Macbook Pro as Whiteboard

Apparently sharpie wipes off easily! [By greentheory.]

Multi-Safari: Run multiple version of Safari/Webkit one one machine

One of the annoying things about Safari if you’re a web designer is that it uses the system-level Webkit rendering engine, meaning that it’s not possible to use the same machine to see how different versions of Safari will render a website.

Solution: these special versions of Safari use the original version of Webkit that came with them. Safari 1.0 - 2.0.4 available.

Small Copy Changes Can Make a Big Difference (OS X 10.5)

This kind of attention to detail is what makes me *love* Apple. [via Daring Fireball]

Jing is the new Skitch

Well, kinda.

More and more in the course of my daily work, I find the need to share a quick screenshot with a friend of colleague to get a point across. I’ve been using Skitch for this, and it makes the process butter smooth. And with its friendly sounds and the UI snapping and sliding in and out of view, it’s a joy to use.

But sometimes I need to capture something in motion to truly explain it, and Skitch doesn’t do video. So I’ve been looking for something that makes video capture and sharing as great as Skitch makes image sharing. Preferably in flash. With one-click upload.

Today my friend soxiam pointed me to Jing. It’s just the ticket.

Still under development, and not quite as gooey and snazzy as Jing yet, but it uploads in one click, outputs flash, and does it all with a minimum of clicks. Mac and Windows, too. Wowza.

Link: Download Jing

I love KeyClick for OS X

KeyClick is a lightweight PrefPane (288k) that makes small clicking sounds when you press keys on your keyboard, click your mouse button, or scroll. Clicks happen in realtime even when the program you’re using is too busy to respond.

It sound like a small thing, but it’s made a big difference. Using my MacBook keyboard is far more enjoyable with KeyClick. Tone and volume are easily adjustable, and there’s a free trial. It rocks.

Link: KeyClick for OS X [via Chris's Flickr Stream]
Worth a read for the background on clicky keyboards of yore, and mushy modern keyboards.

Keyboard Backlighting = CPU Monitor

Just found a really cool utility that will use the keyboard backlighting in mmanyost recent Mac portables (PowerBooks and MacBook Pros) to indicate processor utilization. Brighter lighting as the CPU gets used more, lower lighting as the CPU is more idle. Works on my 1.5GHz 17″ PowerBook.

How creative!

Link: Backlit Keyboard CPU Load Monitor

Widescreen Mail.app Plugin

Gorgeous!

Finally a way to make full use of your widescreen in Mail.app.

Link: Widescreen Mail.app plugin

A great example of blog marketing: macZOT and AppZapper

The problem: You’ve got a new shareware app, and you want the world to know.

The solution: macZOT and AppZapper set up a promotion that worked like this: For the entire day of April 2nd, they pledged to knock 5 cents off the price of AppZapper for every blog mention.

Within 6 hours, the price of the $12.95 app was down to zero, and AppZapper had 259 mentions throughout the blogosphere.

In exchange for 5,000 free copies of the app, they garnered blogger buzz that lasted weeks after the price returned to nornal.

Smart.

Link: macZOT! » 5 CENT BlogZoT™

Chax: Tabbed windows for iChat

It made Luke’s day, so maybe it’ll make yours, too. If you use iChat on your Mac, Chax gives you tabbed chat windows and a few more goodies. [via Mollie]

Soothing Mail.app New Mail Icons

At last week’s Jelly, we somehow ended up talking about the tiny but great mod Josh had made to his new mail Dock icon in Mail.app. By default, Mail.app sports a glaring bright red badge on its Dock icon when you get new mail. There’s no way to turn it off, and hardly any way to ignore it when it shows up and you’re trying to get work done.

By the end of the day, Ian, Luke, and I had all started to use Josh’s soothing, blue “new mail” badge for Mail.app. A few days later, Ian made a simple installer.

Try it out, you won’t go back.

Link: Josh’s Soothing Blue New Mail Badge for Mail.app

How to make iPhoto do Flickr

Wouldn’t it be great if iPhoto could understand Flickr? If Photocasting wasn’t something that only worked with .Mac? If you could drag high-resolution copies of your friends’ photos to your iTunes albums without having to click on the “All-Sizes” button, then “Original”, then “Download” for each and every one?

It’s possible! (Read on to find out how.)

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MegaManEffect

Luke pointed me to the MegaManEffect for OS X yesterday. It makes launching applications the most fun thing ever.

awesomeness

Someone please write an extension for Mac OS that does the following: every “OK” button on the screen turns into an “Awesome” button. Imagine, all those dialog boxes with “Cancel” and “Awesome” buttons. It’d be awesome.

The Problem with Email (aka: MailTags, and how to tag your email)

Two years ago, I stopped filing my email into folders and started indiscriminately putting every piece of non-spam mail into an “Archive” folder on my IMAP server. Somewhere along the way, I started removing attachments to save disk space (that folder is still obscenely large.)

For a while, things were good.

Whenever I needed to find anything in my email, I searched the archive, and I usually found it. But over time, things got slower. And slower. And recently, searching mail has actually become a bit of a chore in Mail.app. When I’m disconnected from the internet, searches are blink-of-an-eye fast because Mail searches an index of its locally cached mail. When I’m connected to the net, I wait and I wait. And it sucks. It sucks because computers are fast, and people shouldn’t need to have to wait on them anymore.

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