Here’s a couple of mods I made a while ago.

A few people asked for a link to them.

  Download

A few more Leopard folder icons.

Download (All of them)

(Edit: Added another verion of the Dropbox folder, now used officially with the app.)

If you change an app’s icons (application icon and/or toolbar icons) and that app is updated quite often it can become a pain to keep changing them each time. Here’s an Automator workflow to automate the process.

Drag the custom icons you want to use to the window in the ‘Get Specified Finder Items’ action.

To add the Resources folder (where you will copy the custom icons to) to the ‘Copy Finder Items’ action, right click on the app you want to modify the icons of & select ‘Show Package Contents’. Open the Contents folder to find the Resources folder & then drag this from the Finder window to the location drop down list in the ‘Copy Finder Items’ action

Save the workflow as an application, then any time the app is updated run the Automator app to change the icons.

To automate it even further you can set up rules in Hazel to automatically change the icons once the app has been updated without having to manually run the workflow yourself.

Some disk icon mods I made a while ago.

A few people asked me for them.

  Download.

I’ve updated the Leopard folder icons again to add a few more.

Download the icons here, and the Photoshop templates to make your own here.

I wasn’t loving the default overlay icons for Dropbox so made some new ones.

  Download.

Not sure when or how it happened but my blog was flagged as malicious by Google & Firefox.

When I looked into it I saw quite a lot of bad links, some that I couldn’t work out how to fix (couldn’t find any trace of some pages and links that were reported as having problems). I recently moved web hosts so maybe these problems were caused when restoring the backed up blog at the new location?

I also found that some malware links had been inserted into some of my pages. Not sure how this was done, but I was able to remove those.

So I’ve hopefully managed to fix the problems and also moved the blog to http://blog.iconaholic.com/

If you were subscribing to the RSS feed then please subscribe to the new one, the old one won’t work anymore.

Since joining Twitter some of the people I follow/follow me aren’t native English speakers, so don’t post in English all of the time. (Me being nosy) I wanted to see what they were saying so tried to find a quick & easy way of translating text & web pages being linked to.

I originally tried to do it with Quicksilver & Google Translate. It was possible for most of what I wanted to do, but not all. In the end I found it quicker & easier to use LaunchBar with Google Translate.
With this it’s possible to translate selected text to you native or a different language, translate full web pages, & also write text in one language then translate it into another.

A few people asked me how to do this so I whipped up this video (I went slower than normal so it’s (hopefully) clearer what’s happening).

View the medium size version here, or download the large version here.

What might not be clear with the keys pressed shown on screen is that I press & hold ⌃Space to invoke LaunchBar which also brings the selected text into LaunchBar (only shows the ⌃ (CTRL) key), & I use ⌥Space to invoke Quicksilver. (For some reason ScreenFlow doesn’t show the space bar). I also use ⌘L to select the URL in Safari’s address bar before hitting ⌃Space to send it to LaunchBar when translating web pages.

To see how it looks at normal speed view the medium size version here, or download the large version here. Once you get used to it translating things becomes very quick & easy.

Here are the search template URLs for LaunchBar:

French to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&q=*

Italian to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=it&tl=en&q=*

Japanese to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=jp&tl=en&q=*

Portuguese to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=pt&tl=en&q=*

Spanish to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&q=*

German to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&q=*

English to French

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=fr&sl=en&tl=fr&q=*

English to Italian

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=it&sl=en&tl=it&q=*

English Japanese

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=jp&sl=en&tl=jp&q=*

English to Portuguese

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=pt&sl=en&tl=pt&q=*

English to Spanish

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=es&sl=en&tl=es&q=*

English to German

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=de&sl=en&tl=de&q=*

French web page to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=fr&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Italian web page to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=it&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Japanese web page to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=ja&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Portuguese web page to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=pt&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Spanish web page to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=es&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

German web page to English

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

To add the search templates invoke LaunchBar & hit ⌘Y to open the configuration window. Click on Search Template & add new ones with the above URLs.

Any questions on how to do anything in the video let me know. It is possible to translate text using Quicksilver (not web pages though), but there’s a few more steps involved so I prefer to do it using LaunchBar. Let me know if anyone’s interested in learning how to do this with Quicksilver.

Update:
Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline has featured this tip in his latest screencast. It’s a members only (paid) screencast, but you can view his part on translating using LaunchBar in HD here, & iPod/iPhone res here.

When I made the Cover Flow UI mock-up for Quicksilver there wasn’t any thought in how it would actually work. It was just throwing the idea out there to see how it could look.

Cover Flow mode is up & running for Julius Eckert’s SilverFlow interface, & it’s taking a bit more thought on how to actually implement it.

For the 3 pane mode (Move To…, Copy To… etc.) here’s a mock-up of how I see it working.

Movie file selected, Open is the default action.

Tabbed to the 2nd pane, selecting ‘Move To…’ as the action.

Movies folder selected as the location to move the file to.

Here’s how it would look if you typed some text (in text mode) & the default option was Paste

And here it’s tabbed to the 2nd pane & selected Copy to Clipboard instead of Paste.

I’ve updated the Leopard folder icons.

As I made the icons months ago (using the folders from a Leopard beta) I found that the folder icons from the released version of Leopard had been tweaked slightly.

This is especially noticeable in the 16×16 versions. I’ve also increased the contrast of the in the 16×16 versions to match the standard Leopard icons more.

  Download