Status-Q

For Apple laptop users, Patrick Stein’s SmartSleep looks like a useful little gizmo…

If you use Aperture and you like to organise your keywords hierarchically using the Keywords HUD, then you may find this page at Bagelturf useful, especially the section about moving keywords to the top level. I couldn’t work out how to get keywords which were in folders back to the top level – it turned out to be because I had too many keywords visible. This hint gives you a workaround, and it’s generally useful to remember that search box at the top.

My list of keywords was getting quite long, and I often had duplicates at various places in the hierarchy – ‘Seattle’ came under ‘USA > Washington State’, for example, but it also came under ‘iPhoto’ because many of my photos were originally tagged there. Typing the first few letters of ‘Seattle’ into the search box allowed me to see both and merge them easily.

This is the solution to another problem, by the way – that of getting the same keyword twice at the same level with different capitalisation.
Drag the one you want to change into a different level of the hierarchy – for example into a temporary folder. Then rename it to the right capitalisation, and drag it back to where you want it, using the search box to make life easier if necessary. Aperture will ask if you want to merge the two keywords.

You don’t even need to create a temporary folder, in fact, you can drag the one you want to change inside the correct one – if that doesn’t confuse you – rename the inner one to match, and then drag it to the level above to merge with its parent.

Hope that’s useful for someone!

There’s a lot of buzz in the Apple-related blogosphere about ExpanDrive. John Gruber likes it a lot, and so does TUAW. Based on very brief experiments, I have to say I rather like it too.

If there’s a remote server you can connect to with SSH or SFTP, ExpanDrive lets you mount the filespace as a drive. I’ve mentioned MacFusion before, which does the same thing. They share a common heritage:

• FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) is a project which originated on Linux. It provides a framework for creating things which look like filesystems in ordinary programs, rather than them having to be part of the operating system. There’s a variety of fun stuff you can do with this.
• MacFUSE is a Google project which implemented FUSE for the Mac.
• ExpanDrive and MacFusion provide a nice GUI that implements the ‘remote SSH server as local disk’ in a way that ordinary users can make sense of it

The upshot is that you can open a file in any application just as if it was on your local machine, even if it’s on the far side of the world.

MacFusion is free, ExpanDrive costs money. They both work. But at present, the latter seems to be faster and more reliable, so I’m quite likely to hand over some of my hard-earned pennies.

Every day I unplug my MacBook Pro from a set of disks and other peripherals at home, take it into the office and plug it into a new set there. In the evening, I do the same going home.

One thing that makes this much less painful than it might otherwise be is a keystroke shortcut I set up a long time ago, based on this hint. Now I just type Cmd-F1, and all my external disks are unmounted. This is exceedingly handy!

To do this, create an AppleScript containing the following:

tell application "Finder"
        activate
	set bootDisk to name of startup disk
	set otherDisks to every disk whose (name is not bootDisk)
	repeat with myDisk in otherDisks
		try
			eject myDisk
		end try
	end repeat
end tell

Save it somewhere and configure your favourite utility to run it. I use QuickSilver and set it up as a trigger.

It won’t work, of course, if you have an application running using one of the disks, so it’s good to check the Finder window before actually unplugging them.

One thing I love about the new iPod/iTouch software is the ability to put links to web pages, and even to bits of web pages, directly on the front screen.

This hint makes it even better, by telling you how to add a webclip icon. I have a link to our CODA system on mine, and it now has a shiny new icon (bottom left):

Finally! SuperDuper, the single most valuable utility on my Mac, has been updated to be fully Leopard-compatible.

Apple’s TimeMachine is great, and I’ve had to do a full system restore from it in the past which was a somewhat slow but otherwise completely painless experience. Leopard still has many buglets to be ironed out, so it’s good that it has a superb backup system built-in as well!

But there are few things which can compare with having a complete, bootable copy of your system on a separate drive. When something goes badly wrong, you can be up and running again in minutes.

That’s what SuperDuper does, and does better than anything else. I will sleep more soundly henceforth.

Now my only problem is that my hard drive crashed again this afternoon, about 3 hrs before SuperDuper was released. Ah well…

One of the things Steve Jobs announced in his latest keynote was a drop in the price of the AppleTV, from $299 to $229 for the base model.

This should be good news for us at CamVine, because we buy quite a few of these – we take them apart and do nefarious things with them.

But there’s no price drop in the UK market – in fact, they’re still selling at £199. Now that’s not a bad price overall, and you have to remember that UK prices include 17.5% tax, but it’s still nearly $400 – substantially more even than the old price.

The price drop in the US, of course, coincided with the availability of movie rentals from the iTunes Music Store – something not available in other parts of the world yet. I wonder if the US hardware is being subsidised at all by the rental business?

They’re very nice devices, but I don’t have one at home because, some time ago, I bought a Mac Mini to go beside my TV, and an Elgato EyeTV box to capture digital broadcasts. It does everything the AppleTV does and a lot more – playing DVDs, for one thing. At the time, it seemed like quite an extravagance. But I’ve never regretted it for a moment. The vast majority of our TV watching is done this way now, and the recent release of a new version of the EyeTV software just makes it better.

Here’s a new feature in Apple’s Leopard OS that’s quite easy to miss:

In the File > Open dialog box on most apps, the left-hand side of the dialog shows your disks, your favourite places etc. What I hadn’t noticed until I heard about it on the Inside Aperture podcast was that in many cases there will also be a ‘Media’ section below these, which lets you browse and search your music from iTunes, your photos from iPhoto and Aperture etc.

Here, I’m browsing my Aperture library from Word’s Insert > Picture > From file… menu.

No need to know the directory in which an image lives before inserting it into your document, if you prefer to think in terms of albums. No need to start up your photo-management software in order to find it.

I write this blog in WordPress using Safari, and when I came to upload the image above I noticed that the upload dialog box has the same Media Browser section too. And because this is part of the OS, not the application, it’s also there in Firefox.

Just to repeat the point, here I’m in Sound Studio opening tracks from iTunes:

I have a cat, which I think I can now let out of the bag.

DisplayLink (who, quite rightly, seem to be the darling of CES at present) have started demonstrating the Mac support for their video-over-USB technology.

I’ve been using it for a few months, and while the performance isn’t up to that of the Windows drivers yet, it’s quite usable. Here’s a photo I took in September of my 4-screen MacBook Pro setup.

You’ll notice that the DVI connector is not in use in this shot. Normally, at present, I’m using one DVI screen and one USB screen, giving three screens in all.

As we’ve always said, pixels are like broadband – they’re addictive. Once you’ve had them, you don’t want to give them up. A friend pointed out that this makes complete sense – displays are the network between your computer and your brain, so having a lot more of them really is like upgrading to a broadband connection.

And no, before anyone asks, I’m not sure when the Mac drivers will be generally available!

Congratulations to Patrick et al…