Instantly create zip archives with a keystroke

A convenient and often forgotten feature of Mac OS X is its built-in ability to create zip archives.

Just select any file or folder, go to the File Menu and select Create Archive. Voila! Instant .zip archive. No third-party software needed.

Make this even better by attaching a custom keyboard shortcut to the menu item—another […]

The Apple Blog: Access any Mac menu with Quicksilver

Quicksilver, the miracle shortcut tool for the Mac, should have its own Marvel Comics movie. It just has too many features and mutant abilities to ignore.

Yasser Dehab of The Apple Blog adds to this neverending list by showing you how to use Quicksilver to access every menu item in any Mac application.

He explains the […]

First impressions of rooSwitch, a preferences manager for Mac apps

Brian Cooke recently showed us his new application, rooSwitch. Here’s how he describes it:

rooSwitch allows you to manage profiles for almost any application. An example of how I use rooSwitch to get a handle on my life is to manage two profiles for NetNewsWire. One for “work feeds” and one for “other feeds”. […]

No time for news? Get it at a glance on your desktop

If you’re feeling guilty for not keeping up with the news, try Newsmap. The site varies headlines by size and color depending on how much coverage a news item gets. This lets you quickly see top news items as well as biases and trends in news coverage. You can see Newsmap with a flick of […]

FlexTime + Growl: A gentle way to end procrastination

Daniel Jalkut has just released the final version of FlexTime, a fantastic little Mac timer deftly suited for the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack. It still has no out-of-the-box support for Growl’s nifty notification system. Luckily, FlexTime now has robust support for AppleScript, allowing a backdoor into the Growl system.

With a little tinkering, I’ve put together an […]

Keyboard shortcuts for your bookmarks in any browser

In Safari, you can press Command+1 through Command+9 to quickly open bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar. Command+1 opens the first bookmark, Command+2 opens the second, and so on. Very cool, but what if you don’t use Safari? For months, I’ve been looking for a way to access bookmarks with keyboard shortcuts in Firefox. Finally, it […]