Apple’s Keynote has been my preferred presentation tool for about a decade. For a long time it felt like the ideal tool, easy to use, powerful and flexible. But at some point, probably around the time when the iOS version of Keynote came along, the Mac version of Keynote started loosing features and became more limited than it had used to be. Since then, I have experienced all sorts of problems, including non-compatibility of new and old presentation file versions, problems with linked video files, crashes, etc.

Last year I decided to use plain text files (TXT) as the main file type for all my computer text input. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one was all the problems experienced when trying to open other types of text-based files (RTF, DOC, etc.) on various iOS and Android devices that I use daily. Another reason is to become independent of specific software solutions, forcing you to use a specific software for something as basic as writing text on your computer or device.

MultiControl is by far the most popular software application I have created, as can be seen in the web traffic here on my site, and also on the download site at the University of Oslo where the app resides. This is a tiny application that passes on data from a human interface device (mouse, game controller) through either OSC or MIDI. When I first created it back in 2004, there were not so many other options.

This is quite certainly the least advanced computer software I have made publicly available (see here for others), but it may still be useful for some: a small application that will ask for a filename and create a new blank text file with that filename prepended by today’s date: If you are interested in trying this out, here are the files: New text file (app) New text file (source - Automator workflow) Over the last years I have become more and more vary of the problems of complex file formats, and find myself using plain text files for most things, including to-do lists and note taking.

When creating figures for papers written in LaTeX, I have found it aesthetically unpleasing to have different fonts in the figures than in the text. Most figures I create in either OmniGraffle or Matlab, and here I have relied on regular OSX fonts. Fortunately, I have discovered that it is possible to use LaTeX fonts in OSX. Apparently, this is now included as a feature in the latest version(s) of the MacTeX distribution (?

I haven’t really played much with Automator earlier on, but have found it to be very useful for doing small things that you would otherwise need to write a small shell script or program to do. Here is a screenshot of an Automator workflow which will add today’s date to the name of any file or folder. Very easy!

Here is how to create a USB drive for installing OSX.6 from a DMG file: Open Disk Utility Select your USB drive Select the “Restore” pane Choose your source DMG file Drag and drop your USB drive on the destination (I don’t understand why this isn’t already selected…). You should probably also select “Erase destination” From the “Images” menu, choose “Scan Image for Restore”. This will then check that your image is working.

To organize files I have for a while been creating folder names that start with today’s date. I typically create a number of folders each day, and had grown tired of doing this manually. Then I came across a page describing the wonders of Automator, and decided to give it a try. It all is very simple. I create a small automator script containing the following two elements: Then I saved it as an application and told Quicksilver where to find it.

I just installed Adobe Reader on my new computer, only to discover that it hijacked the PDF preview window in TextMate when working on LaTeX documents. This also happened the last time I installed a new system, and I couldn’t remember what I did to change it back to using Preview as the default PDF viewer. After googling around, I remembered that TextMate is just using the regular browser settings when it comes to displaying PDF files.

I thought I had written about this trick on my blog before, but couldn’t find it. So I try again: How to invert the screen (systemwide) in OSX: ctrl-alt-cmd-8 This makes it possible to change between regular and inverted view. I find it particularly useful when sitting in a dark environment, since it makes the screen much less bright to look at. Screenshots below: {width=“524” height=“424”} {width=“524” height=“424”}

I was looking for solutions on how to type the degree symbol (like in 0°) on OSX, but could only find solutions for English keyboard layout (or solutions suggesting copying an image…). After some trial and error I figured out the correct combination for a Norwegian keyboard layout: shift-alt-Q.

To follow up on my previous post about the differences between browser plugins, web interfaces and desktop applications, here is another post about my current rethinking of computer habits. In fact, I started writing this post a couple of months ago, when I decided to move back to using Apple Mail as my main e-mail application again. I had used Mail for a few years when I decided to test out Thunderbird last year.

Nowadays I have a hard time deciding on what type of application to use. Only a few years back I would use desktop applications for most things, but with the growing amount of decent web 2.0 “applications” I notice that I have slowly moved towards doing more and more online. Let me use this blog as an example. It is based on WordPress, which now offers a good and efficient web interface.

After working happily with FW-products for many years, the recent trend of disappearing FW-ports have made me look for USB-based solutions. For hard drives the switch has been easy, and I also recently got my first USB-based sound card. The hardest part has been to figure out how to handle video cameras. I have been using various Unibrain cameras for years, and have gotten used to the simplicity of being able to hook up multiple cameras to one computer.

I was at the Musical Body conference at University of London last week and presented my work on visualisation of music-related movements. For my PhD I developed the Musical Gestures Toolbox as a collection of components and modules for Max/MSP/Jitter, and most of this has been merged into Jamoma. However, lots of potential users are not familiar with Max, so over the last couple of years I have decided to develop standalone applications for some of the main tasks.

The latest beta version of Skype (for OSX only, apparently) offers something called “Skype Access”, which makes it possible to pay for access to commercial WiFi networks through a per minute basis using your SkypeOut account. I recall reading this when I downloaded the latest beta a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t think much about it before I opened my MacBook at the Brussels airport last week and saw a “do you want to pay using SkypeOut” message on screen.

I am back at work after a long vacation, and one of the first things I started doing this year was to reinstall several of my computers. There is nothing like a fresh start once in a while, with the added benefits of some extra hard disk space (not reinstalling all those programs I never use anyway) and performance benefits (incredible how fast a newly installed computer boots up!). I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use.

I hadn’t thought about the lack of verb labels in Windows as opposed to OSX before I read this blog entry. The point made is that adding some meaning to the buttons we push greatly enhance the usability, since it is not necessary to read the text above the buttons. Look at the two examples below for a proof of concept: Simple idea and easy to implement!

I bought a 1TB Western Digital hard drive the other day, and it came preformatted with FAT32. Since I will only be using this on OS X machines, I wanted to reformat it with HFS instead, but had problems doing this with Disk Utility. Then I came across a thread suggesting to change the partition type to GUID, and everything worked fine. This can be done in Disk Utility as the screenshot below show.

I am working on a paper for a journal that only accepts RTF documents, and to avoid the possible problems resulting from converting a LaTeX document into RTF (or possibly from PDF), I decided to try using a word processor from the beginning. For simple word processing I have grown very found of Bean recently, a lightweight application slightly more advanced than TextEdit. I started out with Bean, but since I had to include endnotes in the document I ended up moving over to NeoOffice instead.

I had some SVN problems, and figured it would probably be faster to do a full new checkout rather than trying to figure out the mysteries of the .svn folders. But then I realized that I had made some uncommitted changes in the old folder, and started brushing up on my unix diff commands. While looking for some hints on this, I came across this Mac OS X Hint on how to compare two folders.