Archive for March, 2012

The recent announcements regarding the forthcoming addition to the menagerie of clawed operating systems from Cupertino was very interesting to me for a number of reasons.

Chief amongst them is “Wooo! New toys!”, closely followed by “Yay, more consistency!” and finally the slow dawning of realisation that an idea which has been floating around in my head for some time can now be put into action: Project Minimal Macbook! But first, some background…

When I first got my Macbook Air I was delighted with it, but had to rigidly enforce some new ideas about how I used it compared to my previous Macbook which had considerably larger storage capacity. I couldn’t even get close to restoring my data onto it, I had too much stuff, and so I had to work from a fresh install and keep in mind that I needed to be at least mindful, if not downright picky, about what software (and importantly “data”) I could afford to allow into its hallowed SSD halls.

Straight away out went iPhoto and iTunes. I could fill my puny 128Gb of space with my music and photos alone. Co-incidentally around about the same time that I got the Air I picked up my first non portable Mac, and my iPhone 4. That’s another story, but still, off you go dear data, there’s a nice fat spinning platter just waiting over there inside the iMac… But I couldn’t banish it forever; I may as well not have it if I can’t access it. So thank goodness for iTunes Home Sharing, and iPhoto Sharing. They might not be ideal solutions, but they allow me enough functionality to get by with only the occasional massive tantrum.

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One thing that everyone does on their Mac is write. Whether you’re working on an essay, writing code, or composing an Ask Different answer, you spend time working with text.

I’m one of those people who think that keyboard shortcuts are awesome in general: they allow you to do things much more quickly than you could using the mouse. While entering text, though, keyboard shortcuts are especially important. Since your hands are going to be spending most of the time on the keyboard anyway, switching to the mouse costs even more than usual.

Luckily, OS X has tons of keyboard shortcuts built in for working with text. This screencast will familiarize you with all of these shortcuts, as well as walk you through the process of creating some shortcuts that should exist but don’t. It will also introduce the idea of clipboard managers and how to take advantage of them to be more efficient.

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