eugene gordin

Today, John Gruber said that “the only people who aren’t using Dropbox are those who haven’t tried it,” and I have to agree. Dropbox is an ingenious application that syncs your files with just about anything or anyone. I’ve been using Dropbox since it was a closed beta, and it has quickly become one of the most useful apps on my Mac. It’s difficult to sum up all of the amazing things that Dropbox does in one short post. Instead, here are my top 3 reasons to use it:

1. Free, Reliable Backup: Dropbox gives you 2GB of space to sync your files to your online account, your iPhone, and any other computer you wish. Change a file on one computer, and the changes are reflected everywhere else.
   
   
2. Simple Sharing: Dropbox lets you easily share entire folders with other Dropbox users, and files with anyone else. Place a file in your public folder, and Dropbox will give you a public link to paste anywhere you like.
   
   
3. Painless Revision Control: Dropbox keeps old versions of the files in your Dropbox folder for up to 30 days. Open a file in your Dropbox and save it. Each time you change it and save it, Dropbox will store a the old copy for you, just in case you want to revert back.

There’s a whole lot more you can do with Dropbox, but those are the three main reasons I swear by it. So go sign up for a Dropbox account today, and if you’d like to get an additional 250MB on top of your free 2GB, use my referral link.

There are very few applications these days that completely change the way I use my Mac, but Cinch is definitely one of them. Cinch lets you resize your application windows to be fullscreen or half-screen, just by dragging a window to the edge of your monitor.

Drag a window to the top of your screen, and it becomes full screen. Drag it to the right hand side of the screen, and it takes up the right half. Very simple, very straightforward. Although it doesn’t work for all applications (including Parallels windows in Coherence), but Cinch does work for most.

The other amazing thing about Cinch is that it’s actually based on a Windows 7 feature called Snap. It’s hard to believe that such a great usability feature would come from such an unusable operating system.

So go download Cinch – it has a free trial but it’ll be $7 well spent.

I have been back and forth in my opinion about Google Wave, one day hailing it as the future and the next day dismissing it as overhyped bloatware. Regardless of the day however, more and more of my friends are starting to show up on Google Wave, so I have been trying to use it pretty regularly to see if it really is as amazing as some people tout.

If you ignore the current slowness, bugs, and usability issues, the remaining problem with Google Wave is that there currently is no simple way for you to be notified that there is a new wave in your inbox. Hiroshi Saito is working on a simple menubar notifier for Google Wave, but I have yet to get it to work. Waveboard, the first major Google Wave app was released a while back, but it is little more than a unique browser window which loads the Google Wave webpage. The little more however, is significant, because Waveboard includes Growl, Dock, & menubar notification of unread waves in your inbox. This means that those of you who are looking for a Google Wave notifier can look no further. [update: the new version (0.9) adds some very useful new features].

For those of you who don’t mind having the Waveboard icon in your dock, use the app as it is. Those of you looking for purely a notifier can remove the Waveboard icon from the dock using a great app called Dockless (which I’ve written about before). Dockless lets Waveboard run without a dock icon, meaning you get menubar notifications and Growl notifications without all of the visual clutter. [Update: The developer of Waveboard told me that hiding the dock icon will be included in preferences of future Waveboard versions.]

For the those of you who want the ultimate notifier, you can get push notifications about new waves in your inbox using Waveboard’s Growl integration and the amazing Prowl app for iPhone. There is also a Waveboard for iPhone, which works seamlessly with Prowl too.

Regardless of how you use it, Waveboard is a great sign of things to come.

Update: The developer of Waveboard, after discovering this article, has generously donated three(!) Promo Codes for the Waveboard iPhone app to the readers of this site. All you have to do to get one is leave a note in the comments of this post explaining what you currently use Google Wave to do. The promo code recipients will be chosen at random by Monday, November 9th, 2009. Good luck!

Update: Still have two promo codes left – please leave a comment if you want them!

Here are two seemingly unrelated little tips for you guys, both involving things on the web I simply cannot live without!

Adblock for Safari on Snow Leopard
For those that don’t know, adblock apps are browser add-ons which allow you to hide ads on the web. For Firefox users there’s Adblock Plus (which I’ve written about before), and for Safari there is SafariBlock, which is no longer compatible with Snow Leopard out of the box.

Therefore, those of you who used adblocking in the past were faced with a problem when upgrading to Snow Leopard – there was no real app that was compatible with the 64-bit goodness of Snow Leopard’s Safari. You could force Safari to run in 32 bit mode and use Safari Adblock, but you wouldn’t be able to enjoy the speedy improvements that Snow Leopard brought to Safari that way.

Well today I found a great new app called Safari Adblocker, which is 100% free and works with Snow Leopard’s Safari (it is actually based on SafariBlock, my old favorite adblocker). It includes subscriptions to Rick572’s EasyList (which is amazing), and is quite stable. So if you’re on Snow Leopard and looking for Adblocking, be sure to check out Safari Adblocker.

Google Reader’s Popular Items
The other tip I wanted to share was for those of you who use Google Reader (I have written about its amazing usefulness before too). Last week, the Google Reader team unveiled two new features to its amazing product: Personalized Ranking & Popular Items. Personalized ranking allows you to sort your unread items by “magic,” which is a sorting mechanism catered to what you will most likely be interested in (based on the items you marked “Liked”, and shared items). This is very useful if you use Google Reader frequently (like me).

Popular Items however, is an even more interesting feature: it provides you with popular content from around the web, sorted by the content which is most likely to interest you. This combines the “recommended feeds” and personalized ranking features, and has provided me with some very interesting content to which I was not subscribed before. Also, if you’re a big keyboard shortcut user (I use the J and K shortcuts all the time in Google Reader), you can access the newly-added “Explore” and “Popular items” views by pressing g then e or g then p, respectively.

As always, let me know what you think about these things or if you have any questions.

Apologies for not posting in a long amount of time aside, I wanted to share two quick Mac tips:

The first one is an easy way to see if your document is unsaved in OSX – in an application like Microsoft Excel, just take a look at the red close button in the top left hand corner. If you see a black dot in the middle, you’ve made unsaved changes. While you’re at it, be sure to change your autosave setting in your Microsoft Office application preferences to something less than the default 10 minutes (due to traumatic experiences, I have mine set to 1 minute). You can find that setting under Preferences–>Save–>Save AutoRecover information after this amount of minutes. Thanks to OSXDaily for pointing the black dot out – always wondered what that was.

The second tip is an interesting productivity approach that has actually been built into OSX since its first release. Its called Single Application Mode, and the idea is that you only show one application on your screen at once. When you’re working in this mode, each time you switch from one application to another (using the dock), OSX will hide all of the other windows. This is similar to how the iPhone functions. If you’re looking for minimal distractions and have no desire to maximize your windows fully, simply enter these two commands into Terminal.app (Applications–>Utilities):

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true
killall Dock

To get rid of Single App Mode, all you have to do is run the same two commands, but change the word true to false. For more information, see this TidBITS article on the subject.

Hope those tips are useful – let me know what you think.

Back in 2006, I wrote an article about the applications that I would install first when faced with a brand new Mac. Since then, I returned to that same subject, in a updated post for a new website called AppleHits. The introduction of that article is reproduced below.

So here you are, facing your beautiful new Mac, wondering what sorts of applications you simply must install. After being in this very situation many times myself, and helping numerous friends with their new Macs, I have developed a list of apps that I simply cannot live without.

Click here to read the rest of the article on AppleHits.

I listen to a lot of new music every week, and as a result, I end up deleting a lot of music after listening to it once or twice. The problem I’ve run into is that when I’m trying to delete a song from my music library, iTunes, as a precaution, gives me the dialogue box on the right.

Now this isn’t a problem in and of itself, but for some reason, I tend to simply press return when I see this box, instead of pressing the “Move to Trash” button. Pressing return selects the “Keep File” button, which means that somewhere in my iTunes folder, I’ll have an mp3 laying around which I a) don’t want and b) forget about. This might not seem like a big deal, but as it turned out, I have over 1.5GB of these kinds of files, just wasting space on my MacBook Pro.

Today I realized that I must not be the only one with this problem, and so a routine Google search revealed that there was indeed a simple solution. There is an AppleScript called List Music Folder Files Not Added that will search a specified folder (in my case my iTunes Music folder) for any files which are not in your iTunes Music Library.

Two important notes before we go on:

• If you, for any reason, think you removed songs/videos/podcasts/etc from iTunes but intentionally clicked Keep File in the dialogue box above, do NOT follow these instructions because your media will be erased.
• This tip will only work if you have the following checkboxes checked in your iTunes Preferences–> Advanced: ‘Keep iTunes Music folder organized’ and ‘Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library.’ I highly recommend both of these settings be enabled anyway, especially since you can simply consolidate your library.
  

Here’s all you have to do:

1. Download the List Music Folder Files Not Added script from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes (a very useful site).
2. Double click on the DMG to mount it and then copy the “CocoaCallBridge” and “List Music Folder Files Not Added” files to the following folder: [your username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts. I you don’t have a Scripts folder in iTunes, just create one.
3. Open iTunes and you should see a little black script icon in the menubar next to Window. Click on it and select the List Music Folder Files Not Added script.
4. It will open the AppleScript and ask you which folder you want to compare to your iTunes Music Library. For my problem, I selected all of the folders (cmd+a) within /Users/[your username]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music. Then press return.
5. It then gives you another dialogue box which asks where you want to save the exported file. I simply chose my Desktop so that it would be easy to find. Be sure to fill in the box where it says “Save As:” with a filename that ends in m3u. This will create a playlist of all of the songs you removed from the iTunes library but didnt delete. Press return and let it do its work (might take a while depending on the size of your library). If you’re running Leopard it might warn you about running the CocoaCallBridge application – just say yes and let it do its work – its part of the AppleScript).
6. When the AppleScript tells you that it finished, go to iTunes and create a new playlist. Then drag the m3u file that the AppleScript created into that playlist.
7. Now in one swoop, select all of the songs in that playlist (cmd+a), and press cmd+option+delete. It will now give you that dialogue box you see at the top of this post. BE SURE TO CLICK MOVE TO TRASH (if you press return, you’re gonna have to repeat step 6 again). Now the unwanted mp3s are in your trash. Before emptying your trash, take a look just in case at what you just erased one last time.

That’s all you have to do! It’s a great little script and it saved me over 1.5GB on my hard drive! If you have any questions, leave me a comment and I’ll clarify anything you need. Enjoy.

With iPhoto ‘09 out for less than a week, I thought I’d write a post with Tips and Tricks for it that I have discovered while playing with this great piece of software. This will *hopefully* be the first installment of the iPhoto ‘09 Tips and Tricks posts, and focuses on the new Faces feature.  

I can honestly say that I’ve been pretty excited about iPhoto since I got iLife ‘09 last Tuesday. However, there are a few caveats to this useful iPhoto update:

1. Faces is not a replacement for manual photo tagging. As far as I can tell, Faces is basically “next best” solution to not tagging your photos at all – since it’s automated and does not require as much overhead as manually tagging your photos. This is a somewhat sad realization for the 3 of us out there who have tagged almost all of our 20,000+ photo library already, but that’s alright.
2. Keyword Manager, my beloved iPhoto companion, is not yet compatible with iPhoto ‘09 as of this writing. The guys behind Keyword Manager have ordered a copy of iLife ‘09, and we’re all patiently waiting for them to either issue an update (yay!) or tell us that they’re throwing in the towel (sadness!). From my experience with iPhoto so far, I think that Keyword Manager isn’t going anywhere.

As I find more tips, I’ll add them here, so be sure and check back.

1. When working in Faces mode, it helps to click on the 2nd button from the left on the bottom toolbar (looks like a silhouette portrait, see picture on the right). This button will isolate the faces in question in the photo and make it easier to confirm who iPhoto is actually asking about.
2. When in the Faces section, looking at a particular person’s “confirmed” as well as suggested photos, you can easily confirm a suggested photo by dragging it into the “confirmed” section at the top of the window. This can save you the hassle of clicking the Name button and then confirming manually.
3. When tagging someone’s face for the first time, pick a photo where their face is clearly visible (and ideally without sun glasses). Sun glasses really play with iPhoto’s facial recognition system, and picking a good first photo can make iPhoto’s initial face recommendations much better.
4. When confirming faces manually, you can confirm multiple photos at once by simply clicking and dragging a box around the photos in question. Making the same box around the photos while holding the Option key will reject all of the photos in the box, instead of confirming (see screenshot below).
5. In addition to Tip 3 (and in the Portrait mode – Tip 1), I highly suggest that, while confirming faces, you make the iPhoto window large enough (and thumbnails small enough) to show 5 to 6 photos across. That way, you can quickly confirm or reject many photos at once (see screenshot on the right).
6. I found that it was helpful to quickly browse the photos it is suggesting in the current window, and then deciding if the vast majority of them are indeed the person whose face you’re tagging. If the majority are the right person, then confirm them all using the box method described in Tip 3 and reject the individual “rejects” by either double clicking on those photos, or clicking on them while holding option. If the majority are not, follow Tip 3 again, making the box while holding down they Option key. Then you can confirm the individual photos with the correct faces by either clicking on them individually. This GREATLY speeds up face tagging (see picture on the right).
7. When iPhoto did not or cannot recognize the presence of a face (happens more than I’d hope), you can manually add a face. However, the box it creates when you click on “Add Missing Face” is rarely the right size. This box also has a seemingly unintuitive way of resizing. When you click on a corner and contract or expand the box, both sides of the box expand (hard to explain, but you’ll see what I’m talking about). Therefore, when manually adding faces, I suggest you first move the box so that it’s center is in the exact center of the face you’re tagging. Then resize the box. You’ll find that doing it this way will be much much easier since you won’t have to move the box (and resize) around (and resize) as much.

Like I said, I will be adding more tips and tricks (especially about the new Places feature) as I come across them, so check back. In the mean time, you can also find more tips and tricks from Gizmodo and MacLife.

As time goes on, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that we shouldn’t have to be forced to watch television on someone else’s schedule. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for new ways to watch my favorite tv shows whenever I want. Sure, there is on demand from your friendly local cable company, but that has neither every episode nor every show. So what to do?

There are three websites that I’d like to recommend which let you watch your TV shows online, without ever having to download any of them:

Surf the Channel

Probably the most comprehensive collection of links to streamable tv episodes out there. I just found this site, and I have to say, I’m impressed. They even have every episode of The West Wing online, often with multiple backup sites for each episode. Wow.

All UC

This site has been around for quite a while now, but it’s still quite great. If Surf the Channel doesn’t have your show, then AllUC probably does. Be sure to check it out.

Hulu

Hulu is the ‘legitimate’ one of the bunch, but also provides high quality streaming of lots of different tv shows. It was founded as a joint venture between NBC entertainment and NewsCorp. It’s well done, and quite useful so check it out.

With bandwidth and space costs decreasing, it’s nice to see an alternative to downloading tv shows or watching them at their regularly scheduled time.

If anyone has any other suggestions for streaming tv show sites, let me know! Its time for me to get back to watching the Mad Men season finale!

Two seemingly unrelated things, unless you’re still getting your photos developed at your friendly local photo place. Well, for the purposes of this post, they are simply two very helpful but unrelated tips. Here goes:

Split Bills Simpler

Have you ever gone on a trip with a group of friends, and painstakingly collected all of your receipts only to find out that now you have to fire up Excel and figure out who owes what to whom? I have. In fact, if you count our house bills, I have to go through this very process pretty regularly.

Luckily there’s a fantastic little tool out there called Short Reckonings which takes all of the work out of it. All you have to do is open the Short Reckonings page, name your expense sheet, enter the involved people’s names, and then enter the expenses one by one and the people among whom you’d like to split that expense. That’s it.

Short Reckonings does the rest for you, figuring out how much each person owes, and the most efficient way for each person to pay (so that a minimum of checks are written). It generates a report for you, optimizes for printing, let’s you have non-even splits (weights), and even allows you to export your data to Excel format. You don’t even need to sign up for an account. It saves your expenses and gives you a convenient URL to save or hand out to the participants (check out my Bonnaroo expenses, for example).

It’s a great little tool and the developer, Mikaël Gravé, is extremely helpful and always looking for suggestions and bug reports. There are alternatives to Short Reckonings but none are nearly as well done or as simple. So next time you gotta split up a whole lot of expenses, be sure and try out Short Reckonings.

Easily Download Picasa WebAlbums on a Mac

Have you ever received a notification from a friend that he or she has place new photos of your most recent trip on their Picasa Web Albums. If you’re on a mac, you know that its nearly impossible to easily download all of those photos all at once. In fact, the only way I knew how to do this was to run Picasa in Windows through Parallels (which allows you to simply click Download to Picasa and drag the photos back to my Mac that way, ugh).

Luckily, today I found a simpler way thanks to a thread over at Apple’s Discussion Forums. As long as you have iPhoto ‘08, you can simply do the following:

1. Copy the URL of the RSS feed from the PicasaWeb album (it’s at the bottom right hand corner of the thumbnail view)
2. In iPhoto go to: File –> Subscribe to Photo Feed and paste the URL you just copied.

That’s it. I didn’t even need to number those steps. Iphoto will automatically download the photos to your Mac. Brilliant!