Up until now I wasn’t able to use the tab key to switch between various elements on the Mac desktop. On the save dialog “save” and “cancel” couldn’t foccused with the tab key. One had to use the mouse. Seems Apple thought of that being wise or something, thankfully the left an option to change this behaviour. All you have to do is to check “All controlls” at the bottom while hilighting “All applications”.

Just press Command+Shift+C and the color picker wil pop up. Then select a new mail and it will inherit the selected color.

This is a pref pane which allows you to remap some system keys. I set the fn key to act like ctrl and the right lower enter key as forward delete. Thanks Trung! Double Command

It is a powerfull toll that allows you to create shortcuts for allmost any situations… It can execute scripts, menu shortcuts and so on. And it’s universal bin too Spark

Sidenote is a smal tray that pops up when you hit the edge of your screen with the mouse. You can store anything that’s drag&dropable in in. Very handy to put the stuff on your desktop in a sidenote…
Sidenote

Quicksilver ROCKS!

Here are some basic and advanced tips how to use quicksilver in new mind boggling ways:
For a good read check this tutorials:
http://vjarmy.com/archives/2005/02/quicksilver_fro.php
http://vjarmy.com/archives/2006/01/quicksilver_gold_trigger.php

Assign custom shortcuts with triggers
1. You can use QS (QuickSilver) to bind _ANY_ action to a custom key combo. This way you can start all sorts of scripts and programms with a shortcut of your choice. Wanna have a shortcut for resizing your frontmost window? Check this one. Save the following snippet as a AppleScript… script:


tell application "System Events"
set frontApp to first application process whose frontmost is true
end tell

tell application (name of frontApp)
set zoomed of window 1 to not (zoomed of window 1)
end tell


Save the script somewhere and remember it. Then fire up QS and go to prefferences. There click on Triggers on the left side. You can add a trigger with the + sign.

In the select pane navigate to your script. Note the select pane works just like QuickSilver - just type in what you look for… After you found your application or script, press save. You’ll be back in the trigger main pane. Assign a shortcut in the right pane. That’s it.

Start/Search tracks from iTunes with QS
You can have a specialized instance of QuickSilver just for iTunes. Way faster to choose your tracks than switching to iTunes and clicking on the search pane.
Create a new trigger and select iTunes -> Browse Tracks. For the Action choose QSObjectSearchChildrenAction. Click on save and choose a shortcut ( I took option + space). That’s it. System wide iTunes track search. And it’s not only about iTunes tracks… You can modify the trigger to search for artists, playlists and so on.

Go nuts with Proxies
To use proxies you have to enable the advanced features -> Beta in QS. With this you can add proxies to QS so it knows what’s going on. Like what is your frontmost window, what webpage is in the frontmost browser and so on. You can then combine this stuff with triggers to bind your key combo to actions like: Hide other windows other than the frontmost one, or start another browser if the website you are viewing in Safari does not display correctly. To enable the proxies, go to the QS prefs, then on click on Catalog in the left pane, expand Quicksilver and check Proxies. Now you have more actions for triggers.

For other hints and ideas check the two links from the top.

Did I mention that I like the QuickSilver font? Hm, this would make a nice tatoo

Imagewell is a small and nifty image editor. It can upload the images via ftp, webdav, to a folder or directly to .mac. I like it Imagewell

When you select some text in the terminal you have to cmd+c to copy it and cmd+v to paste it. Terminal.app allows you to paste the actual selection - there is no need to copy it first. Its shift+command+v.
I mapped this keystroke with Usboverdrive to the middle mouse button for the good ol’ xterm feeling…
By the way - you can also drag the selected copyed text to the actual prompt and it will be pasted too… This fits well with Apples drag anywhere mantra.

I was looking for a really small and fast image viewer without bells and wihstels and I found it:
Phoenix Slides
In conjunction with USB Overdrive I mapped wheel down and up to right and left arrow. Now I can skim through the images only with the mouse(wheel)

I found this hint while I was working with irb (ruby) and realized that I can’t type ö, ä and ü. To enable umlaut(e) do:

Then put the following in your ~/.inputrc (if it’s not there create the file in your home dir):


set meta-flag ON
set input-meta On
set conver-meta Off
set output-meta On
set show-all-if-ambiguos On


That’s it. Restart Terminal.app or do “source ~/.inputrc”