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

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

Using 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

A New Year of Learning: How to Take Notes?

You might think it’s ridiculous to spend your holiday thinking about how you’re going to take notes the coming year. When the year is over though, you will be glad you did, when you have all the notes you took together so it will be easy to find the information on that specific topic you wrote about in january.

During the year a great amount of information will be fired at you, and it will be way too much for you to remember. It will probably also be way too much for you to write down, so it’s important to capture the essentials.

Don’t let those precious words escape

As a student I had a ring binder with tabs for each class. I used this binder for a year and the next year I bought a new one, fresh paper and tabs to start over. Looking back at the things I wrote down at that time it’s amazing to see how much information got lost. Some lessons are almost gone, just a few words remain but I don’t remember a thing of what’s been said. Read more

A New Year of Learning: Which Planner?

A well prepared student knows at what time which lesson starts in which room. It’s not only a good thing to be in the right place at the right moment, it’s also good to be prepared for what’s going to happen. To bring the right materials and notes from the week before.

But that’s only one reason to have a good planner. Another one of course is to write down all assignments and their deadlines. It sounds so simple, but I’m amazed by the amount of students who neglect to write down this kind of useful information and then ask their teacher later on “Oh, what was it we had to do this week?”. They’re not leaving a good impression.

Flexibility is key

One very important feature of a planner should be the possibility to input data in every possible situation. We need to be able to get an appointment, reminder or deadline into the system immediately without having to remember to write it down or to write it on a piece of paper and put it on the calendar when we’re at our computer. So the work you do and the situation we’re in might influence our choice. It’s best to find our own favorite tool and adjust it to fit our needs if necessary. Read more

Taking Notes: Choosing the Right Tools

It’s a known fact: the longer the lecture or presentation, the smaller the amount of information that will be remembered. If a lecture is 30 minutes long, students don’t remember the first 15 minutes as well as in a lecture with a duration of only those first 15 minutes. So how can we keep track of the information given to us in a two-hour lecture?

Not Just Reading a Book

When we read a fiction book we probably read a line only once. That’s no problem. We don’t really have to remember that specific line, but we want to understand the story. When we have to learn something, say for our final exams, we really have to study the material and make sure we will not forget what we read. So we have to read it over and over again, or use a smart highlighting system to keep track of the most important fact and information.

However, when we listen to a lecturer or a presenter, we can’t highlight words or read things over several times until we really understand what’s being said Read more

Gain Freedom by Disabling Your Network Connection

Recently I discovered Freedom for Mac OS X. This application disables all wireless and ethernet networking on your computer for up to three hours at a time. When you open the application it asks you ‘how many minutes of freedom’ you would like.

Set the amount, hit ‘OK’ and it you will not be able to use your internet or your wireless network anymore. Afterwards your connections will be re-enabled. You can quit Freedom before the time you set, but this does not get you back on the internet. You will have to restart your computer to for that.

Why would we want to do something like that? Is it so hard to keep yourself focused on your task at hand? Yes, for some people it is! What could be so distracting then? There are more than a few things that can keep you away from what you should be doing. Read more