Things have gotten so bad that I have to admit defeat and start over completely from scratch.
Somehow in the course of running the Snow Leopard betas and then Snow Leopard followed by the Lion betas and then Lion, my computer has become incredibly inefficient and almost unusable. (The developer betas of mobile platforms doesn’t help either)
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I try to use my mouse / trackpad as little as possible. The key to this is keyboard shortcuts. Here are some of my recent favorites.
Most people know that [cmd]+ allows you to switch programs. Did you know that [cmd]+` lets you move backwards in the list? That one is for all those times you hit
one too many times and have to cycle through all the programs to get back.On a Mac, windows are grouped by applications. So how do you switch between application windows? If you are anything like me, you have 5 Safari windows open (each with 9 tabs). [cmd]+` will allow you to cycle through those windows. As an added bonus, [cmd]+[shift]+] will move you to the next tab. You could probably guess that means [cmd]+[shift]+[ will move you to the previous tab.
Now here is my favorite gem. You are going to love this one.
Let’s say you are sending an email and you need to attach a document. Unfortunately you can’t remember which one is the right version. You can use Quicklook right from the file dialog!
Click to add the attachment. Highlight the file you think you want to attach. Hit the spacebar. It will give you a quicklook of that file and if it is the right one then just click ok and attach it. (This works from any file dialog on a Mac).
I know everyone has their faves. I would love to learn your’s.
Apple has already announced that the next version of OS X will be dubbed “Snow Leopard”. It is going to be a “no new features” release, instead focusing on speed, stability, and security. Last night I realized that is not the whole story.
Apple innovates; it is what they do and I don’t think they can’t refrain from innovating. While Snow Leopard adds some cool parallel processing built into the OS, I am positive that is not the only OS innovation Apple is working on.
Snow Leopard is really a “pre-requisite release”. In order to release the next Apple operating system they first need to get some stuff in order under the hood. In order to implement the features that Apple wants to implement next they first need a faster/more stable system. Snow Leopard also buys Apple 1 year of development time.
Any guesses as to what the big new features will be after Snow Leopard?
Here are mine:
I have been toying with the idea of how Google Docs could be used as a Business Intelligence platform for small businesses. As the thought develops it is expanding from just Google Docs to Google as a platform which could include Google for your domain, Google Gears, Google Gadgets, Google Charts and maybe more. I am hoping to prove the concept with a project for our retails stores our retails stores. The goal is for a daily push of our key metrics to a Google Spreadsheet. The key metrics would then be reported on using some sort of Dashboard.
BI dashboards are a metaphor based on the dashboard in your car. Wikipedia describes car dashboards as something that “contains instrumentation and controls pertaining to operation of the vehicle”. Wikipedia also touches on BI dashboards: “Based on the metaphor of the instrument panel in a car, the computer, or “digital” version of a dashboard provides a business manager with the input necessary to “drive” the business. Devices such as red/green/yellow lights, alerts, drill-downs, summaries, graphics such as bar charts, pie charts, bullet graphs, sparklines and gauges are usually set in a portal-like environment that is often role-driven and customizable.” The Mac OSX dashboard typically doesn’t fall into the same category, but I am finding it a great way to get a quick glance at the information I need.
Coincidentally all of the partners in our stores are using Mac laptops. There is a tool for displaying Google Gadgets as OSX Dashboard Widgets. By automating a process to send key metrics from our Point of Sale system to a Google spreadsheet I will be able to create a Google Gadget that pulls calculated cells from that spreadsheet into the Gadget using JSON. The Google Charts API will allow me to create charts from the JSON information as well. My hope is that I can drop a couple of Widgets onto our dashboards and all of the partners will be able to hit F12 and see recent sales numbers, current trends, inventory levels, etc. The best part is that there is no expensive software to purchase and maintain. The only custom code will be a little Javascript in the Google Gadget and a Ruby script that parses information from the POS and sends it to Google via an Atom call. I could probably create OSX Widgets without creating Google Gadgets, but using Google Gadgets will also allow us to have the same information on a Google for your domain start page.
When I first heard of Webclips in OS X I thought it was a feature I would have no use for. The problem was that all of the examples I saw could easily be remedied by RSS browsers, etc.
I was wrong.
There are two Dashboard Webclips that I am using which I find really useful. Both of them are weather related. While there are weather widgets available for Dashboard, none of them convey the information I want in a format that I can comprehend with a quick glance.
The first one I am using is WKRN’s 7 day weather forecast image as seen on nashvillewx.com. The second is the hour-by-hour daily forecast from The Weather Channel.
Here is what they look like:
I have to say, using these two Webclips has me on the lookout for others that might be useful.
Ever since I have moved to a Mac I have felt like my development environment was a little lacking. Sure, OS X is UNIX, but sometimes there are tools or libraries that I want to use, but won’t compile on a Mac.
Having said that, I don’t know that there is a better text editor than TextMate which is only available on OS X. Enter the best of both worlds…
Recently I decided that I wanted a Linux virtual machine. I initially thought that I would use it for development, but while KDE is really nice, I like OS X more. Then it dawned on me, use a Parallels VM that is identical to my production environment. I can clone the VM and practice upgrading major components prior to migrating production and still maintain a clean copy of the production environment. All the libraries that are on production would be available on the dev VM. I still want to develop with TextMate, so I shared my code folder with the linux server.
That is about perfect.
I am really looking forward to installing Leopard this week.
Yeah, I am a geek. You should have already known that.
