Step-by-Step Know-How for Macheads

On November 24, Hog Bay Software released version 2.0 of their todo list management software, TaskPaper. The new version adds a number of new features, such as a new search system, a Quick Entry Window to add tasks even when TaskPaper isn’t in the foreground, Drag and Drop and keyboard shortcuts to make managing projects and tasks more efficient, a customizable theme system which lets you give your Taskpaper documents custom visual styles, a Projects Sidebar and a Projects Toolbar to quickly access a project in a large document and AppleScript support.

I’ll be putting together a full review of TaskPaper 2.0, which should be up next week. Subscribe to the macsteps blog via RSS or email if you want to be sure not to miss it. Links for subscribing are at the top of the sidebar on the right.

TaskPaper 2.0 is a free upgrade for owners of version 1.x. The full version costs $29.95, but if you watch the screencast, you’ll get a discount.

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Backups are like insurance: you make them in the hope of never needing them. And they’re equally boring. You never see anyone get all excited about his backup strategy (except total geeks) and nobody’s really all that interested in insurance (except insurance salespeople). Usually, backups and insurance are things we want to get out of the way as fast as possible and then never be bothered by again.

Fortunately, Mac OS X Leopard goes a pretty long way in achieving exactly that. With the introduction of Time Machine even home users with zero technical expertise can now finally backup their data without setting any reminders, fiddling with arcane software or going insane while trying to restore data. And that’s actually quite an achievement, considering the fact that backups, apart from the occasional month-old backup on a rewriteable CD, have in the past been virtually non-existent in most home computing environments.

In this article we’ll take a look at how to set up Time Machine, some tools to make using it a bit more comfortable and efficient (if you are so inclined) and some additional ways to satisfy our inner geeks (which Time Machine isn’t really any good at, since it’s so easy to use). We’ll also look at a backup tool called SuperDuper!, which works nicely alongside Time Machine as an additional safety net. [click to continue…]

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The Mac OS X menu bar can get quite crowded and sometimes the icons don’t show up in the same spot after every reboot/logon. If an icon suddenly shows up in a spot you don’t like, there’s an easy way to beat it back into place:

Simply hold down the -key and drag it to its new position. Unfortunately this doesn’t work with all icons, although all system icons, such as Time Machine, AppleScript, Bluetooth and others, work and some applications, such as SoundSource and MagiCal, also let you drag their menu bar icons to new spots. You’ll just have to try out for which apps it works.

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Coming from the Windows world, I’m used to switching applications by using Tab. If this is your way of working too, you may have experienced the issue when this wouldn’t work anymore. Pressing Tab simply does nothing and there seems to be no way of getting it to work again. Previously, I resorted to rebooting my Mac. Now I know better. [click to continue…]

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When you designate a disk to be used for Time Machine’s backups, it’s given an icon that resembles an external disk in a green casing with a Time Machine logo on it. This makes it easy to instantly recognize the Time Machine disk and prevents you accidentally erasing it or using it to store other data.

Every once in a while, this disk seems to somehow lose its default icon. Instead of the green external disk it will have, for example, the same icon the main disk uses. This apparently happens when you add new disks to your system, at least that’s when it last happened to me.

Adding a new disk, by the way, will likely cause Time Machine to completely redo its backup instead of doing it incrementally, as it normally does. This is intended behaviour, any changes in hardware configuration will result in a fresh backup. You can still browse older backups, if you keep them, by clicking Time Machine’s menu bar icon and pressing the key. This will change the menu item Enter Time Machine to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.

So, how do you get back that familiar green icon? Since I couldn’t find the icon Time Machine uses for its backup disk anywhere, I managed to find another way to get it back:

1. Select the disk icon on the Desktop
2. Right-click (or -click) and select Get Info from the contextual menu
3. In the Info window, click once on the disk’s icon in the upper left corner, so it’s surrounded by a dim blue frame (see screenshot to the right).
4. Press X
5. The disk should now have its original icon restored. Close the Info window

If that didn’t work, you might have to employ some additional steps:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Select Time Machine
3. Click on Change Disk…
4. Re-select the disk you are using for Time Machine and click Use for Backup

Those steps should now have resulted in the default Time Machine disk icon being restored.

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If you’re a regular user of the Mac OS’s built-in character palette, you mind find this little Dashboard widget useful: CharacterPal copies the HTML code for symbols, keyboard codes, greek letters and more to the clipboard at the click of the mouse. This is great for quickly entering characters like ⌘,  or ☯ without having to first find those symbols in the character palette.

CharacterPal organizes the characters into categories, such as Symbols, Greek, Keyboard or Math and Science. If you don’t want to bring up Dashboard every time you need CharacterPal, you can configure it to display as a translucent HUD on the Desktop, similar to tool windows in regular applications.

CharacterPal is “karmaware”, which means you are not required to donate, but will receive some good karma if you do. CharacterPal is available at taco widgets.

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Usually, we don’t need actual uninstaller software on Mac OS X. To remove an app, simply drag it from the Applications folder to the trash and you’re done. Well, most of the time you are. Some apps drop stuff in other places and all apps have a preferences file. And if you don’t want to clean out those manually, AppZapper will do the job nicely.

AppZapper works great and there’s really not much to explain about it. But if you’ve run it at least once, you might have found one particular aspect of it to be at least a bit annoying. When you zap (remove) an application, AppZapper makes this really loud ZAP! sound. If you have your system sound set to a normal level, this zap sound will be significantly louder than that and might make you jump out of your skin. Since there’s no way of setting the sound level per application, we’ll have to do some minor surgery on AppZapper to tune it down a little. [click to continue…]

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There seems to be a trend for webdesign tools that integrate all the steps involved in creating, testing and publishing into a nice, clean workflow. Coda is one of these tools and Espresso from macrabbit is another contender and set to launch in November.

If you’re into using WYSIWYG tools such as Dreamweaver or RapidWeaver for your web development, Espresso is probably not for you. You need to know how to write HTML and some knowledge of CSS won’t hurt either. Although chances are good that Espresso’s CSS editor will be just as cool as macrabbit’s CSSEdit, which makes editing CSS a breeze, and a fun one at that.

I’ve just signed up for the current private beta of Espresso. If I’m accepted I’m going to give it a serious spin with some of my web projects. Otherwise, I’ll just have to wait until the final version comes out, which shouldn’t be too far away anyway. Look out for an extensive review of Espresso here once it’s out.

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A recent crash of my main text and code editor, Textmate, led me to look into submitting a ticket to Macromates support. The crash was so bad that I had to switch off my Mac with the power button - something that rarely ever happens.

I dug a little deeper into the problem and I could reproduce it by copying several dozen rows from Excel into Textmate and then doing a “Join line with next” to join the rows. Somewhere along all that joining Textmate locked up and, even though I managed to force-quit it, my whole system was unresponsive after that and the only thing I could do was reboot. [click to continue…]

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