Apple’s Iphone Celebrated its 10th anniversary, so I’ve decided to articles, focusing on Apple’s product.
I hope you will enjoy these, readers.
It used to be all the rage to photograph in excruciating detail the ‘unboxing’ of a new piece of gear, especially hardware that few people (or no-one else) yet had. this was great, but it’s sort of like a wedding: the event is relatively brief and the important stuff comes afterwards,
as you spend years together. likewise, unboxing a new macintosh may be exciting, especially if it’s a surprise. But the important part comes next. while apple includes some software, and offers more to download for free via the mac app store, what else should a new user or a fresh system get?
I have 5 suggestions that will make your life better by shaving off the irritations that remain in os X Yosemite and in apple’s bundled software. a new mac user will be happier than otherwise, while a veteran user looking to refresh a system will find the time and effort savings rewarding as well.
1. LaunchBar
While OS X’s Launchpad and Spotlight can, in different ways, let you quickly find and open apps, documents, and other things, they can be maddening. Launchpad’s interface is hardly useful when you have more than a handful of apps, and Spotlight searches everything, rather than specific categories and in specific ways. Instead, pick LaunchBar (obdev.at, €23 [£18] individual; €39 [£29] family), which indexes and links to all sorts of stuff: music, contacts, apps, emoji, search history, bookmarks, and more.
The app can be invoked from a keystroke – we use the default 1-Escape. Then you just type a few letters to select the thing you want, and press Return to launch it or open it with the appropriate app. LaunchBar’s bar, however, also lets you perform most Finder actions with a 1-shortcut and carry out calculations. LaunchBar can also add Clipboard depth, turning into something like the old pre-OS X Scrapbook: you can revert to and cycle through previous items you’ve copied or cut.
2. Default Folder
There are three elements of Yosemite itself that we spend more time interacting with than any other: the Open dialog, the Save dialog (and variants like Export), and Finder window navigation. Default Folder (stclairsoft.com, £25.50) enhances all of these to your advantage in efficiency and organisation. When installed, the app wraps your open and save dialogs in a bunch of extra interface items. On one side, you can select from volumes and special
locations, Finder windows, favourited locations, and recently visited folders. The file-navigation dialogs can also be set to snap to the last document opened or other locations, while pressing Alt, plus the down or up arrow cycles backward or forward through recent folders. Another item allows a variety of Finder-style file actions directly within the dialog, like rename, duplicate, and move to trash. A pane at the bottom reveals a preview, Spotlight comments, tags and
permissions, as well as file data such as creation date and whether the item is locked or not. There’s a host of other options, too: tap a key combination, and the current folder is opened in the Finder. With Default Folder installed, you never have to painstakingly navigate your drives and folders.
3. TextExpander
We know this is crazy talk, but what if you could replace the tedious repetitive typing of common phrases with a few keystrokes? Such shortcutting dates back
decades – once known as ‘macros’ – and TextExpander (smilesoftware.com, £26 individual, £35 family) is the modern mature version of it. Start with figuring out a few characters to type instead of your name or mailing address, then advance to using its tools for tapping a few keys to insert the current date, formatting it as you like. As you become more familiar with the software, you can move on to employing prefabricated AppleScript to tap into URL shorteners, handling the round trip from clipboard to a tiny path. Graduate to its fill-in forms, which allow you to compose
a message with selectable fill-in values to automate replies. Smile revised its iOS version, TextExpander 3 (£3.99) to work within the add-on keyboard approach in iOS 8. Snippets can sync using Dropbox among Mac and iOS devices. 4. 1Password
Security pundits recommend that you create a unique strong password for every site or service you use. That’s impossible for most of us to manage, but an integrated password generator and secure storage app such as 1Password handles that with ease. it can create random password according to rules you set, or those absurd ones imposed by sites, and then securely store them for you. that would be perfectly dandy, but not terribly useful if that’s all it did. However, 1password also comes with web browser plug-ins for safari, chrome and Firefox, which let you invoke the app while visiting a site. tap a keystroke, and it either prefills a username, password, and more, if there’s only one match; or lets you choose among multiple accounts for a site. when creating an account, the password generator can be invoked in the same way. 1password also stores and can fill in one or more identities (address information), as well as credit card details. Versions are available for windows, ios, and android, and a password database can be synced among them. (the app store version is required for icloud sync with os X and ios.) the similarly featured lastpass (tinyurl. com/mj77n44, free) is an alternative for those who want to be able to gain access to passwords via website, which 1password doesn’t offer.
5. Dropbox
Keeping files up to date among multiple computers was a pain for many years. it wasn’t until Dropbox (dropbox. com, free tier with 2- to 16 GB; 1tB Dropbox pro, £7.69 per month or £79 per year) appeared – a harbinger of cloud storage – that it became simple. Dropbox has a single folder into which you can place anything, and it’s copied to its
internet storage in your account, while also synchronised to any computer logged into the same account. (You can selectively omit specific subfolders on each machine.) that would be enough, but it also offers two kinds of sharing. shared
folders sync the contents to any members who have joined the folder. a shared link allows any recipient to download a file or folder, or browse a folder’s contents. Because Dropbox keeps a copy centrally, it keeps track of every change. older versions and even deleted files are available for up to 30 days after a change or removal, and an upgrade to Dropbox pro, called extended Version History, extends that to a year. Dropbox’s ios client lets you browse its cloud-stored versions, forward files, and download them to the app or open in other apps.
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