Hack the Day

On the 1st of January I had a skiing accident resulting in the injury my right arm - actually my right shoulder. After about two weeks of waiting for the pain to go away, I got the guts and visited a doctor who didn’t think twice before putting my entire right arm into a tight bandage and forbidding me to use my right arm for the upcoming 10 days.

Easier said then done - after all, I’m a work-from-home software developer, right-handed on top of that. Medical leave being out of the question, how am I supposed to get my job done by typing with only my left hand?

Luckily, I managed to work something out, and here’s a couple of the tricks I did for it, just in case they might help other imprudent skiers out there:

1. System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Keyboard -> Sticky Keys - this is the single greatest mobility impaired aid on the Mac: all special keys become sticky and appear on the screen as you type them, thus allowing you to single-handedly type complex, 2, 3 or more “simultaneous” keys combinations. Option+Backspace, Fn+Backspace, Cmd+Option+Escape and many more contorted keys combinations become now available to anyone
2. Quicksilver - I never really understood the full impact Quicksilver has on my productivity until now - launching an application without a mouse becomes really a life saver when you can only type with your left hand…
3. Textmate - luckily for me, I’m a Ruby(on Rails) programmer using Textmate on a daily basis. Although no longer being able to use the complex keyboard shortcuts that trigger all kinds of snippet generations, I was still able to remain productive using its built-in code completion and the tab-triggered snippets.
4. Terminal - a ROR programmer can’t get any kind of work done without the command line - be it just to change the working dir to the project’s one, or to start a server or.. many more. But typing in Terminal becomes an annoying pain when you need to run the same commands on and on. So I edited the .bash_profile and added a couple of alias for the most common commands I use on a daily basis. The .bash_profile is to be created(if not already existent) in the User’s home directory (just run cd ~ in Terminal and you’re there); here’s a couple of the aliases I defined for my daily use:
   
alias pr='cd ~/Work/MyProject/'
alias prr='cd ~/Work/Projects/MySecondProject/'
alias matem='mate .'
alias ss='./script/server'


There are more to say about tricks that made my programmer life better these last days, but I’ll take a little break for now; hopefully I’ll get back some day with more cool Tricks for the Mobility Impaired Programmers

(image by The Pack)

I spent the day before yesterday cleaning up my MacBook hard drive and reinstalling anew my Tiger operating system.
Sure, OSX is a very powerful system, but even it gets cluttered after months of intense usage and hundreds of apps installed. So.. nothing like a fresh new install to get rid of all unwanted apps, documents, archives or garbage.

So, if you are a new Apple owner, here’s my list of 9 tips for you to do on a fresh OSX install:

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Remember I promised I’d show you how to do your basic computer stuff from within Quicksilver? Well, it took me a while but I finally pulled myself together and wrote this tutorial - a beginner’s guide on doing all kinds of nice and useful stuff with Quicksilver.

What is Quicksilver, you ask? I dare you ask this again after reading my articles on Application Launchers - the ultimate geek Power Tools

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Disabling the Trash Can

Sometimes the Trash really stands in your way - for instance, if you have a small capacity USB drive, a memory card or a Windows partition. You want stuff deleted from the Finder to be immediately erased instead of moved into the Trash Can.

To do this you need the Terminal (if you’re a beginner, see our terminal tutorials first). You’ll first need to change directories to the USB drive location - all drives addresses are to be found in the /Volumes directory. Once in the right location, you just need to remove and recreate the Trash folder - see below how:


cd /Volumes/YOURUSBDRIVE
rm -rf .Trashes
touch .Trashes


Easy, right? From now on, whenever you delete something on the drive, OS X will alert you that it will be deleted immediately.

How to view hidden files and folders in Finder?

Still in Terminal, type “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles ON” (no quotes). Press Enter.
Next, restart the Finder process - type “killall Finder“.

From now on, in Finder you’ll see all hidden files and folders. Warning, it won’t be very pretty.

To reverse, repeat the same steps but with the first command “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles OFF”.

(via applepedia)

Right-clicking with only the trackpad

All new switchers learn pretty soon that in order to right-click on OS X, they need: a. a two-button mouse or b. to press Ctrl while clicking.

Well, Apple laptop owners have a third less-documented choice(I didn’t know about it until recently): tapping the trackpad with two fingers.

If it doesn’t already work for you, then you must enable it: in System Preferences, open the Keyboard & Mouse item and make sure to check the “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click” check box.
(via Ron Miller)

Ever since I bought my sweet white Mac Book, it’s existence has been threatened by a minor yet annoying little thing: the startup sound.

While the startup chime doesn’t bother me a bit, it drives my girlfriend mad, and her threats of throwing the damn thing away have been getting more and more frequent. As any Mac Book user out there knows, there’s no way to change the chime sound or disable it from within the system. Even plugging earphones before booting up fails, and if you don’t want to hear the annoying chime each morning, you’d have to carefully(or automatically) switch off the sound before shutting the computer off.

But all these worries are now gone, as today was my lucky day - randomly browsing macosxhints made me discover the little free application that’s bound to save my laptop’s life.

StartupSound.prefPane 1.1-BETA comes form Arcana Research Japan, is free and available at this link (direct download link here). Being a beta version makes it possibly unstable, but so far it worked out great on my Intel Mac Book.

Hack the Day is probably the only blog never to have talked about the iPhone. I decided to change this now that the iPhone has launched. Everyone is claiming that it will make their lives more complete and more productive, two justified reasons to pay the price.

But is the iPhone the ultimate productivity tool, as some have been hoping? I take a look into how this device will impact your working style (disclaimer - I wasn’t lucky enough to be born in the iPhone country, so all information below is based on blog reviews and Apple’s documents) and what applications to use for your organizing and productivity purposes.

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In the previous article in the series you learned what Terminal.app is, what it does, how to start it and a couple of basic tasks to do with it(move around folders - the cd command, look what’s inside folders - the ls command, opening up files - the open command and how to remove files - the rm command). Today you’ll learn how to remove entire folders, how to copy files or folders, how to move them somewhere else, how to create aliases to files or folders and even a bit more.

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Let’s be honest - Apple has gained a lot in market share last year, so there are plenty of former Windows users who just switched to the Mac. This tutorial is for those new switchers who never had the courage to open up Terminal, OSX’s most underrated power-tool. This tutorial is not for the Linux/Unix gurus, but for the casual daily worked who wants to improve his computer operating skills and

First, the basics: you probably remember Windows Command Prompt, though chances are you never had to use it. Well now, Terminal is like Command Prompt on steroids. This is because Apple’s OSX is built around Unix, the most powerful geek-oriented Operating System ever, but with a nice-looking user-friendly gift-wrap. The result? OSX is an operating system that kicks Window’s buttocks any time of the day. Chances are you’ll never have to use Terminal, but I strongly suggest it - as any real Power User will tell you, mastering the command prompt commands is the ultimate swiss-knife for the computer geek.

In today’s lesson you’ll learn to start the Terminal, move around, look around, open up things from within and remove things.

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You want to get more productive in your computer usage? In today’s lesson, we’re introducing you to a power-user time-saving trick.

First, here’s the context: I’ve seen lots of people for whom simple computer taks such as launching Word, Firefox or Outlook take at least half a minute. Most of the time is spent with: minimizing the opened windows, slowly moving the mouse aiming it towards the Start button, clicking on the Programs Menu in the Start Menu, missing it, finally getting it right, slowly looking for the right application folder & icon, risking to click outside the Programs menu and restart the process, etc. Average users are a bit more productive - they save frequently-used applications shortcuts on the desktop. But this forces you to minimize everything on it to find the right shortcut and clutters the desktop with shortcuts. On Apple computers the issue is similar for the ordinary user - sure, there’s the Dock, but it has a limited shortcut capacity and to find a less frequently used application you’d still have to open the Finder, open the Applications folder and look, again, for the app you wanted.

So what can you do?
Remember, you want to stop wasting your time moving the mouse all around looking for applications, folders or files. A first step would be to get your desktop organized - instead of just throwing stuff on it, you create folders for the most important tasks and start placing things right where they belong. For more info on how I did this, take a look at my article - Turn your Desktop into a Productivity tool. But the power user trick is to use the right tools for the job, and this can only happen once you start using your keyboard more.

What are Application Launchers?
Application Launcher is a fancy term for a simple tool - a piece of software that stays in the background and, when you type a given key combination, gets up and helps you find the right application, file or action you want to execute. Instead of moving your mouse around, aiming and clicking at things, you just type a shortcut (usually Ctrl+Space), start typing the name of the program you want to execute and hit Enter. Simple and fast, and takes a tenth of the time you’d have needed to search the shortcut with your mouse.

Neat trick, but what’s the software I should use?
There are, as always, free pieces of software and for-money ones that do the trick. Some of them do more, some do less, but for the simple task of launching apps, the free ones will do:

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Like most knowledge workers you probably spend more time in front of my computer than in the living room (that is if you’re not a work-from-home freelancer as I am - in this case you spend ALL of your time in front of your computer… ). Cleaning up your desktop becomes even more important than housecleaning. After all, you can hire someone to clean out the mess in your living room, but it’s you and only you who can clean, sort and organize your hard drive and computer folders.

One of the most obscure parts of the GTD-like productivity systems is the “Research” part. David Allen’s method calls it the Collect bucket - the place where you collect anything that’s of interest for your current or future projects. He even describes a physical way to do it - the “tickler file” - mostly known as the 43 Folders technique. I won’t go into further details on that, as it seems a pretty nice way to organize your physical paperwork.

But having 43 Folders just for organizing files becomes extremely complicated to use on your computer. We need something different.

I introduce you to the way I’ve recently reorganized folders on my Mac OS X MacBook, in a manner that maximizes my productivity, making my daily information collection process a simple, organized and efficient one. This kind of setup can be made on any computer’s desktop(Windows or Linux) - it’s the method that matters, not the design.

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