macOS tips – Tech Reflect

Ultra high volume email workflow

2020-04-02

In my last years at Apple, if I had no workflow in place, it was not impossible to get over a thousand emails a day. When I would visit people’s offices, I would see two main workflows:

An inbox with 50,000+ emails in it, mostly unread
A hundred or more mailboxes, one for each mailing list, also with high unread counts

Sure, there is a ton of garbage emails, such as automated emails or irrelevant mailing lists you can’t subscribe from. But I developed a system that worked for me and I was able to never have an unread message and was able to always find the most important ones.

The very simplest version of it looked like this. For a smaller flow of email, it could work well, but I ended up beefing it up a bit.

The decision process I would go through was this:

Is the message

…

2019-11-04

I ran across a list of tips I wrote when Leopard shipped a million years ago. Most of them still work and are useful. And best of all, I’ve found that most people are unaware that they exist.

Dock springing. If you drag a file and hover over Dock items, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. Note you have to have springing ON in Finder Preferences (or use spacebar).
- If it’s a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock.
- If it’s a folder/stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens.
- If it’s the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn’t exist already.
- The coolest springing trick is if you hover over an application while dragging a file The application comes to the foreground and then you can hover over the window you want and that springs to

…

2019-06-16

Many years ago, search engines supported using a (+) symbol next to terms that you definitely want to be on the resulting pages. This is similar to how using the (-) symbol before a term omits pages that contain that term.

I’ll use a search string I was using recently to illustrate:

Does diatomaceous earth kill aspergillus (normal search)
Does diatomaceous earth kill +aspergillus (the word “aspergillosis” is required in search results)
Does diatomaceous earth kill aspergillus -bacteria (same search but exclude pages with the word “bacteria” on them)

In June of 2011, Google launched Google Plus. In October, they removed the (+) symbol as a search modifier so that it could be used for Google Plus.

However, I recently discovered that it’s been replaced by using double quotes! When you quote a word or phrase, it not only searches for that word or phrase, but it mandates that it …

2018-06-12

In pretty much any Cocoa app, option-delete is an incredibly useful shortcut to delete the previous word or path component. If you mess up typing a word, for example, you can start fresh instead of having to use the mouse/trackpad or hit backspace multiple times. For paths, it’s great for when you want to remove a few components from the end of a path.

In Terminal, however, this is not possible by default. You can enable a command in the Edit menu called “Use Option as Meta Key” and it will restore this Cocoa editing behavior.

You can also enable it on a per-theme basis in the Keyboard tab.I find this incredibly useful in quite a few scenarios.

You make a typo and it’s just quicker to do option-delete and retype the word
You’re typing a command and you’ve messed up the flags or perhaps the ordering of

…

2018-06-11

In case you’re not familiar with App Switcher, press Command-Tab to bring it up

From there, you can continue to Tab until you reach the app you want to switch to and then release. But there are some pretty advanced things you can do.

…

“defaults” command tricks

2018-05-30

If you use the defaults command to set preferences, it’s easy to forget that you ever did. Some implications of this:

You could be filling up your drive with logs or slowing your system down
You could run into other bugs later that are caused by the default itself
An update to an app might not benefit you because the default you set is overriding behavior

Finding defaults

The defaults command has a find subcommand, but I’ve found that people generally aren’t aware of it. Let’s say you set some defaults relating to your trackpad, but don’t know what domain they are in:

defaults find trackpad

Found 3 keys in domain 'Apple Global Domain': {
     "com.apple.trackpad.forceClick" = 0;
     "com.apple.trackpad.scaling" = 3;
     "com.apple.trackpad.scrolling" = "0.75";
 }
 Found 3 keys in domain 'com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad': {
     Clicking = 0;
     DragLock = 0;

…

Keyboard tricks in Dock stacks

2018-05-29

Note: For most of these keyboard commands, your stack must be in Grid View. Right-click on a Dock stack and choose View content as Grid. A small subset of the commands work in List View and Fan View.

Keyboard navigation commands

Action	Result
Tab or Right Arrow	Selects upper left item in the grid
Shift-Tab or Left Arrow	Selects “Show in Finder” which is the lower right item in the grid
Tab, Shift-Tab, and arrow keys	Navigate between items
Commmand-UpArrow	Navigate up to parent folder
Command-DownArrow	Navigate into selected folder
Space bar	Quick Look selected item
Command-Return	Reveal selected item in the Finder
Type characters	Select matching item

Some other interesting commands not related to keyboard navigation

Action	Result
Option-click file	Open file and leave stack open
Command-Shift-Plus/Minus	Increase/Decrease icon size
Command-click on stack or stack item	Reveal clicked on item in Finder
Option-Command-click on stack	Reveal

…

2018-05-23

Hot corners is a great feature, but can also be frustrating as you can have a lot of accidental activations. There are two strategies for dealing with this, one of which I will write about later.

Much of the time that hot corners are activated inadvertently, you are trying to reach a menu at the left or right edge of the menu bar and you accidentally end up in the corner. One thing you can do is adjust the delay before hot corners are activated:

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-corner-action-delay -float 0.5
killall Dock

The delay is in seconds. To reverse it:

defaults delete com.apple.dock wvous-corner-action-delay
killall Dock

With a 0.5 second delay, you might find that it’s hard to accidentally trigger them if you are hunting for a menu, but not too long as to be annoying. Play with the number and see what you think.

…

2018-05-22

Currently if you take a screenshot, it gets a name like this:

Personally, I feel the date and time are redundant given you can already sort files by date in the Finder and in Dock folders. So you can omit the date like this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture include-date -bool false

To reverse it:

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture include-date

Now, you’ll get screenshots named like this:

If you want to go full-on retro, you can also change the name used for screenshots:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name Picture

To reverse it:

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture name

This should bring back some memories:

Also, if you’re in the habit of collecting screenshots on one machine, I find naming screenshots after individual machines to be very useful.

…

Creating human-readable Swift tool with Xcode

2018-05-10

One of the (few) nice things about a shell script is that if you share it with someone, they can look at the source code and see how it works or modify it for their own purposes.

It’s not as quick and dirty as a bash script, for example, but it has some big advantages:

It’s Swift and it’s a great way to learn it and reduce the number of languages you need to know
You can use Xcode to create the tool and have the full power of Xcode debugging
Writing tools in bash can be very frustrating due to the unusual syntax and lack of some modern language features.

There’s one downside though. The output from Xcode is a compiled binary, so people have to check out your source code from a repository to see how it works. So, here’s what you can do after you’ve created your …

Tech Reflect

Reflecting on 25 years in tech

Category: macOS tips