The Macbook / iMac pro tips thread

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by PeteLFan

I'm going to getting a new MacBook. Just trying to decide if ivwant high res glossy screen or anti glare and the difference?

Matte all the way. Can't stand using my desktop anymore after having the matte screen on the lappy.

Sent from my HTC Vision using Tapatalk

[Barnes]

Ctrl+Option+Command+8

You're welcome.

[Russic]

You know how on windows when you get a dialogue box and you can tab the highlight between the options and then press "enter" to make the action trigger? It took me about 3 years to figure out that on a Mac you need to go to system pref --> keyboard and check the "all controls" box. Finally, you use spacebar instead of enter to trigger the action.

[pylon]

Awesome tips so far.

I have another question. I keep hearing things in the background on my computer. It is a sound effect like someone kicking a sack full of potatoes. Kinda a wooshy thud. I keep killing whatever screen I am on to see what has updated, or changed, can never find it. What is this mystery noise.

[Flames Fan, Ph.D.]

Quicksilver. That is all.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Flames Fan, Ph.D.

Quicksilver. That is all.

I prefer Alfred, but either is a good choice.

[Russic]

I was a total quicksilver fanboy for a time, but alfred has officially won me over. You have to pay for it (to unlock to best features), but that just means it is better supported. The clipboard manager alone is worth $20 to me. How anybody works on any computer without a clipboard manager is beyond me.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by Russic

I was a total quicksilver fanboy for a time, but alfred has officially won me over. You have to pay for it (to unlock to best features), but that just means it is better supported. The clipboard manager alone is worth $20 to me. How anybody works on any computer without a clipboard manager is beyond me.

I'm sure it's probably pretty self-explanatory but what exactly can you do with the clipboard manager and what makes it worth $20?

[Russic]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

I'm sure it's probably pretty self-explanatory but what exactly can you do with the clipboard manager and what makes it worth $20?

Copying multiple items individually puts them in the clipboard and then hitting a hotkey of your choosing brings up a list of them, each with a corresponding key combo. You can either click them, arrow to them and hit enter, or input the key combo (control+# or command+#) to paste the item. Once you get the pattern down you can paste multiple without even really looking at the list.

Screen:


To keep the Alfred hints coming, you can also integrate it with a few apps. I use Fantastical on my mac to enter calendar items into ical a little faster than iCal generally can. As they work together I can now bring up alfred with a hot key and enter "f meeting with client tomorrow at 2". It'll bring up a little window for me to review the details and enter it into the calendar.

It also works very well with your contacts so if you just need a phone number or address you can bring up a name and copy any of their info to the clipboard.



I also enjoy using a hotkey to open a folder. If I'm working on something for a while and it's buried deep I'll give it a hot key and alfred will open it instantly for me.

One thing I find quicksilver did better was folder drilling. The way Alfred does it doesn't seem to click with me and I always find myself guessing. For that reason I don't use it as much.

Alfred is free but it's $20 to unlock the power pack which in my opinion is necessary.

[Flames Fan, Ph.D.]

Originally Posted by Russic

I use Fantastical on my mac to enter calendar items into ical a little faster than iCal generally can. As they work together I can now bring up alfred with a hot key and enter "f meeting with client tomorrow at 2". It'll bring up a little window for me to review the details and enter it into the calendar.

It also works very well with your contacts so if you just need a phone number or address you can bring up a name and copy any of their info to the clipboard.

It looks like we have similar setups.

Quicksilver or Alfred, I think the salient point is that having a launcher application that you can invoke without taking your fingers off the keyboard is a great boost to productivity.

I use Fantastical as well, mostly because it is in the menubar, is fast and not clunky. I'm having trouble with the whole iCal / iCloud thing (the Flames calendars either don't show or show up as delegates which aren't readily synced to the iPhone), but Fantastical interfaces very well with Google Calendar so that's that. I wish there was a Fantastical-type app to manage contacts.. Apple's skeuomorphic contacts (and calendar) is fugly, and I would really love something that can sit on my menubar and I can consolidate / easily edit the various contact lists I have.

My Omnifocus app very slightly overlaps with Fantastical, but they're obviously very different programs.

[MickMcGeough]

Lion runs much cleaner as a clean install

You need the App Store to download it (legally), but there's an ESD within the package contents of the "Install OSX Lion" app that you can write to a USB stick or DVD directly in Disk Utility. You just boot off that and do a clean installation.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Lion runs much cleaner as a clean install

You need the App Store to download it (legally), but there's an ESD within the package contents of the "Install OSX Lion" app that you can write to a USB stick or DVD directly in Disk Utility. You just boot off that and do a clean installation.

Actually, there's an even easier way to do this...do your standard App Store upgrade install, then boot into recovery mode via command-r at boot time. From there, you can wipe the disk, and do a fresh install. Note that it will download Lion again from the app store, but this way you don't need to burn anything.

I discovered this when I realized I had no optical media in my house, nor an 8 gig or larger flash drive. I'm almost 100% cloud these days

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Flames Fan, Ph.D.

My Omnifocus app very slightly overlaps with Fantastical, but they're obviously very different programs.

Do you use Alfred or QS, I couldn't tell from your post. Either way, Dirt Don (google him) has some pretty neat natural language scripts to interface Omnifocus with Alfred (that could also be adapted for QuickSilver quite easily, since its a shell script underneath).

Basically, it gives you Fantastical style Omnifocus data entry

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Actually, there's an even easier way to do this...do your standard App Store upgrade install, then boot into recovery mode via command-r at boot time. From there, you can wipe the disk, and do a fresh install. Note that it will download Lion again from the app store, but this way you don't need to burn anything.

I discovered this when I realized I had no optical media in my house, nor an 8 gig or larger flash drive. I'm almost 100% cloud these days

Ah that's interesting. I'd read that the online installation only worked for machines that came out after Lion. Didn't make much sense to me but I didn't test it. What machine did you do this on?

[silentsim]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Ah that's interesting. I'd read that the online installation only worked for machines that came out after Lion. Didn't make much sense to me but I didn't test it. What machine did you do this on?

Online installation is on the new machines- it does not ask for a Mac App Store account login where Lion was purchased (since the machine came with it preloaded).

On old machines with the Recovery partition it will ask for a login, where Lion was purchased. It then re-downloads it and installs it.

[CKPThunder]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Lion runs much cleaner as a clean install

You need the App Store to download it (legally), but there's an ESD within the package contents of the "Install OSX Lion" app that you can write to a USB stick or DVD directly in Disk Utility. You just boot off that and do a clean installation.

Are we talking about manually reinstalling all relevant apps after a disk wipe or can we get by, by using migration assistant?

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by CKPThunder

Are we talking about manually reinstalling all relevant apps after a disk wipe or can we get by, by using migration assistant?

If you've got your applications backed up via Time Machine you can migrate them over (or from another machine entirely), but yeah I'm talking about wiping the OS partition completely.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Ah that's interesting. I'd read that the online installation only worked for machines that came out after Lion. Didn't make much sense to me but I didn't test it. What machine did you do this on?

It'll work for any machine upgraded to Lion, because the Lion upgrade process creates the recovery partition. Inside the recovery environment, you actually supply your App Store credentials, and away it goes. With good bandwidth, its not that much slower than working with media.

I did it on a first-gen 13" MBP

[Russic]

Originally Posted by Flames Fan, Ph.D.

It looks like we have similar setups.

Quicksilver or Alfred, I think the salient point is that having a launcher application that you can invoke without taking your fingers off the keyboard is a great boost to productivity.

I use Fantastical as well, mostly because it is in the menubar, is fast and not clunky. I'm having trouble with the whole iCal / iCloud thing (the Flames calendars either don't show or show up as delegates which aren't readily synced to the iPhone), but Fantastical interfaces very well with Google Calendar so that's that. I wish there was a Fantastical-type app to manage contacts.. Apple's skeuomorphic contacts (and calendar) is fugly, and I would really love something that can sit on my menubar and I can consolidate / easily edit the various contact lists I have.

My Omnifocus app very slightly overlaps with Fantastical, but they're obviously very different programs.

I know for my flames calendar I had to open the calendar so it resided "on my mac", export it (which makes it a static calendar and not live), delete it out of iCal then re-import it into one of my existing cloud calendars. Seemed to do the trick.

As for the calendar being fugly there isn't much to do but you can get it back to the old silver way. Pretty straight forward: http://www.cultofmac.com/106596/how-...d-before-lion/