I really like the new iTunes 11 mini-player and it has replaced several apps that I’ve used for interface controls in the past.
The one trick that’s not available natively is a quick way to see and rate the currently playing track.1. I came up with a couple different ways to use Keyboard Maestro toward this end.
Macro Group Version This is the version I really prefer. It consists of a new macro group that shows a palette for one action when triggered with ⌘+Shift+R.
DEVONthink and DEVONagent can be difficult to explain. They are enormous and extremely powerful. I’ve been working on a draft of a tutorial for months. But DEVONtech has a great set of video tutorials that does a much better job than I could do.
These videos are free but they will likely cost a lot when you end up buying the apps. They are secret weapons for search and organization.
Rob Trew does wonderful things. This new trick is pretty compelling. It pulls completed tasks from OmniFocus into Day One. While I don’t use Day One for this kind of journaling I can see why someone would want to.
If you use OmniFocus or Folding Text, you probably want to subscribe to Rob’s GitHub. I’d be willing to bet that lots of cool stuff shows up there.
Some magic for AppleScript to parse JSON directly.
By way of Nik’s Crappy Blog
I’ve been noticing a stubborn external disk that just refused to eject. It finally frustrated me enough to do something about it. I turned to an old, old friend named What’s Keeping Me. This is little gem of an app that does one thing.
You search for a disk by name and it tells you what application or process is holding it up. It also works with stubborn trash files that are locked by an application and preventing the trash from being emptied.
What happens when you connect a bad USB hub or cable to a Thunderbolt Display? Lot’s of stuff. After setting up the display, I connected a FireWire 800 drive to the display1 and a USB3 drive to to the MacBook Pro.2
I experienced two kernel panics the first day. I also noticed that I could no longer restart while the Thunderbolt Display was connected. Finally, I started to notice that Spotlight services were not working properly.
I use a mix of iTunes and Pandora for most of my musical enjoyment. I’m a PandoraOne subscriber and used the PandoraOne Mac app, which was a terrible Adobe Air kludge. Even their web site requires Flash, like an animal. Now I use Pandabar.1
Pandabar runs as a menu bar application that exposes all of the Pandora functionality. There are the standard controls as well as option to rate the current song.
I’m a Moom guy, but I’m also a nerd about keyboard shortcuts. Slate is crazy and I love it for existing, even if I never have time to use it.
By way of an awesome nerd on Twitter.
This MailTags performance stuff is really worrying me. I don’t use a lot of tags, but I do love and rely on the ones I do use.
I’ve used Kaleidoscope for at least the past year.1 It’s a great file comparison tool. The latest version is in beta now and I’ve already purchased an upgrade.
Rather than do a review, I’ll just suggest that you set it up to work with Sublime Text and discover it for yourself.
First, get the SublimeFileDiff plugin (also available in package control). Then config the plugin to use the Kaleidoscope command line tool by uncommenting one line in the config file.
