Some simple tricks for Mac users. Do you know all of these?
Tag Archives: tips
Zipping along to the plumber
I’ve often bemoaned the fact that so many garments, bags, etc are spoiled by the failure of their zipper; an event which turns something previously warm and cozy into a source of frustration. But unstitching the zip and installing a new one is often tricky and therefore time-consuming or expensive; generally not worthwhile on an old garment or bag.
Not all zipper failures are terminal, however; many can obviously be repaired with a bit of jiggling, but many more can probably also be fixed with some cunning techniques. A retweet by my friend Lyndsay got me thinking along these lines, and I went and searched YouTube for ‘zipper repair’, and you can find a wealth of tips and suggestions: almost anything except significant loss of teeth can be fixed without the zipper needing to be replaced.
Here are some basic tips to get started:
But for a larger selection of example fixes, you might want to browse this playlist from UCAN, a US-based zipper company. Lots of good stuff there.
OK, so what’s that bit in the title about plumbers?
Well, it’s not, I admit, a very obvious connection, except that if you’re in the mood for fixing things yourself, I’ve become a fan of another source of YouTube wisdom. There’s a retired plumber named Al who has a great set of videos about how to fix various plumbing issues: what to do if your kitchen mixer tap is leaking into the cupboard below, suggestions for fixing leaking gutters, how to use compression couplings to join copper pipes…
Al has uploaded hundreds of videos on all sorts of topics, not just plumbing, but I do like his plumbing ones: they’re completely unpretentious, unbiased chunks of accumulated wisdom and it’s just the sort of thing YouTube does well.
PDF Tips and Tricks for Mac Users
My latest little screencast shows some of the things you might not have discovered in the Preview app on the Mac.
Also available on Vimeo here.
Pinpointing things on Google Maps
How to add a marker to a Google Map so that you can tell people, “It’s here!”
iOS tip of the day
In most places in iOS where you can edit text, you can tap with two fingers to select a whole line. This works, for example, in text editors like Notesy, Drafts and Byword, and can be quite a time saver. In fact, it selects the line up to the next line break; if you’re typing code, that’s probably one line, but if you’re writing prose, it’ll select the current paragraph. Very handy if you want to move paragraphs around using cut and paste.
Another place you can use it is in the URL field of a browser, where it will select the entire URL with fewer clicks than the usual tap-tap-select-all.
I use this, for example, if I’m looking at a page in Safari and want to open it in 1Password. As you probably know, apps can register particular URL schemes for their own use, and 1Password’s browser will recognise ophttp and ophttps, so you can just go to the beginning of the URL in Safari, insert an ‘op’, and you’ll be taken to the same page in 1Password (or ‘g’ for GoodReader, etc.)
The problem is that just ‘going to the beginning and inserting something’ can be a pain if the URL is long. You probably have to scroll slowly left, tap the correct insertion point, and so forth. Much easier is a two-finger tap, select ‘Cut’, type ‘op’ and then tap ‘Paste’.
If you’re doing this kind of thing regularly, you may want to set up a bookmarklet to make it even easier, but the two-finger tap is a handy thing to know in general.
The key to saving keystrokes
For many years I’ve been a fan of TextExpander on the Mac, a utility which converts a short sequence of keystrokes into a much longer one. For example, most of my email messages end with
All the best,
Quentin
which appears when I type ‘atb’ and hit space. There are many much more complex things you can do with TextExpander, which is good, because it’s a little pricey for a small utility, but in the end I realised that 35 bucks wasn’t too much for something I use dozens of times every single day.
But typing efficiency is even more important when you have a sub-optimal keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad’s. One of my favourite tips is that you can get an apostrophe or quote mark by pressing the comma or full-stop key briefly and sliding upwards; there’s no need to switch into punctuation mode. (I wrote about this before once, but I think it must have been on Twitter or Facebook, which means I can’t find it now. Note to self: always keep useful stuff on blog.)
Anyway, one of the recent iOS updates added a very handy but somewhat hidden keystroke-expansion feature, and I’ve realised that I’m using that all the time too.
Under Settings > General > Keyboard you can create shortcuts, which will let you do something similar to my ‘All the best’ trick, and can be very handy if you have a silly long name like mine: ‘qqsf’ expands into ‘Quentin Stafford-Fraser’, complete with capitals and punctuation.
But the thing I’ve found most useful is to have abbreviations for my main email addresses, since an increasing number of sites use them as login usernames. I find I’m always having to type, say, ‘quentin@mycompany.com’ on my little iPhone keyboard, and it was a real pain until I replaced it with ‘qmc’ and a space.
One small note: if you use it this particular way, there are some sites that get confused if you leave the space on the end. So I actually tend to type ‘qmc<space><backspace>’, but that’s still a great deal easier than the whole address.
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