May 2, 2008
monotask, reducing clutter, os x, tools
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Spirited Away is a free program that will autohide your inactive applications. If you haven’t used a program for a predetermined number of minutes, spirited away will hide the program — the icon will still be in the dock, but when you use expose, it won’t show up. I’m a big fan of spirited away, because it’s a gentle way to encourage you to monotask rather than multitask.
[Click here to download Spirited Away]
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Header photograph by peasap
March 25, 2008
os x, tools
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Monolingual is a program that strips your mac of the extra languages installed on it by default. How much space could this possibly take up? Lots. As sample results, monolingual cleared 3.4 gigs from my MacBook Air and 2.8 gigs from my wife’s powerbook.
[Click here to save space with Monolingual]
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Header photograph by Gaetan Lee
January 22, 2008
reducing clutter, os x
2 Comments
GrandPerspective is an OS X application that lets you visualize how much space files take up on your hard drive. This lets you quickly find what’s been hogging the most room and causing those scary ‘you are about to run out of space’ warning messages.
GrandPerspective is also helpful for teaching those less familiar with computers about the relative sizes of different kind of files. People like my mother, who will leave a 3Gb movie laying around, but spend hours deleting text files to try and free up space.
(The above photograph is from my own attempts to declutter my current laptop and see if I can squeeze down into 64Gb for the SSD on the new Macbook Air. Sadly, it looks like that won’t be an option.)
[Click here to download GrandPerspective]
November 27, 2007
os x, Getting Things Done
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The people at Macformat have made a handy little guide called ‘Get Things Done on Your Mac’ covering many of the apple-specific basics. A nice review for the already organized and great suggestions for those new to OS X, such as how to hide the dock, using spotlight, and the wonders of quicksilver.
[Click here to download ‘Get things done on Your Mac’]
[Click here to visit Macformat.co.uk]
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Photograph by arquera
November 22, 2007
os x
1 Comment
Oh the sad, sad caps lock key. It seems the desire to type solely in capitals never propelled it to fame. Now it sits on the side of the keyboard, alone, passive-aggressively tripping us when we enter passwords.
Here’s a tip on how to change that prime real estate into something more useful:
1) Open ‘system preferences’ and go to ‘keyboard & mouse’.
2) Click on ‘Modifier Key…’. (Note the ellipse hinting at the mystery that lies beyond)
3) This menu places caps lock, control, and option at your mercy. Using the drop boxes, you can switch their functions or even disable them at your whim. My recommendation is to leave the others alone, but remap caps lock to the more useful control key. Your emacs pinky will thank you.
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Header photograph by i_yudai