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Web usage has changed dramatically over the past couple of years, with even the average user now utilising web services alongside informational resources. As most of the major browsers have moved towards tabbed browsing, many web sessions now involve hopping between your ‘web service’ tabs such as rich email client, project management service, image manager, etc and other websites. Well, if you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I could just run my web services as an application and separate them from this tabbed browser model”, you actually can. [Of course you always could just by running them in a separate browser window but that often results in even more confusion].

Fluid is an excellent little freeware app for Mac OS X that enables websites to be run as applications. The site is shown without the usual browser clutter around the edges and is presented as a standalone application in your App menu. The execution has been thought through excellently - such as web links to other sites being launched in your preferred browser, rather than the ‘app window’ losing the original app. For instance, I run the project management web service Basecamp as a Fluid app. This means that I can flick back and forth to it with ease, it never gets lost amongst other tabs in a browser, links to client sites/resources open appropriately in my browser, etc. Give it a try!

Here’s one for the keyboard shortcut lovers out there. When I moved back to the Mac 18 months ago the only thing I really missed was Launchy. I’d always been aware that Launchy was known to be inspired by Spotlight on the Mac, yet when I finally got to use Spotlight I found myself wanting Launchy back as Spotlight just doesn’t do enough. It’s fine to quickly find a file, email or contact but doesn’t have the contextual actions that Launchy did.

Well, even better, Quicksilver on OS X improves massively on Spotlight and, after a few months usage, I’d say is even better than Launchy too. This is one OS modification that I think everyone with a liking for keyboard access should use. Initially it feels a little bit of an effort but once you’ve persevered a short while you’ll never look back. Open the last document an app opened, find a contact and start a blank email, add something to your calendar, etc. It’s all merely a few key presses away. Once you’ve downloaded Quicksilver and tried the basics, there are a few tutorials out there but here’s a good one to get started.

If like me you’ve ever moved from a PC to a Mac you are probably freaked out by uninstalling apps on the Mac e.g. just dragging the relevant app to the Trash from the /Applications directory. But what about all the DLLs and Registry entries? No such thing on Mac. True though that is, there’s still a bit of other related clutter that each application keeps somewhere else. Usually just small Preferences files and the likes but still, if something’s worth uninstalling then it’s worth uninstalling properly! In this case, AppTrap. comes to the rescue. It’s a small freeware app that pops up when you trash an application and prompts you whether you’d like to remove the app’s related preferences etc.

One of the biggest issues we found with Google Apps as a genuine business/enterprise mail and calendaring solution was the difficulty of synchronising calendar clients with the Google Calendar server. For example, it was straightforward to set-up a calendar application to pull in events from a GCal using the iCal format but ‘publishing’ events involved a convoluted workaround or use of 3rd party syncing software. Recently this has changed however and having followed the instructions from Google on getting started with CalDAV we now have a much more savvy centralised calendaring system.

Having been a fan of OmniGraffle since moving from PC to Mac over a year ago and needing a Visio replacement for wireframing and user flow work, Graffletopia has proved an invaluable resource for extra stencils. The free resources have saved significant time and have often helped provide far more coherent and clear documentation.

Web developers and designers using Mac OSX should check out the Hex Color Picker extension which adds an extra method for working with colours right at an OS level. The result is that all apps which use the standard OSX colour picker [yes, the one with the option to pick colours from a selection of crayons] benefit from an extra tab that allows you to use web style hex values such as #ff0000 [for red].

iStockphoto, a favourite amongst many designers for cheap image/video/flash stock assets, is developing an application to allow richer access to it’s library. The application offers enhanced features over an already capable web interface, adding things such as ‘cover flow’ view, multiple/batch downloading and improved lightbox management. The initial release - public Beta due in February - is Mac OSX only, with an Adobe AIR version to follow shortly after.

One thing missing from the OSX finder is the ability to toggle hidden files. If you’re a web developer you’ll have conctinual need to access hidden files such as .htaccess or .svn, but equally you may not want to make every Finder view look so untidy. Sure, you can use Terminal to enable/disable hidden files but sometimes you just want quick access to something you know is there but can’t see it. Well, this application appears to do just that. I’ve only just installed it so I can’t vouch for it’s long term usage but for now it offers exactly what I needed - a button on the Finder toolbar to toggle the visibility of hidden files.

As a designer with all those screen-hungry design apps, a mail program, a couple of browsers, file windows, text editor, etc all open at once, you can quickly lose your mind. Spaces - the multiple desktops feature in Mac OS X [borrowed from Linux I think] - is invaluable to solving this problem, allowing for a much more structured working environment. However, sometimes when moving between a dual-display and single-display set-up Spaces stops working and if you’ve become dependent on it you’ll suddenly feel shackled. However, before reaching for the “Restart” button, try this…

1. Open the Terminal.
2. Type ‘killall Dock’.
3. Spaces should come back to life.