Lately I’ve been obsessing about running a dual “N” and “G” network and getting a more reliable TimeMachine system for the laptops in my home. The Time Capsule seems to fit the bill. It is arriving today so I’ll let you know how it all turns out.
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Every so often, I like to troll the archives of interfacelift for new wallpapers. It is a great site with plenty of interesting wallpapers and icons for your Mac. It even remembers your screen resolution so you can filter through only those wallpapers that fit your screen. I keep wallpaper images in a subfolder in my pictures folder. The problem is that once I find a good wallpaper there are a lot of clicks and drags involved getting the file into the wallpaper folder. No problem though. Automator to the rescue.
Once Automator opens, start a “Custom” project.
When you run this script, you’ll already have the picture you want open in Safari. So the first step is to tell automator to get the current Webpage with the command, “Get Current Webpage from Safari” This can be found under the “Internet” category in Automator.
Next, Automator needs to download the URL to your wallpaper folder. This is done with the Automator action called “Download URLs” which can be found under the Internet tab. Drag it over and we are going to customize it.
Specifically, you need to tell it where to put the wallpaper file. It defaults on the “Downloads” file but that isn’t a good place for wallpaper. First click the selection arrows…
Then click “other” and find your wallpaper folder.
At this point you could stop if you like. The Automator script will automatically grab your wallpaper and save it for you. I also wanted it to automatically load the file as my current wallpaper so I continued.
In order to load the new wallpaper, Automator needs to select the file. Drag over “Get Specified Finder Items” from the Finder group.
The final step is to take the selected file and load it into the desktop. There is an Automator task for this function called “Set the Desktop Picture” from the Finder group.
That is it. Four simple actions will save lots of clicking and dragging for all wallpaper addicts.
Automator gives you a variety of ways to save your scripts. I’m going to save this one as a plug-in to the script button in my menu bar so I can get to it easily.
Save as a “Finder Plug-in”
And then it pops right out of your script menu and you are good to go.
Enjoy! If anyone comes up with any interesting tweaks to this action, let me know in the comments or email.
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My friend Ben Stevens over at the MacLawyer blog participated in a recent debate for the American Bar Association Journal about Macs vs. PC’s. Of course Ben won the contest. As Ben explained, “Of course, I had a much easier position to argue since the facts were so strongly on my side.”
The whole debate reminds me of a recurring experience I’m having with my Mac as of late. Everytime I pull it out at the courthouse or in deposition, I become the subject of curiosity and questions. It seems a lot of people in the legal profession are curious about switching. I attended a day long seminar recently in Los Angeles about a PC-only application that I use often in my practice (CaseMap). I run it in Parallels with no problems. I think I sold about 10 Macs that day. The funniest thing was the speaker hunted me down afterward and told me how funny it was for him giving the presentation and looking up at about 100 Dell logos with one shining Apple in the middle. Then he told me he wants to switch too.
The guy behind Quicksilver, “Alcor”, has a new application out called “Secrets” which puts a nice shiny GUI around a lot of hidden customizable features for various OS X applications. It was released open source so I’m guessing we’ll see quite a few updates with even more Secrets exposed. I’ve been running it all of 5 minutes and it is interesting. If you are a “tweaker”, check it out.
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Let’s say you are about to make the perfect voicemail message but it doesn’t include the right background noise to convey exactly how things are in your home . Then suddenly it dawns on you. You need that audio file you had of screaming monkeys. You open a Finder window full of audio files with user friendly names such as xq235.mp3 and realize this is going to take awhile. Apparently someone at Audio Ease also lost the screaming monkeys audio file because their application, Snapper, is perfect to help you out of that pickle.
Snapper is a Finder add-on that pops up a little window below your finder or iTunes window. Whenever you highlight an audio file Snapper lets you preview and manipulate it. In addition to giving you audio previews, Snapper provides you a bunch of data on the file and generates a waveform. The time required to generate the waveform depends on the size of the sound file. For small files it is very quick. For a 128kbps encoded version of Miles Davis’ “All Blues” it took about 8 seconds on my MacBook Pro.
Once Snapper has your audio file up you can then very easily crop and convert sections. This is perhaps Snapper’s most impressive feature. It is quite intuitive as you begin selecting segments of audio and dragging it into your Finder window. For ProTools users, you can send a clip directly into your ProTools project. After little time you’ll become quite conversant with Snapper clipping and converting to your heart’s desire. There is something quite satisfying about selecting a portion of a song with your mouse and dragging it out. If you are looking to load up your iPhone with ringtones, this could speed the job up. Snapper’s information panel can be customized and provides immediate access to just about any metadata you could ever need. While there are plenty of tools available in Snapper I thought the interface could use some polish.
I couldn’t find any sound file on my Mac that Snapper couldn’t play. The developer explains Snapper can open over 50 different file types. If you want the Snapper window to attach to your iTunes window you can enable that function in the preferences. I tried it and then turned it off because the wave form generation was slowing me down.
There are a few things Snapper doesn’t do. It doesn’t organize sound files. It really is made to latch onto a file more than organize it. Also, although you can manipulate the files, it doesn’t really act as a sound editor in any traditional sense.
Snapper excels at quick and dirty clips and conversions in Finder organized audio. If you already have audio software on your Mac, there probably isn’t anything that Snapper does that you can’t already do with your existing software. For me, Snapper’s best selling point was its convenience. It was much faster doing quick clips than any of my existing Audio software.
Unfortunately, at a price of $79.95, I think Snapper misses the mark. There is some very robust audio software out there at or around the same price that can do much more than Snapper. I suspect the ProTools integration may be its biggest selling point at its current price. While this is a handy application, I think it would be much more attractive around the $20 price point.
The good news is Audio Ease has a fully functional 100 day demonstration so you can kick the tires for over three months if Snapper sounds interesting to you. You can download it at audioease.com.
The winners are TerryC and Dale Lymn. I’ve sent their names to audioengineusa.com and they should get their gear soon. Thank you everyone for participating. I really enjoyed reading all of the interesting ideas for using this unique product.
Also, thank you Audioengineusa.com. They were very generous with this contest and I hope you all consider them in the future for your audio needs.
Ars Technica is reporting Apple has sent out invitations for a press event on March 6 where it is going to discuss the iPhone software development and Apple’s “exciting new enterprise features.” Hmmm. They missed the promised February date, but just barely. Furthermore, it is not even clear whether the SDK is done but at least we’ll get some information and the tease about enterprise compatibility may be a game changer for a lot of folks. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
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Just two days left until the drawing for Audioengine AW1’s so if you haven’t joined the contest yet … do it now.
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It is Tuesday again. This time Apple announced some very nice updates to the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. They include processor and hard drive bumps. Likewise, the MacBookPro 17″ is now getting an LED display and the MacBook Pro line is getting the MacBook Air gestures on the track pad. You can see the product details here.
I know several people who have been waiting for this update (including my friend Victor from the Typical Mac User podcast) and I expect we’ll be seeing reviews of the new hardware in no time at all.
I’m still quite satisfied with my slightly aged MacBook Pro. If any readers are buying one of the new machines, chime in on the comments.
Reader Anthony recently wrote me about the OS X slow motion features. That is, if you hold down the shift key while minimizing windows or activating expose’ or spaces, everything moves very slow. It really gives you a better idea of how the animation works in terms of both motion and fade.
I always thought of it as eye candy but Anthony makes a good point. When teaching your switcher friends how windows minimize into the dock, slowing things down can be helpful to demonstrate exactly how it all works.