Toluu

PragMactic OS-Xer

MenuMeters & TextDecember 8 2008

Lots of OS X geeks I know use Menu Meters to monitor the goings on for their machines. But here's a nuance that remembered last week, watching one of my colleagues give a presentation. I can't remember exactly where I heard (overheard?) this, but apparently it's quite relatively expensive to paint letters and numbers on the task area of the menu bar as opposed to graphics. Not sure why, and it may just be a rumor, but in any case, I tend to keep the graphical version of the CPU meters up, not the numeric one, just in case.

Open in Terminal (4 Ways)November 19 2008

One of the cool little helpers I talk about in The Productive Programmer is "Command Prompt Here" or "Bash Here": little context menu items for Windows that allow you to select a folder in Explorer, right click, and open a command prompt (or bash shell, if you are using Cygwin) at that location. Someone recently asked me if you can do this on the Mac, and it turns out you can, in a surprisingly large number of ways.

The first way leverages Automator to create a little script that makes an Automator plug-in for Finder. This trick appears here. The cool thing about this tip is the stuff it teaches about building Finder extension via Automator, which is a pretty cool subject unto itself. However, the bad thing about the final solution proffered by this tip is the location where the context menu appears: 2 levels down in the right-click menu, under Automator. Too much clicking.

Not being satisfied with the above, I found an alternative, which creates a toolbar icon at the top of Finder that opens the current selected folder (or the folder of the currently selected file) when you click on it. This trick appears here. The only downside of this version is the number of windows it spawns: one per request, instead of opening new tabs (it was created before Terminal supported tabs

The New Backup StrategyAugust 19 2008

Before Leopard, I had a specific backup strategy for both my volatile content (things like source code, documents, etc) and my entire hard drive, which was a snapshot backup. The volatile documents solution was Subversion, kept on a remote, universally accessible machine. The snapshot backup was handled by SuperDuper, which backs up your entire drive in a bootable state, essentially creating a complete snapshot of your hard drive. A couple of problems reared up because of this setup.

1. I had to handle the "package" files (the ones created by Apple iWork, like Keynote and Numbers) files specially, because Subversion didn't like the way the applications managed the contents. Basically, I had to zip/unzip them for version control. This wasn't terrible (I automated the process to a large degree), but still a little annoying.
   
2. My Subversion repository was huge, because I had my entire Documents folder in it. However, most of the documents were there just so that I could have a backup, not because I wanted to version them. The only files I really versioned where the source files and related content.
   

The advent of Leopard and Time Machine changed my strategy. First, I separated out the Documents stuff for which I really only wanted backups and let Time Machine handle them. I put all my versionable files (like source files) in a new, much smaller Subversion repositor

Keyboard ZoomAugust 11 2008

This is a re-blog from Jack Dempsey, setting up a keyboard shortcut to Zoom.

This works well because almost all Mac applications include the Zoom menu item on the Window menu.

Thanks, Jack.

Quick BlankAugust 7 2008

This was left by Emilio as a comment to the Quick Sleep entry from before, but I'm afraid not enough people read the comments so I'm promoting it to full-blown entry.

The keychord CTRL-SHIFT-EJECT instantly blanks the screen, without invoking the screen saver. It's just instant blank. Note that it will not lock the screen if you have passwords turned on for the screen saver, it just makes the screen blank. Still, pretty cool.