I’ve always been told that battery technology is the bottleneck. Until we can figure out how to push more power in smaller spaces, it will be hard to evolve portable devices to the next level. As an example, just look at all the constraints smart watch makers are facing with the amount of screen time they can be turned on and the problems with charging your watch. A team at Stanford seems to have made a breakthrough with better materials. The whole thing feels pretty science fiction to me using elements with “infinite” growth and tiny nanosphere cages to hold things together. Nevertheless, it sure would be nice if I could get a week out of a phone charge instead of a day. Do you think our kids will bore their children with stories of having to charge their phones the way we bore our children with stories of rotary dials?
Systematic 107, Nominally on Presentations
Yesterday I recorded an episode of Systematic with Brett Terpstra. It was my third podcast of the day (after a full day of work) and I was pretty punchy. We started talking about Presentations but very quickly the talk digressed to mind mapping and then Ella Fitzgerald and free range chickens. I always have fun with Brett.
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.
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.
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.
Sponsor: Mighty Deals Email Templates
This week MacSparky is sponsored by Mighty Deals. Mighty deals puts together deals on some of the best tools and resources available for your Mac. This week they are featuring an email template package that includes 11 professionally designed templates from ChocoTemplates. These include over 100 color variations and over 500 layered PSD files. They are highly customizable and work with all major email clients. The templates connect with MailChimp and Campaign Monitor so you’ll be able to use the templates on your next email blast. The above example is just one of the eleven you’ll get, all for just $12. If you have ever sent out campaign emails or ever think you may, you should go buy these templates now.
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.