Posts tagged with "mac"

The New All Aluminum Mac mini with HDMI

While all of us expected to awaken to iPhone 4 pre-orders, none of us expected a rather serious Mac mini update that’s available online and in stores this morning. Their smallest Mac now features HDMI out and an SD Card Slot - big upgrades for the tiny desktop that make it suitable for hooking up to the big screen. Also included is our usual Nvidia 320M integrated graphics, and the choice of a 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor, making it 2x faster than the previous model. Firewire 800 also stays on the Mac Mini, but it has lost a USB port with the feature updates - which is fine by me.

But Mac fans such as myself are most excited with Apple’s amazing visual refresh, which casts the Mac mini in an 1.4-inch-thin unibody all-aluminum enclosure over a round rubber panel that allows customer access to replacing RAM. The Apple team completely reinvented the guts by including a new green, space saving power supply which completely eliminates the need for the brick - all you need now is a single straight cable. A powerhouse that only consumes 10 Watts of energy when idle (85W when active), the Mac mini is also Apple’s most energy friendly Mac yet. Cupertino, this is a job well done.

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On Symlinks

Shawn Blanc has published two interesting posts (here and here) about the process of creating symbolic links on Mac OS X, following up to Gruber’s post from last week where he wrote about his configuration of Yojimbo’s library synced and backed up with Dropbox.

I’d like to cover two neat ways of playing around with Symlinks (for a basic knowledge about the subject you can head over the Wikipedia page) which involve the terminal, and I’ve found them very useful so far.

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My Backup Workflow

You’ve probably read John Gruber’s post about backups last week, the one where he talked about his experience with a damaged internal hard drive and, luckily for him, the way he managed to save data with Dropbox, Super Duper, Disk Warrior and a couple of external hard disks.

I think John made some strong points in suggesting to purchase not one, but a couple of external hard drives - as you really don’t know when a hard drive is gonna fail. Just as an internal drive can die, so a Firewire one with all your backups can.

Anyway, there are some other practices I’ve gotten used to follow over time I’d like to talk about.

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Organizing Files: The Librarian Syndrome

But the more important conclusion is less obvious, which is that nearly everyone can benefit from the use of software that doesn’t require explicit file system management at all.

Instead of putting music files into a folder, all you had to do was put it into iTunes. Once you’ve added a song to iTunes you no longer need to worry about where it actually is in the file system

To argue that users should embrace manual file system management for every bit of data they wish to store is to argue against human nature.

This is not an argument that all software should abstract the file system by using the library paradigm, but just that more software should.

It wasn’t long time ago, though I can’t remember very well. I’m talking about the day I realized I needed a better solution to store all my documents, as the Finder simply couldn’t do that anymore. Maybe it was some months ago, back in September / October, when I made up my mind and decided to give Yojimbo a second, in-depth spin. I fell in love with it, much like I did with Things from CulturedCode the second time I tested it. Guess there’s a second time for everything, right?

Problem is, I couldn’t use a hierarchical folder system anymore. With hundreds of documents to manage (be them .pdf files, spreadsheets, reports, casual but still important notes) and new pieces of text each day, the situation became unmanageable and yeah, Finder was slow and cluttered. So I started using Yojimbo which allowed me to enter any kind of information both manually and in other ways like the Quick Panel or the Drop Dock. Be sure to read my previous post about if you missed it. I still have Yojimbo in my dock, if you ask.

A few weeks ago I discovered and wrote about a new app, iDocument, which wants to be the ultimate solution for storing and retrieving documents on Mac OS X. iDocument lets you import documents, tag them, organize them in folders and smart collections.

If you work with your Mac, you need a powerful centralized solution to sort and archive files. In this post I and Cody will take a look at 4 different systems (Finder, Yojimbo, iDocument, Leap) and discuss how they actually work, in which cases. We’ll surely miss a lot of apps, but we wanted to focus on those we know and use on a regular base.

Enjoy.

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How To Export Notes from Yojimbo and Convert Them to .rtf

You know how much I love Yojimbo. It’s great information organizer for Mac OS X which lets you store all your data like text, photos and password in one big Library. I wrote a couple of posts about Yojimbo here and here, be sure to read them to get an overview of this amazing application.

Anyway, Yojimbo has one drawback: sync and export. The developers (BareBones Software) don’t seem to be willing to release an iPhone app anytime soon, so the only way to “sync” Yojimbo would be that of exporting the whole database to Dropbox and import it later on another machine. But still, this is not a real sync, nor ax export feature: you can’t view single items in the database.

So, I wrote an Automator workflow to export notes from Yojimbo and convert them to .rtf. It uses the textutil shell script (which should come by default on any Mac OS computer) and lets you view and edit all the notes you have in Yojimbo in external apps such as TextEdit. It has some limitations anyway, we’ll see them together.

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