Three More Cool Small Tools for OSX

Here are three tools I’ve discovered recently, at least two out of three came from [FreeMacWare.com](http://www.freemacware.com/).

* [Deskop Manager](http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/) — This is a virtual desktop manager. A lot of people have discovered this already, so I’m a late-comer. The latest stable build is for 10.3, so it runs in Rosetta on my Mac Book Pro. It runs fine, though it sometimes doesn’t move windows from one desktop to another very well. Still, it’s virtual desktops, so it’s very useful for me.
* [Library Books](http://tc.versiontracker.com/product/redir/kind/0/db/mac/id/25731/) — this handy little app interfaces with your local library’s website and lets you know what books you have out, when they are due, etc. With a click it will log you into the library’s website where you can renew your books, search the catalog, etc. This works straight out of the box with Omaha Public Library’s site. Since I get all my reading material these days from OPL, this is a must-have for me.
* [Speed Freak](http://home.comcast.net/~jeff.ulicny/software/utils.html#sf) — this is my most recent addition to the page, yet it is probably the most useful. This app let’s you configure what other app you want to run faster than the others. What it really does is run [renice](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/renice.html) over and over again. Therefore, you can only run this as an Administrator user. It can also hide all the applications that you are currently using (just click on their icon on the Dock to get them back). After a day or so I can already notice a difference. Very cool, indeed!

Getting Emacs more like TextMate

So I got to thinking over a short break from work (and blogging) that
I should re-evaluate my Emacs usage on OSX.
[Aquamacs's](http://aquamacs.org/) latest is based on Emacs 22 and
I’ve been doing more and more tweaks of Emacs at work to try to get it
like my TextMate setup at home.  There are a few things that I don’t
like about TextMate,like having to use the mouse when you are loadingwe
a new file.

I have spent some time last night and this morning trying to get my
Emacs setup like my TextMate, so I can do 95% of the thing I do in
Emacs that I do in TextMate.  I’m not quite there yet, but here are
the things I enabled/downloaded to get things going.  And, yes, the
fact that I had to download extra packages for Aquamacs and not for
TextMate does give TextMate a +1.

* [Blogging](http://peadrop.com/blog/2007/05/11/blogging-with-emacs/) with [Markdown](http://jrblevin.freeshell.org/software/markdown-mode/)
* [Icicles](http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles), i.e. mega-buffer and command management
* [Skeleton Pairs](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/autotype/Inserting-Pairs.html)

This is my first post using Aquamacs, with weblogger and Markdown.
And it failed — I ended up copying and pasting it into WordPress’s
admin.

And thus the smackdown begins . . .

MacFuse

As I’ve said before, [TextMate](http://macromates.com/) is becoming my killer app on OSX. One thing I have been missing is a way to edit files over SSH. Emacs has [Tramp](http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/), which works very well. I googled around and noted that the TextMate list had mentioned [MacFuse](http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/) as a way to accomplish this.

I remembered hearing about MacFuse in the past and have played with the original [Fuse](http://fuse.sourceforge.net/) before. Fuse is a way for a normal use to mount a filesystem. And “filesystem” is a relative term — with the Linux-based Fuse, you could mount your GMail account and use that like a file system, or even an SSH connection, which was my hope. I looked at MacFuse and they are getting some good stuff around. MacFuse not only has a pre-built version for SSH (called, wittingly, “[sshfs](http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/MACFUSE_FS_SSHFS)”) but also [one for making SpotlightFS](http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/MACFUSE_FS_SPOTLIGHTFS). Sorta like Smart Folders. Only different.

I installed MacFuse and it required a restart. I did that and installed sshfs. I configured a connection (I use private keys with my SSH — I think it’s required for this operation. At least it should be). When I used Finder or the open file dialog, it was slow at first. But as MacFuse was able to do it’s caching, it turned out to be only a little slower than a normal file system. And reading the file in TextMate and then saving it were also so. But, really, the same is true in Tramp as well.

I think I like the Emacs/Tramp combination better, but I don’t see TextMate getting anything like that. So MacFuse and sshfs will have to do. And I think they will do nicely.

Yet Another Story About What is Cool about Apple

My parents came over on Saturday to do some computer work. My mother needed a presentation done and I only had a vague idea what she wanted. Little did I know that she had just a vague idea as well. What she wanted was a set of pictures of “sandhill cranes”:http://www.savingcranes.org/species/sandhill.cfm set to music. But she had no pictures and she forgot the CD with the song she wanted! So it was back to Square One.

I went to our CD cabinet and took a few samples out. I put one of the CD’s into the MacBook Pro and we listened to a few songs in “iTunes”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ . She chose one and I ripped it into my hard drive. So we googled around and found “pictures of sandhill cranes”:http://images.google.com/images?q=sandhill%20cranes and imported them directly into “iPhoto”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ (Command-Click on a picture in Safari and then choose “Import to iPhoto”).

After that, we made an album in iPhoto just for this project and put the photos in there. We chose to make a slideshow, chose the song we ripped earlier from iTunes, and then put the picture in the proper order. We played the slideshow many time, tweaking the timing of one slide to another, add more pictures, taking others away. Finally, we had our slideshow. And it turned very professional looking.

But wait! This was probably going to play on a Windows PC. How do we move it over! Well, File-> Export will generate a Quicktime movie of that slideshow. I burned that movie and the Windows version of “VLC”:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ so that it can be played full screen.

This whole process took us three hours, from finding the music to burning the movie onto a CD. Not bad at all. It was almost all about getting into your “iLife”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/ except for VLC. C’mon Apple — let the free version of QuickTime Player play fullscreen.

Upgrade your iTerm!

I have considered iTerm one of my must-have OSX apps since I first got my MacBook Pro.  But I haven’t always kept it up to date.  On Friday evening, my MBP was running very, very slow.  I started shutting things down and, when I stopped iTerm, things sped up tremendously.  I usually have iTerm open for weeks, so I figured there must be a very slow memory link.  Getting the latest version may help the situation. So I upgraded yesterday afternoon.
And now I suggest that all of you make sure that you are on the latest version.

My old iTerm was at 0.8 and now I’m at 0.9.5.  In between those versions, they added Bonjour to automatically detect ssh and sftp servers on your network.  They also added support for Growl, so now you can be notified when a long-running process is done in one terminal and you using another.  I’ve also started using bookmarks — now a Ctrl-Cmd-g takes opens up another terminal and opens an ssh session to my Linux box in the basement.

One of my complaints in the older version is that they didn’t emulate many terminals by default.  Now you can configure a bookmark to use a profile.  A profile can have certain display and terminal types.  Maybe they had some of this before — I didn’t use bookmarks until after I upgraded. But the profile functionality seems to be fairly new.
So it’s worth upgrading.  Maybe this will help me get off my butt and learn some Applescript to see what cool things I could do.