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

Software Review: VoodooPad

We’ve discussed some different ways of taking notes before, here and here. When you’re taking notes in a digital form, using the right software to keep them together is very important. One application that is particularly suitable for this is VoodooPad by Flying Meat. Here’s a review.

You can use VoodooPad for taking notes, brainstorming and jotting down your ideas, but how does it work? For people familiar with wikis on the internet (click for a definition on Wikipedia), VoodooPad will have a very familiar interface: you write down some text and create links which automatically point to new, blank pages. So actually you’re creating a web consisting of different pages, linked to each other. 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

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

Huge Online Resource for Education Tools

Today I read on academHacK about this, they call it a “Ridiculously Useful Resource”. It’s the Centre for Learning and Performance Technology’s Directory of Learning Tools. And it’s quite a list! From blogging tools to presentation tools and mind mapping and brainstorming tools. With a note if the described tool is free, a download or a hosted service and if it’s open source.

As a Mac user I have to say I don’t see all my favorite Mac applications in the list, although it contains over 2300 tools. But especially if you’re looking for a hosted service and have a good overview of it’s competitors, this is a great directory to check out. They also have a list with their Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 selected by 159 ‘learning professionals’. It’s worth taking a look at.

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

Buy Discounted Software Before You Graduate

Many software developers have special prices for students and teachers. You can sometimes get up to 50% discount on the normal retail price. Looking back I realize how much software I bought after I graduated. Luckily the institute where I studies is now my part-time employer, so I can still use the educational prices when I buy a piece of software. But when you are not in this situation and you know you have to buy software for your professional career, don’t wait until you graduate!

During your studies (especially with technical studies), you are sometimes asked to do a project or make an assignment using a specific piece of software. And specialist software tends to be expensive. At school this is no problem as long as they provide you with a computer that has all the necessary tools installed.
You can also work with open source equivalents of course but these are not always available or as powerful and reliable as you often wish they would be. 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