OS X Curiosity: Clippings

Posted on Oct 4, 2008 in Mac

Leopard is the 6th major OS X upgrade, and as such feels very refined and polished. Nearly every nook and cranny has been through a number of iterations and most features feel very well thought out.

Sometimes though, you’ll come across features or behaviours that leave you scratching your head. Today we’ll take a look at one OS feature that feels as though it was added with 10.0 and forgotten about ever since: Clippings.

Text Clippings

If you’ve ever selected a bit of text in Safari and dragged it to your Desktop, OS X will save it in a “Text Clipping” file. Double-clicking this file will open a small window displaying your text. That’s all you can actually do in that window though: You can’t select, drag or edit the text in any way.

Back to School Shopping Guide Part II: Essential Apps

Posted on Sep 21, 2008 in Mac, Opinions, Reviews

No college student can get by nowadays without a few productivity apps to help them keep track of assignments, files, notes etc. There are a ton of different apps designed to do this sort of thing, but a lot of them are either aimed at business users (and priced accordingly) or don’t just feel to feature-laden and dense to be really practical for quick notes in classes.

So here’s a few productivity apps that students might find are worth checking out. Affordable, intuitive and ideal for quick notes, references, links and more.

Jetlink: 3 great sites for finding OS X Apps

Posted on Jun 16, 2008 in JetLinks, The web

A question that never stop being asked is where new Mac users can find OS X equivalents of their favorite Windows apps. Whilst some people would say to just head over to VersionTracker or MacUpdate, I’ve found they’re usually a bit overwhelming: I don’t want to sift through every update, utility or abandoned freeware if all I want is to find a semi-decent FTP client.

So here are 3 sites I’d recommend anyone new to the Mac should check out if you’re looking for the right app for the job:

Waiting games: Automator

Posted on Jun 7, 2008 in Mac, Opinions

 Automator – which was introduced in 2005 as one of Tiger’s major new features – is a great concept, but unfortunately one that I think is let down by one minor flaw: speed (or more to the point: the lack of it).

For those of you who have never used it, the short explanation is that Automator is a tool to automate repetitive tasks. You don’t need any programming knowledge and instead create “Workflows” by visually arranging “actions” (e.g. you could create a workflow to convert, rename and upload a folder of photos).

Sounds like a brilliant idea, right? The basic premise actually works very well: Apple includes a lot of actions for common tasks and some 3rd party developers also include their own actions that allow you to integrate  their apps into your workflows

But there’s one caveat: On both of the Macbooks I regularly use, workflows can sometimes take as much as 10 – 15 seconds to launch.

MobileMe predictions

Posted on Jun 1, 2008 in Opinions

So it looks as though this year the long-rumored .mac overhaul might finally be on the cards.

Not only did the 10.5.3 update introduce a placeholder for the word “.mac” in various locations across the system, the domains “me.com” and “mobileme.com” are both apparently being held for Apple. 
(Perhaps Apple will also try to nab one of those fancy new Montenegrin “.me” domains – “mobile.me”.)

So here’s my predictions for some of the changes we’ll see to .mac: