OS X

Coda is awesome. Here's a quick way to make it awesomer: invisible visible invisible characters!

Coda lets you show all the newlines, tabs and spaces, which comes in handy. But the default settings are pretty distracting. If you change the invisible character display color to match the background, they only show up when you select text.

First do this:

Then change this:

And rock out like this:

I've been using Pukka—a Mac client for Delicious—for a bit, and it's pretty great. (More on that later, it's already the subject of a half-finished Technophobe review). I like it enough that I recommended it to a friend today:

bobthecow: @storiesofmac Pukka is pretty okay (Delicious + Mac)

about 2 hours ago

Sun Jul 19 02:05:23 +0000 2009

And what do you know, Justin Miller (the creator of Pukka) noticed:

incanus77: @bobthecow Any way I can make Pukka 'really ok'? :-)

about an hour ago

Sun Jul 19 02:52:12 +0000 2009

So here, other Justin, are a couple of ways to make Pukka great:

• Pre-populate the page title when dragging a URL into Pukka for bookmarking: I was actually surprised that it didn’t already work like this.

• Popular tags support: I still use the official Yahoo plugin in Firefox to do the majority of my bookmarking because of this one feature. I will drag a page from Safari to Firefox and bookmark it there just so I don’t have to think up all the tags to use.

• Global keyboard shortcuts for bookmarking: I'm not sure how this one would work, but I’d like to be able to bookmark via hotkey in any browser. It might need to be an input manager or a set of browser plugins. Think 1Password for bookmarks.

• Bonus: if you can work it into the plugin/input manager goodness, I love being able to select a paragraph from the site to use for my Delicious description text.

• Real Spotlight integration: For this it might make sense to stash the local bookmark cache as a folder full of webclips, and make sure they’re named, tagged, and commented in a Spotlight friendly way.

You're well on your way, and I'd love to see Pukka get even better.

Every once in a while someone asks me what cool software they should install on their computer. Invariably, I say something like "check out the OS X tag on my blog."

Apparently I've been lying to everyone, because I looked at the software categories on my blog the other day and realized that I haven't been posting much there at all. So I decided to do something about it:

Introducing Technophobe, the future home of my tech rants and recommendations. I've started out with a really sweet Mac menu extra called Jumpcut.

More features, more reviews, more hotness coming soon. Check back for a regular dose of nifty applications. Subscribe to the site feeds. Enjoy :)

One of the reasons I like OS X is the consistent user interface. Apple has well established guidelines that lay out how an application should look and feel, and for the most part developers adhere to this. And those who don't are usually mocked....

So you can imagine how excited I was when the Firefox team announced that they would be releasing operating system targeted themes for Firefox 3. Under Windows XP, it would have XP-like styling, Firefox for Vista takes cues from native Vista apps, and on a Mac, Firefox 3 looks like it belongs:

Screen grabs, Del.icio.us Bookmarks hotness, and custom Mac OS X styles after the jump.

This post goes out to all my fellow Mac mouse haters:

Mac OS X doesn't always get along with my Logitech wireless mouse. The main symptom is weirdness when trying to hover over menus or hover over the dock… basically, it doesn't. The only way to get a "hover" style action is to right click where I want to hover. Which is a problem.

At first it looks like Apple operating system quirkiness, but rebooting the compy won't fix it. Poking the "connect" button won't fix it. If you're having the same problem as me, try unplugging the wireless receiver for a couple of seconds and plugging it back in.

It isn't enough to unplug the hub that the receiver is plugged into, most likely because my hub is powered. But unplugging the receiver kicks it in the pants and everything starts working again.

A few weeks ago I purchased the MacHeist II bundle, a program that hooks up Mac users with great deals on software and earns money for charity in the process... This year they donated almost half a million dollars. I've got no beef with MacHeist. I do, however, have a problem with Yazsoft, the vendors of Speed Download, which was included in the MacHeist bundle.

You see, Speed Download, like most applications, automatically checks for updates. In fact, Speed Download installs them automatically as well. This worked out just fine until version 5.0 was released. Right on cue, Speed Download installed the update and popped up a notification that I should relaunch the application.

The difference between this and previous updates is that version 5.0 was not included in the license I purchased. Without warning, without confirmation, Speed Download "updated" itself to a 21 day trial version. I entered the registration information, which I purchased less than three weeks ago as part of MacHeist. But since this update was from version 4 to 5.0, my old license was no good.

i've been using leopard for a couple of weeks now. and i don't know about you, but i have a hard time telling at a glance which stack is which... a handful of blogs have posted about the japanese blogger (note: blog is all in japanese) who hooked us up with really spiffy custom stack overlays. now the overlays are available in color, and there are a ton more of them.

the latest version of the overlay icons come pre-tweaked, so they'll work whether you sort by name, by "date modified", or by "date created". but my downloads stack is sorted by "date added", and the it turns out that "date added" is tough to spoof with timestamps.

a couple of blogs have posted applescript or automator solutions, but none of them were quite slick enough for me. so here's my shot at it:

1. download the custom stack overlays, choose some you like, and add them to your stacks. if you have the old overlays already, make sure to grab the new ones for this to work.
2. download and unzip my refresh stack overlays script.
3. copy it to /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts
4. add the new folder action to any folder you want—i use it on "ToDo" and "Downloads". (instructions for adding folder actions here).
5. whenever a file is added to your folder, the stack overlay will move to the front.