After spending hours trying to find the fix that does the trick (and, man, did I try them all: removed spotlight indexing from my HDD, removed launchpad db files, removed various folders and files), countless Trash emptied and reboots, I finally found the fix.

Here’s what worked for me (via stackexchange):
I opened up Terminal.app, pasted the line below, then pressed Enter:

A few minutes of waiting, and when it was done I launched the Mac App Store app and.. miracle: I was able to, once again, download my favorite app from the store.

I hope this will save a few hours for you as well

To get you sorted in this digital mess, we present to you the 5 most important tools you can use to de-clutter your digital existence Evernote, Simplenote, Dropbox, Push the Page and Instapaper:

1. Evernote

   I have already told you about Evernote and how I’ve been trying to use it as a digital information manager, gathering my links, snippets, texts and quick notes. While the software’s user interface is not impressive, one can’t deny that Evernote is a real powerhorse, able to store pretty much everything you send to it, and even automatically tag the images/photos to allow for text search inside them. The main advantage of using Evernote is as a powerful sync tool of information files – be they text notes, web snippets, photos or other documents. The clients for iPhone / iPad / Android will sync these, so you can always access your data on the go.

2. 
   

   Simplenote

   Whenever I mention Evernote on my Twitter posts, there are always some replies like “Yeah.. Evernote is nice.. but I kind of prefer Simplenote“. Unlike Evernote, Simplenote only lets you edit and sync text notes, but does so with style and a fast minimalist user interface. It only has a web interface(a great one) and clients for iPhone & iPad (there are no official desktop clients), but there are 3rd party apps that fill the need(such as the highly recommended free editor Notational Velocity)

3. 
   

   Dropbox

   You surely remember Dropbox from my previous articles. The ease of use of the desktop client and the free official clients for iPhone & iPad make it a perfect tool to keep most things in sync across your various devices – so if you save a file from your computer, you’ll be able to retrieve it afterwards from your iDevice. If you want it the other way around, there are many apps with Dropbox integration to help you: for instance the free PlainText iPhone/iPad text editor or the $0.99 iPad text editor Clean Writer (developed by yours truly) that will save your text notes directly to your Dropbox account.

4. Push the Page

   To be honest, this is the real reason why I wrote this post in the first place. You might have heard of all these other apps, but chances are you haven’t yet heard about Push the Page. It is an amazing free app that does one simple thing.. but does it extremely well. Kind of the thing you didn’t know you missed until you see it. What Push the Page does is help you send, instantly, a link from your desktop to your iPhone or iPad.

   Let me explain this a bit.
   
   Imagine you are browsing the web on your computer, looking for a pasta recipe, which you want to cook tonight. When you finally find it, you usually have 3 options:
   1. you can take the laptop with you in the kitchen. But you probably don’t want to, ’cause there’s no place for it there, and it’s too risky anyways
   2. you write it down on paper, so you can take the paper with you. But it’s time consuming, and kind of beats the purpose of all the gadgets in the house
   3. or, you can open that web page on your iPhone or iPad, which are much more suited to help you in the kitchen(being smaller and more kitchen-proof than a laptop)
   In order to open that same web page on your iDevice, you used to have 3 ways : a. either type the url on the device to match the one on your computer, b. email yourself the link, or c. save the link in Evernote or Simplenote, open the Evernote/Simplenote clients on your device, sync, then finally click the url in the latest note.

   Push the Page brings a 4th, most direct variant: all you do is, on your computer’s browser, click on a bookmarklet and the page’s address is instantly sent to your iDevice. You’ll get a notification and tapping it will eventually load that page in the browser. Free, quick and painless. All you need is to set up an account on www.pushthepage.com, download the free Push the Page apps on all your devices, set them up and drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s Bookmarks bar. Easy peasy.

5. Instapaper

   Like its headline says, Instapaper saves interesting web pages for reading later. It’s more than a bookmarking tool, because it actually saves the web pages content, strips off advertising and clutter and magically saves the web article’s actual content, so that you can read it later. What’s best is that there’s a free iPhone client app (or a $4.99 iPhone+iPad universal app) that will retrieve these articles from your account, for you, so you can read them even offline, using your favorite iDevice. I can’t recommend Instapaper enough, and I think it’s probably the greatest web-related invention since the RSS reader. But that’s just my opinion.

Enabling screen locking is pretty easy, although hidden where you leaste expected it. Here’s how it’s done:

You’ll need to open up Keychain Access, a utility app that comes preinstalled on your Mac and can be found inside the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Once there, you’ll open up the Preferences menu (press ⌘, or as the submenu of Keychain Access menu). In the General tab, make sure the checkbox ‘Show Status in Menu Bar’ is checked. A tiny lock icon will appear in the menu, somewhere on the right. Clicking on it will reveal the long awaited option: Lock Screen.

PS. Make sure you know your mac password before clicking on it, because only those who know it will be able to unlock the computer.

1. Download Calibre, a free powerful army swiss-knife on all things ebook. Calibre has conversion tools, ebook library management and even a desktop ebook reader. What it doesn’t have is a UI that doesn’t make you want to scratch the screen with your fingernails. Still, one heck of an app, one that you can easily use to convert most document formats into most ebook formats. Word to epub, pdf to kindle, etc. You name it, and Calibre probably has it.
2. Download this set of Calibre plugins(and hurry, who knows how long they’ll stay online) from this address. Unzip the archive.
3. In the Calibre app go to Preferences page(the rightmost icon), then to Plugins(in the Advanced section), then select Add a new plugin and chose, one by one, the 5 plugins from the archive you unzipped in the previous step.
4. Now, configure each plugin (click Customize for the plugins in the File Plugins section), as follows:(copied from the Apprentice Alf’s Blog page):
   • for DRM’ed Mobipocket ebooks you must enter the PID you entered on the retailer’s web site, or the PID of your installation of Mobipocket Reader into the customisation field of the K4MobiDeDRM plugin. The PID will be ten numbers and letters, with * or $ as the eighth character. If you have more than one PID, enter them separated by commas
   • for Amazon Kindle ebooks that were downloaded to your Kindle, you must enter your Kindle’s serial number into the customisation field of the K4MobiDeDRM plugin. If you have already entered a PID there, add the Kindle serial number as well, separating it from the PID with a comma.
   • for Amazon Kindle ebooks that were downloaded to the copy of Kindle for Mac or Kindle for PC that was installed on this computer, you do not need to add anything extra into the customisation fields.
   • for ePub or PDF ebooks that can be read in Adobe Digital Editions, you do not need to add anything extra into the customisation fields.
   • for Nook and all ePub ebooks from Barnes and Noble, you must enter your name and full credit card number into the customisation field of the Ignoble Epub DeDRM plugin. The name and credit card number should be the ones set as part of the Credit Card unlock code on your Nook Library page. Separate the name from the number with a comma and do not put any spaces in the card number or around the comma. For more details, you can check out the related README file from the tools folder you’ve unzipped way above.
   • for eReader ebooks from Barnes and Noble or Fictionwise, you must enter your name and the last 8 digits of your credit card number into the customisation field of the eReader PDB 2 PML plugin. Again, the name and credit card number must be the ones entered at your ebook retailer’s website as the DRM key/Unlock code.
5. Now, all you need to do is to import your protected ebooks into Calibre, and the DRM will be removed. The plugins ONLY remove the DRM when the ebooks are imported, so if your ebooks have already been imported into calibre you will need to remove them and import them again.

Attention! EPub ebooks bought from Apple iBooks or Microsoft LIT ebooks can’t, for now, be hacked by Calibre.

**Warning/Disclaimer! This blog’s author is not responsible for any damage, lost or other kinds of problems caused by this article. The responsibility of using the above information lies only on the reader. **
foto credits: kodomut

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.

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)!

First of all, download SIMBL – SIMBL (SIMple Bundle Loader) – pronounced like “symbol” or “cymbal” – is a nifty app that enables hacks and plugins into OSX apps that don’t normally support them. The latest (Leopard and Snow Leopard version) can be downloaded directly from this link. A list of the most popular popular SIMBL plugins is available here.
Like you already guessed, we’ll get ourselves a couple of SIMBL plugins.

• My favorite is called SizeWell. It’s free, easy to download, install and setup, and adds a simple to use System Preferences pane. What it does? It allows you to configure how you’ll resize and zoom the windows on your Mac. For instance, by holding down CMD when maximizing the window, it will grow to the maximum screen size(except for the MenuBar and the Dock), which is probably what you want like 90% of the time and the default behavior that Windows has for maximizing windows(a lame pun, sorry). You can also configure maximizing on just half of the screen(left or right or top or bottom), which is a dream come true for most multitaskers who don’t want to spend $14 on the nice Divvy utility.
  
• If you’re really craving for fullscreen, SizeWell won’t be enough for you. Instead (or, better yet, in addition to it), you’ll need Megazoomer, the latest version of which can be downloaded from here. After unzipping the downloaded archive, you’ll need to copy the included megazoomer.bundle to the /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/ folder so that SIMBL can use it. Once you do this, you can start toggling full-screen mode for your current windows by simply pressing CMD+Enter (or look in the Menu at the Window submenu for the newly-added Mega Zoom menu entry). Really awesome stuff in my opinion, wouldn’t you agree?
  

That’s it. One simple app and two plugins to install, and your operating system just got 50% better. My regret? That I spent 4 years on the Mac not knowing about them.

[Disclaimer/warning/footprint:
Like all OSX hacks, SIMBL and its plugins are not supported by Apple(obviously, since they only support their own apps) and might stop working at some point in the future. Also, we don't make any guarantees that they will work for your system. They should, but just don't sue me if they fail for your particular machine.]