Powertool for your Mac – Hyperdock

I’m not the kind to praise apps, but once in a while a recently downloaded app makes me so happy I need to share it with the world. Today I feel this way about Hyperdock, a currently free beta app (the developer warns us that once it gets final it will cost a small fee – although if you want to keep it free you can probably just disable the automatic updates). To be noted that there’s no hidden reward for me for this tiny review – the developer didn’t contact me about the app(as a general rule I tend to ignore all email I get that promotes web services or apps), I’ve hard about it from a Tweet and decided to give it a try.

Hyperdock installs itself as a System Preferences pane, and replaces the OSX standard Dock with a much more powerful version of it, kind of like a swiss knife of system goodies:

  • Window previews – when you hover over the icon of an opened app in the Dock, you get to see a small bubble with live preview of the app’s opened windows.
  • Powerful shortcuts – for all the apps in the Dock, you can configure particular or general shortcuts. Take the default shortcuts for instance – Option+Left click on any of the Dock apps will trigger Expose to show the windows opened by that app. Shift+Left Click will hide it, etc.
  • Window Management – by far the best feature, allowing to quickly snap and resize windows(Windows 7 style) by simply dragging them to the screen edges, etc. It successfully replaces the $14 Divvy app and adds, on top of that, quick shortcuts for moving and resizing windows.

There are other features listed on the app’s page, but I stop at this for now. I can only hope that the developer will chose a small enough price for the app(I’d expect less than $10, but I’d really hope something like $5) to encourage wide adoption of this pretty great all-in-one app.
Give it a try and let me know what you think of it in the comments below.

Do it yourself – Fullscreen mode for your Mac apps

Everyone knows that multitasking is usually bad for your productivity, and that in order to get ‘in the flow’ one would need to focus on the task at hand and nothing more. Having your app maximized to your screen size might be enough most of the times, but a real full-screen mode(that is, covering also the Dock and the MenuBar) would be even better.
Apparently the next operating system version for your Mac(OSX Lion) will add native support for full-screen apps. But until then, neither of these two options are made easy by the current Mac OSX version.

If you’re in the same place as I am and too impatient to wait for your full-screen productivity boost, I found a temporary solution. An awesome one which, best of all, is completely free(although donations to their developers are welcome)!
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Three Tools for a more Productive Day

To mark my comeback to HackTheDay blogging, I’ll share with you three amazing apps I use on a day-to-day basis:

  • Jumpcut – minimalist clipboard buffering for OS X – it’s a free(even open-source) tiny app that stays in the menu bar and remembers every fragment of text you copied or pasted lately. So whenever you’re in a IM discussion and are too afraid to copy-paste something in order not to lose something already in the clipboard, don’t panic – with Jumpcut you can manage more than a single item in the clipboard. You can even define the keys to switch around them – mine is Ctrl+Option+V
  • Dropbox (referral link, if you use it you get an extra 250MB of storage)- one of the hottest startups of the moment, provides seamless sync of a special folder and all it’s contents onto the web and all the computers connected to it. The free account allows for 2GB of disk space (upgradeable up to 8GB of space – you get 250MB extra for each friend referred to the service) but you can also pay $99/year for 50GB of space or $199 for 100GB of space. The way I use this is by saving all my text files and docs inside, so they are safe in case of disk crash. Also, I can easily access them using lots of 3rd party tools – including your’s truly ‘Clean Writer‘ – iPad simple text editor app.
  • Sparrow – a new email client designed specifically with GMail users in mind that’s quite the rage lately. It looks beautiful(way better than the default Mail.app OS X email client) and integrates seamlessly with GMail, with live updates and more fun features. Above all, it’s pretty minimalist, letting you focus on the email writing instead of useless extra features.

Those were about it for today. Other tips for a more inspired and productive day will come soon.

Firefox 3.6, Fullscreen and WebDeveloper

After updating to Firefox 3.6, I started having issues with WebDeveloper, the single favorite Firefox extension I’m using on an almost daily basis.
Namely, the keyboard shortcut I was using most frequently ⌘-⇧-F had been overwritten by the latest Firefox update; instead of calling the ‘Display Element Information’ function from WebDeveloper, it now called View in Full Screen mode.
Frustrating, to say the least.

Since I didn’t want to change my typing, a bit of Googling led me to KeyConfig, an amazing Firefox extension (more info here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=72994) which allows you to change almost ALL keyboard shortcuts in Firefox and the installed extensions.

Hope this proves useful to someone else as well.

Automator tips


I promised a long time ago to tell you more about the most underrated yet one of the most powerful tools on your Mac OSX: the Automator.
I’ll be speaking here about the Automator version on Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) which, although highly similar to the one in Leopard (OSX 10.5), has a number of extremely cool usability improvements. If you haven’t yet, you should upgrade to Snow Leopard, anyways – it’s highly worth it.

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Self Help Classics

Update

By teaching better ways to use your computer, recommending new software tools that make your life easier, or suggesting ways to improve your personal mindset or lifestyle, this blog was all about improvement: personal improvement and technological one alike. This is why, although self-promotional, I won’t shy away from recommending you my latest creation:

The Self Help Classics iPhone E-book collection


Created using my own personal iPhone ebook software (TouchBooksReader), this unique ebook app collects the major classic masterpieces in the fields of Self Help, Personal Improvement or Productivity and delivers them to you in a low-price high quality iPhone and iPad ebook app format.

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Essential tips to make your Mac the king of USER FRIENDLINESS

Dock

It’s a common symptom among new Mac users to be really ecstatic about their new MacBook, praise the speed and functionality, then after a month or so start seeing some flaws; much like in any relationship, where your passionate blind love from the first weeks starts to fade, giving way to more realistic assessments.
Some hard-core Linux geeks will probably miss their configuration files, kernel hacking and source code install. Windows users might miss their favorite software(Picasa, Winamp or Total Commander). I didn’t miss my Windows machine one bit, partly because I got used to other essential Mac software, partly because I use my Windows software from within Windows virtual machines, and mostly because I realized the Mac offers me all the productivity tools I ever wished for, out of the box or for free.

This article lists several essential but frequently forgotten configuration tips that make the most of your Mac. A future article will cover some vitally important FREE (or really inexpensive) Mac OSX software for your daily chores.

Faithful readers might have already read these tips here, on HackTheDay, but I do hope they’ll learn a few new things as well.

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How to seamlessly sync your iCal with Google Calendar

Quick question: what is the One and only most essential tool for any productivity fan?

You guessed it – the calendar.

There are many reasons why you’d want to use Google Calendar for your time management: first of all, it’s free; second, it’s online(you can access it from everywhere). Third, it has SMS alerts, which is probably the single feature I use most. The one major downside of Google Calendar has is… being an online tool; a less than perfect user interface, less than instantaneous responsiveness. Luckily, this all is in the past as of today:

Google announced CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal(version 3.x – on Mac OS X v10.5+ ). In layman’s terms, this means seamless bidirectional synchronization of calendar events. No more awkward emails, no more missed meetings(actually.. this isn’t such a good news, as we all know it – meetings are productivity killers).

Here’s a step by step walkthrough in setting up Google Calendar synchronization:

1. First, you download on your OSX 10.5 mac the setup tool, called Calaboration. It’s in zip format, so you’ll want to unarchive it. Go ahead and run it, entering your Google login credentials, then click Sign In.

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How to display the date in OSX Leopard Menu Bar

If you don’t want to fumble around just to learn the current date, you can display it in Leopard’s Menu Bar, right by the clock, to always have under your eyes.

What I did was to follow TUAW’s tutorial, but here’s a quick summary, just in case you’re in a hurry:
1. in System Preferences, International, Formats submenu. Select Customize date, then chose the format you want, and COPY it (select all, Cmd+C).
copy_date_format
2. Press Ok, then from the same window, Customize for the Times part. Move the cursor before the time format, press Cmd+V(Paste). Press OK.

leoparddatemenu

Easy peasy.

Task Five – the simple yet beautiful online task management tool

I never really managed to get GTD working for me.
The basic concepts of the GTD (Getting Things Done) method are really easy to grasp and pretty useful:
Write stuff down instead of trying to remember it, do the easy tasks quickly to get them out of your way, divide projects into smaller tasks and review your tasks periodically.

However, just like so many things in my life, turning a nicely put “method” into a productive habit is… almost impossible for me – my attention span lasts at most a couple of weeks, as if I were related to the common goldfish.

The one method that’d work for me… generally, would be one where I could write down my projects and goals, somehow mark my progress (I’m in constant need for confirmation and gratification, just to keep me going), automatically have it under my eyes on a regular basis (I kept forgetting to open up the GTD software I’ve been trying for the last couple of years), help me prioritize between different tasks and, most importantly, be really easy to use(no complicated setup, hierarchies or folders).

There is a lot of software out there that meets this criteria, offline or online. The one I use for the time being is TaskFive. Gorgeous, really easy to use, pretty effective.
Task Five

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