Tag: minitip

Semibold keyboard shortcut in Pages

So… Turns out there is no shortcut to turn text to semibold in Apple Pages, from the iWork suite. There are shortcuts for bold and italic respectively, but not semibold (or light / ultralight for that matter) even for the fonts that support it.

The closest thing to a solution that I found is through Character Style:
– Select a piece of text, make it semibold
– In the Styles Drawer, under Character Styles, click on the little arrow next to “none” and “Create New Character Style From Selection”
– Assign a Hot Key to the newly created Character Style, by clicking the arrow next to it and Hot Key.

There are a few drawbacks to this approach, mainly that the character style you’re defining will be tied to a particular font, and that the only shortcuts allowed by the Hot Key setting are F1 to F6. If anyone has a better way, I’m all ears!

Automatically restart applications on OS X

I use GimmeSomeTune to provide hotkeys and some other goodies for iTunes. It works alright, but is veeeery crashy — usually every dozen hours or so on my machine.

How to fix that? Let’s relaunch it as soon as it crashes. Simple!

In a terminal:
for (( ; ; )); do open -W /Applications/Multimedia/GimmeSomeTune.app/; done

open is the bash command to launch applications on OS X. It works with all kinds of files: open somefile.avi will open that file in your default video player, VLC for example. The -W flag tells open to wait until the application exits before returning any value. By putting it all in a for loop, we effectively ensure that bash will launch GimmeSomeTune, wait until it crashes, then relaunch it, and so on.

Edit: this is a bad way of doing things. A better way is described here.

Synchronize and backup Address Book contacts with Dropbox

A nice way to synchronize contacts between your Macs without having to buy a MobileMe account is to have them on your Dropbox.

Basically, it boils down to moving the folder containing your Address Book data on your Dropbox, then adding a symbolic link to it so Address Book will know where to find its data.

Let’s go on bash!

Move the folder:

$ mv -v ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook ~/Dropbox/

Add a symbolic link:

$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/AddressBook/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook

Done!

Now you’ll only have to add the symbolic link to every Mac you want to synchronize (you may also need to remove the existing AddressBook folder). Another awesome consequence is that you don’t have to worry about losing your contacts if your hard drive crashes: they’re safe in your Dropbox.

A word of advice though: Address Book was not originally meant to be used this way. It would be wise not to edit your Address Book from the two computers are the same time, for example.

A keyboard shortcut to change files colours in the Finder?

My usual habit (some would call it an intermittent OCD, but meh) of sorting and organizing files and folders to a great extend and my almost as severe relentless longing for optimisation recently met in an existential question: is it possible to colour files in the Finder through a keyboard shortcut?

OS X lets you add colours -or “labels”– to a file by right-click or in the Finder’s File menu. GUI are cool, but get in the way of efficiency once you know your keyboard inside and out.

Well, after some research, it seems that such a shortcut does not exist. You can’t even create a shortcut the usual way, as the “Label” menu point stands for all labels. (I’ll eventually describe the usual method in this blog!)

The simplest way to implement such a feature was to create a set of AppleScripts that colour files that are currently selected, and launch them via the most amazing QuickSilver. Or Alfred. Or even Spotlight.

The AppleScripts look like that:

property file_color : 5
-- replace '5' above with the number for the color you'd like to use:
-- 0=none, 1=orange, 2=red, 3=yellow, 4=blue, 5=purple, 6=green, 7=grey 

tell application "Finder"
	activate
	set items_ to selection
	repeat with item_ in items_
		try
			set label index of item_ to file_color
		on error e
			display dialog e
		end try
	end repeat
end tell

This is the purple one. Therefore, I called it scp_SetColourPurple.scpt and dropped it off somewhere QuickSilver indexes – proceed this way for each colour you want to add.

All it takes now to colour a set of files is to select them in the Finder, type in Ctrl+Space (to summon QuickSilver) and the three letters to your colour of choice – scp to set the coulour to purple, scr to set colour to red, scy to set colour to yellow…

(Full disclosure: the above code was originally found somewhere on the internet, I can’t find where right now. If I find the link again, or if someone can point it to me, I’ll give props to the original author.)