Archive for July, 2007

Copy and paste the full path of a file in the Finder

Friday, July 27th, 2007

Finder iconThis is a handy trick that I use from time to time. Say you’ve selected a file or folder in a Finder window, and you want to copy the full path to that file or folder as a text string – for pasting into an email or a script, for example. Here’s how:

  1. Open a Terminal window.
  2. Drag the file or folder to the Terminal window. (The full path appears in the window.)
  3. Select the path in the Terminal window, copy it, and paste it into your email or script.
  4. Close the Terminal window.

The only slight snag is that, if your file or folder path contains spaces, the spaces get escaped with ‘\’s in the Terminal window.

If the escaped spaces bug you, or you often want to copy the path to a file, check out the catchily-titled FilePathToClipCMPlugin. Download and open the .dmg, drag the FilePathToClipCMPlugin.plugin file to ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items, and restart the Finder (Apple menu > Force Quit, then choose Finder in the list and click Relaunch). You can now right-click any file or folder and choose FilePathToClip! to copy it to the Clipboard. Works a treat.

(PathSnagger does a similar thing, but sadly it doesn’t have a stable Universal Binary version yet so I can’t test it.)

A lovely way to view Web photos

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

PicLens logoI’ve been playing with PicLens a fair bit recently. It’s a browser plugin (Safari on the Mac, Firefox on Windows) that lets you view online photo albums with a slick, fullscreen interface. It’s compatible with Flickr, Facebook and Google Images, amongst others. It can also work with any site that delivers a Media RSS feed. Just hover over an image on a website and, if you see a little “play” button appear, click it to view that album or photostream in PicLens. You can flip between photos using the arrow keys.

It’s very swish, but of course it’s highly dependent on the quality of the source material. That 120×120-pixel Google Images photo is never going to look good when viewed on a 20″ iMac, no matter how you slice it!

(Oh and guys – a Firefox version on the Mac would be appreciated. We don’t all use Safari, you know!)

UPDATE 8 Dec 07: If you’ve just upgraded to Safari 3 and it won’t open any Web pages, it’s probably because you have PicLens installed. You need to uninstall it. You should find Safari then starts working again!

iPhone: Wot no To Do list?

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

No To Do!I realise that I’m probably in the minority here, but anyway…

The one thing that piqued my interest when I heard Apple was making a phone was the possibility of syncing my iCal calendar events and To Dos with a nice, sexy, Apple-designed PDA-phone. I currently use Missing Sync to sync with my Tungsten T2 – and while both Missing Sync and the Tungsten work, they’re not the most reliable of beasts. And I’d like to have my PDA and phone in one handy gadget. I’m a big GTD fan, so being able to sync events and To Dos is pretty much essential.

Frankly, you can keep your music playback and Google Maps – all I want is a nice way to manage my events and To Dos on the move.

So I was somewhat taken aback to discover that, not only does the iPhone not sync iCal To Dos, but it doesn’t actually have a To Do feature at all! What the…?!

It gets worse. Although it will sync iCal events, it apparently dumps all events into a single calendar. Much like the bad old days with my Tungsten, before I switched from iSync to Missing Sync. Extremely lame.

Come on, Apple – you made iCal, you made the iPhone. Can you not at least get them talking properly to each other?!

All this is probably moot anyway – I live in Australia, so probably won’t get my hands on an iPhone until 2015… 😉