Showing posts tagged mac os x

The iOS-ification Of Apple’s Ecosystem

Make List View Stacks Work Like Grid View Stacks

Hacked List View in Dock

This trick is really nice. It makes the list view (that’s used in Stacks) more useful.

I also think the list becomes more beautiful. There’s more space, and icons look great to the left in the list.

In list view, you’re able to scroll through a lot of files quickly. Thanks to this trick, you can also navigate to another folder without leaving the Stack — you just keep drilling down as many subfolders as you’d like (just like in Grid view).

This is not possible in Snow Leopard per default — unless you write the command below. So, open your Terminal and write this:

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES

Once you’ve done this, restart the Dock for changes to take effect.

The best way to do this is by writing killall Dock in the Terminal.

It takes a couple of seconds. After that, you’ll notice that your Stacks lists just got a whole lot more useful.

Swatch

“Millions of colors in your menu bar.”

Seems like a great color picker.

Droplr

Slick. Looks attractive. The file download pages have a clean, modern and professional look.

However, I don’t see why you’d need Droplr if you’re already a Dropbox user.

And then there’s CloudApp. All these apps are excellent at sharing photos, documents and other files.

JustNotes – selfcoded

This is a wonderful note-taking application. It’s beautiful, the user interface is gorgeous and the features are great.

Most importantly, it syncs with Simplenote (which I use all the time on my iPhone to take notes).

The Simplenote service is free to use (premium plans available). And JustNotes is free, too. (I’d gladly pay for it.)

The syncing works flawlessly between JustNotes and Simplenote. I’d wish that you could take good syncing for granted, but obviously it’s harder to do than you’d expect. (Just take a look at Apple’s MobileMe and its iDisk for a problematic example.)

On the other hand, Dropbox is a perfect example of excellent syncing. The syncing is perfect, no matter how many files you sync between multiple devices at once.

JustNotes has an easier task than Dropbox — keeping simple text files in sync — but it does a great job.

Other Simplenotes Clients

If you don’t like JustNotes as much as I do, you’d might want to take a look at some other Mac OS X clients:

Show Full Path in Finder

This one will show the full Unix file path in Finder (rather than just the name of the current folder). I find this invaluable.

For example, two folders can be named the same thing, even though they are two completely different folders, with different content.

Open a Terminal window, and write the following two lines: 

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES 
killall Finder

The last row will restart Finder. To revert the changes, do the same thing as above, but change “YES” to “NO”. Hit Enter and killall Finder one more time.

Make Hidden Apps Transparent on Mac OS X

I love this hack, and I always miss it on a newly installed Mac.

This code snippet makes the icons of hidden applications semi-transparent. This makes it a lot easier to understand which applications are currently hidden.

The change will be visible in the Dock and in the fast app switcher (the thing shown when hitting cmd + tab).

Open Terminal and write these two lines:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES
killall Dock

That’s it.

To revert the changes, write the code above but change “YES” to “NO”.