19 Aug 2010

Five Obscure Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

Posted by in Geekery, Mac, Productivity | One Comment

Yes, it’s a list post, with a prime number of items, to boot. Sue me. Here’s five of the more obscure Mac keyboard shortcuts I use, plus some bonus tips for good measure. If you know about all of them already, you’re probably really über-geeky (umlaut tip: hit Option‑U to prepare an umlaut; it’ll then […]

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4 Aug 2010

Installing Markdown as an OS X Services Menu Item Using Automator

Posted by in Geekery, Mac, tips, tutorial | 9 Comments

I just had a quick look around the web for ways to install Markdown translation as a Service (i.e. available from the Services menu) on my Mac. Most of the hits I got seemed to be quite old, and involved hacking about with an existing service for another text converter. So, I experimented. And the […]

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9 Mar 2010

Taking Screenshots from the Command Line in OS X

Posted by in Geekery, Graphics, Mac | No Comments

I was so impressed with this I had to share. I was looking for a way of taking screen shots of a user taking a screen shot. Yes, that’s a bit meta. Basically, I wanted to grab some screen shots for a tutorial piece on how to capture screen shots on a Mac. So I […]

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5 Dec 2007

Screencast: Creating an iTunes Music Visualizer in Quartz Composer

Posted by in Animation, Design, Graphics, Mac, Screencast, tutorial | One Comment

I’ve put together a basic screencast tutorial which introduces you to Apple’s Quartz Composer, the graphical programming environment which ships with OS X. Quartz Composer is a graphics generator, capable of drawing 3D graphics, animations, and all sorts of Good Stuff. And you make it work just by dragging little boxes about and connecting them […]

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