Finer Things in Mac

Photo edits made on iOS appear as reversible, non-destructive adjustments in Aperture

chartier — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:42:14 -0600

Photo edits made on iOS appear as reversible, non-destructive adjustments in Aperture:

iOS 5 brought some basic editing features to the Photos app. Select any photo, tap Edit, and you have options to rotate, enhance, remove red eyes, and crop. These changes are also reversible, as you can tap back into that photo at a later time and choose “revert to original.” Fortunately, Aperture, Apple’s pro-sumer photo editor and manager for the Mac, also recognizes these adjustments and even lets you roll them back.

How to follow just the Finer Topics you want

chartier — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:11:00 -0600

More and more readers are asking for ways to follow just the topics they want on Finer Things sites, and I’m happy to oblige!

Bookmark tags

One thing you can do is bookmark specific tags, because I try to stay pretty organized and thorough when tagging all posts and reader submissions. If you’re a nut for OS X icons, you can visit Finer Things in Mac, click any post tagged icons, and read about all the slick little stuff Apple and third-party developers pack into those tiny buggers.

Same goes for iPhone and iPad apps at Finer Things in iOS. A lot of people have asked for a way to follow just the iPhone since they don’t own an iPad, or vice versa since they don’t have an iPhone. That’s why I’m using the iPhone apps and iPad apps tags and added them to the main site navigation.

If you have ideas for more tags you’d like to see, let us know or submit a post.

Follow tag feeds

Every Tumblr site offers an RSS feed you can toss into Google Reader, Fever, and any other RSS/feed/newsreader. But a little-known trick of Tumblr is that it also does feeds for tags. Simply add /rss to the end of any tag URL to turn it into a feed you can follow. For example:

ios.finerthingsin.com/tagged/iphone-apps is a good tag to follow in your browser
ios.finerthingsin.com/tagged/iphone-apps/rss is that tag’s RSS feed

Naturally, the Finer Things sites are on Twitter and Facebook as well, so you can follow there too (find ‘Follow Us’ links in the sidebar)! Let us know if you have any more ideas for these sites, and thanks for reading!

Apple made some subtle changes to iconography in its OS X 10.7.3...

chartier — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:54:00 -0600

Apple made some subtle changes to iconography in its OS X 10.7.3 update. Nice catch from Marc Edwards of Bjango.

OS X also presents a new icon when you take a window screenshot with ⌘-⇧-4.

Collect your favorite apps, files in the Finder, Dock for easy access

chartier — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:37:48 -0600

OS X’s Finder makes it easy to collect your favorite stuff for easy access. Give these shortcuts a try:

⌘-T will add the currently selected app or file to the sidebar on the left
⌘-⇧-T will add apps to the left side of your Dock, and files to the right side

Note: if you don’t see a sidebar or a toolbar at the top of your Finder window, hit ⌘-⌥-T (View > Hide Toolbar) to show them.

You can also drag just about anything to the toolbar at the top of your Finder window, though I haven’t been able to find a keyboard shortcut for that.

Have you recently found yourself asking “boy, won’t...

chartier — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:12:00 -0600

Have you recently found yourself asking “boy, won’t someone make a Twitterrific-inspired theme for Alfred?”

Don Southard has granted your wish with two Twitterrific-inspired Alfred Themes—one dark, one light, at his site, Dirt.

Mobelux: Carousel Extension For Safari and Chrome

chartier — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:47:02 -0600

Mobelux: Carousel Extension For Safari and Chrome:

Mobelux has a new browser extension that lets you open Instagram photo links directly in Carousel, its slick Instagram client for Mac. Clever.

While playing a Genius Mix, you can’t see or do much with...

chartier — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:18:00 -0600

While playing a Genius Mix, you can’t see or do much with the song currently playing. You can’t even rate it; File > Rating is grayed out.

But if you hit Command-L (Controls > Go to Current Song), iTunes will show you the song in your library where you can add a rating and edit metadata. Hit Command-L again and you’ll be taken back to Genius Mixes.

For App Store apps, Quick Look shows the purchase date instead...

myfreeweb — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:32:00 -0600

For App Store apps, Quick Look shows the purchase date instead of Last Modified.

If playlists, artists, albums, and genres just don’t work...

chartier — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:35:05 -0600

If playlists, artists, albums, and genres just don’t work for your music management and sync style, iTunes lets you manually add individual songs to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. As long as your device is plugged into your computer or you’ve enabled the new WiFi sync feature, you can drag songs from your music library onto your device in the iTunes sidebar.

iTunes will keep track of all manually added songs at the very bottom of your device’s Music info tab, pictured here. This is also where you can remove those songs.

Note that iTunes has long allowed manually adding other media like movies, TV shows, and podcasts from their respective device info tabs.

Finer Things in Web: The website for Fantastical, a smart menu...

chartier — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:26:05 -0600

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Finer Things in Web:

The website for Fantastical, a smart menu bar calendar utility for the Mac, uses some clever animation to draw your attention to its interface and features.

Moom is a great utility from Many Tricks for managing your...

chartier — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:43:00 -0600

Moom is a great utility from Many Tricks for managing your windows. It adds a popover to the green “best fit” button in most windows, containing quick-access options for doing things like setting a window to take up the entire left or right half of your display.

It gets much more powerful, though, allowing you to quickly lay out windows to fit your workflow, save a bunch of windows as a “Snapshot” to use over and over, and even specify pixel dimensions and a display edge for a window. As you might expect, Moom also has healthy support for shortcuts. You can specify multiple actions like “Center” and “Move & Zoom,” then set a keyboard shortcut for quickly using that action on every window you want. Snapshots are also invited to the shortcut party.

I’ve used Moom for a couple months, and it quickly became one of the apps I have to install when setting up a fresh Mac. Moom is some of the best $5 you can spend on a utility.

Nice Lion Touch: Swipe for Dock Exposé

chartier — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:05:51 -0600

Nice Lion Touch: Swipe for Dock Exposé:

Steve Lyb discovered a handy multi-touch gesture for quickly triggering OS X’s Exposé feature to focus on the open windows of a specific app, instead of all open windows.

iTunes’ rental icon turns red when one of your rentals is...

armadus — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:43:44 -0600

iTunes’ rental icon turns red when one of your rentals is about to expire.

Alfred, the incredibly useful productivity utility from Running...

chartier — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:22:00 -0500

Customizing a Group in Alfred

Alfred's handy extensions

Alfred, the incredibly useful productivity utility from Running with Crayons, lets you create “Groups” for launching a bunch of apps and files all at once (the Powerpack add-on is required). Add everything you want to a list, give it a keyword, and call it up whenever you want your Mac to do more of your work for you.

Right-click a group in Alfred’s preferences and you can export it as a .alfredextension file to share with others. Running with Crayons now has an Extensions site for finding more extensions and sharing your creations.

Taking this idea one step further in version 1.0 which just went beta, Alfred’s upcoming Global Hotkeys feature allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to open Groups, collections of URLs, specific apps, toggling iTunes features, and more.

Alfred is free to use. Its Powerpack option, required for features mentioned here and many others, costs about $20.

Some of Apple's OS X icons Think Different

bensk — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:38:03 -0500

The text of “Here’s to the crazy ones” is on the Text Edit icon:

Some of it also appears on the new All My Files icon in Lion:

why do files open that I previously closed when I open applications from the launchpad

chartier — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:12:00 -0500

Restoring your open windows and documents is a new feature of Lion called Resume. Apple wanted to make it easier for you to get right back to what you were doing the last time you quit an app or shut down your Mac. But if you don’t like the feature, you have a couple options for getting around it or taking more control of how apps resume:

You can disable the Resume feature system-wide in the System Preferences > General pane, pictured below:

You can get in the habit of proactively closing documents and apps before you quit them or restart your Mac. In most apps, including browsers, Command-Option-W will close all open documents, windows, and tabs, but not quit the app (in Safari, it will close all tabs except the one you’re currently viewing). It’s a great way to quickly clear the slate and stop all that stuff from reopening next time. After that you can Command-Q to quit the app or leave it alone to reopen the next time you restart.
You can install a utility, such as RestoreMeNot, that gives you more control over how your Mac and apps behave with Lion’s Resume feature.

My imac is currently using OS X 10.4.11 as I did not get around to upgrading the operating system. I would like to upgrade it now is this still possible? The next software update seems to be no longer available and it appears I would have to go straight to snow leopard. It is has a 2.16 GHZ intel core 2 duo processor.

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:33:19 -0500

I think your best bet is to head down to an Apple Store with your iMac. I’ve heard that if you tell them you want to upgrade to Lion, they’ll install Snow Leopard for you, then walk you through buying Lion in the Mac App Store.

Alternatively, you might be able to find a Snow Leopard disc on eBay or Amazon.

Pre-order the "Steve Jobs" biography on iBooks and support Finer Things in Tech

chartier — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:40:00 -0500

Pre-order the "Steve Jobs" biography on iBooks and support Finer Things in Tech:

The only biography Steve Jobs ever authorized arrives on Monday. Jobs gave Walter Isaacson unprecedented access to his life, and judging from the teaser snippets they’ve released over the last couple of weeks, it sounds like this will be an incredible look into the life of a famously private genius.

If you feel like supporting the Finer Things in Tech, you can pre-order through this iBookstore link to send some good vibes my way. Of course, you can also order the hardcover and Kindle edition through Amazon, though the company unfortunately does not run its affiliate program in the state of Illinois.

Either way, thanks for reading and supporting The Finer Things in Tech.

iCloud.com displays a custom thumbnail icon in Safari’s...

chartier — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:16:00 -0500

iCloud.com displays a custom thumbnail icon in Safari’s Top Sites [Updated]

Does anyone know if this is powered by some kind of markup that any site can use to supply browsers with a custom thumbnail or icon for Top Sites-like views?

Update: Nik Fletcher describes how this works, as it involves an apparently undocumented snippet of JavaScript for serving up this preview image.

If you use Screen Sharing to control or observe one Mac from a...

chartier — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:35:06 -0500

If you use Screen Sharing to control or observe one Mac from a second Mac that has a smaller display, the first Mac’s desktop can look quite small (for example: Screen Sharing my 27-inch iMac from my 11-inch MacBook Air is an exercise in a lot of squinting). But Screen Sharing’s View > Turn Scaling Off/On option will let you get a 1:1 view of the target Mac no matter the size of your Screen Sharing window.

This makes it much easier to see what you’re doing and navigate the target Mac. Move your mouse near any border of the window to scroll around the target Mac’s display.