I’ll be the first to admit that I find the Finder to be tedious for certain tasks; for me at least, a multi-window interface is just not the most obvious paradigm by which to deal with a filesystem.

For example, a common use case is to move something from a location buried at a ridiculously deep layer in the filesystem to an unrelated and equally ridiculously deep layer. I’m certain that there are people who are completely facile with this activity in the Finder; I’m unfortunately not one of them.

Back in the days when 8088 machines with 8MHz ‘Turbo’ switches roamed the earth, we used Norton Commander, a file manager with a dual-pane interface. For my money, this interface hasn’t been bettered yet for filesystem manipulation; it’s the simplest and easiest interface for the task.

I’d tried a few of the the Norton Commander clones on Windows, but none of them held the magic for me. I was therefore intrigued to discover Forklift, a dual-pane file manager for OS X.

The tiny screenshot size available here on Blogger doesn’t really do Forklift justice; I strongly recommend visiting the site to see higher-resolution images.

Forklift is quite full-featured; I use the following features constantly:

• dual-pane interface, with tabs
• integrated archive (zip, tar, rar, etc.) support
• application deleter
• integrated FTP/SFTP support
• live preview inspector panel, with, for example, audio playback available directly in the inspector

There are numerous other features available; these are just the ones that I’m making constant use of. This utility reminds me of the iPhone announcement….

“We’re releasing a file manager, an archive utility, an application deleter, an FTP client, a preview utility, an Amazon S3 client….do you get it? It’s a file manager, an archive utility….”

Cue applause. In short, you can obtain all the functionality provided by Forklift, but with Forklift you get it all in one spot, with a beautiful Cocoa interface.

Forklift is relatively new to the market, but was rock solid during the lengthy public beta period. It’s been completely reliable for me.

A 15-day unlimited trial is available; registration cost is $29.95.

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.

Installing XP under Boot Camp is the Way of the Many Reboots; it takes just short of forever to get all the patches installed, even when starting from an SP2 base. Not something you want to have to do twice, but none of the usual backup utilities will backup or restore a Boot Camp partition.

Fortunately, there’s Winclone, a free utility to address this problem.

So far as I’ve been able to determine, Winclone is the only way to easily and reliably backup and restore a Boot Camp partition; I’m surprised that it’s not getting more press.

Winclone handles both XP and Vista partitions.

Tags: Backup, Windows

I classify backups into three categories:

1. Bootable full backup
2. Local backup of user files
3. Offsite backup of user files

I was doing a decent job of the two user file backups under Windows, but the bootable full backup was a different story.

I used Norton Ghost to back up my Windows main drive to a backup drive. The version of Ghost I was using didn’t do hot backups while the system was live; rather, it took the system down to a custom DOS program while the backup ran. And ran. And ran.

The thing took forever, and the system was unusable during the multi-hour process. As a result, I seldom did full backups like this. It was fortunate that the main drive was a RAID, since my backups were always out of date.

I resolved to do a better job on the shiny new Mac Pro. Given my past experience, it was evident to me that I needed a backup utility that:

• produced bootable full backups
• ran in a reasonable amount of time
• was completely reliable
• could run while the system was up
• could be automated, so it could be used every day

Requirements in hand; off to Google for some research. Some poking around revealed two excellent posts on the plasticsfuture blog:

1. The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X
2. Mac Backup Software Harmful

These are both epic posts, with excellent commentary. You could spend days following up on all the pointers provided therein, and I did — I must have tested nearly every backup product available.

And, as with many others, I settled on SuperDuper! as my weapon of choice. It’s simple, fast, reliable, produces bootable hot backups, and can be scheduled to run automatically. The vendor provides a free version which will, under manual control, clone a drive; one couldn’t ask for a much better trial than this. For $27.95 USD, scheduling, incremental backups, and other features are unlocked.

My system now performs an incremental bootable clone every morning at 3 am, without intervention, utterly reliably, in very little time, for about one-third the cost of a comparable Windows cloning utility.

I’m really starting to love this platform.

Tags: Backup