multitude

Apr 27 2009

Use Your Screen Corners

Brought to you by: James

Your Screen Corners can be used for a multitude of tasks. In the old days, we used to call these “Hot Corners”. They’re like Hot Keys, but a lot easier to get to. Unfortunately, you only have four.

Sure, you only have four corners, but there’s a lot you can do with four. To see what the Apple would like you to do with your Screen Corners, go to System Preferences/Dashboard & Exposé. Apple has been pretty stingy on the amount of available options, but they are all very useful.

Personally, I prefer to set my lower-left screen corner to “Start Screen Saver”. This is both in homage to the old After Dark days, and to quickly lock my screen if need be. My lower-right corner is set to “Dashboard”. This allows me to quickly access my most commonly used widgets such as Weather, Dictionary, Calculator, and Calendar. My upper-right corner is set to “All Windows”. This triggers Exposé to resize all windows, making all of them visible and easy to choose from, which is a great help when I’m working on more than five Photoshop documents at once. I haven’t set anything for the upper-left corner, and probably never will. I use the Apple Menu too often, and I don’t want to accidentally trigger anything each time I go near it.

If you think that your Screen Corners are limited to Apple’s suggestions, then you’re wrong. Take a look at CornerClick and Spanner. From opening applications to running AppleScripts, there’s a lot more for your Screen Corners to do. Enjoy!

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Mar 11 2009

New talking iPod shuffle released. Talks funny to PC users and annoys Apple earbud haters.

09ipodshuffle hand 20090311 191536 New talking iPod shuffle released. Talks funny to PC users and annoys Apple earbud haters.

Apple announced its newly designed iPod shuffle today. It’s nearly half of the size of the previous model and now it talks to you. The same VoiceOver technology found in Mac OS X now enables the iPod shuffle to speak your song titles, artists and playlist names (oh, yeah, you can have multiple playlists now!!).

This is now the third generation iPod shuffle and you’ll find all of its controls have moved from the device to the earphone cord. This means, with the press of a button on the supplied Apple earbuds, you can play, pause, adjust volume, switch playlists and hear the name of the song and artist. It also means if you’re one of the multitude of people that prefer not to use Apple earbuds with your iPod, you’re out of luck when it comes to the shuffle until third party adapters come along:

Apple says there will also be third-party adapters that will let you add a remote to your favorite headphones.

The new iPod shuffle comes in silver or black at a capacity of 4GB selling for USD$79. The new iPod shuffle requires a Mac with a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS X v10.4.11 or later and iTunes 8.1 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows Vista, Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 3) or later and iTunes 8.1.

As this is a Mac website, I don’t usually list Windows PC requirements in the posts I make here, but thought I would this time since I’m going to talk about an interesting difference in using the 3rd Gen iPod shuffle on a PC than on a Mac: it talks funny on a PC. Watch this guided tour and at about 3 minutes and 24 seconds in you’ll hear what VoiceOver sounds like for PC users.

You might have noticed the mention of iTunes 8.1 in the shuffle’s requirements. iTunes 8.1 was released today as well. Here’s its list of added features:

  • Supports syncing with iPod shuffle (3rd generation).
  • Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ.
  • Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows.
  • Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs.
  • Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods.
  • Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus.
  • Includes many accessibility improvements.
  • Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls.

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Aug 2 2007

Noodlesoft releases Hazel 2 with app zapping App Sweep feature

hazel 20070802 204825 Noodlesoft releases Hazel 2 with app zapping App Sweep featureIf you don’t already use Hazel, I encourage you to do so. I even did a segment about it for The Lab with Leo Laporte. Hazel is a housekeeper for your folders and files. Using a powerful rule engine, you can easily keep your files automatically organized. Hazel also features options for managing your Trash.

Noodlesoft has announced the availability of Hazel 2 for Mac OS X. Hazel 2 brings a multitude of new features to allow users to easily create more powerful workflows to organize their files. Users can now create rules to rename files or sort them into subfolders based on any file attribute. With Hazel’s improved Spotlight integration, rules can filter on any metadata in the system. Hazel’s new App Sweep feature allows Hazel to watch for thrown away applications and give the user the option to throw away its support files. Hazel 2 also provides Growl support so users can receive notifications on their desktop. Other improvements include a new menu bar icon and a preview feature.

Hazel 2 is a free upgrade for existing registered users. Hazel 2 is available for download now and features a free trial. Hazel 2 has a retail price of USD$21.95.

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