Archive for July, 2007

New Quicksilver UI

Saturday, July 21st, 2007

I posted a mockup I made of a UI I’d like to see for Quicksilver on flickr.

Quicksilver Bezel Mockup

Preview Click the image for a larger preview.

I looked into making it & found that it looked possible, but haven’t had the time to have a go at it.

Anyway, someone has contacted me saying they’d like to have a go at it. So hopefully it’ll see the light of day in the future :)

Stop External Drives Slowing Down OS X (& Quicksilver)

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

I have an external FireWire drive & use ChronoSync to automatically sync/backup my whole Home/User folder to it every night (So don’t use the FireWire drive in the day).

But when I use the Copy To.. & Move To.. actions in Quicksilver (I use them all the time) the drive almost always slows the computer down by spinning up. Same when saving & opening files in OS X. When the Open/Save dialogue windows open up there’ll usually be a delay while the FireWire dive spins up.

I saw a handy workaround over at macosxhints. Someone posted some code to use in Terminal to mount & unmount FireWire drives. I don’t use Terminal so turned them into Automator applications & then set them to run automatically through iCal.

Unmount FireWire Drives

 

Mount FireWire Drives

So every night it will automatically mount my FireWire HD & ChronoSync will automatically sync my home folder to the FireWire HD.
Then it will automatically unmount the drive in the the morning so that it doesn’t slow down Quicksilver, & the Save & Open dialogue windows throughout the day.

If you want to try it out it’s really easy to do. You can download the Automator workflow apps along with the instructions from here. (Also has USB drive versions).
(You could just run them manually instead of through iCal if you wanted).

Automator
iCal
Quicksilver
ChronoSync

Keeping Downloads Off the Deskop

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

After seeing the new Stacks feature in Leopard I thought I’d try to clean up my desktop.

So I changed the preferences in Safari, Camino etc. so that downloads are directed to my Downloads folder (In my Home/User folder) rather than the Desktop.

Then set up up a script to automatically open up the folder any time new items (downloads) were added to that folder. Keeps things much tidier.

Here’s the script

Save the script to ‘~Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts’. Then right click on the Downloads folder & select ‘Attach a Folder Action…’. Select the ‘Open when new items are added.scpt’ file & that should be it.