Emacs was my text editor of choice for many years.

We used to joke that the name stood for ‘escape, meta, alt, control, shift’; emacs uses a ton of key modifiers, being from an era when spiffy window and mouse based systems didn’t exist. It took a while to get used to, but when you were finally in the groove, you could really fly with it — editing is naturally quite fast when you never have to remove your hands from the keyboard.

The Mac has taken this philosophy to a high art; there are shortcut keys for everything.

Now, I suppose after a year or so on a Mac, these will have become second nature, but as a recent switcher, I’m finding that it’s taking a while to retrain my fingers. Now, obviously, there are menu choices for everything I want to do, but that’s the slow road; for common applications, I want to get used to using the keyboard shortcuts.

Learning these via the menu entries is tedious. The act of moving the mouse, going to the appropriate menu, locating the command, and observing the shortcut key combination is just too much of an interruption for my feeble attention span. By the time I’ve done all that, my train of thought has derailed.

However, there is a very cool alternative that works quite well for me.

KeyCue is a utility which monitors the command key. If command is held down for a short time, the desktop dims and a window pops up, listing keyboard shortcuts currently available.

As an example, here’s the shortcut display window with Camino as the foreground application:

Very slick indeed. Crisp, well-organized, easy to read, and my hands are still on the keyboard. I’m starting to remember the key shortcuts quite easily now that I don’t have to jump through hoops to determine what they are.

KeyCue offers multiple themes and is very configurable. Frankly, this is just so useful, I’m surprised that it’s not part of the OS already.

One downside is that the trial period is quite short. After only a few activations, KeyCue greeks most of the displayed shortcuts and asks for registration. Personally, I find this approach to be a bit draconian, since I think the application sells itself.

It would also be nice to have the application configuration present itself as a system preference panel; at present, it’s a hidden background application.

KeyCue is $19.99 USD or Euro. Registration was painless, and a registration key was provided instantly via the checkout page. However, strangely, the key is apparently not sent to the customer email address, so it’s important to retain a copy of the checkout page. While this is good advice in any case, the lack of an email invoice and key information is a bit unusual.

 

One of the upsell offerings made to me when purchasing the new machine was a discount on a .Mac account.

.Mac was described to me as an email and web publishing account. I declined an initial purchase, even at a discount, since my Google hosted domain already provides these services. I was informed that the discount would remain available to me for 14 days, and that a free trial of .Mac was available.

Prior to starting my free trial, I did some research into reviews of the service. I was quite surprised by the degree of visceral hatred expressed in many of the reviews.

However, the theme of the negative reviews was a common one. To paraphrase them:

“The Man wants $99/year for this service, and it’s only 1GB of disk space; fight the power. Here’s how you can get the same thing for free by simply running these twelve different applications, only three of which are in direct violation of Google’s Terms of Service.”

Hmmm….been there, done that, no longer interested. Perhaps I’m getting old; the enjoyment I once derived from manually integrating half-baked solutions seems to be waning. My interest was piqued. To the trial!

The web publisher, iWeb, does indeed seem to be ridiculously easy to use, but it’s probably not something I’ll make any use of in the near term.

The mail service is well, mail. Simple, easy to use, seems to have quality spam filtering. Comes with a trendy @mac.com address identifying one as a member of the hip digerati. Nice, but I’ve got Gmail, so again, not something I’m likely to make much use of.

Photo sharing/publishing, nicely integrated with iPhoto, is the next component of interest. We’re always sharing pictures with the rest of the family, so this is likely something that’ll see some use. Getting warmer….

Next up, backup. Now this gets interesting. The .Mac subscription includes a very nice backup utility; I’m quite impressed by the manner in which the typical features of backup have been supplied in what is a very user-friendly application. It includes scheduling support, simple specification of backup sets, the ability to back up to disks, CDs and DVDs, and, most importantly, online backup.

Online backup is performed to the ‘iDisk’, a webdav-hosted volume located on Apple’s servers. 1GB of space is provided, initially split evenly between mail and general disk space. This allocation can be adjusted via a control panel on the .Mac site.

In my opinion, iDisk is what makes the offering compelling. The iDisk appears as a virtual drive, with locally cached synchronization similar to that provided by AFS or DFS filesystems in the Unix world. While it works as a regular filesystem, the OS also exposes APIs by which applications can synchronize data to it. As examples, browser bookmarks and passwords can be automatically synchronized to the .Mac account for safekeeping and to allow consistency of these items on different machines. While I’ve only got a single Mac, Sensei Patrick does have quite a stable of them; he does make extensive use of this feature.

The iDisk is also available to Windows systems, via both a thick-client solution and a web-based interface. Handy when traveling.

The killer feature to me was Quicken’s built-in support of .Mac, allowing for zero-intervention, automated offsite backup to be performed each time Quicken is closed.

While 1GB of storage does seem paltry these days, it suffices for my personal data — documents, source code, financial data, and other records. These are critically important, but they don’t take up a lot of space. Thus, for my important data, 1GB is generous. Seamless integration and the ability to access this data easily from anywhere makes this to me a substantial value. Further, no one seems to pay list price for .Mac; Amazon is presently selling the yearly subscriptions for $20 less than list, and seems to have done so for some time.

However, discounted or not, I spend more per year on bathroom tissue. .Mac makes offsite backup painless; the price seems reasonable to me for the peace of mind provided.

 

Tags: Backup

And now for something completely different.

I’ve always enjoyed screen savers. They outlived their original purpose of preventing phosphor burn-in long ago, but they’re art, and art…don’t need no reason….

My favorite, Dream Aquarium, is being ported to OS X, but it’s not ready yet. While waiting for it, I’m enjoying Electric Sheep, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.

Electric Sheep is a free, open-source screen saver; it runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac.

The concept behind Electric Sheep is very interesting, using distributed processing to create amazing morphing fractal animations called “sheep”.

The sheep are beautiful and mesmerizing. You can vote on a sheep using the up and down arrows on the keyboard for ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, respectively. Popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm, producing a pleasing flock via natural selection.

Now tell me that’s not cool.

A couple of hints:

• It can take a few days for sheep to start appearing on your machine naturally, so it’s recommended to obtain a starter flock via one or more sheep packs.
• Electric Sheep can automatically play an iTunes playlist; I’ve found the dreamy soundtracks produced by pzizz to be very appropriate.

If all Electric Sheep did was display incredible fractal animations, it’d be one of the best screen savers available. Understanding what it really does is to say the least, impressive.

Baa….

 

Our old PC had 1GB of memory. That’s about one-half of what 32-bit XP can use, but it was still tight, especially with multiple users and fast user switching. Often it was preferable just to log the other user off when switching.

Our new Mac Pro has 4GB, and will address a great deal more if necessary. As it happens, 4GB is very generous for our needs; the fast user switching experience under OS X is actually usable.

Really, there’s so much memory available that one never needs to close anything. This is nice, but cluttered, and I’m easily distracted when confronted with visual clutter. For this reason, I’d often use the maximize window function under Windows; there’d then be nothing else blinking at me while I was attempting to work on something.

Sensei Patrick chides me for this as DOS thinking, but I have to go with what works.

OS X does offer a zoom function, but it doesn’t work in the same way that maximize works under Windows; the differences between the UI approaches and the rationales behind them are described well at the XvsXP site.

Well, if zoom isn’t our solution to reduce visual clutter, then perhaps we can minimize the windows we’re not using.

OS X has a minimize function just as Windows does; the window does a spiffy Genie effect and descends to the dock. Nice, but it makes the dock larger, and now there’s a redundant icon in it. This reminds me of the Windows task bar, which I always had to expand to multiple rows in order to contain everything in a readable manner. Surely we can do better than this.

And we can. OS X does offer something different; showing and hiding of applications. Contained in the application menu of any running application are the entries ‘Hide’, ‘Hide Others’, and ‘Show All’. These commands are ideal when dealing with clutter. A hidden application’s windows simply vanish; the running application is still available via the dock icon or command-tab, and reactivating via these methods will restore it from the hidden state.

Perfect for our needs. To focus on a single application, just doing a ‘Hide Others’ will declutter the desktop. However, being of an obsessive nature, we can still improve on this, and some applications, for example MacJournal, do so via use of a fullscreen entry mode. This is a nice approach for something like pure text editing, but the paradigm doesn’t really work all that well elsewhere.

There’s a great discussion of this very issue on 43 Folders, including an informative video podcast. In the podcast, several utilities to assist in elimination of distraction are demonstrated; among them are Backdrop, MenuShade, and Spirited Away. These applications are freeware, and their use is demonstrated in the podcast.

These three applications do what they do well, but I’d prefer a single application to take care of it all.

There is such an application, Desktopple Pro.

Desktopple Pro combines the functions of the three freeware utilities into a single preference pane and menu bar icon. It’s rich with features, but for purposes of decluttering, the following two are just killer:

• Firstly, it monitors the activity state of non-foreground windows. When they’ve been unused for a configurable time period, they’re automatically hidden. It’s like having someone clean up after you; the developer terms this ‘Window Cleaning’. Quite nice.
• Secondly, by choosing a menu option or by using a hotkey, desktop icons are hidden, the wallpaper is smoothly replaced with something basic (I use black), and the menu bar fades into the background; hovering over the menu bar will restore it. There’s now zero visual distraction; only the application is visible.

It’s all very crisp, polished, and highly configurable; it’s evident that a great deal of care has gone into development.

Desktopple Pro is $17 USD shareware, with a 15-day unrestricted trial.