The Basics

It all begins in your bookmarks. In the “Unsorted” section of your bookmarks, create a folder called “Search.” The bookmarks we’re about to create won’t do us any good in either the bookmark menu or the bookmark bar.

Now we’re going to create a new bookmark. We’ll just make it to google for starters. Notice that when we create the bookmark we have an option to add a “Keyword.” This is a text shortcut for the bookmark, so that now anytime you type “g” into the location bar of your browser and hit enter, it will go to google.com. This is a trick in itself, I have many of my common university sites bookmarked in this way, so that “lib” will take me to the library website and “myslice” will take me to the course management site and so on.

We want to make a search shortcut, so it’s good that we’re at the search site we want. Run a search for anything your want, I use the string “test” myself. What we want is the result in the location bar.

The text from the location bar for that search was “http://www.google.com/search?q=test” Be prepared for your result to be much more messy. It might contain all sorts of crazy characters, but we don’t have to worry about them. All we’re looking for is the string we search for, in this case “test.” In my case it was easy enough to find. It is the last bit of the result, right after “q=”

The next step in creating our shortcut is to take this url and replace the string we used, “test” with “%s”

So my result will be “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s”

We do this because Firefox will replace the %s with whatever we search for in the shortcut. Now we copy that url and  paste it into the bookmark we made.

Now you’re done! For now on, if you type “g” and a space followed by a search string, that will be searched by google.

You can go on to create similar shortcuts for many other search engines. Listed below are several others, along with the keyword I use to use them.

w – wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

y – yahoo – http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=%s

tube – youtube – http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Search

Add a little luck and things get interesting…

I hope you’re still with me, because it’s about to get pretty cool. For those of you unfamiliar, Google has a search option called “I’m feeling lucky” which takes you straight the first site the search yielded. This feature never really made sense to me, until I made it into a shortcut.

The code for the “I’m feeling lucky” search is the string is “&btnI=I” so I made a shortcut:

gf - google I’m feeling lucky search – http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I

To get to the Onondaga County Public Library I just type
gf Onondaga Library – I honestly haven’t a clue what the url is!

Power through large complicated sites

Combine the “I’m feeling lucky” trick with a site specific search to give a quick way to hard–to–find pages in large websites.

I’m a student at Syracuse University, and often have to find various departmental websites like Parking Services, Financial Aid, and the like, and they can be hard to find sometimes. This trick is amazing in how it translates my thoughts to websites.
In order to do a site-specific search in google, you add the phase “site:syr.edu” (in the case of Syracuse U) to your search, which limits the search to websites within that domain.

In this shortcut, we’re not going to remove everything we searched for from the url, we’ll leave the “site:syr.edu” in and place our %s after it. This looks a little weird because of the codes that represent the colon and the spaces.

s – Lucky Syr Search– http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Asyr.edu%20%s&btnI=I

This searches only sites within the syr.edu domain. Notice that &btnI=I? That makes the search lucky, which means that it takes me instantly to the first hit. So the next time I’m looking for the Public Safety website, I just type:
s Public Safety – and I’m there!

Instant directions

I use google maps to find directions. For those of you who are unfamiliar, google maps will give you directions if you search for a phrase that goes like
one address to another address.

So the phrase “1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC to 2 Macquarie St, Sydney New South Wales” will yield the humorous directions from the White House to the Sydney Opera House.

Here’s the thing. When I moved to central New York, I found myself looking up a lot of directions and they were all similar. I always wanted to know how to get from my place to another place in the city. I realized there was only a small amount of information that was changing each time, namely the street address of the place I wanted go.

Suppose I live at 1234 Pleasant St, Syracuse NY.
Every time I looked for directions I type into google maps:
1234 Pleasant St, Syracuse NY to new street address Syracuse NY

Just like we left text in the site specific search, we can leave stuff in this search too.

to – instant directions from home to somewhere in the city –

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1234%20Pleasant%20St%20Syracuse%20NY%20to%20%s%20Syracuse%20NY

Here that %s really gets lost. It’s between “%20” before “Syracuse” on the end, see? This shortcut means that if I need directions to a friends place or a business in Syracuse, like the University, I just type:
“to 700 University Ave” In my location bar and hit enter and bam, instant directions. I use this nearly every day and it really saves time.

Obviously you can copy any of the links in this post into bookmarks with keywords and use them as is. To make your own “to” search, search google maps for directions from your address to an address in your city and then replace the street address of the destination with %s, leaving the city and state. A tip, the code %20 is for a space, so leave one on either side of your %s in the “to” search.

Hope you found this trick helpful and informative. Let me know if I can clarify this post in anyway.

Use the Subject Line Productively

Email subjects have a tendency to be vague, while emails tend to be requests for specific information. It can make your readers inbox a lot easier to understand if you include a fair amount of the question of the email in the subject line. I find that virtually all emails I send can fit all the needed information in the subject line. You’ll note also my use of the “|” character to preserve John’s Re: subject. Bars and slashes can be very useful in breaking up information in the subject line and keeping it nicely readable.

Use ONLY the subject line

Some emails have such simple requests they don’t need a message body. EOM for End of Message, or NB for No Body are common codes for this kind of message. This also reinforces the above point. A common email might have the Subject “Bhabha Citation” with the text “Could you send me that Bhabha citation?” Such small messages can be a lot easier to handle if you can respond to them without even having to open them in your mail client.

Death to Carbon Copies!

I admit that this is a nerdy pet-peeve of mine. There is no real difference, as far as I’ve discovered, between emailing a message to multiple addresses and cc’ing people to a message. Replying to either such message will reply to the sender only, while reply–all replies to everyone who received it.

The “Whoops! I need to reply-all” problem

How often have we quickly hit “Reply” to such a message, only to realize too late that everyone else on the email needs to see it as well. Putting all of your readers in the “To” field makes them easy to find in such a flub. The “To” header is almost always displayed first in a message, so its easy to copy all the addresses to which it was sent and paste them into your reply. “CC” headers are sometimes displayed and sometimes not. They require digging. Besides, group emails should be egalitarian. Who feels the love from the messages they were “CC’d”?

Extra Nerdy Solution to the “Whoops! I needed to reply-all” problem.

If, like me, the “reply-all” problem afflicts you often enough to want to spare the pain from others, there is another trick you can use. Most email clients will let you set a “Reply To” field. This affects who will be targeted in a reply, so placing the group sent in this field means that the group will, by default, receive all the replies.

I hope this has helped to you understand my strange email habits, and perhaps given you food for thought. Let me know if you’d like any more email tips.

Peace!

Today’s blog concerns such a discovery. While horribly mistyping the word google (don’t ask me how) I stumbled across a proxy object I had never seen before:

At first I thought to myself, what good is this? But than I realized a wealth of possibilities in trigger creation. Imagine, anything that you frequently do to, well, anything that you can drag, you can make into a trigger that requires you to simply drag it to some corner of your screen! To find out how to do this, read on.

Side note: I know that there are many QS cultists on the world wide web that consider QS to be the death of the mouse. I’ll admit that I am not the greatest fan of mousing, but I do not think that QS makes us more efficient by replacing mouse clicks with keystrokes, I believe it makes us more efficient by allowing us to chose when we change modes. I’ll have more to say on this when I post my writeup on the uses for Constellation menus in a few weeks/years. (given my stellar posting record)

On to the creation of a Trigger with the Mouse Trigger Dragged Object. For this demo I’ll be making a Trigger that allows me to email a file/string to anyone by dragging the object into the upper left corner of my screen.

Step 1: Create the Trigger
To create our trigger will invoke QS and hit Command-’, which takes us to the Triggers section of QS preferences.

We’ll chose a Mouse Trigger (which requires the mouse trigger plugin) for our quick-email trigger, otherwise it won’t work!

In the Primer-like three pane trigger step up we find our Mouse Dragged Trigger Object. (this is a proxy object, make sure proxy objects are enabled in your catalog in the Quicksilver section.)

Next we tab to the action pane and type Email, to get the Email (Compose) action.

That’s odd, Email isn’t available? Are we out of luck?

Step 1-retry
The reason our trigger doesn’t work is because there is nothing in the Mouse Dragged Trigger Object proxy when we make the trigger, at least nothing that QS thinks you can email. There is a way around this.

We invoke Quicksilver on something that can be emailed. Any file or string will do. We then tab to the action pane to get our desired action: Email (Compose)… in this case.

With our focus in the action pane, we hit Command-C (as in copy). Yes, you can copy actions, trippy eh?

Step 2 – Finish the trigger
We go back to the trigger pane and back to our Mouse Dragged Trigger Object trigger.

Tabbing to action pane, we hit Command-V. Poof, Email (Compose)… is where it should be.

We leave the third pane blank and un-tabbed to so that when the trigger invokes it gives us the opportunity to specify to whom the file will be emailed.

Step 3 – Setting up the Mouse action that will trigger it
Our last step is to configure the mouse action that will trigger this trigger. (he he, trigger)

For the type, we want Drag and Drop. Drag Entered will work, but it will invoke and then disappear if you drag and drop. Drag and Drop works every time.

Next we chose a screen corner/side. I chose my upper left hand corner.

Finally, we have the option of specifying a modifier key. I chose this so that I don’t accidentally trigger the action when spastically mousing around. This also allows us to re-use space. If you want to get crazy, you could assign many triggers to the same corner, each using a different set of modifier keys. (points to some math-nerd who tells me how many)

All Done
That’s it! Our mouse dragged object trigger should work now. So the next time you’re browsing the web with your mouse and you run into some passage that you want to email someone, select it and Command-Drag it to the corner. Mouse-browsing the Finder and find the file you want to send to Jimbo. You could Command-esc it, but maybe it suits your flow to drag it up there before switching to keyboard mode.

Well I hope the tutorial was helpful and relatively free of errors. I’ll try to update more often in the future. This is especially true if I notice any readers.

I once waxed on to a colleague who asked what Quicksilver has done for me:

It has made iTunes telepathic. It has replaced my dock when my hands are on the mouse or keyboard. It records my every thought and moves it to the right container. And everyday I learn about something else it can do.

The fellow immediately demanded that I qualify my comments, something neither of us had the time for. Hence, this blog.

For those of you that don’t know what Quicksilver is, I suggest looking over the list below. These are great sites for getting started:

• The Apple Blog’s: Quicksilver changes everything.
• Merlin’s: Quicksilver: Grab a copy and play along at home.
• Dan Dickinson’s: A better OS in just ten minutes.

Since most of what I’m going to be talking about are triggers, I also suggest you read Dan’s excellent explanation of them here.

Today’s adulation: iTunes reads my mind.

There are many freeware apps out there that allow us to control iTunes without going to iTunes. There are hotkeys, menu bars, floating widgets. Many of them offer some of the functionality Quicksilver can. But since we use Quicksilver for so much else, why not this as well? For those of you that already have Quicksilver doing some iTunes control, skip “The Basics” and move to “The Awesome.”

The Basics

First thing we want to do is control tracks without changing what we’re doing. For this we make a series of Quicksilver triggers. Stated briefly, anything you can do with Quicksilver can be made into a trigger, which can be mapped to a hotkey or mouse corner to execute automatically.

Quicksilver’s iTunes module comes with scripts to control iTunes already, so all we have to do is make triggers out of them.

Here we have made the script “Next Song” into a trigger. To do this we clicked the plus at the bottom of the Triggers window in Quicksilver’s preferences and at the primer-like prompt began typing”next song” until it came up. Run is the action we want so we hit “Save”

Next we need to give it a key mapping. We double click on the “Trigger” column to bring up the following shelf.

We click the Hot Key field and press Command-Option-Right Arrow.

And that’s it! From now on, whenever we hit that combination of keys, iTunes will go to the next track. So when your writing a paper, blog, or otherwise engaged you don’t have to break flow in order to skip a track.

We repeat the process with the following scripts and key mappings.

• Previous Song gets Command-Option-Left Arrow
• Play/Pause gets Command-Option-Space

The Even More Basic
So long GrowlTunes

Some of us are fans of Growl, a notification framework that can unobtrusively handle notifications from many different programs. Growl comes with a program that will make Growl notifications for our iTunes tracks. Likewise there are many programs, GimmeSomeTune for example, that provide this functionality without Growl. Again though,if we’re using Quicksilver, and Growl, there’s no need for the extra program.

Just go to the iTunes section of the Preferences and select “Monitor Recent Tracks” and “Display Track Notifications.” You can then go to your Growl preferences and chose which growl style you want the notifications to come from.

The Awesome

Okay, so we’ve got iTunes well controlled. While I’m blogging in Flock, I can start and stop iTunes, skip or replay tracks, and have a sexy “what’s playing” notification when the tracks change, all without break the flow of my work.

But you know how when you’re listening to iTunes on shuffle while you’re hard at work and hearing one random song puts you in the mood to listen to another song? What do you do? You have to break flow, switch to iTunes, find the song and play it. That’s so much mousing, most of us pass the opportunity by.

With one simple trigger all that can change. With the iTunes module you can Quicksilver an item called “Browse Tracks.” This is essentially a catalog item that has all of your tracks. Make the following trigger:

Map this to a key combo, I use Command-Option-b, and it will bring up a seemingly normal Quicksilver window that searches only your tracks. Bring it up, starting typing the first few letters of the track you feel like hearing, hit enter, and BAM, it’s on.

You can do this with other categories as well. I have a Browse Artists Trigger mapped to Command-Option-a, for when I get the urge to here someone as opposed to something.

Even Better…

If you’re like me, you listen to iTunes in shuffle play (sometimes limited to playlists) most of the time. This allows us to be like a live DJs while we’re listening, programing our listening as we go. With the Browse Tracks Trigger, that becomes much more dynamic and doesn’t involve breaking our attention from whatever else we’re doing. Let’s bring it up a notch.

Rather than listening to your library with shuffle on, get in the habit of listening to the Party Shuffle. This is the same as shuffling, except it selects the first 15 or so songs ahead of time. If you do this you’ll want to modify your Browse Track habits to use the action “Play in Party Shuffle” when you get the urge to hear a song out of the blue.

But what about if you get the urge to hear a song, but don’t want to interrupt the song you’re listening too? Ordinarily you’d have to keep that in your head until the song finishes. If you’re listening to the Party Shuffle though, bring up your Browse Tracks Trigger and modify the action a little bit.

“Play Next in Party Shuffle” adds the track to the playlist after the one you’re currently hearing. So you can add it and forget it!

Concluding Thoughts

So there you have it. With Quicksilver, iTunes can be telepathic. You’re working on something listening to your tunes on the Party shuffle. A song that doesn’t fit the mood comes on. Without breaking flow (and after a few weeks, without even thinking about it) you skip the track. A song plays that you really like. Without breaking flow, you play it again. A song (or something else) reminds you of a song you’d like to hear. Without breaking flow, it’s playing. You realize the perfect follow up to the tune you’re currently jamming to. In about the space that it takes to have that thought, you’ve slated it to play next.

Truly this is an example of Quicksilver’s motto Act without Doing.

Blogged with Flock

I’m a Mac Geek. I believe that computers should (and are) able to actually make our lives easier and I strive to make my Mac that way. I’m a grad student and therefore poor poor poor, so I heavily favor free software. As a rule, excepting the vitally necessary, I don’t buy software. I don’t steal it either. Rather I evaluate the best freeware/opensource options and use them.

Once upon a time, I had a dream of setting my computer up to do absolutely anything I could imagine. I went through several programs a day and kept an external harddrive filled with “just in case” apps that I made sure were the best of the best and always up to date.

The hobby had become a dangerous obsession, what’s worse, it had made my computer kruffty, so it all had to go. My new philosophy is when I find a task that I want my Mac to do, I solve it with the triage below. I refrain from solving problems I may someday have.
1) When encountering a task you want the computer to do, see if it’s built into Mac OS X.

I had a number of freeware programs doing things that Tiger could do fine. For example I used OSXVNC when my Mac could run a VNC server all by itself. There are a lot of features and tools built-in to the OS itself, I’ve have yet to stop learning about them.

2) If Tiger doesn’t already do it see if an existing tool (i.e. Quicksilver) does.

As you will see in my next post, there are a million programs that will control iTunes for you. It just so happens that QS is one of them, and I use QS for other things anyway. I figure it’s better to have one tool than nine, so I try to keep as many solutions “in the family” of apps that I’ve gathered, so that everyone plays nice and I don’t squander system resources.

3) If 1 and 2 fail, seek out a freeware tool solution.

Favoring those that are streamlined, functional and strike you as a good member of “the family.”

In this way I strive to keep my hacks productive. The quest for gadgets can quickly become a profound distraction. This way, I try to make my computer a great place to work, not a never ending fix-it-up project.