eugene gordin

Just a quick post today about something I’ve been patiently waiting to be released: Silverflow Interface for Quicksilver.

I’ve written about Quicksilver before, and now that its open-source I still highly recommend it. However, for those looking for a little more dazzle for their Quicksilver interface can download Silverflow, a coverflow-type interface.

Julius Eckert has more than a handful of very good looking QS interfaces, but Silverflow is now in open beta and I recommend those that don’t mind little beta bugs to try it out. Its a beautiful thing.

[Quick note: to install Silverflow, simply double click on the .tgz file that you get from Julius' site, and then double click on the Silverflow.qsplugin that gets extracted. Then, fire up Quicksilver and press cmd+(comma) to see the Quicksilver preferences. In the Preferences section, click on Appearance in the column on the left, and then under Command Interface select Silverflow. All done!]

Last Monday, I received a phone call from Microsoft’s Mac division, asking if I would like to help them improve Microsoft Office for Mac. My first instinct was to ask them how they’d found me. As it turned out, Microsoft and their henchmen keep their ears to the proverbial (online) street, and had recently encountered my website and found it filled with the sort of feedback and recommendations that they thought would serve their purpose. Since this isn’t exactly a tip or trick, click the link below to read about my visit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Luckily, someone over at LifeHacker and DownloadSquad must have been thinking on the same wavelength, because they both posted the next day about Awesome Highlighter. Awesome Highlighter allows you to highlight as many passages as you want on any webpage, and then send the link to someone else, preserving your highlights. It even creates a short URL for your link, making it easier to share with people. This is great little tool and I highly recommend it. If you don’t believe me, take a look at an example. Enjoy!

PS For those looking for a bit more features, such as adding comments and the like, check out Jump Knowledge, which is also a great tool but a little more complicated.

Just a quick tip for those of you who are Safari users (all you Mac users should be using Safari anyway). Personally, I was always really annoyed that Safari didn’t open links in a new tab, always opting to open them in a new window.

As a result, I found myself using programs like Saft and SafariStand, purely to get my links to open in new tabs instead of new windows. Luckily, thanks to a post on TUAW today, this problem is no more. Even those of you who are Terminal-shy can definitely do this. I promise it won’t hurt (and is well worth it!). Just keep in mind that you need the newest version of Safari (3.1), which you can get via Software Update.

All you have to do is open up Terminal, and paste the following command into it, and press return.

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true


That’s it. From now on, your links will open in new tabs, instead of new windows. To undo this preference, just copy the same command above into terminal, changing the true to false. Enjoy.

Update #1: I found some more really interesting Safari tips via Digg. Be sure and check those out too!

Update #2: In keeping up with my apparent theme of cool Safari tricks, Jon Hicks of Hicks Design pointed out a cool new trick in the leopard version of SafariStand. Its called History Flow. Just as the name implies, it allows you to go through your browsing history with a coverflow-type interface. Very cool for those instances that you remember what a webpage looked like, but not what it was called. Click on the image to the left for a screen shot.

Simply put, I was disappointed. After just over two weeks with the Time Capsule, I found myself stopping my Time Machine backups manually, constantly fixing little problems here and there, and being just plainly frustrated. Let me explain why.

1. Configuration is Complicated: the first backup must be done over wired ethernet, but if you don’t use the Time Capsule as your main wireless router, you need to reconfigure it at least twice, involving Time Capsule restarts each time you make the slightest configuration change. Sure, once its finally set up, the Time Machine just works in the background, but this only brings me to my next complaint.
2. Speed is Terrible: even after the initial backup is done, the incremental (and hourly) backups take entirely too long, often staying in the “Preparing to backup” stage for hours at a time, regardless of backup size. Sure, it doesn’t matter how long it takes because its in the background, but that little clock icon spins infinitely, and the backup results in errors a quarter of the time.
3. Other Connections Suffer: Trying to browse the internet while one of the Time Capsule backups is working is almost impossible. Since there’s no way to throttle or prioritize the Time Capsule traffic, my internet connection would go out almost regularly during a backup session (which happened every hour). And I wasn’t the only one feeling the hit – those on my network had problems connecting too. This is entirely unacceptable.
4. Server Grade Hard Drive My Foot: It turns out the much touted “Server Grade” hard drive inside the Time Capsule is about as server grade as I am. Not the biggest deal, but why advertise it as such?
5. SuperDuper Doesn’t Work: This has less to do with the Time Capsule (or Superduper) than it does with the way OSX is built. Basically, you can’t create a bootable copy of your hard drive with SuperDuper and Time Capsule because OSX cannot set the permissions correctly on shared network drives. There are workarounds, but nothing that will allow you to create an instantly bootable copy.

After two weeks of dropped connections, errors, constantly spinning icons, and unbootable backups, I’m finished. Indeed, I loved not having to connect my external hard drives and printer to my computer each time I needed them, but daily usability shouldn’t suffer in the mean time.

I want to be sure and note that just as I’ve said before, any backup solution is infinitely better than no backup solution. In fact, if you plan to use Time Capsule as your main router, and only backup, then I recommend it. In that sense, Time Capsule is a great idea. However, Apple’s unbelievable ability to take great ideas and turn them into great products simply failed with the Time Capsule. Most of the problems it has can (and most likely will) be fixed in the future, but in the mean time, I’d rather not deal with them myself.

One of my favorite applications for Safari is Inquisitor. It was this program, along with SafariBlock, that made my transition to Safari from Firefox easiest.

Those of you who have used Firefox will recognize the idea behind Inquisitor. And those that have used Apple’s built in Spotlight will immediately recognize Inquisitor. In fact, Inquisitor’s tagline is: Spotlight for the web.

That’s useful and great, but what I love about Inquisitor is that it extends Safari’s search capability by letting you search not only Google (which is standard in Safari), but pretty much any site that has search capability. Let me show you what I mean. Let’s say I wanted to search for Time Capsule (because I’m getting mine today).

With Safari by itself, I would type it into the search box and press return for my results. But with Inquisitor, not only does it autocomplete as I type, it also begins to list search results automatically for me. And if that wasn’t enough, it lets me search Google, Wikipedia, Google Blog Search, and anything else that I have it set to search – just with the click of a button!

This is a great little feature and I use it all the time. And adding a new place to search couldn’t be easier:

• Go into Safari’s preferences, and click on Inquisitor
• Check the “Display Additional Search Engines” box and click “Edit Sites”
• In the window that opens, either choose from on of the many sites built in, or choose “New custom search shortcut” from the little + arrow in the bottom left corner.
• If you’re adding a custom one, all you have to do is replace the query with %@.

I have listed some examples below from the ones I use:

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%@
• Hype Machine: http://hypem.com/search/%@/1/
• Gmail: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/%@
• Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/music/?q=%@
• Google Blog Search: http://google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=%@

Right now I find myself aboard Flight 763 to Las Vegas, and the only word I can muster at this point (other than those that I’m typing, of course) is: amazing. The cabin of the plane looks like nothing short of a classy nightclub, backlit with blacklights and soothing lavender neon. The divider between first class and coach isn’t a trendy curtain that the flight attendants censoriously shut, but a transparent purple plexiglass enclosure that seems to just be some sort of soon-to-be fishtank they’d fill if only the FAA would let them bring liquids onboard.

• The ability to instant message not only seat to seat, but also in chat rooms, either with the entire flight, a select group of passengers, or specific to a TV channel (in split window with the channel itself). Unreal. So cool.
• The ability to make playlists from the offered music catalog – wow. I guess it helps when you own your own large record company.
• Electrical outlets at every seat: simple, necessary, well done.
• The food is ordered from the Eat menu on your screen – choose from drinks, snacks, or entire meals, all with one swipe of your credit card along the top of the screen. The flight attendant comes right over and serves you your order.

I found it especially interesting that the options for email checking, shopping, reading (of news), and instant messaging were all already built into the system, just waiting to be enabled (although it was quite sad to see those options, but to not be able to use them). How I long for the days of in-cabin wireless internet. The future of air travel is a bright one.

What can I really say except that the entire flight was, well, an experience. That, and I paid full price for my ticket: a whopping $44.

For those that don’t know, Airtunes is a feature of the current Airport Express, which allows you to broadcast your music from iTunes to any speakers hooked up to the Airport Express. In my house, for example, we have our Airport Express in the living room, which means that at any point, I can tell iTunes to play music not through the speakers in my computer, but to the speakers in the living room (which are hooked up to the Airport Express). Airtunes lets me do that, and its quite an amazing little feature.

The one downside of Airtunes (other than the occasional skip), is that you can only transfer audio from iTunes wirelessly, and any other programs get ignored. Well, luckily, the fine folks at

Rogue Amoeba offer a very good tool called Airfoil, which allows you to broadcast all of your audio, iTunes and any other program, to your Airport Express (and now Apple TV!) – see the screen shot below!

• control the volume on the target stereo hooked up through airtunes (not possible with iTunes on its own)
• output to multiple speakers throughout the house (iTunes has this ability too but Airfoil extends it to all applications)
• play video and have synced audio using Airfoil’s Video Player
• turn any computer into a speaker (basically you can play your music through any computer in the house, very cool)
• use it on Mac OR Windows!

The one downside that I see to the beauty that is this app is that its not free, but $25 (there is a demo version on their site that you can try, fully featured). Still, for all of the added features that this application provides, its still quite worth money. If you have an Airport Express or Apple TV and aren’t using Airtunes, I highly suggest you check it out. But once you do, be sure and pick up Airfoil.

In my search for the ability to hide an app’s dock icon, I ran across a little application called Dockless, which removes the application’s dock icon even when its running. The program is amazingly simple: it surveys all of the applications on your Mac and then gives you the option of having a dock icon for it while its running or not. You can just as easily restore the dock icon for an application as you hid it.

There is one downside to this approach (which as far as I know is the only approach to this problem). When you hide the dock icon for an application, you will no longer be able to control it if you close its window. Since you’d use Dockless on the kind of applications you want to hide tend to be those that should run in the background without much intervention anyway, this isn’t much as problem.

However, I have found that that problem is easily remedied by two different solutions

1. You can bring up the program’s main window by relaunching the program (a quick keystroke in Quicksilver or from Finder), which will bring up the program’s window again.
2. You can get to the program’s preferences by remembering the keyboard shortcut for preferences on a Mac (typically ? + ,)
3. Worse comes to worst, you can always rerun Dockless and re-enable the app’s dock icon. Configure what you need, and then hide the icon again with Dockless.

So there you have it – a simple app that provides a simple solution for an annoying problem – be sure and check out Dockless!

First, for those of us that already own SuperDuper (highly recommended), the update makes your installation Leopard compatible for the lovely price of $0.

Second, for those of you that haven’t yet bought SuperDuper, you can use the program for as long as you like for the staggering price of $0. However, if you end up purchasing the amazing application that has saved me on more than one occasion, you also get the SmartUpdate (very quick updates) and Scheduling (very automatic updates) features of SuperDuper enabled for a low $27.95. That’s money well spent.

Now that you know its available, go download the free trial! In the mean time, I want to revisit the Time Machine vs. SuperDuper debate that I brought up in my previous post.

To be honest, for the last three months, I have been using Apple’s much touted Time Machine. However, when I say I’ve been using it, I mean that it has been backing up my computer in the background for the last 3 months. Sure, this provided me with my much needed (and much recommended) comfort of knowing that my data is secure. However, I cannot honestly say that I have ever used Time Machine to find a file from the past and bring it back to the present.

While I will be the first to agree that maybe Time Machine is one of those things you don’t know you need, before you need it. Sure, that’s quite a possibility, and its definitely the reason I’m going to give Time Machine some more, well, time. However, when I look back on the last three months, I see that the only time that I ever opened Time Machine was either to 1) tell Time Machine to stop making backups of my Parallels Drive or 2) to show it off to my friends.

The first reason was simply because Time Machine backs up my 10GB Parallels drive image each time I run Parallels, which ends up taking a whole lot of room. So I deleted the previous copies several times before realizing that I could just tell Time Machine to ignore that folder (under System Preferences –> Time Machine –> Options). The second is self explanatory, and quite fun, but not necessarily useful. But in the end, that’s all I’ve used it for.

Therefore, if this trend continues, Time Machine is not by any means more useful than SuperDuper. In fact, a complete system restore (knocks on wood) would take longer using Time Machine as opposed to SuperDuper, as we saw in my previous post.

So that’s my 3 month report with Time Machine. I’ll report back in another 3 months with Time Machine, SuperDuper!, and Time Capsule. Should be interesting. For now though, SuperDuper wins in my eyes.