Q. How do I Create a Screenshot on Mac OS

A. Please use the following commands to create a screen shot on MAC:

• Apple (Command) Key +Shift+3

  Captures entire desktop to a file on the desktop as ‘picture #’ . This option lets you capture the whole screen. If you want just one window on your screen, you will have to edit the picture using image editing software.

• Apple (Command) Key +Shift+4 

  Allows you to use your mouse to select a specific part of your desktop for capture. This will turn your mouse pointer into a cross, please hold down the mouse button and drag to select the part of the screen you want. When you release the button the screenshot will “snap” that part of the screen.  Press ‘Esc’ to release.

• Apple (Command) Key +Shift+4 then press Spacebar

  Allows you to select which window to capture.

If you haven’t used Mint to track your personal finances, then you need to start today. Mint automatically downloads all of your transactions and categorizes them for you. No hassle of entering everything manually, not even a manual sync button. It’s all just some sort of financial magic. Mint is the only reason I have any idea what I’m spending money on, and now I can know if I’m on/off budget where ever I am.

Get it now.

Core 77 

Design Milk

Trendir

Blue Ant Studio

Yanko Design

What sites would you recommend for a good shot of motivation and creativity?

One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear … Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first.

That means it’s a race to the bottom by new sites…

And so,

From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that.

After all, if you’re going to run the race to the bottom, then honesty-be-damned you’d better win.

This latest version was a lot of fun to work on. WTYM is already my first ever Cocoa app to work on, and now it’s my first ever Cocoa app that automatically updates. Just like all those other fancy apps that provide a handy “Check for Updates” button, WTYM now incorporates the Sparkle framework to provide that same seemless upgrade experience.

And the best part? It only took about an hour to integrate and test (and I’m probably on the slower end of all you Cocoa pros out there ).

Very fun stuff  Download WTYM here or visit the site for more info.

Pyjamas, GWT, and Objective-J all hinge around a central concept: Abstracting away the authoring of JavaScript-heavy web applications by allowing the developer to program entirely in their natively language (be it Python, Java, or an Objective-C-like-language accordingly)…

I worry about large abstractions like this for a number of reasons.

Well worth the read.

I’ve updated the Features page with more screenshots and descriptions, as well as a potential roadmap for the project. I’ve also added a poll to the front page, so give me your feedback! There’s a million directions this project could go, and I want to make sure I’m adding the features you’ll actually use, so let me know what you want  

As for v0.2.2, I’ve added two new applications: Spotlight and Running Applications. The Spotlight app lets you search your entire computer straight from your iPhone. The Applications app lets you navigate and control the menubar of all running applications, as well as launch new applications on your Mac.

I’ve also made lots of smaller updates: better icons and thumbnails for picture files, better meta data support for media files, album and cover art for music and movies.

Check out the full changelist on the Downloads page, or just download v0.2.2 now!

However, it did give me a great excuse to go buy two 1Tb My Books from the Apple store today - so that almost made up for it.  And after a bit of rsync research, I wrote up a nice shell script to keep the two disks mirrored.

My next instinct was to set up a cron job to daily-sync everything at some ungodly hour in the morning, but to my surprise OS X 10.5 does not support croncron is deprecated in OS X! I’ve tried setting up launchd plists to get it syncing, but am having exactly zero luck. I even abandoned the command line for a launchd GUI app and still couldn’t get it working…

Is anyone else doing this? How do you daily-run tasks in OS X?

I just released version 0.2.1, which is already leaps and bounds better than the previous version (though still not close to a 1.0 ).

Features include:

1. Control your Mac’s screen from your iPhone / any browser
2. Control iTunes, Front Row, SlingPlayer, DVD Player, and more with the Universal Remote application
3. Peek through your Mac’s iSight webcam
4. Lots and lots of code cleanup, faster icon generation (so faster file browsing!)

TICKY FULLERTON: And yet people are very excited in-world about the idea of buying a book through Amazon [inside of Second Life].

CLAY SHIRKY: No. No-one is excited about that. People are excited about other people being excited about it.

It’s such a great quote to keep in the back of your head. I find I often like the idea of something, but I don’t like the implementation of something - and it’s an important distinction to make, especially when designing a new product. Hype is not reality, and hype is not revenue.

Before you begin a project, make sure that both the idea and the implementation are worthwhile - you’ll need to sell your customers on both.

Until now, Columnizer required you to set the width on your container and it would fit as many columns as it could into that width - or - it would fit as many columns into the window’s width as it could. This made it difficult to create columns for a horizontally scrolling site.

What if you wanted a 400px tall container to scroll horizontally for as many columns as needed? With old versions this was impossible, but now no longer!

Check out the Columnizer page for full documentation and samples.

Usability Post just wrote up a small article on overwriting system level key bindings in web-apps, and how, obviously, it’s a bad idea. Apparently Google overwrote an OS X key binding with their new find and replace feature.

What’s amusing to me isn’t the overlap of the key bindings - that’s just sloppy - no, no what’s amusing is this:

You read it right: Google Docs is in “beta” and they’ve still managed to release an “alpha” version of a feature.

Seriously everybody? You couldn’t just spend the extra - what, 2 or 3 days? - to implement a real Find and Replace? You had to ship it only with Replace All?  And worse, you’ve shipped it with just as much apology text as actual feature text? Is there any quality level you have to meet  at Google to ship something? If it’s not ready you just throw a “sorry it’s crappy” tag on it and call it a day?

This rant isn’t about Google, and it’s certainly not about a Find and Replace feature. I could care less about some random piddly feature somewhere. No, this rant is about the philosophy of this feature. It’s the very idea of shipping something this half-assed that just turns my insides.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about excellence: in software, in work, and in life. The most frustrating thing to me is a lack of focus, quality, and vision when sitting down to a task - these are not optional. True excellence is not “whoops! not done with [alpha] feature yet! ship it with apology tags attached!” Excellence is this opposite of this. Excellence is an angry grumpy image of your most hated critic (ideally yourself), standing at the release gate, saying “No. Wrong. Do it again, and next time call me when you’re actually done.”

And so, I appeal to you, my few readers and subscribers, as you work at your job, your family, your faith, and your life, please strive for a more perfect and excellent result than it’s-beta-and-alpha-all-in-one-but-I-shipped-it-anyway-lol.

Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

Even the launch of change.gov is a huge change from previous administrations. I’m very eager and excited to see how all this pans out.

My immediate reactions is that while this looks beautiful and I love the idea of this furniture, I can hardly imagine this actually being at all remotely comfortable to sit in.

When trying to do two things, this furniture has failed at both, and failed beautifully, in the strictest sense of the word.

Parallels to the software world shouldn’t be ignored. When designing and building software - make sure to focus on one exact purpose, and succeed whole heartedly at it. No matter how beautiful your design is, no matter how well engineered, no matter how gorgeous the interface - if it doesn’t do it’s task well, then you’ve failed.

If you plan on reading any of the 12 books it offers anytime in the near future, it’s well worth the $2.99. They’ll also be offering free updates with more books, so that little bit of money goes even further. From their site: 

We care deeply about these books. That’s why we’ve spent countless hours working on making them look just right on the screen, with included illustrations when available, and even our own, custom cover designs.

The application is just gorgeous - if you do anything today, check out the site and watch the demo. If you do two things today, the second should be buying the app on iTunes.

1. Trying to get Phase 3 of the MVC in JavaScript Tutorial written
2. Updating the jQuery Columnizer plugin to include the latest requests
3. Building Listotron
4. Building WelcomeToYourMac
5. Updating the layout/plugins of this site

Add into that my the normal responsibilities of work, church, and family (and multiply the family line-item by 2 to properly account for my two year old daughter), and you’ve just about summed up my current ambitions.

Recently I’ve made a fair amount of progress on #5, but at the expense of just about everything else. And while updating this site can be fun, I’d hardly call it productive in the true sense of the word. And so all of this brings me to this post - focus. Not wanting to throw anything off the boat, I’ve instead decided to rotate my attention to a specific task each month.

Since Google Analytics tells me you’re much more interested in the MVC and Columnizer more than any of the other items, in the coming month I’m going to focus in earnest on the the MVC tutorial (with Columnizer next in queue), but before I switch gears I’ve made some moderately exciting progress on the Listotron front that I want to share. It’s completely altered my development plan - more specifically my testing plan - for Listotron.

I’ve been in desperate need of adding unit tests to Listotron, and last night I began playing around with jqUnit. I realized soon after setting up some basic tests that since I’m building the entire application in JavaScript - as I’ve planned to do with Listotron - jqUnit will not only let me write tests for individual modules of the application, but also for any and every user action with the application. 

What’s exciting - I think we can all agree that unit tests are wildly exciting - is that the MVC in Javascript provides a clean separation of model and view, and each can be tested easily and independently. More importantly, the entire UI - indeed the entire application - can easily be tested in the same framework. The fact that Listotron will load exactly 1 page - and from then on be run entirely in JavaScript - means that I can test any and every user workflow with a corresponding functional test.

Absolutely any error that the user runs into, I’ll be able to write a duplicate functional test for exactly that workflow. For any “standard” web app that works over multiple page loads, testing a user path would be tedious and near impossible. Tools like Selenium and SilkTest get of most of the way there, but with a properly engineered AJAX application, we can test just as much with fewer dependancies on other tools.

And I’m a big fan of using fewer tools to accomplish the same ends. Less stuff to do during development decreases cycles spent on process and increases cycles spent on actual development.

I already have a prototype of the Listotron UI running alongside some basic unit tests, but it still needs a bit of code cleanup before I won’t be embarrassed to have others look at it. Expect a full code release and walkthrough in the coming weeks.

I have been waiting for this little tool since I started my analytics account many years ago. This simple dropdown lets you easily specify a subset of data to use in your analytics reports. This means it’s now incredibly simple to see things like the loyalty of just your returning visitors (Google used to lump in first time visitors into this chart too, which made it close to worthless), comparisons between paid and unpaid traffic, or even compare what content new visitors are reading compared to your returning visitors.

You can even create your own custom segments and use those to filter your reports (youtube tutorial). This works just as you might imagine: beautifully.

This tool suddenly became exponentially more useful.

The free software started becoming available through Apple’s App store on Sunday…

I tried the application late last week and was impressed how well the iPhone version kept up with the performance, features, and usability of Google Earth for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux–at least, while using a Wi-Fi network connection. For example, your view of the world starts looking straight down, but you can tilt the view so terrain contours are visible, and generating that variable perspective takes some significant processing.

What’s most interesting to me, though, is that the iPhone’s multitouch screen actually made using the application easier than the PC versions.

Google Earth for iPhone also includes a small Webkit-based browser to show the specific information users click on. Apparently the app is already released in the Australian iTunes store, and will follow suit in other nations “shortly.” I’d guess within a few hours. Update: here’s the iTunes link to Google Earth.

It’s a simple, straight-foward, and read-only view into your spending and finances, and I’m particularly excited because they just recently announced investment tracking tools.

Want to compare all your holdings to relevant market indices like the S&P 500, Dow Jones, or NASDAQ? Click on the Investments tab, and then click on All Investments. Choose the index you want to compare to the chart above and you can quickly see if your investments are outperforming or underperforming.

Need to drill down further? Simply select the specific investment account you’re interested in to easily compare it, or individual stocks and funds, to the market indices.

Their timing on the investment tools couldn’t be more timely . If you need a simple tool to help you manage your money better, give Mint.com a try.

Ouch. A big blue glow effect right around the “real” input area. This clashes badly with the image the designer wants to use for the field. Thankfully there is an easy CSS fix for this. All you need to do is set the outline property to none for when this field is in focus. The code looks like this:

input:focus { outline: none; }

Once you do that, the blue glow in OS X will be gone:

Certainly a handy tip that’s not used/known enough. Check out their full post here.