mac

BBEdit 10.0 is finally available in the App Store now. Great upgrade to a long time friend of the Mac. It's a free upgrade if you bought the previous version in the App Store too.

If you have a Magic Trackpad and 3-finger window drag enabled, try dragging a window across your screen (given it some velocity) and lift up one finger. The window will slowly glide to a stop rather than abruptly sticking to window. It feels very natural. I wonder if this is foreshadowing (a.k.a testing) of new interface effects meant to extend the idea of a physical desktop environment. The effect feels right at home to me.

Another simple but incredibly enjoyable Keyboard Maestro macro. There are two predictable things about my daily workflow. At the end of the day, my Mac desktop will be filled with open windows of all kinds. At the beginning of the day I will be annoyed by all of the open windows blocking my view of OmniFocus, BusyCal and Mail. I created a simple Keyboard Maestro macro to rectify #2.

Curio I’ve been using Curio from Zengobi for several years. I’ve found it to be one of the best ways to take notes on the Mac. It’s incredibly flexible and easy to use. The application has some nice features like built-in Evernote search and import, PDF import, and pasting of audio and video. Curio also is one of the easiest ways to make gorgeous mind maps. Whenever I sit down at my Mac to take some serious notes I use Curio as a sort of TrapperKeeper notebook.

I’m serious about backup.[1] Here’s my current setup: Primary Machine I have an iMac (from early 2011) with an internal 256GB SSD boot drive and an internal 2TB spinning platter secondary drive. The secondary drive contains my iTunes, Photo and Documents folders. My Dropbox folder is also on the secondary drive so that the SSD is really just for the OS and Applications. Secondary Machines I use a Mac Mini (from early 2010) as a server for FTP, WebDAV and iTunes.

After upgrading to Lion I quickly discovered that many of my custom macros that depend on Python were broken. A busy schedule meant that I put off researching the issue. Fortunately DrDrang’s recent post shed some light on the issue. It appears that Lion uses a newer version of Python (2.7) and also has a bit more restrictions when installing packages. If you want to get your python customizations back you’ll need to perform some maintenance.

Nice solution from Don McAllister if you already upgraded to Lion but now want to make a USB installer.

Great series of essays by Dr. Drang that cover his evolution of writing everything in plain text files. His latest post discusses BBEdit and Textmate.

Nice round-up of the new features in AppleScript for Lion. Looks like Cocoa/ObjC is more exposed to AppleScript than ever. That includes a new template for Cocoa-AppleScript applets. I'm going to have some fun with this.

The Mac App Store (AppStore or App Store) just notified me that there was an update for OmniOutliner Pro. Sure enough the Omni guys have implemented Lion's Auto Save, Versioning, Full Screen and Resume functions in OO. Now all I need is 10.7. It's pretty great that applications like my beloved OmniOutliner will be ready with Lion specific features on day one.