probably this is too arcane, too complex, or too unique to really matter to anyone. and yet because google will bring the 3 of you who are interested to this page, i wanted to quickly share some items that solved some minor annoyances on my new macbook, made desktop apps more cloudlike, and generally put a smile on my face. some day, and some day soon, everything will work like this, without all these hoops, without all the techno mumbo jumbo, and maybe more than 3 people will read this post with interest or better yet, this post won’t be necessary.
a long time ago, i put firefox in my dropbox and it worked. don’t know what dropbox is? it’s a brain dead easy way to share files between computers. in my case, putting firefox in dropbox meant my bookmarks, add-ons, and general hackery were the same everywhere, and life was pretty good. it wasn’t perfect, i had a mac box and windows laptop, so google gears protested, but i was happy. now, having replaced (finally) my windows laptop with a macbook, gears worked too, but more importantly, new things were possible.
- contact management
- i put address book in dropbox (it’s easy). contact additions and changes anywhere are reflected in all places immediately. and while my iphone won’t get over-the-air updates, every time i sync it i get the updated list there as well. itunes/isync enable syncing address book with gmail and yahoo mail, and while yahoo mail will create duplicate entries galore, you will now have a fairly ubiquitous set of contacts.
- keystroke commands
- like the 3 of you reading this post, i was a quicksilver fanatic until support stopped, os x was updated, and consequently it became unreliable. i’ve been using launchbar as a replacement, which works, yet i lament that between it and a change by delicious in how they store bookmarks locally (they now use sqlite), i could no longer index my delicious bookmarks and access them with a keyboard shortcut (as i could with quicksilver). last night i slayed this dragon and in a vain attempt to be brief i’ll say that the trick is:
- use automator to open ybookmarks.sqlite
- run sql against it and output the results to a textfile
select shortcut,url from bookmarks where shortcut != '' order by shortcut; - read that file with your preferred scripting language and create an html bookmarks file that launchbar can parse
<dl> <dt><a href=[URL]>[SHORTCUT]</a></dt> ... </dl> - set up a cron job or some such process to run this process frequently enough to keep it in sync with your delicious bookmarks stored online
- some apple minutiae
- the iphone headphones and line-in microphone work with your mac. this enables you to use skype rather painlessly anytime you have your laptop. skype and launchbar work fairly well together too, though i did have to find a script somewhere to initiate the call
- more apple minutiae
- to change your default instant messenger client you must open ichat and change preferences. why this wouldn’t be available from systems preferences i have no idea. i only found this because launchbar would open ichat when i tried to use it to invoke an IM window with a contact