Fun hacks, WP plugins, photography, and PKI junk. Languishing since 2008.
Archive for May, 2009
Basic WebDAV Bridge For Cloud Files
May 19th
Awhile back I signed up for Skitch, a service that lets you create quick screenshots, edit them, and upload them to a variety of services. Unfortunately, despite the abundance of choices, Cloud Files support is not an option. This was irritating, and since I’ve never been one to let phrases like “ridiculous kludge” or “bereft of all sanity” deter me an idea was born. Why not write a (very) rudimentary WebDAV interface in PHP and use that to bridge to Cloud Files? To accomplish this feat it turns out we really only need 3 distinct pieces of functionality. The actual plumbing More >
Right Click On A Mac Trackpad
May 10th
This one is pretty basic, but nonetheless very important. As OS X laptops become more prevalent among less technical users I’ve noticed that there are quite a few people who aren’t aware that right click is available on their laptop. To enable this in Leopard (10.5)1, open system preferences, select the trackpad prefpane and check the “secondary click” (or “secondary tap” if you have tap to click turned on). Now simply rest two fingers on the trackpad and click (or tap two at the same time for tap click).
- This process is essentially the same in Tiger (10.4) and Panther More >
Full Keyboard Access in OS X
May 8th
A coworker got a Macbook Pro for work today and he immediately noticed that by default you can’t tab through all controls in OS X. Enter Full Keyboard Access!
To enable this incredibly useful feature open System Preferences, select Keyboard & Mouse, and then choose Keyboard Shortcuts. At the bottom of the window you’ll notice two radio buttons. Change it to “all controls” and you’re set! You can now tab (or arrow key) through radio buttons, check boxes, buttons, et cetera in almost anything.
Highlighted items will have a thin color around them (in your configured highlight color, typically blue or grey) More >
Title Bar Tricks in OS X
May 5th
Standard OS X title bars have several hidden features that can be very helpful. If you hold the command key and click the title of a window1 you will get a menu that allows you to drill down through the hierarchy to the root of the filesystem.
However, that’s not the only useful trick you can perform. If you have a document open in an application you can click on the icon in the title bar and, after holding for a brief second until the icon darkens to indicate it has been selected, drag it. This acts as a standard drag/drop but More >
Spelling Suggestions In OS X
May 3rd
One of the lesser known OS X niceties is the ability to get spelling suggestions/completions from any standard Cocoa text input. To accomplish this, simply hit the Escape key1) in any supported application (iChat, Mail, and TextEdit are some examples) and be amazed. I find this feature very useful for quickly obtaining the correct spelling of a word without taking your hands off the keyboard to get a correction. Sadly, many applications use their own text handling for various reasons so this won’t work universally (Word, TextMate, et cetera).
- In some cases Escape already has a bound behavior. For these situations More >