MPU 75: Remote Access

Mac Power Users Episode 75, Remote Access, is live. This show explains how to remotely control Macs and PCs with your various bits of Apple technology. Get the episode over at 5by5. Also, don’t forget to subscribe in iTunes.

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Shrink and Expand Save Dialog

Command + “=”

I never new that.

Mac Floppy

Stephen Hackett turned me on to this fun website looking at the original Mac. I had to smile at the post with the original control panel. I can identify the very moment that my love of the Macintosh began. Having used a succession computers including the Radio Shack Color Computer, Atari 800, and then Apple II, I sat down at an original Mac and saw this control panel. The graphical user interface blew my mind. Also, I loved the whimsy of it. When I saw the tortoise and the hare in the control panel, I was hooked. I still am.

Hazel 3.0? Yes please.

One of my all-time favorite Mac utilities, Hazel just turned 3.0. I’ve been using the beta for several months and today I’m paying my $10 upgrade fee gladly. ($25 for a new license is also a steal.)

Paul, not surprisingly, did an amazing job with this update with useful new actions like import into Aperture and syncing. Yes, you can one-way sync a file or folder to another location with a Hazel action. (Think about that for a few moments.) The Rule preview feature gives a popover to display a file’s attributes with highlighted attributes for the matching rule. Perhaps my favorite improvement is nested rules letting you combine “and”, “or”, and “not” to automate in new and smarter ways.

The user interface also looks sharper and is more useful. Conditions and actions are now draggable/reorderable. Finally, he built everything around a new engine that makes it all even more efficient.

Here is a page showing off some of the changes. Also, if you are new to Hazel, go listen to the now dated MPU show about it. Perhaps we’ll need to do a new show.

iPad AirPlay to a Mac with Reflection

Wow. A new Mac app that turns your Mac into an AirPlay receiver. That’s right. You can wirelessly display your iOS screen on your Mac. A game changer. In initial testing, it looks pretty good but I’m not sure yet if it is a replacement for a video capture device in production work.

via TUAW

iThoughtsHD Update

As much as I like iThoughtsHD, I’ve never been happy with its color options. The latest update fixes that with several useful palettes, including solarized. A damn useful app just got pretty. As an aside, the image is my original pass at a mindmap for my Macworld Scrivener article, which I’m told will be in the new print edition shipping this week. Yay.

Moom 2.4

Chained commands. My love of this window resizing utility blooms like flowers in spring.

More on DuckDuckGo

It’s been about a month since I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo for my search engine. This far in, I’ve found the search results to be slightly slower (not enough to matter) and sometimes different from Google’s. In some case different means worse. In other cases, different means better. It feels like a wash to me.

Overall, I’m glad to have made the switch and don’t see myself going back. I like the clean way DuckDuckGo presents results and did I mention DuckDuckGo’s privacy policy?

I’ve picked up a few tips since my last entry on the subject:

• Use “ddg” as your trigger in LaunchBar or Alfred. It is easier to type than “duck”.
• Make a TextExpander snippet: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=. Fire that off in your browser’s URL bar and start typing your search. I got that tip from Jason Rehmus, via Steven Hackett.

iCal 2 Week View

It always made me crazy how iCal can’t show a two-week view. With a one line terminal command, you can fix that.