Yoink, AirDrop & LaunchBar

Move and Zoom your windows on your Mac, easily and quickly using your Mouse, Trackpad or Keyboard.

Moom is a great application that integrates seamlessly with OSX to give you complete mastery of your environment. Move and resize windows, move them out of the way or even send them to different monitors.

You can even create "Window Layout Snapshots" to allow you to postion your favourite application windows just as you like them, then store for future use. With a simple command, all your windows will reposition themselves exactly as you saved them. You can even set automatic triggers based on your screen resolution or available monitors.

This week's tutorial takes you through all the great features of Moom and demonstrates how you can take control of your Macs windows on OSX. The full tutorial covers:

• Introduction to Moom
• Moving and Zooming with Mouse
• Spacing Windows
• Accessing Custom Controls
• Move and Zoom Using the Keyboard
• Creating Custom Controls
• Window Layout Snapshots

In addition, I've included an extra section just finishing off the coverage of QuickTime - looking at using clips in QuickTime Player X

Now that iOS5 has a great notification service, isn't a pity that OSX doesn't! All is not lost, however, as you can add a system wide notification service into OSX, with the installation of Growl.

Even better, application events captured by Growl can now be forwarded to your iOS device using Prowl.

Growl - Growl has been around for a while as a free open-source Mac service. The original version has been supported by lots of the leading Mac applications and acts as a framework to collect, collate and display alerts from installed applications on your Mac. The latest version has recently been released in the Mac App Store, for the first time as a "paid" application. The new version is Lion enabled and contains many new and improved features such as support for sandboxed applications, some new networking support and a rather nifty "roll up" display. As it is a brand new version, some applications previously supporting the older version of Growl will not work with the new version, and will need updating. In the screencast, I demonstrate the install process and how to configure alerts and notifications on an application by application basis. I also demonstrate some typical scenarios using Twitter and iVi video encoder.

Prowl - Prowl is an inexpensive iOS universal application for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. In conjunction with a free plugin for Growl and a free web service, Growl is able to send alerts from your Mac directly to your iOS device, and have the alerts appear as notifications - very cool! The screencast demonstrates the installation of Prowl and it's plugin, along with the configuration of some simple alerts. I also take you through some of the other features of Prowl such as send alerts from any service using your own Prowl email address.

In addition to the main topics of the tutorial, I've also included a small section on how to search the ScreenCastsOnline website to track down previous tutorials.

This week, a greatly misunderstood, free utility to allow you to customise your OSX desktop - GeekTool

Create "Geeklets" to echo the contents of textual log files, display multiple images or even run Unix scripts, directly on your Desktop.

GeekTool is a great utility but it suffers in one area, and that’s in the documentation. It can do so much, but it’s a little bit impenetrable for most people!

That’s where this week’s ScreenCastsOnline tutorial comes in useful. I take you through the basics of GeekTool, now available via the Mac App Store.

In the tutorial I explain and demonstrate how to configure and use "Geeklets". These are the components that allow you to add different types of content to your desktop.

• File Geeklets - These allow you to display the contents of text files directly onto your desktop. Not just static files, but files being updated in real time. Want to keep an eye on a log file? Just create a File Geeklet and the contents of the file are echoed to your desktop as the file is updated. Full control of the frequency of when the file geeklet is refreshed, it's position and size and even the colour and font of it's display/
• Image Geeklets - Display images or sequences of images on your desktop. The images can be from your local filesystem or hosted somewhere out on the web. Again, full control of how the images are displayed.
• Shell Geeklets - Probably the most powerful of all the geeklets as these allow you to run anything from a simple Unix command to a full shell script. This section demonstrates some simple commands that can be run from Shell geeklets to build a dynamic calendar on your desktop.

As mentioned, there are lot's of example geeklets available on the web if you seek them out. Here are some links to help you:

MacOSX Tips

Mac AppStorm

Flickr

This week's tutorial takes you through a clean install of 1Password and Dropbox as well as describing some of the changes brought about by the introduction of the new 1Password Safari Extension.

1Password is the ultimate Password and Identity Manager for the Mac, but bringing it to Lion was not without it's challenges.

Due to changes brought about by Lion and the new version of Safari, Agile Bits have had to re-write parts of 1Password and the essential Safari extension. This extension allows you to access your 1Password data from inside Safari, and allows you to seamlessly login to various websites and services with just a few simple keystrokes.

With 1Password now being available via the Mac App store, you can install it on all your Macs, and with a free DropBox account, sync all your 1Password data easily and securely. If you're a mobile 1Password user, this also allows you to sync your data across all your iOS devices too (not forgetting your Windows machines).

This episode is a refresher on using 1Password as well as a peek at the features and functionality of the newly redesigned Safari extension.

One of the many things built in to OSX that we take for granted, is the ability to both compress and archive files without any third party applications.

This show takes you through the basics of compressing (and un-compressing) files and folders, including a look at an application you may have seen make a fleeting appearance in your Dock - Archive Utility

A mini montage show looking at three different topics -

OSX Keychain

One of the more mysterious aspects of OSX, but knowing about the keychain andthe Keychain Access application can be useful.

OSX Application Switching

Some simple (and not so simple) tips on switching applications in OSX with keyboard shortcuts and gestures.

MPlayerX

A quick look at a great open source video player for the Mac.

This show covers ""A Better Finder Renamer"" - a very smart utility for renaming files in OSX. You'll be amazed at how versatile and powerful this batch file renamer can be, it even allows you to create multi-step rename actions.

The tutorial also includes an in-depth section on WiFi networking - Everything you need to know about the latest Airport Extreme and Time Capsule devices and creating the optimal home network with 802.11n

A Better Finder Rename
As promised, this section takes an in depth look at one of my go to utilities whenever I need to rename files, A Better Finder Rename. This application takes care of the heavy lifting, whenever you need to rename a bunch of files and allows you the ultimate flexibility. With categories such as Text, Characters, Positions and Ranges, Conversions, Truncations, Sequence Numbers, Roman Numerals, Date & Time, Alphabetical Sequences, Image Dimensions, MP3/AAC tagging, Parent Folder Name. Path Components and Advanced & Special, it’s amazingly versatile. Add in the ability to create multi stage renames, plus support for droplets and presets, A Better Finder Rename is the ultimate file renaming utility

802.11n WiFi Networking 802.11n, 802.11b/g, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, Simultaneous Dual Band!!! Are you confused with the current jargon surrounding WiFi?

With the advent of more and more WiFi enabled devices, the need for faster and more reliable WiFi networking becomes more important. iPhones, iPads, iPod touches, Apple TVs not to mention MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros and virtually every other Apple device now either relies on or utilises WiFi.

But what’s the best solution? What’s the difference between 802.11n 2.4GHz and 802.11n 5 GHz? What do my devices support? What’s the fastest?

This section takes an in depth look at the current state of WiFi networking in relation to Apple products. I explain simply Apple’s strategy for 802.11n and how it differs from device to device. The section explains the pros and cons of each and why, if you have older devices on your network, you may not be getting the best performance out of your current network setup.

Apple have a range of AirPort devices that allow you to create a powerful dual band WiFi network to allow you to take advantage of the increased performance of more modern Apple devices such as the iPad, and I give a full description of each one.

It’s all very well understanding the theory but this episode takes you one step further by demonstrating screen by screen, how to setup an Airport Extreme to create a dual band network. I also take you through creating a “roaming” network with multiple Airport devices, allowing you to flood your environment with strong WiFi and allowing your devices to seamlessly switch between them.

Finally, I demonstrate using some open source tools to measure the throughput between various devices on both a 2.4 GHz network and a 5 GHz network. You may be surprised at the difference!

Viewer Testimonial:

“Well thanks to your network show, I just completely redid our home networking. The switches, and wireless hub was > 5 years old. We were paying for high speed and the network was dragging (4 mac laptops, 1 mac mini, 4 iphones, 4 ipod touches). My wife's business is run from the home and when I'm in town, I work from the home as well. Replaced with new Airport Extreme, setup with the 5ghz and 2ghz channels (per your show), new gigabit switches, placed the old wireless on it's own subnet for xbox live and ipod touches/iphones. Most importantly, with a little planning, it all switched out, up and fully functional in under an hour. Our network speeds are amazing. Everyone has noticed. I've bought great software based upon your shows, but this fix for our home helps. Thanks!!! Barry”