You can also access this from System Preferences –> Universal Access.

Bonus: 25 super ninja night-vision kudos points.

Quicksilver has many uses. It’s the all-powerful grammatical navigation and manipulation utility for Mac OS X.

A nice trick is to allow you to run shell commands from within the QS window. You can do this in text mode (hit ‘ and type your commands, then select “Run A Text Command in Terminal”).

But you can also get access to any of your command-line utilities in a different way – by adding their directories to the QS catalogue.

Normally you can’t add ‘invisible’ folders to your custom catalogue (through the + icon in the Custom screen of the Catalogue), but QS lets you drag invisible folders into the Catalogue window directly.

So, if you want a quick vim window, add /usr/bin to your Catalogue, and you’ll be able to enter QS, hit ‘vi’, tab and select ‘Run in Terminal’. Note that ‘Run as Shell Script’ will fail in most cases unless it’s a command that exits cleanly.

If you’d like to see a visual demo, check out MacBreak’s video interview with GroupSmarts [QuickTime movie, 93.6MB]. Warning: Merlin Mann present. I don’t mind him but I know that many do…

An especially interesting feature (new in the current version), is the ability to query a photo’s subject via email about some aspect of it. For example, by assigning your brother’s Address Book contact to a photo of your him and his dog you could query him automatically for the dog’s name, or some other forgotten aspect of the photo (see screenshot here). This function appears to be driven via web services, but as incorporated into MemoryMiner, they’re proprietary rather than open-access.

As I mentioned, Facebook already incorporates some of this functionality. MemoryMiner has been able to take the ideas further because of its tight integration with other system services in Mac OS X, but there’s no reason why any photo-sharing/social networking site couldn’t attempt something similar.

One interesting question is how people may export this social/spatial/time-based hybrid information to other similar systems in future. Clearly the value of it is in the linkages between the different types of information on a given entity, e.g. that a certain photo was taken at a certain place at a certain time with a certain group of people. In other words, the context of the photo.

This raises a question common to all social software hybrid applications. Is innovation ahead of the curve when developing standards for these features? Certainly, RSS photostreams including geotagging information can be done at present, but how are we to incorporate people as entities into these systems in such a way as they are transferrable? Can Great Uncle Joe become a URL?

Answers on a postcard please. Or a comment.

Location of first Apple store in Scotland:

Filed under: Retail, Apple

Survivingcinemas.org.uk has uncovered the future location of Apple’s first store in Scotland. 147 Buchanan Street, Glasgow will house Scotland’s Apple Store as well as a glass spiral staircase and a Genius/iPod bar. This former theater will have an estimated £1,1,68,000 pumped into it to covert it into a stainless steel encased Apple Store (signage will be approved separately). Interestingly, it would seem that this store will not have a theater which is becoming a trend in new Apple Stores.

[via MacNN]

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)).

Breaking news: animated chipmunks join German industrial rock band!

Exhibit A.

If you listen to Last.fm radio on a Mac with its audio output sample rate set to 96Khz, you will too find that the godforsaken hellish sound of The Chipmunks has infiltrated your machine.

TextMate

Macromates’ superb script-driven text editor for Mac OS X. I use this mainly on PHP files for work, but I also use it for blog posts (like this one), as its built-in support for HTML Tidy, and the very handy ‘lookup selection on Google and link’ macro are incredible timesavers. Also, the mate command-line tool is extremely handy, especially since you can pipe other things into it (like curl downloads).

Fugu

An excellent Mac OS X front-end for OpenSSH‘s sftp client. Supports TextMate and various other external editors.

curl

Need a file from the web? Forget ‘download managers’ – curl has your back (though wget is also very good for recursive downloads). I use it extensively to grab XML files from our repositories at work – and pass them to other things, all on the command line. Also useful with the curl -I URL command, to check broken headers. Available for every platform under the sun, too.

Safari

Still the best browser for the Mac. Gotta have AcidSearch and SafariStand though.

Vienna

An excellent Mac OS X open-source RSS/Atom syndication client. Loads faster than anything else. And plus, I helped to write the MarsEdit AppleScript for it.

EyeTV

My TV, video recorder, and source of endless numbers of movies to watch!

Linked below is the very talented John Siracusa’s article on the fifth anniversary of Mac OS X. I know exactly where I was on Mac OS X’s launch day of Saturday 24th March 2001, because I was working in the Scotsys AppleCentre Glasgow selling it.

I was fifteen at the time, and it was an exciting day. It heralded the effective end of a system that I’d grown up knowing in the most excruciating detail, but also some kind of new beginnings. It also represented a huge challenge, since as with everything Apple, troubleshooting and compatibility information was a bit thin on the ground before the launch. Also, none of us had a scooby about Unixes.

People I demoed it to on the launch day were very impressed, and when I look back on how far it’s come since then, I’m almost embarrassed. Yet it did establish a solid foundation for everything that was to come: iTunes, Quartz, the new versions of QuickTime, the Intel transition and countless architectural improvements.

Typical of Scotsys (and Apple at the time that I worked with them), we didn’t have enough copies to sell. I think we had around one hundred, but most had been set aside for pre-orders. In any case, we sold out.

Scotsys has been taken over since I worked for them, but I heard various things at the time regarding an Apple Store in Glasgow. There was supposedly a three-year agreement between Apple and Scotsys not to open stores in Scotland until they had time to restructure their business.

I left Scotsys in March 2003.

I’m just saying…

Five years of Mac OS X:

Mac OS X is five years old. John Siracusa takes a look at the road behind as he ponders the critical role the OS has played in Apple’s revitalization. From closing the book on the original Mac to practically inventing a new platform overnight, OS X changed Apple and its users in ways that worthy of a birthday reflection.

Mac OS X 10.0 was the end of many things. First and foremost, it was the end of one of the most drawn-out, heart-wrenching death spirals in the history of the technology sector. Historians (and Wall Street) may say that it was the iMac, with its fresh, daring industrial design, that marked the turning point for Apple. But that iMac was merely a stay of execution at best, and a last, desperate gasp at worst. By the turn of the century, Apple needed a new OS, and it needed one badly.

(Via Ars Technica).

1. Windows
   You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you’re pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month “playing the stock market” but in reality you’re only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn’t been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be “The Asshole”. Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
3. Apple
   You think you’re so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your “loft apartment”, which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns ‘n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to “Steve” would be “pretty cool”. When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don’t know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you “run Unix” now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
5. Linspire
   You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don’t know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer he installed Linspire on your machine.
7. Umbongo (ed: Ubuntu Linux)
   You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandella, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
9. Gentoy (ed: Gentoo Linux)
   You’ve been “into computers” for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as “a bit of a hacker”. Wouldn’t know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You’ve explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an “optimised floorplan”. They’ve tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you’ve ignored them so far because you can’t read those complicated regulatory documents.
11. Linux From Scratch
    Much like the Gentoy user but you’d also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You’re not just building a house from matchsticks, you’re planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You’ve cleared some land but don’t know what to do next because you havn’t read the books you’ve got, so you’ve posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It’s been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.

Some of the replies are pretty good too:

7. Amiga You are a bitter person, twisted by how unfair the world is to have ignored your choice of system and operating system. You still think it is the late 80s, and don’t realise that everybody else has caught up, gone past and then lapped you. Oddly enough you hate your neighbour, also an Amiga fanboy, because they have a blue front door. You have a collection of Amiga t-shirts, including a XXXL Amiga Inc t-shirt sent out 3 years after you paid $50 to try and keep your platform alive. You current hardware uses a 5 year old VIA southbridge, and you need to use a PCI card IDE controller because of it. You don’t really know how computers work despite having used one for nearly 20 years. You still think that PCs have no custom chips and use the original x86 instruction set.

And another:

8. GNU HERD You don’t really exist in the conventional sense. You are more an abstraction. So too is your operating system. Your imaginery friends call you all the time to arrange getting together to add on more features to your imaginery OS. You will always buy the fair trade bar of chocolate for $5 before the bag of smarties @ $0.50 but thats ok, because although the cost to your productivity by using HERD now runs into the tens of thousands, that is more than made up for by the imaginery dent you are doing to the Microsoft corrporation. You could be from anywhere but you might well be German and as you know very well, its dangerous to purchase proprietary software but it’s ok to stone someone else to death for using it! : )

And finally, a comment on OpenBSD…

7. OpenBSD You walk around feeling incredibly secure, since you’re supposed to be secure by default. Then, because you didn’t take the time to understand the OS and did something stupid, you realize that you’ve been walking with your fly down the whole time. Of course the girls you tried to pick up at the bar called you out right away with your smug attitude, lack of “features”, and that “Puff” t-shirt you thought was cool. Once you realize your mistakes, you desperately post to misc@openbsd.org begging for help. You get laughed at by other people just like you, only of a higher caliber. But hey, you don’t care, you’re secure… right?