is easy to remember, you create ’shortcuts’ for your text. This is great when you get a lot of email and a lot of people are asking you the same thing over and over again. You can also use it for URL’s email addresses, and signatures.
While writing code or inserting html tags this can also save you a lot of time, as you can imagine. Read more

How Quicksilver Streamlined My Computing Experience

Quicksilver is definitely my favorite add-on to Mac OS X. Since I discovered it’s power only a bit more than a year ago, I can’t think of using my Mac without it. But it took me a while to convert to it. What’s so great about this quite mysterious application?

No Love At First Sight
Once, somebody told me about this program called Quicksilver and how wonderful it was, so I downloaded it (it’s free!), installed it and tried to use it. I’m saying ‘tried’ because it really wasn’t a great success. Now looking back I think I just didn’t get it. You might say “What’s there to get, it’s just an application launcher, right?”, and I think that’s exactly what caused my struggle with it. I thought it was ‘just an application launcher’ but it seemed so complex to me, especially to set up in the way I wanted it. For just an application launcher there were too many preferences I didn’t get the first time I looked at it, and so I didn’t really take the time to dive in it any deeper. So Quicksilver didn’t get a lot of love from me the first time, I judged as being way too strange and obscure and I threw it in the trash, confused and disappointed. Read more