Alfred App Themes

Alfred App

Alfred App is a great application for quickly finding and launching things on your Mac. It’s similar to LaunchBar, Quicksilver and Google’s Quick Search Box (plus many more similar apps).

What I love about Alfred is that is quick, very quick in fact, and simply to use. I don’t really need all the extras that Lunchbar or Quicksilver offers, although they are handy — I just want to be able to quickly find stuff on Mac, launch Applications and lookup contacts — job done!

Alfred is free, but there is a paid add-on called Powerpack, and since version 0.8.1, Powerpack users could create their own colour themes. Now with version 0.8.2, you can export/import themes meaning you can now share them with friends.

tangerine theme

Read more

How to Backup VisualHub

I recently archived and reformatted my Mac so I could do a clean install of Snow Leopard, as a result I wanted to reinstall some of the apps I used to use, one of which was VisualHub, a video conversion tool that unfortunately is no longer developed — yes I know there are plenty of other apps out there, but VisualHub works perfectly with my current setup/workflow.

After copying the app and finding my serial, I discovered it needed to download a conversion engine before it could work, but for some reason it couldn’t or wouldn’t download it, so after a search on Google I discovered I could just copy the engine from my archived Mac — although the website with the instruction eventually worked, I had to use Google’s cached file to start with.

I’m a little concerned the site might be broken or worse the information might disappear altogether so I though I would republish the instruction, which may be of use to other users?

Read more

My Top 5 Website Building Tools

Designing and editing websites and blogs can be much easier with the right tools. Here is a list of my top 5 website building tools:

smultronSmultron: A free text editor for the Mac which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to not confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced user. I have been using Smultron for well over a year, and it has become my default text editor of choice for .txt, .html to .php

Website: Smultron by Peter Borg. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.9 Tiger or later
Price: Free!

csseditCSSEdit: This little application is quick, clean and offers superb CSS styling of absolutely any web page. It is the fastest, easiest CSS editing application I have used, and find using anything else a real pain in the …

Website: MacRabbit. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
Price: $29.95.

photoshopAdobe Photoshop: Possible slightly over the top, in price terms, for most web-designers, and can be a bit daunting to use for the first time. But I’ve been using Photoshop for fifteen years now and know it like the back of my hand – so I never start a new design project or website without mocking it up in Photoshop first. It is always running on my Mac and allows me to edit any image instantly.

Website: Adobe. Requirements: PS CS3 Mac OS X v.10.4.8 or higher.
Price: from $649.

transmitTransmit 3: If you design your site locally like I do, then you need a way to get it from your desktop to your server! For pure simplicity I have used Transmit for years now, as it does just that. It is the FTP app of choice for a lot of Mac user, allowing perfect Synchronisation between Your Stuff and Theirs (local and server).

Website: Panic. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.
Price: $29.95.

parallelsParallels: If you build it you really (really) should make sure it works in every browser! I must confess I am slightly cynical on the whole browser testing thing because I use Safari for most of my browsing these days, and generally it seems to work with 99.9% of every website I visit. Firefox does come a close second, and I do use it for writing and editing posts on my WordPress sites as this is one thing that Safari doesn’t like (sigh!).

Read more