Hawk Wings » Mac OS X

ExposÃ©’s built-in window switcher

Tim Gaden — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 11:03:13 +0000

Did you know that ExposÃ© has a built-in window switcher?

I didn’t. The details are buried down at the bottom of Apple’s ExposÃ© web page where I missed it.

Activate ExposÃ© and then hit the Tab key. It will bring all the active windows to the front app by app.

Here it is helping me to choose which Safari window to jump to:

How useful this is to you will depend, I guess, on your workflow, whether the normal âŒ˜-Tab is enough for you and whether or not you already use Peter Maurer’s excellent Witch window switching app:

Still, clever! apple, expose, mac OS X, productivity, window switching, tipsSimilar Posts:

KeyCue: Keyboard Shortcut Reminder

Tim Gaden — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 13:24:45 +0000

Keyboard shortcuts are great time-savers, as everyone knows. The only problem: you need to remember them to save the time.

KeyCue is a nifty little app that will — at a single keystroke (by default the âŒ˜ key) — list all the available shortcuts for the currently active app, in this case Mail.app and iCal:

Press another modifier key and the screen will highlight the matching keys in yellow. Select the shortcut you couldn’t remember, and the screen disappears.

The app’s Preferences pane offers option to customise the keystroke which calls the app, the contents of the window and when the window should disappear.

KeyCue is shareware (USD 14.99) and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adam] productivity, keyboard shortcuts, keystrokes, time-saving, apple, Mac OS XSimilar Posts:

Ubuntu switcher takes a step back to Mac

Tim Gaden — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:22:07 +0000

A month ago Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim torched off a mini-firestorm in the blogosphere by announcing that they were switching away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu.

Hawk Wings covered it because of Mail.app’s central role in Mark Pilgrim’s decision to switch away.

Now Tim Bray is almost having second thoughts. He has posted a list of things that Mac OS X does better and things that Ubuntu does better. Mac OS X wins out in some important areas.

Mail.app and iCal don’t fare so well though:

I have so had it with Apple applications. A couple weeks with Thunderbird made it obvious I should have long since dumped Mail.app. Every week iCal gets slower and every week I hate it more. When I was on Ubuntu, I maintained my schedule by typing it into a plain-text document in Emacs, and that was so much less painful.

No love lost there!

Given that the Mac vs. Ubuntu debate got caught up in the unrelated “proprietary vs. open format” issue, perhaps the most interesting sentence in the post is this:

now that Iâ€™ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesnâ€™t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.

ubuntu, linux, mac OS X, Apple, Mac, mail.app, apple mail, ical, switchingSimilar Posts:

A double life: OS X, Windows, productivity, email

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:01:53 +0000

Martin Gordon raises an interesting question .

Now that his iMac boots into Windows as well as Mac OS X, and he needs to spend some time in both OSes, how can he get easy access to his email, calendar and other data in either OS?

His solution is to push everything to the Web, in particular to Gmail and Google Calendar. He no longer uses Gmail’s POP access to read his emails in Mail.app.

Finding a decent online platform-independent RSS reader is more of a challenge.

He seems aware of the problems that a Web 2.0-focussed life raises, access to your information without an Internet connection and data security/backups. Still he is going forward in faith, confident that they can be overcome.web 2.0, gmail, gcal, mail.app, apple mail, windows, bootcamp, mac os x Similar Posts:

Mac Attack Snack Pack

Tim Gaden — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:06:25 +0000

A tasty assortment of links on the recent security excitment, which also affects Mail.app.

Well-done

Secunia rates the Safari vulnerability as “extremely critical”, a rating the company gives when “successful exploitation does not normally require any interaction and exploits are in the wild.” Secunia is a provider of IT-security services.

Anti-virus company Intego has analysed the Leap-A (“Oompa-Loompa”) Trojan horse. After exhaustive testing, the company reported that “the best protection against this Trojan horse and its variants is Intego VirusBarrier X4″. CEO Laurent Marteau says, “it is clear that antivirus software on a Macintosh computer is as essential as wearing a seat belt in a car”.

Medium

ZDNet Australia carries an interview with Paul Ducklin, Sophos’ Asia-Pacific head of technology. ” “There is not a clear and present danger like there is with Windows but the same risks apply”, he says.

Eric Bangeman on Ars Technica thinks that “the malware may be less destructive, more difficult to find, and less prevalent than on other platforms. But it’s there, and it’s not going to go away.”

Medium-rare

At Wired, Leander Kahney is keeping his cool: “These Mac security holes are a storm in a teacup,” he says.

The Daring Fireball puts it all in perspective. John Gruber writes: “It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.”

Stephan Schwab is also fairly relaxed: “Of course this unwanted interference is annoying and it’s far better to let the user decide when to execute something, but it’s not a security threat of any magnitude.”Trojan horse, exploits, virus, mac OS X, security, apple, safari, scriptsSimilar Posts:

Finder’s Keepers

Tim Gaden — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:58:28 +0000

John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written a long and interesting post on Leopard and the future of Finder.

It’s worth reading.

He suggests:

Dissatisfaction with the Mac OS X Finder is endemic in the Mac user community, ranging from mild frustration to deep-seated rage.

Apple recently advertised for a software engineer to join the development team for Finder.

John, who is always interested in Finder, takes this as a sign of things to come and ponders what Finder’s keepers have in store for the future.

Along the way he touches on the history of Finder, muses on Leopard (10.5) and even Ocelot (10.6).

Recent switchers like me, who know of nothing before Panther, will find lots to learn. Old hands will no doubt find much to prompt their memories and provoke them.

[Thanks, Dan !] Similar Posts:

Will Windows Vista be Apple’s Trojan Horse?

Tim Gaden — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:31:32 +0000

Gavin Shearer (who works at Microsoft on Project Planning for Visio) has a cunning theory about Mac OS X and Windows compatibility.

He thinks that OS 10.5 Leopard will run Windows Vista “out of the box” easily, quickly and completely.

As he sees it, this is “the centerpiece of Apple’s strategy for the next 5 years”. It will be Cupertino’s Trojan Horse, leading to a doubling of Apple’s current market share in two years.

In the brave new Leopard world Windows XP will become the “new Classic“, he predicts.

Articles like this always cause a minor sh*t-storm. Be a part of it! You know you want to.Similar Posts:

Import emails from KMail into Apple Mail

Tim Gaden — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 12:11:34 +0000

A post on macOSXHints contains a useful shell script for Linux users switching to Mac OS X.

It converts the maildir hierarchy used by KMail into a standard mbox format which Mail.app can import.

UPDATE: (November, 2006) A better script is now available at macOSXHints.Similar Posts: