Bartender’s Five Second Rule

One of my favorite Mac utilities is Bartender, which allows you to create a sub-menu in the menubar. I run an ever-fluctuating set of utilities in my menubar and sometimes they end up filling up the whole bar to such an extent that they get buried under application menus. This is particularly a problem if you are working on a small laptop that doesn’t have much menubar space to begin with.

Screen Shot 2014-07-30 at 4.24.32 PM.png

Bartender fixes this. Specifically, it lets you choose whether a menubar icon exists in the menubar proper or Bartender’s sub-menu. Using Bartender you can take control of your menubar without giving up any of your beloved menubar applications. It even, remarkably, works with Apple menubar applications.

Screen Shot 2014-07-30 at 4.24.51 PM.png

An often overlooked feature of Bartender is the ability to promote a menubar application to the menubar proper when it is active. By checking a box in the preferences, you can move a menubar application to the main menubar whenever it’s doing something or for a set period of time after it’s doing something. This is particularly useful for applications like Transporter and Dropbox where you don’t need to see them often but when they are active, it’s nice to have quick access. I call it the five second rule.

If you haven’t tried Bartender yet, you should. It’s a simple app that brings sanity to your geeky menubar. If you have Bartender already, take a look at the preference and enable a few of your own five second rules.

MPU 205: Geek Vacation

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about using technology on vacation and how to maintain actually enjoy time away from work in this strange always-connected world. Katie and I covered these topics and more in the most recent Mac Power Users episode.

∞

Little Snitch to Keep LTE Costs Down

Today I discovered several people have been writing up ways to use Little Snitch to hold down LTE data costs as tethering becomes more common. The idea is to have Little Snitch clamp down on data hogs, like Dropbox, iTunes, and online backup services, when you are tethered so you don’t burn through your LTE data. Eddie Smith and Guillaume Ross have both covered the technique admirably and it is enough to get me to re-install Little Snitch after not having used it for years.

I particularly like Eddie’s footnote about Dropbox and how he gets burned when people he shares folders with drop files in his Dropbox account with no warning. Having written a media rich book with Eddie, I’m pretty sure he could have changed that to read he gets burned when David Sparks shares large files with no warning.

1Password Keyboard Shortcuts

Few software companies get blogging the way 1Password does. They just posted a helpful guide to using keyboard shortcuts in 1Password that had a few tricks I didn’t know. For instance, did you know holding the Option key will reveal a password and Command-Shift-C copies the password without any pesky mousing? Follow the above link for all the details.

Incomparable Meetup

With the San Diego Comic-Con in full swing, a lot of the Incomparable gang is in southern California. Tonight they are going to do a meetup at the Stone Brewing Company in Escondido at 6pm. I’ll be the one running around like a great big fan boy.

Pasting Plain Text with TextExpander

There are a lot of ways to paste text. The most common way I do it is with the Command-C and Command-V shortcuts. However, a lot of times you are working with text that is carrying a lot of formatting baggage and when you use the standard paste, the text shows up in your document unusable. Most apps that deal in text give you an option to paste and match formatting and the keyboard shortcut for that is usually Shift-Option-Command-V or some near-variation of that. The trouble is that the shortcut isn’t universal and, even worse, some apps that involve text fields don’t have any support for an option to paste as plain text.

TextExpander to the rescue. This is perhaps the easiest snippet I’ve ever posted. I just invoke the clipboard formatted as plaint text. My snippet is xpt (X-Plain-Text). This works everywhere on the Mac. (Even Microsoft Word.) I find typing x-p-t much faster than wrapping my fingers around more complicated combinations or mousing into menus.

I’ve also got one for pasting rich text from the clipboard, x-r-t, that I use much less frequently.

I know this is a bit obvious but I showed this to a friend recently and she thought it was pretty swell. You can download my clipboard snippets below. Also, I’ve got a lot more snippets for download over here.

Clipboard TE Snippets

The Apple Ad Stickers

Mike Wehner at TUAW tracked down most of the stickers in Apple’s latest ad. Probably because of my day job, I prefer to keep my Mac naked. If, however, one of the stickers in the below ad tickles your fancy, Mike has you covered.

∞

<br />

The Yosemite Public Beta

Apple is releasing the Yosemite public beta today, which is pretty remarkable. It’s been a long time since Apple has opened up an operating system beta to the general public. In the abstract, I think it is a fantastic idea. Developers are, generally, power users and bugs slip through that developers may never experience but would be obvious to non-power users. Jason Snell explains the details at Macworld.

All of that said, I don’t recommend jumping into this beta unless you have an extra Mac sitting around. Even then, you have to be careful. Apple is making a lot of changes to iCloud and iCloud data is very much in flux right now in the betas. There be dragons.

Fantastical for iOS 2.1

Today Flexibits released Fantastical version 2.1 for the iPhone and iPad. There are some useful features in this update including:

Snooze support
The ability to search and add contacts or locations when creating a new event
New event invitation notifications and app icon badge option
Upcoming birthday notifications
Event preview when duplicating and moving items
Keyboard shortcuts when using an external keyboard

There are more but the above features really jumped out for me. The apps are also on sale. The iPhone app is half off at $5 and the iPad app is 33% off at $10.