Instagram’s popularity is something that remains a big mystery to me (and Aayush, too) considering it only allows iPhone users to upload photos. The service has taken off like a rocket and the onus of bringing it to other platofrms has been put on third-party developers. Instadesk was the first app to take the leap for the Mac platform, but apps like Carousel and Instaview have also made their way onto OS X. Let’s take a look at these three Instagram apps for Mac today and see how they fare.

Instadesk– Meritorious but Humdrum

Instadesk was the first Instagram app for the Mac after they released an API for third-party developers. Taking full advantage of the API, Instadesk brings the whole Instagram experience to the Mac (except photo uploads, which the API doesn’t allow yet).

Unlike the other two apps we’re reviewing, features a conventional & typical native Mac app look and UI. It more-or-less reminds me of LittleSnapper with its placing of different sources in the Sidebar. The sidebar on the left gives you quick access to your own Feed, the Popular feed, Tags and News. The photos are laid out nicely in a grid layout against a dark background. Clicking on a photo opens it up in its glorious full-size, and information about the photo is displayed in a sidebar on the right this time. Here, you can view the Comments/Likes a photo as received, as well as leave your own comment. Icons in the toolbar up top allow you to Like, Share, Download or Open the photo in the browser. You can browse through the different photos using the arrow icons or even your keyboard.

Instadesk also has a nifty slideshow feature that runs fullscreen and gives you a bunch of transition options to choose from. My desktop setup consists of a 15″ MacBook Pro connected to a 24″ Apple Cinema Display, and Instadesk allows me to run the slideshow in my secondary display while the primary display is left for other apps. You can even ‘Like’ a photo if you want and quickly get back to where you were, without interrupting the slideshow.

Overall, while Instadesk is a great app, it feels a little unpolished to me. Having tried the other two apps in the post as well, I’d personally much prefer the custom, streamlined look of those apps than this native, full-blown look. So while Instadesk is functionally great, the UI keeps me from recommending it to anyone. It is available on the Mac App Store for $1.99.

Carousel – Instagram for Mac Swiss Knife

Carousel wasn’t the first Instagram client for Mac to hit the market but it surely is the best one yet. Carousel takes the traditional approach to display your Instgaram feed in a slick and elegant UI resembling a photo album. The interface is almost a no-brainer and using it is child’s play. There are five buttons along the bottom that toggle your view between the feed, favorites, your photos, likes and a search feature introduced in the first point update to the app. The search tab lets you lookup users or even tags which is bound to appease the twitterati.

Each image in the feed is presented with the person’s avatar, timestamp and the location, provided  geolocation was turned on while taking the picture. Tapping the avatar/username takes you to the user’s profile but the best part is how Carousel presents a feed of images geolocated around the same area when you click the location on an image. I almost jumped up in glee when I first stumbled upon this feature. One can Like a photo by pressing the heart or comment on it by tapping the word bubble. Both these actions bring up a iPad-like popover that shows people who’ve liked the photo or commented on it, but you can skip the popovers by using the option-click modifier.

Carousel supports multi-touch gestures and also features a number of keyboard shortcuts that further simplify the app’s usability. Photos can be viewed in Preview by hitting the spacebar. This also means you can use Preview’s full screen feature to make the photo occupy all of your screen’s real estate. Other than this, you can save the photos to your Mac by using the good old Command-S keyboard shortcut. Notifications are available in the form of an icon badge and Growl is also supported. One can set the auto-refresh interval in the settings but there’s a refresh button in the app that lets you manually do the job. The app ships with a bunch of themes to give a refreshing new look to your feed.

The latest update brought with it the ability to pin tags, locations and people to the search tab making it easier to keep track of things you like. Carousel does a brilliant job at bringing the perfect Instagram experience to the Mac which justifies the $4.99 price tag it comes attached with. It is only limited by the Instagram API which currently does not allow users to upload images from third-party applications.

Instaview – Peppy and Fun

Instaview is the latest kid on the block in the Instagram for Mac arena. It takes a whole new approach towards displaying the Instagram feed on your Mac. Instaview, rather than presenting photos from people you follow in a single feed, lets create multiple windows showing different Instagram streams. So what is an Instagram stream, you may ask? A stream can be constituted by any one of the following–a user’s photos, photos you’ve liked, popular photos, located based photos or photos with a hashtag.

The stream is encapsulated within a photo frame to give it an old-fashioned look. There are a bunch of frames to choose from but I personally love the ‘Metal Stand’ and the ‘Wide Wood’ ones. Photo information such as likes, comments, timestamp etc. is hidden in an overlay which is shown with a mouse hover. This saves space without compromising on functionality and I definitely prefer it over Carousel’s implementation. Instaview comes with multi-touch support and a customizable interface which certainly can be improved upon. Just like Carousel, you can view and save full size images in Instaview. As far as notifications are concerned, badge on the icon and little paper in the corner of a stream are the two ways of getting notified of unveiled photos.

Slideshow is the big weapon in Instaview’s armory. The individual streams suddenly start making a lot more sense with slideshow. As the name suggests, you can cycle through images in a particular stream by putting it on slideshow. The duration and sequence of the images can be tweaked in the slideshow options. If you come to think of your Mac as a living room, then these slideshows would be the digital photo frames decorating it.

RougeSheep likes to believe that users would enjoy multiple streams–and slideshows, of course–more than a single integrated feed but I’m not totally sold on the idea. It is certainly fun at times, but the clutter it creates on the desktop isn’t very pleasing to the eye. It is definitely not something you’d like to have when you’re trying to be productive. Although Instaview does let you view your Instagram feed in a single stream, if you wish to view favorites, popular photos or other such stuff, then creating multiple streams is your only option. On the whole, Instaview takes an aggressive approach towards Instagram and the initial reviews in the Mac App Store have been encouraging. You can grab the app for $4.99 from there.

The native-full blown look of Instadesk seems a bit too overwhelming for a simple app providing access to a photo-sharing service. Instaview is the more fun and peppy way of going through your Instagram feed and I’m sure it’ll find its own niche of users.
I however prefer the simple yet beautiful Carousel interface that houses all Instagram features under a single roof without creating clutter on my desktop. Instadesk is the cheapest way to go about things but both Instaview and Carousel retail for the same price, so take your pick wisely.

iCal is the the first app that gets fired from my dock everyday in the morning. It is my preferred event manager that helps me organize my work schedule, keep track of household chores and even set birthday reminders. It helps me get through the day with ease, making it indispensable and any app that improves upon the whole iCal experience is more than welcome. Enter Fantastical. The beautiful Fantastical app ships from the Flexibits factory. It does an amazing job at simplifying the whole iCal experience. Also not only does Fantastical work on iCal, it also supports Outlook and BusyCal.

iCal, Outlook or BusyCal are all complete applications in themselves and Fantastical does not add any new features to them. But before you give up on Fantastical, read on to find out how it changes the whole iCal experience. I’ll continue to use iCal throughout the review but remember, all the things apply to Outlook and BusyCal users as well.

Fantastical resides in the menu bar and a click on the icon reveals the shiny rectangular drop down interface that houses the calendar and allows to add and view events. When using the app for the first time, you’ll notice elements and animations that have been meticulously added by the developers at Flexibits. Be it the words flying out from the text box, pencil-made circles on the dates, brushed paint highlighting the event date or the calendar clinging to the two staple pins, each and every detail has been done brilliantly. The neat and compact interface lays the groundwork for an easy switch from iCal to Fantastical.

Fantastical picks up events already added to iCal and any new events created in Fantastical are added to iCal automatically. Adding new events is easy like a pie. Start typing in the text box to create an event or create one by double tapping a particular date. The app has plain English support, so I can type “Call Preshit tomorrow at noon” and a new event gets created with the specified date and time. Dates are also recognized in plain english, paving the way for super fast event creation. When you begin to type, the calendar slides down, revealing options to add event location, duration, select a calendar or even add invitees to the event. Simply put, the app looks great and works great but the inability to edit/delete an event or create a To-Do is sorely missed in the app.

Fantastical comes with quite a few preferences to tweak around. Apart from the menu, the app can be accessed by a custom keyboard shortcut. The menu bar icon can be customized to show only the date or date along with weekday or month. Default calendar and alarm settings for timed events and all-day events can be set within the preferences. So if you usually like to be alerted, say, 15 minutes before an event, let Fantastical in on this fact and it will appear as your default alarm setting for new events. I like the option to manually set the number of days to view the event list for. This means you can have Fantastical show the events just for today or for the next 31 days. Events from your super secret individual calendars can be hidden in the preferences too.

If you’ve reached this far reading the review, pull out your credit card because I’m sure you’ll wanna buy Fantastical. By concocting just the right ingredients, Flexibits developers have come up with the perfect recipe to manage your calendar. The ubiquitous nature of the app coupled with beautiful and super easy to use interface, makes it worth the $19.99 it retails for on the Mac App Store. There is also a 15-day trial version available if you still can’t make up your mind. iCal power user like me would surely want to splurge on this handy little app that makes your life just a little bit easier to manage.

Sometimes, trying out beta version of an app can lead to a sore experience that ultimately changes your perception of the app even before developers roll out the final build for public consumption. Something similar happened to me when I installed the first beta of Sparrow Mail around nine months ago. Sparrow, back then, was a Gmail-only client that had taken a leaf out of Tweetie’s book. I abandoned the app after a few betas as the design seemed too minimal & lacking important functionality, marking it as another wannabe mail client for the Mac. I wish I had stayed on to experience the revolution that Sparrow Mail has undergone since its beta days to emerge as one of the best mail clients that we have on the Mac App Store today.

Sparrow has come a long way since its beta days and now supports all IMAP accounts including Gmail, MobileMe, Yahoo and custom IMAP. Sparrow features a three-column layout with accounts occupying the narrow left column, your list of emails in the middle column and mail content filling up the last one. Sparrow retains the minimal ‘Tweetie look’ by having a collapsible third column. The minimal look generated a lot of buzz during the beta days and is still a strong selling point of the app. Moreover, it switches between multiple accounts the same way, but that’s pretty much all the inspiration it takes from Tweetie.

If you’re a Gmail addict you’d know there is hardly a native app for Mac that provides the same level of functionality as the web app. I’m not counting Mailplane in here as it is essentially a wrapper around the web view itself. Sparrow set out to put things in order and with the latest update it has moved closer to replacing Mailplane as the default mail client on my Mac. The first point update added support for Gmail labels, priority inbox and keyboard shortcuts. Gmail labels and folders can be edited straight from within Sparrow, helping you keep your inbox neat and tidy. The only small glitch that I encountered while using the app is that Gmail label colors aren’t synched over and if you’re used to color coded messages, then it would take some time to set things right by editing the label colors manually. Sparrow v1.2 came with a slew of new features that included unified inbox, threading by subject and Facebook integration, bolstering its strong feature set.

Unified inbox was Sparrow’s much awaited feature and now with its inception you can browse emails from multiple inboxes under a single roof. Sparrow claims to be the world’s first social email client by adding Facebook integration. Simply punch in your Facebook account details to populate the mailbox with profile pictures of your Facebook friends to make identification easier and make your inbox look prettier. Although the Facebook integration is nice and innovative, I absolutely love the way conversations feature has been implemented. It neatly bundles the message history while showing only the latest message in the conversation. The bundle is sorted chronologically displaying the timestamp corresponding to each message. Also there is this really cool quick reply feature making replying to emails super quick. A click on the quick reply button and magically pops out a reply box atop the message without cluttering your workspace with another window. One can however bring up the compose window to reply to emails that comes loaded with a formatting bar allowing you to change fonts, font size, add lists, indent, align etc. Similar to Mail.app, Sparrow has inline attachments and Quicklook feature that lets you preview attachments without having to download them. Search bar is integrated into the app and can sort queries by sender, recipient, subject or mail content. The top bar has handy shortcuts to compose, reply, archive or thrash mail but once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts, you will not give a damn about the top bar shortcuts. There are plethora of keyboard shortcuts and memorizing them greatly enhances the overall app experience.

Sparrow uses your chat avatar and associates it with your account, though you can assign a different one to each account. Signatures however, have to be set up manually for each account. MobileMe users will take comfort in the fact that Sparrow supports aliases and they are brought over automatically during account set up. While setting up a mail account, Sparrow can download the entire mailbox but if you have a really large inbox, you can check the option to download messages on demand, which limits the synchronization. Notifications are an essential part of any mail client and Sparrow acknowledges that and ships with Growl integration out of the box. Apart from Growl notifications, new mail alerts ring in with a chime and the unread mail count is displayed on the dock icon and the menu bar, all of these settings can be toggled in the preferences pane to suit your taste. Overall, Sparrow pays attention to detail and is highly intuitive with an impressive feature set, making it one of the best mail clients for the Mac platform.

Sparrow has an aesthetically pleasing interface and it goes about its job nonchalantly. The developers have added some cool animations that not only serve as eye candy but also add to the functionality of the app. I’ve used the enhanced Mail.app that Apple intends to ship with Lion and Sparrow is already a step ahead of it. Honestly speaking, Sparrow is close to being the perfect mail client for the Mac platform, for me atleast. With Loren Brichter, developer of Tweetie and Dave Morin, CEO of Path joining Sparrow’s advisory team, one can only expect Sparrow to touch new level of awesomeness.  Sparrow retails for $9.99 on the Mac App Store and is worth every cent.

It seems like there’s a sudden surge in discussion over the iPad’s hardware, over a combination of recent rumours and iOS 4.2, that I felt I had to chip in. Although the question of whether or not Apple will introduce a smaller iPad has been settled by Jobs, there’s still debate (for the sake of it) as to whether it’s the better size. And second, fanboys seem to be lusting over the

The 7 inch iPad

The first piece of opinion comes from Paul Miller at Engadget. He likes his iPad, but wishes it would be smaller, like the Samsung Tab:

I can’t help but yearn for an iPad that’s as small and light and comfortable as this new Nook. My biggest problem with the iPad is its shortcomings as an e-reader. First off, it’s heavy. Josh noticed it in his review, and it hasn’t gotten any lighter over time, no matter how many iPad-curl reps I do. Next up, it’s just a little large for curling up with like you do with a book. Combining the curl-up-incompatibility and the weight and I’ve actually managed to hit myself in the face numerous times with the iPad while attempting to recline with it. Third, the screen’s resolution is inferior to many e-ink displays, along with the high-res LCDs being used on the 7-inch Tab and Nook Color and PlayBook.

I blogged about this a few weeks ago, that weight was the number one thing Apple needs to fix on the iPad. I thought I’d get used to it after a few weeks of usage, but it hasn’t changed one bit. You can’t hold the iPad in one hand for more than a minute without wanting to put it down or have another hand support it. In my little note, I wrote:

Making the iPad lighter would be no small feat. The three major sources of iPad weight are the battery (148g), the LCD (153g), and the front glass (193g), which is 500 grams out of a total of 680grams. Because battery technology is moving at a snail’s pace compared with the rest of technology, the only way you can reduce the size of the battery, is to reduce power consumption. The electronics are already just sipping power, so making room for improvements in performance, that’s not going to drop. The glass, well, I don’t think that can be done away with so easily, considering how integral a part of the whole experience it is. The only thing that can drastically change the game, is the display, which could reduce its weight and power draw — perhaps one of those AMOLED displays, but this is still an uninformed suggestion.

The other option would be to make it, as Miller says, of a smaller size, like say 7 inches. That would greatly reduce the size of the glass, and the thickness required. It would also drive a smaller display, requiring a smaller battery. And, it would mean a smaller bezel, making the device even smaller.

But is a smaller size really worth using? I don’t know about you, but surfing websites on the iPad feels just right. Any smaller and it would appear to be an experience more like the iPhone. If it feels like surfing on the iPhone, then why not just use an iPhone and get over it? Not just websites. Take the keyboard as another example. I use both hands to type on the landscape keyboard. I can hardly type a sentence on the portrait keyboard without getting frustrated. It’s either got to be full sized, or brought down to an iPhone sized two-thumb version. Anything in between is frustrating as well.

Apple has obviously tested every screen size within .1 of an inch of each other. The iPhone UI is meant to be accessible using just your thumb. But with the iPad you’re using your forefinger, which means your hand is freely floating in space. You need bigger UI to compensate for that. As an example of what I’m talking about, see how much more difficult it is to navigate an iPhone app on the iPad (which is why 2X mode is the only way to go). Notice the size of the pop-overs (or the sidebar). They’re half an inch wider than on the iPhone, and resolution has nothing to do with it. The pop-over is that size, because smaller elements would require more accuracy to hit, thereby causing slowness in interaction. Now if the screen were smaller, and the pop-over was the same size as it is now, it wouldn’t be a pop-over anymore, as it would occupy almost or even a little more than half the size — feeling very iPhone-like.

The one situation where a 7 inch display makes complete sense, is for reading books, and I’m not talking about Instapaper long reads. That’s a task that involves far more holding than interacting, and the 7 inch size is perfect for reading. In fact, iBooks’ reading view, if you crop out the superfluous UI and margins, is roughly a little over 7 inches. But reading is just about 5% of what I do with my iPad, and I’m sure most people aren’t using it as a book reader — that’s just one of the many things it can do.

I do think Apple needs to figure out the weight issue, but not at the cost of screen size.

Retina Display: Not gonna happen

The second big discussion, is over the retina display. Everyone would love to have the retina display on the iPad, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be available on the next iPad.

There are two opinions of what size constitutes a ‘retina’ display. One, is that it needs to be over 300ppi to be a retina display (the pixel density over which the human eye cannot discern pixels). The second, is that it should double the pixel density, thereby creating 2048*1536 display at 266ppi. I think when the iPad does get a higher resolution, it’ll be the latter, and not a ‘true’ retina display. For one, you hold the iPad at a distance much further away than an iPhone, and second, it would be a far easier transition for developers, considering none of this is based on a resolution independent OS.

The most important reason why we’re not going to see any kind of resolution enhancement, is that the technology is not there yet, at least not sustaining the price point, battery life, and performance of the iPad. The iPhone’s retina display sports 0.6 million pixels. An iPad retina display would have to drive 3.2 million pixels.

In terms of usability, a retina display is more of a luxury than a crucial feature. The iPhone was retina’d because not only was the technology present at the time, the competition was getting ahead of Apple. I use my iPad every day, and at no point do I go “If only this thing had more pixels”. The situation probably presents itself for those who concurrently use an iPhone 4, but even then it’s a marginal adjustment. Moreover, Apple doesn’t have any competition stealing its marketshare.

Retina display not happening in 2011, and doubtful even in 2012.

No USB ports please

Third, is with this USB port rumour. Yeah that’s not going to happen. The problem with having a USB port, is that people would expect it to work with every peripheral imaginable, which obviously won’t be possible. I can see an integrated SD-card slot on the iPad, but even that is far fetched. Wireless is the way to go.

The Next iPad

So what will the next iPad have? I’d say a front-facing camera, more RAM (hopefully 1GB, but the reality will be closer to 512MB), slimmer and lighter (wishful), a faster processor, and a white version shipping several months after.

Your thoughts?

[Photo by Ari]

Almost everything can be done with the Terminal. At least that’s what the experts tell you. We find glorious “Terminal Hacks” which unlock some special features of the Mac. While for most part it’s fine not knowing, it wouldn’t hurt to know what exactly is going on behind those lines. Here’s a short crash course in using the Terminal, from a total newbie at that. Though I did do my homework, my less than exceptional knowledge of the Terminal might produce some errors in this guide. I have tried all the commands myself, so I don’t suppose anything should happen to your system, but do always backup before messing around with your system. Always.

Where’s the Terminal?

Use Spotlight to launch it, or you’ll find it in the Applications/Utilities folder.

Navigating the Terminal

The Terminal will generally launch with your home directory selected. To navigate down a folder, enter “cd foldername”. To navigate up to the containing folder, enter “cd ..”.

You can even directly navigate to a specific folder. Enter something like “cd users/myhomefolder/documents”. “cd ~” takes you back to the Home folder. The tilde key (~) stands for home folder. You can enter “cd ~/music” to go into the music folder within your home folder. If you just want to get the job done, Cmd+C any folder in Finder, and Terminal will paste in its path.

To know that you’re in the correct directory, hit “ls” to bring up a list of file names. I’m guessing ls stands for list. While you’re writing out commands, you might want to navigate that line itself. ^a to get to the start of the line, ^e to the end. Option+Click on any part of the line to move your cursor there. ^w (Ctrl+W) to backspace on any word, while ^u will clear out the entire line prior to the cursor. ^k is the inverse of ^u.

One important command: ^r will allow you to cycle through your history of commands. So if you can’t remember which command it was that enabled some setting (and you want to disable it now), this is a good way to go back in time. You can also type in history to get a list of your past commands.

Sudo

Very often one comes across this command ‘sudo’, which is generally appended at the start of a string. ‘sudo’ stands for ‘super user do’. The sudo command provides logging for individual commands run and some cases it has completely supplanted the root logon for administrative tasks. That is, it runs the command as root user, which is useful if the system isn’t allowing you to perform some tasks such as deleting, etc. To get into root mode, type in “sudo -s”. To test whether you’re in root mode, type in whoami (follow by a return, of course). To get out of root mode, type in exit.

Creating Symbolic links

Symbolic links allow you to create aliases that behave like normal files and folders. Which means you can have a symbolic link to a folder in your projects folder, that’s also present in your dropbox folder. Dropbox will think that symbolic link is a real folder, and sync the data up into its cloud, not realising that the files are in a totally different location. In this example, we’re going to create a symbolic link to Things’ database:

ln -s ~/Li- brary/Application\ Support/Cul- tured\ Code ~/Dropbox/Library/ Cultured\ Code

ln stands for link name, and -s stands for creating a symbolic link. The reason for those reverse slashes, is because there’s a space in the names of those folders. There are so many use cases for symbolic links, so be creative.

Nano: The Terminal text editor

If you’re feeling extra geeky, you can bring out the Terminal text editor to create new text documents or edit existing plaintext files — all in monospaced font and UI straight out of the 80s. Simply type:

nano “my filename.txt”

If it finds a matching filename in the current directory, it will open it. If not, it’ll create it for you. Navigating inside of the text editor is solely via the keyboard, where the bottom row shows you the available commands. It’s fun.

Splitting large files using the Terminal

It’s always bad timing, where you have to copy that large file over, but your flash drive is still in FAT32 format, or your email service doesn’t allow large files, or .

After navigating to the folder your file resides in, enter “split -b 10m filename.dmg part_”. Here ‘split’ is self explanatory; tells the computer to split the file. “-b 9m” stands for the file size. In place of 9 you enter whatever size in MB you want the file to split into. Replace m with k for kilobytes. Then comes the filename itself, and lastly “part_” is an appendage to the split files.

To join the files, “cat part_a[a-g]>filename.dmg”. I assume ‘cat’ stands for the house cat, which then specifies which files you need to rejoin. “[a-g]” is the last letter of the files that the previous step spits out.

Useful Terminal Commands

Every software release from Apple brings out some new terminal commands. I don’t know how they find these commands, but they always make their way into the Apple community. They’re usually just boolean commands, meaning you have a string of text with a YES or NO at the end. Either way enables or disables the feature.

Enable path bar.

If you want your Finder window titlebar to always show the directory structure, you can enable it using a single command:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

QuickTime X

With QuickTime X we lost all power over its preferences. Thankfully there are still some settings in the player; they’re just not accessible via a GUI.

Always hide titlebar:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoTitlebar 1

Unfortunately, this means you can’t close the movie window or minimise it.

Keep fullscreen while App Switching:
If you Cmd+Tab or somehow interact with another app while QuickTime X is playing something, it’ll automatically exit fullscreen mode. This command ensures your fullscreen stays intact.

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGFullScreenExitOnAppSwitch 0

Autoplay movies:
If you’re tired of hitting the play button every time you launch a movie, this command will do the obvious.

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

There are more commands for QuickTime X, if you feel the need.

List view stacks

If you’re not already using this feature, you’re missing out. Instead of the showy stacks or the extra large grid, you can have the best of both words, in a slick list-stack. Once you’ve enabled it, hit the + or – buttons on your keyboard to increase or decrease the icon sizes.

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

Global text substitutions

If you want to enable all the text substitution features for every app that supports it, just blindly copy paste it in. On the other hand, if you want just one of the features enabled, read through the command and remove all that you don’t need. You don’t need this command really, since you can very well manually enable text substitution on a per app basis.

defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool truedefaults write -g WebAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool truedefaults write -g WebContinuousSpellCheckingEnabled -bool true

Dock tricks

The Dock responds well to terminal commands. You can move your Dock to the left or right by entering:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start

Replace start with end if you want it on the right. Replace with ” ” to restore position. You need to run a killall Dock for any of the settings to take action.

There’s also a command to make hidden application icons show translucent:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES

You can also add a free moving spacer to your dock icons by entering the command from this txt file.

And finally, to get the 2D dock:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Hide desktop icons

This one I’ve found really useful. With just one command all my desktop icons are always hidden from view.

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

That’s it for now

We’ll continue posting cool terminal commands as and when they surface, but till then this list should do. There are a lot more commands, but most of them are for nerds (more so than you and me), or things that make your Mac look ugly. If you have any killer commands, shoot them into the comments and we could even add them into the article.

I used Quicksilver for a long time. At least 4 years. It had so many weird, arcane commands that called up so many powerful features that I felt a level of control over my Mac that made me feel like a ninja at times. Slowly though, the iTunes triggers became less necessary with the addition of media keys to keyboards, the development of plug-ins started dying when Quicksilver’s dev stopped working on the project, and when Snow Leopard came out, it was weeks before there was even a stable version of QS. And over the next year, the sluggishness of Quicksilver was noticeable. The app just crashed way too much. Combined with the abandoned state of the software, I knew it was time to find an app that could replace Quicksilver. I remembered LaunchBar. Loren Brichter told me about the LaunchBar 5 beta when it was first available, and I tried LaunchBar out, but at that time, I was still happy with Quicksilver, and didn’t see much benefit to switching.

Fast forward a year, and I’m fed up with Quicksilver crashing and eating up RAM, and I try out LaunchBar again. I haven’t found anything that I can do with LaunchBar that I couldn’t do with Quicksilver, but unlike Quicksilver, LaunchBar is responsive and never goes down. I’ve used it for about a month now, and I’ve had zero hang-ups. To me, LaunchBar’s stability is its biggest feature. I mean, I don’t know what there is to tell you about LaunchBar’s features. If you’ve used Quicksilver, you can do it in LaunchBar. It’s great for launching apps, searching files, starting web searches, appending text and accessing OS services. LaunchBar has a great feature called Instant Send where you can use a keyboard shortcut to instantly open certain actions instead of opening up the UI the normal way and typing in the action. Just hit command-space and ‘g’ and it’ll open right up to a Google search. It’s a useful little feature that will save you some time if you commit it to muscle memory.

What you can do with LaunchBar

LaunchBar has become my little Swiss Army knife of Mac software. There are a lot of little things that LaunchBar can do that make a lot of OS X utilities more or less unnecessary. LaunchBar’s clipboard history function can replace all those little clipboard utilities. It’s also got this nifty little ClipMerge™ feature that allows you to stick two clipboard items together into one single item. This allows you to mass-copy stuff like links on a web page. Simply press Cmd + C twice to add the item to the current clipboard item. Then bring up the LaunchBar Clipboard (Cmd+K after invoking LaunchBar) to perform actions on those items. LaunchBar is great for creating todo lists right inside of text documents. Have LaunchBar locate your .txt file, press Shift+Space, type in any text, and hit return to add that string of text to your .txt document.

Instead of using a dedicated iCal extender app, you can use LaunchBar to add events to iCal thanks to LaunchBar’s iCal indexing service. The syntax is fairly simple, using natural language instead of controls and buttons. Invoke LaunchBar, type in the name of your calendar, hit space, then enter your event like “Record special edition podcast with Gabe and Milind @ Monday 4:30 pm !15m” will add an event to your calendar on the following monday, at the specified time, with an alert firing 15 minutes before the event. You can omit the date for an all day event, specify time blocks like “4-8pm”. If you just enter any text string without syntax, it’s merely added to as a todo task. To specifically add a todo task, enter “Reinstall Windows > next month !1h” to remind yourself to reinstall Windows before the next month, with an alert an hour before your due date. You’re probably going to have to reinstall it sooner than that though, but let’s not get out of topic.

LaunchBar’s integration with Finder is robust as well; you can copy, move and delete files. You can hit Cmd + G to grab an image in the Finder and transfer it to launchbar, ready for to be manipulated. If it’s an image, just enter “resize” or “flip” and you can perform those actions straight from LaunchBar. You can set images as desktop backgrounds too. And if you’re a plain text nut, you can append text to an existing file. But LaunchBar’s integration goes deeper than that. Say you want to open a file in Pixelmator while your default for that file type is Photoshop. Drag the file from Finder, and while dragging invoke Launchbar; type “Pixelm…” and then drop the file on the bar. If you don’t like seeing the contextual menu after, you can hold down modifier keys like Shift to “select in LaunchBar” or Option to “Copy to Folder”. The entire thing is documented in the LaunchBar help, which I’d highly advise you read through.

There’s another amazing workflow that will be useful for any user, and that’s quick internet searches. How often have you searched for a movie name in Google only to click on the first link that sends you to IMDB? Wouldn’t it be way quicker if you could just enter the name of the movie in LaunchBar and be taken to its IMDB listing? Well LaunchBar makes it so easy and painless, that you will soon find yourself using LaunchBar instead of Google to get to most of the sites you frequent. Here’s the secret sauce:

Invoke LaunchBar, click on the little gear icon, get to your Index, and in the sidebar click on Search Templates. Once you understand how this works it’s super easy to create your own search templates. Launchbar will use the Name as a trigger to initiate that search, and then insert your keywords in place of the asterisk it finds in the search string. For instance, to search Google Images, enter “Google Imag…” in LaunchBar, when selected, press spacebar. Now enter any search term you want Google Images to throw results for (let’s say “cute cats”). Launchbar will take the Google Images url, and replace the asterisk* with cute+cats, thereby creating a direct google search. LaunchBar comes with a whole lot of search templates, but you can create your own one. Say you want one for Smoking Apples. Just create any search in our searchbar above, and then copy the resultant url (something like “…pples.com/?s=omnifocus”). In LaunchBar, create a new entry in your search templates, add a trigger (e.g. “SA”), and then in the details field paste in the copied url, but replace Omnifocus with an asterisk.

There’s one more thing. The genius that is Aayush Arya taught me to leverage Lucky Google to create even better custom search engines. For instance, if you used the above template, our WordPress backend would generate a search results page with all the articles matching your search term. But as we’ve come to realise, Google is a far better search engine than WordPress will ever be. Moreover, the custom SA template will only take me to the results page — I still have to click. If on the other hand you do a Google search for “Omnifocus smoking apples” the first result will more often than not be our most popular article on Omnifocus. If you use LaunchBar to create a Lucky Google search for those search terms, it means direct access to articles on specific sites. Create a new search template, add a keyword, and then use “http://www.google.com/search?btnI&q=*+smoking+apples” as your url, replacing smoking apples with imdb, or amazon, or youtube. Just try it out; it’s worth the initial effort.

The third, and most obvious, aspect of LaunchBar is its ability to control iTunes. Enter any artist name, and use your keyboard to narrow down the search. There’s a nifty feature called “Best of Lists”. Just search for Best of Coldpl… and it will automatically narrow it down to all songs by that artists with four or more stars. Handy way to quickly listen to your favourite music.

There are still so many more of the ‘little things’ that LaunchBar allows you to do quickly, that would otherwise take up your computing time, we could write a book on it. Look through the help files, or this official ‘usage examples’ guide on the Obdev site.

What I use LaunchBar for

So what kind of things do I use LaunchBar everyday for? The simplest is of course opening applications, but I also use it for searching my hard disk. If you tell LaunchBar which directories you want it to index, then you can find files much faster than with Spotlight. For example, I just downloaded a “Linux distro” and I want to open it without going to the Finder. I double tap ⌘ and then start typing in say… “Lin” and BAM! My “Linux distro” is right there and I just hit enter to open it. LaunchBar is also very intelligent, as it learns your actions and instantly provides you the right result as you continue using it. If I open up my Linux distro often enough, soon it will have it selected on typing the letter L. Also, do you love using Spotlight for light calculator work? You can do the same with LaunchBar, and you can do even more complex math with LaunchBar than you can with Spotlight, the result of which can be thrown on your screen as a large text overlay. I’ve also started using LaunchBar as a way to add events to iCal without opening my calendar. Simple as that. It’s also a great way to move files around. I find a file by searching, tab over to its options, and then copy or move it to another location. Great for stuff that needs to go into Dropbox. I have been using file actions as a way to email attachments quickly too. Select a file, go to the options, and send as an attachment. That easy, but more importantly, that much quicker.

If you’re a Quicksilver user now, I think it would be wise to move over to LaunchBar. Sure, it’ll cost you some money, but you’ll be getting an actively developed piece of software that still has a future. Quicksilver, while open source is seemingly dead and its creator has been quoted as saying that he thinks LaunchBar is a great replacement for Quicksilver. You can download a 15 day trial of LaunchBar and purchase it for €24.

A lot of Mac users have quite taken to the fresh new launcher Alfred. It’s by no means a bad app, and we’ll surely have a review of it soon enough. But Alfred is not LaunchBar. The key difference in these application is that where LaunchBar is powerful and flexible, Alfred is super easy to use. Alfred sports a much larger UI, simpler options, and less customisation, making it ready to use right out the box. But if you’re invested in the Mac as a productive tool, you might as well take a few minutes to program your fingertips to react the LaunchBar way. It’s faster, way more powerful, and in most instances, better.

[Milind Alvares contributed to this article, so several instances of "I" may not in fact be Brandon.]