March 18, 2010

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How-to: More Useful Quick Look Plug-ins

January 4, 2010 By hac Leave a Comment

In my last post I explained how to install Quick Look plug-ins and showed you three of my favorites. In this post I introduce three more as well as two great sites that have dozens more.

HetimaClipping

HetimaClipping is a Quick Look plug-in for text clipping and picture clipping files. You can make a text clipping file by selecting text from an application and dragging it onto the desktop or a Finder window. Picture clippings are a rarely used file type; you can create them by dragging album artwork from iTunes or a layer from Photoshop to the Finder.

Folder Quick Look Plug-in

The Folder Quick Look Plug-in, which Mike has already written a good description of here, is a very straightforward but useful plug-in. When this plug-in is installed, instead of seeing the useless blue folder icon that you normally do when using Quick Look on a folder, you will see a list of files contained in the folder. You also get to see the time you created each file, the time you last edited it and the size of the file.

FJNWebArchive

A convenient way to save a web page in Safari is as a WebArchive file, which is an exact copy of a webpage and any embedded media on it (in contrast to an HTML file which contains only text). FJNWebArchive is a Quick Look plug-in for WebArchive files.

There’s More

The plug-ins listed above and in my previous post are just a small selection of the huge variety available. For a more comprehensive list, see QuickLookPlugins.com and QLPlugins.com.

Filed Under How To's Tagged With Finder, plug-in, Quick Look

How-to: Expand Quick Look with Plug-ins

January 4, 2010 By hac 1 Comment

One of the biggest improvements to the Finder in Mac OS X Leopard was Quick Look. With Quick Look you can preview the contents of entire files just by tapping the spacebar. By default, Quick Look supports many popular image, audio and word processing formats, but the formats that come pre-installed are just the beginning of Quick Look’s functionality. By extending Quick Look with plug-ins you can add to the list of file formats that it will preview.

Suspicious Package

Suspicious Package lets you preview the contents of installer packages. When an installation requires more than just dragging an application to your Applications folder, software developers will commonly use an installer package, which you can identify by the file extension .pkg or .dpkg. Installer packages can put files anywhere on your computer and run just about any kind of command on your system, all without telling you what they’re doing. When you have Suspicious Package installed, you can see all the information about the installation through Quick Look.

Suspicious Package

Suspicious Package

BetterZip

Want to see what’s in a file archive without extracting it? The BetterZip Quick Look Generator lets you do just that. It supports 17 different archive formats, including the popular ZIP, TAR and SIT formats.

BetterZip

BetterZip

BitTorrent

A torrent file contains the information you need to start a download via BitTorrent, a popular way to download large files. Often it is hard to tell what files you will get from a torrent file without starting the download in a BitTorrent client. The BitTorrent Quick Look Generator lets you see all the useful information in a torrent file, including a list of files and their sizes.

Installation

You can identify a Quick Look plug-in by its extension: .qlgenerator. Follow these steps if you find yourself with a Quick Look plug-in and want to install it:

An installed plug-in

  1. Open either the Library folder that sits at the root of your hard drive, (to install the plug-in for all users) or the one inside your home folder (to install it for just your account).
  2. If the Library folder contains a folder called Quick Look, drag your plug-in onto it. If you can’t find a Quick Look folder, make one and then move your plug-in into it.

Newly installed plug-ins will take effect the next time you log in (Those comfortable with the Terminal application can run the command “qlmanage -r” to make them take effect immediately .)

Filed Under How To's Tagged With Finder, plug-in, QuickLook

Three Tips for Getting the Most out of the iPhone Keyboard

November 27, 2009 By hac 1 Comment

One of the things that makes the iPhone unique is its virtual keyboard. Although for the most part, it’s obvious how to use the keyboard, there are a few commonly unnoticed features that you can use to increase your typing (or your tapping) speed:

  1. Hold down a key for one second to see a list of variants of the letter as they appear in foreign alphabets. This works with the keys A, C, E, I, L, N, O, S, U and Z. This tip will save you the time it takes to switch between keyboards if you need to type in multiple languages.
  2. When in Safari, hold down the .com key for one second to see a list of nine more domain endings, including .net, .org, .edu, etc.
  3. The most obvious way of making a digit or punctuation mark on the keyboard is to tap the 123 button, tap the desired character, and then tap the 123 button to return to the regular keyboard. Instead of three taps, the same thing can be done in just one stroke! Press down on the 123 button, drag your finger to the character you want to type, then lift your finger off the keyboard.
Filed Under How To's, iPhone Tagged With iPhone, iPhone Keyboard, keyboard, touchscreen

How-To: SIMBL

September 18, 2009 By hac Leave a Comment

SIMBL (pronounced like “symbol”) is software for OS X that makes plug-ins possible in places where they wouldn’t normally be. Following are four extremely useful SIMBL plug-ins that I use: (See below for installation help.)

Megazoomer allows you to make just about any open window fullscreen. This is a very convenient if you want all of your focus on a particular document your working on, or if you want to browse the web with as big of a window as possible.

Afloat provides you with even more control over your windows. You can easily change the transparency of a window, make it stay above all other windows, pin it to the desktop, and do many other useful things with it.

Afloat lets you control the behavior of your windows.

Afloat lets you control the behavior of your windows.

Keywurl is a Safari plug-in that lets you define shortcuts you can type in the address bar. For example, you could put “wiki OS X” in the address bar to quickly go to the Wikipedia page on Mac OS X.

SafariStand is a multipurpose plug-in for Safari, which when installed is accessible through a “Stand” menu. SafariStand has too many features to list, but they cover everything from letting you preview your tabs in a sidebar to automatically changing the font size of certain sites to letting you download a flash video by command-clicking it.

Two of SafariStand's features: a tab shelf and the ability to download flash movies

Two of these plug-ins, Afloat and Keywurl, come with SIMBL included, which needs to be installed before any plug-ins will work. If you want to install a plug-in that does not come with SIMBL, and you haven’t installed it before, you need to download SIMBL here first.

Some SIMBL plug-ins (like Afloat) come with an installer to install themselves, but sometimes you will end up with just the plug-in, identifiable by its .bundle extension, and need to know where to put it. To install a plug-in, open Library?Application Support from your home folder, then create a folder named “SIMBL” and another folder inside SIMBL called “Plugins” (assuming those folders don’t already exist). Finally, you just need to drag the plug-in into the Plugins folder. Running applications won’t be affected by a newly installed plug-in until you close them and reopen them.

Filed Under How To's Tagged With plug-in, SIMBL

How-To: Save Power with Hibernation Mode

September 17, 2009 By hac Leave a Comment

Hibernation mode lets you stop your portable Mac from using any battery power while you aren’t using it, while retaining most of the convenience regular sleep mode. Even though your Mac powers off during hibernation, all of your open windows and applications are written to disk when it does—and then restored when you turn it back on. All Mac laptops since the release of the PowerBook G4 (including all MacBook models) ship with a hibernation feature, but it is disabled by default.

Luckily, there are several third-party applications that you can use to enable hibernation mode. Depending on how the speed and amount of flexibility you want, one of the following tools will probably suit your needs:

Deep Sleep shows up as a moon-shaped widget in your dashboard. You can configure the sleep mode that your Mac will enter when you click it, and the the sleep mode that your Mac will enter when you put it to sleep normally. (Note that the widget uses the term “Deep Sleep” instead of “hibernation”.)

The Deep Sleep widget lets you enter hibernation mode in one click.

The Deep Sleep widget lets you enter hibernation mode with one click.

SmartSleep adds an extra pane to System Preferences under the “Other” catagory when installed. It allows you to set the mode that your Mac enters every time you put it to sleep. It also includes an extra “smart sleep” mode which will automatically choose choose a sleep mode depending on your battery level.

SmartSleep lets you choose between four sleep modes.

SmartSleep lets you choose between four sleep modes.

Hibernation Tool is a minimal Applescript-based application with no options. Run it from the Finder or Dock, then click “OK” to enter hibernation. Most of the time it’s all I need to quickly go into hibernation mode.

Filed Under How To's Tagged With Deep Sleep, hibernate, hibernation, Hibernation Tool, iBook, MacBook, SmartSleep

How-To: Use Google Chrome on OS X

August 25, 2009 By hac Leave a Comment

Last week I explained how you can use the beta version of Safari 4 in order to have your tab bar at the top of your web browsing window. Another browser that has the same feature, plus a number of other ones unseen in other browsers, is Google Crome.

Chrome's minimal interface

Chrome's minimal interface on Leopard

By looking at the Google Chrome website it would seem that the browser is only available as a download for Windows, but contrary to what the site might make you think, it is not hard to download the OS X version of Chrome. To use it, you need to get the “developer release,” which is available for download from Google here. Although the release is really intended for developers, there’s no reason why most people couldn’t use it for their regular browsing.

But, since it is a developer release, you will notice that a few things aren’t completely finished. At this point in development the browser is slightly lacking in plug-ins. The current release doesn’t include:

  • support for Java applets
  • support for QuickTime movies
  • a built-in PDF reader

Two other drawbacks to be noted are that printing does not work at all, and many of the advanced preferences are disabled. But aside from that, this release of Chrome is extremely fast and very stable. It launches almost instantly, and it’s multi-process architecture means that a crash caused by one tab won’t affect the browser or any other tabs you have open.

Filed Under How To's

How-To: Use Safari 4 Beta

August 18, 2009 By hac Leave a Comment

Safari 4 Beta was introduced with some eye-catching new features, one of them being a merged tab bar and title bar similar to Google Chrome. In the next version of Safari, however, this feature disappeared. If you’d like to save a little bit of screen space or just like to see all of your tabs in the title bar, follow these steps to download and run Safari 4 Beta.

    Browsing the web with Safari 4 Beta

  1. Download Safari 4 Beta for Leopard from Apple here:
    http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/Safari4/061-4669.20090224.lpsaf/Safari4.0BetaLeo.dmg. If you simply wanted to replace your current version of Safari, you could run the installer from the disk image, but since you probably want to keep the current version installed as well, the following steps will tell you how to install the previous version non-destructively.
  2. Download Payload Extractor (free) here: http://hactheplanet.com/download/Payload Extractor 1.0.dmg. You can leave the application on the disk image if you don’t want to install it.
  3. Drag the Safari installation package (named Safari4.0BetaLeo.pkg) from the Safari 4 disk image onto the Payload Extractor application.
  4. Let Payload Extractor find and decompress the installation files (it will take about 25 seconds on a relatively new Mac). When it is done, it will show a list of all the files that would have been installed if you were to have installed the package normally.
  5. Drag Safari.app from Payload Extractor to your desktop or to an open Finder window:

    Dragging the old version of Safari to my desktop so I don't overwrite the newer one in my Applications folder

  6. Launch your new Safari application from the Finder. Your bookmarks, history, and preferences will automatically be shared between both versions of Safari, so you should have no problems switching back and forth.
Filed Under How To's Tagged With Safari 4 Beta

Learn how to use your Mac at Best Buy

March 29, 2009 By James Lundy 1 Comment

I have known for some time that if you are lucky enough to live close to an Apple retail store that you can go there and get lessons on how to use Apple products. I always thought that was a great thing if you happened to live near one. I do not.

This weekend I was shopping for some new electronics and stopped in at best buy. As i was browsing through the store I saw a large Apple display. I made the assumption it was a product promotion or something and kept shopping.

Well as I got closer to the display I realized there where several people gathered around and there was almost every Apple hardware product represented. I inquired a bit further and found that Best Buy was actually holding Apple training sessions for Mac users. They had a schedule of topics so you can plan to attend a subject of interest to you.

This day they where doing a fairly in depth training on how to use Garage Band.

I do not know if this is occurring at all best buy stores but if you live in an area where an Apple store is not close by then give Best Buy a try and you may be able to pick up some free training.

Filed Under How To's Tagged With .Mac, Apple Training, Best Buy

How To Install Apps on iPhone Without Jailbraking

March 25, 2009 By Cananito 2 Comments

Have you been thinking of jailbreaking your iPhone just because you want to try some of those Installer apps? Well now you can get those apps without jailbreaking it! Ripdev has this neat application for Mac (soon coming to windows): InstallerApp.

One of my favorite packages

One of my favorite packages

The price of this piece of software is $7, which is more than fair to me. Here are the 2 features I liked the most (taken from their site):

Support for Both Installing Solutions
Now you don’t have to make a choice between alternative installers, you can get the best of both worlds, Installer and Cydia — InstallerApp supports both! Just add a your favorite repository in the Preferences window and application will automatically recognize its type and will show the packages from that repository, so you’ll be able to download packages to your computer and install them to a USB-connnected iPhone.

Built-in Pusher
InstallerApp comes with free built-in Pusher — software that can install Installer.app on your iPhone without “jailbreaking” it, so you can use App Store and Installer simultaneously without putting your private data at risk. By default Pusher will not install a set of command-line utilities and unlock the system partition as it’s usually is done by some popular jailbreak solutions and may lead to additional instability of the iPhone software, but it will do so if that is what you want.

Anyway, It works with both iPhones, and as soon as a jailbreak comes out for the 3.0 firmware they’ll support it. iPod Touch is not supported, only iPhones

Filed Under How To's, Software, iPhone, iPhone Apps Tagged With Apps, cydia, installer, iPhone

How To: Edit Safari 4 Beta Top Sites

March 9, 2009 By Carlos Yanez 3 Comments

The new Safari 4 Beta has a lot of great and eye-catching features, one of them is Top Sites.

With the regular use of Safari, Top Sites will eventually learn the sites you visit and sort them into a cool looking wall of screenshots. By default, Safari will display Top Sites when you open a new tab (you can change that in Preferences > General) so you can have your favorites at one click.

Personally, i sensed the process slow and inaccurate so i decided to look for a way to add my Top Sites and lock them. I succeded.

To do it, browse to: User > Library > Safari > TopSites.plist and open the file, it will launch Property List Editor and show the following window:

Now you just have to double click each value to change it like the ones in the image and add your own Top Sites.

Let me know how this works out for you in the comments!

Filed Under How To's Tagged With Safari 4, Safari 4 Beta, Safari 4 Beta Top Sites
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