Expose is just one example. One of my favorite features, though, is the Smart Folders features that is integrated into the Finder. Infact, the way Apple has integrated and designed Smart Folders is so brilliant that it’s almost too easy to miss it.

For those who are not aware, a Smart Folder is a folder that contains a dynamically generated list of files.

Create Your Own Smart Folder

So, now that we know what exactly a Smart Folder is, let’s try and create one of our own.

Open the Finder and click on “File -> New Smart Folder“. Finder will open a new Window with the title of the Window set to “New Smart Folder”. Now, type in a search term in the Spotlight text box. All the files that match your search term will now be displayed. When you’re satisfied with your search term, click the Save button and give your new smart folder a name. You can even choose to add the folder to the sidebar if you want. That way it is always just a couple of clicks away.

The next time you want to see all the files related to “Canon 500d” on your computer. Just open this smart folder and you’ll have the latest list of files, without ever having to manually change anything in this folder. Now, tell me if this isn’t magical?

Create Complex Rules With Smart Folders

The above example was a pretty simple rule but smart folders can do much more. Let’s create a slightly more complex rule and you’ll understand what I mean.

Click on the “+” sign next to the save button and a new row of options will pop-up. Click the “+” sign again and you get another row of options for even more fine grained control. In the image above, I’ve set my smart folder to only show me JPEG images that have been opened in the last 5 days. Imagine a folder that gives you a list of all the documents that you’ve worked on over the last, say, 3 days. Isn’t that Magical ?

I know I’m overdoing the magical part here but the truth is that Smart Folders are a very powerful and, often, underused feature of Mac OS X.

Do you guys use Smart Folders in your regular workflow ?

I love the always available convenience of Google Reader and the fact that I can take all my feeds with me wherever I go but I’ll have to admit that I’m not really a big fan of the user interface and I’m sure if the Google engineers sit together for a night or so, they can probably even come up with a better interface.

Till that happens, however, I’ve decided to use this wonderful add-on for Chrome, my browser of choice, that super-charges Google Reader into something incredible.

FeedSquares is an extension for the Google Chrome browser that displays all your subscribed feeds in a visual manner that looks cool and retro at the same time.

Installing FeedSquares, like all Chrome extensions, is a snap and once you have it installed, you can’t miss the small pink colored square button. Click the button to launch feedsquare for the first time.

FeedSquare requires you to login to Google Reader before you start using it.

As soon as you login to Google Reader, you’re taken to the FeedSquare homescreen that looks something like this.

Isn’t that cool?

The reason I also said it looks retro is because the home screen reminds me of a magazine or comic books shelf at the local library. And that is what I like the most about this extension. At a single glance, I can see which one of my subscribed blogs have had updates and the number on the upper right hand corner also tells me the number of unread items that I have in that particular blog. It almost gives me the same joy going through my feeds that I used to get going through the comic books section of a library as a kid.

Clicking on one of the unread feeds, opens up a small area at the bottom of the window and all the unread items from that feed are displayed over here. You can then just click any one of the posts and feedsquares opens it in a window of it’s own over the main interface.

Doesn’t that beat the pants out of Google Reader ?

FeedSquares doesn’t offer much by way of customization right now and I’d love to see them work more on that aspect of their interface. Other than that, FeedSquares has almost replaced Google Reader for all my Weekend feed reading.

So, which one is it for you? Google Reader or FeedSquare? If you ask me, I’d still use Google Reader if I’m looking to get something done quickly and Google Reader’s largely text based interface lets me just concentrate on the actual content. But, when I’m looking to get some work done visually or when I’m just looking to get an idea about the state of all my feeds, FeedSquares is what I’ll prefer.

Which one do you prefer?

TinyURL, of course, was one of the pioneers in the field but ever since Micro blogging sites like Twitter started to take off, a number of services have come up that all provide essentially the same URL shortening service.

One major problem with using a third-party URL shortening service is that all your links are always bound to that one service and if they ever go out of business, like tr.im did, all your data is gone too. And that is why, if you’re serious about saving all the wonderful links that you’ve discovered from around the web, you might want to consider running your own URL shortening service.

YOURLS gives you exactly that.

Installation

First of all, you need to download YOURLS to your web server and unzip the package.

Now, use your favorite tool to create a mysql database for YOURLS. If you’re using a shared hosting provider, there must be a way to do this from inside your domain control panel. If not, just open a ticket with your hosting provider and let them handle it for you. I named my database ‘kunz_yourls‘.

Now, browse over to the includes directory and rename the file named ‘config-sample.php’ to ‘config.php’.

Open ‘config.php’ in a text editor and edit the following variables.

‘YOURLS_DB_USER’
YOURLS_DB_PASS
YOURLS_DB_NAME
YOURLS_DB_HOST
YOURLS_SITE
$yourls_user_passwords

The comments in the file are pretty self explanatory and you can also get an overview here.

Now, from your web browser, visit the site http://<website>/admin, where website is the domain name where you installed YOURLS. Click the “Install YOURLS” button.

If all went well, you will see the following message which means that YOURLS was successfully installed on your domain.

Start creating your own Short URLs

Browse over to http://<website>/admin/index.php and login using the username/password combination that you entered earlier in config.php. If you didn’t enter any, try username/password. That’s the default combination and that is why you should change it when you’re installing YOURLS.

Upon login, you’ll be able to create short URLs easily by just entering the complete URL in the prominently displayed text box and clicking “Shorten the URL” button.

You can even get some nice and simple statistics about the short URLs that you’ve created.

Be sure to check out the bundled tools. You get two cool bookmarklets that you can use to create short URLs right from your browser toolbar.

YOURLS also provides an API that you can take advantage of in custom applications and such.

Did you find YOURLS useful? Will you use it over, say, bit.ly? Let us know in the comments.

Before Google Chrome come along, I’d been using Firefox for a long time and while I used to try a lot of browsers, it is firefox that I always came back to.

That changed when Google announced support for extensions in the Chrome web browser.

Here was a browser that was faster than Firefox for almost all tasks, had a smaller footprint and a number of advanced features such as the ability to manage separate tabs as separate processes. It had almost everything that firefox had and more, except, extensions! So when Google announced that they were going to enable support for extensions in the browser, I jumped on to the bandwagon and switched (almost) full time to Chrome.

This is a collection of some of the cool extensions that I use to spice up my browser and I hope you’ll find them useful too.

1. TV Chrome

TV Chrome is an extension that turns your computer into a television set. With hundreds of free TV channels from around the world at your disposal, you’d never want to leave your computer (or turn on your television).

2. Incredible Start Page

The start page is the page that you see when you first start Chrome or open up a new tab. The default start page is pretty nice to look at and gives you a view of your Top 8 visited web pages, recently closed tabs and bookmarks. If you want something more from your start page, though, you should install this extension. Incredible Start Page not only gives you a pretty looking start page, it also lets you customize it even further by letting you change the font colors and the image that is used as a wallpaper. You also get a handy little notepad that you can use to take notes.

3. Friends Mural For Facebook

If you’re a Facebook addict (and who isn’t these days), this is an extension that you should definitely install. Add your best facebook buddies to the Mural and watch their updates without ever having to visit Facebook. As a bonus, you also don’t have to put up with the atrocious advertisements that run on facebook.

4. Chromed Bird

If you’re a twitter user (and you should be, if you aren’t) Chromed Bird gives you access to your timeline from right within your browser. It is, essentially, a twitter client that works from within your browser and on all operating systems that Chrome works on.

There are thousands of extensions available for Chrome and I’ve just scratched the surface without even talking about the real superstars such as XMarks, AdBlock, Google Mail Checker. Use these extensions and go take a look at the gallery, you might just find a gem that I might have missed !

Google is also famous for their developer friendly culture and one of the offshoots of that is the 20% time that the developers are allowed to work on side projects that aren’t directly related to their products. Some of those features make it to the public and the Gmail Labs is an example of that. These are experimental features that the Gmail team doesn’t consider ready for prime time yet but they still release it for their users to use and benefit from them, at their own risk. None of these features will harm you or gobble up your email but they’re just not as polished at Google would want them to be.

To enable the Labs features, you need to log-in to your Gmail account, click on the Settings link and select the Labs tab. Select the Add-ons that you want by checking the “Enable/Disable” radio button and click the Save Changes button.

With all that theory behind us, let’s dive into some of the Add-ons that I recommend.

1. Right Side Chat

This add-on puts the Gmail chat box on the right of your inbox and is an absolutely must have for anyone who wants to use their on screen real estate efficiently. Another bonus is that you no longer see the advertisements on the right when you’re reading an email.

2. Advanced IMAP controls

If you use IMAP to access your Gmail account, do yourself a favor and enable this extension. This lets you select labels that you want to see via IMAP, Turn off messaging expunging and trash messages as soon as they’re deleted from IMAP. Very useful extension, if you ask me.

3. Canned Responses

If you’re one of those people who like to reply to emails in terse one liners or if you’re Steve Jobs, enable this extension. You get the ability to save your own Canned Responses and use them when replying to/composing an email instead of typing out the same thing everytime. Real timesaver.

4. Create a document

Have you ever felt the need to add some information from an email to a document that you need to make? Do you do this often ? If the answer to both the questions is yes, I’d suggest that you enable this extension that lets you create a Google Docs document straight from your email.

5. Custom Keyboard shortcuts

Gmail already supports a large number of keyboard shortcuts and for the Unix nerds among us, those shortcuts just make sense. If you’re not a Unix or Emacs guy and really wished that you could somehow remap the shortcut keys, use this add-on that lets you do exactly that.

6. Default ‘Reply to All’

This is for all those corporate types who love to mark a hundred people on an email and then always use ‘Reply to All’ on every email. This add-on makes ‘Reply to All’ as the default option for replying to emails. Isn’t this fun ?

7. Multiple Inboxes

I’ll admit first hand that this is one extension that I haven’t tried myself because of the simple reason that I don’t need it, yet. But, if you are someone who deals with hundreds of emails everyday and would like to have quick access to emails from multiple labels, then you should use it. You can also have a search term as one of your inboxes. Very useful extension for the email ninjas among.

8. Quote selected text

This is an extension that I personally find very useful. I reply to a lot of emails everyday and, often, I have to quote a part of an email when replying. Using this extension I just select the part of the email that I want to quote in the reply and hit the reply button. Voila ! Only the part that I selected will be quoted.

9. Google calendar gadget

If you use Google Calendar, chances are that you live your life by it. Most of us anyway swear by email, so why not combine the two ? Enable this extension to display your Google Calendar alongside your email.

So, these were some of my favorite Labs features. Do you use any of these features ? Which ones are your favorite?

For example, Your music preferences on Pandora (which is an Open Graph launch partner) are shared with Facebook which may then choose to share it with your other friends (or advertisers).

Scared, already ?

Thankfully, Facebook has made it reasonably easy to exclude yourself from the “Open Graph”.

Exclude Yourself From Facebook’s Open Graph

First of all, sign in to Facebook and open your privacy settings.

Click the “Applications and Websites” link.

Press the “Edit Settings” button on the “Instant Personalization” section. Deselect the check-box that says “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites.”

Facebook will prompt you to confirm your selection. Press the Confirm button.

Facebook also lets your friends share certain information about you, like your photos for instance. If you want to disable that also then go back and press the Edit Settings button in the “What your friends can share about you” section and make sure that you deselect each one of those check-boxes.

You’re done .. Almost.

For the initial launch of the Open Graph API, facebook has partnered with Yelp, Pandora and Docs and you have to individually go to each application’s page on Facebook and block them if you don’t want to share any information from them.

To block Pandora, for example, visit the Pandora Page and click the Block Application link below the Pandora logo.

Repeat the same step for Yelp and Docs as well.

That should cover you from these three applications.

Do you feel safe now?

First a little perspective – I LIKE to listen to music, especially when I’m at work or riding the bus on the way back home. But, I don’t really like any of the radio stations that play in my area and then there are those times when I just want to listen to a particular song and waiting for my favorite online radio station to play it, just doesn’t cut it.

Times like these are when I miss my desktop at home the most because that is where I store all my music collection. I’m sure you all will agree with me on this and if you’re a music lover, I’m also pretty sure you must have faced this problem yourself.

Today, I found a solution for this problem. AudioBox.fm !

AudioBox is an online cloud based audio streaming service for your own music. What that means is that they provide you with space on their servers to upload your music and then listen to it using an awesome full featured web application.

The best part about AudioBox is that you don’t even need to install any application on your computer/mobile to stream songs from their site. It all works using an HTML 5 based web application.

Uploading Music and Getting Started

AudioBox offers up to 1 GB of space FREE for you to store your music. Just Sign Up, pick the free plan, choose a username and password you’re good to go. One short email confirmation and you’re all set to upload 1 GB worth of music to AudioBox’s cloud.

Once you’re inside AudioBox, launch the music player by clicking the Cloud Web Player link on the top of the page.

This will take you to an iTunes like HTML 5 application that lets you upload music to AudioBox’s servers and play it at your convenience.

Click the Upload Media button in the top left corner of the page to upload your music files. Once all your music has been uploaded, you can start playing by simply clicking the play button, or double clicking the particular song that you want to listen to. AudioBox works almost like a real desktop based music application.

The free version of AudioBox lets you stream music to a desktop only using your web browser but if you upgrade your plan, you also get the ability to stream music to a mobile device like the iPhone.

Have you ever felt the need to listen to a song your desktop when you’re away from it ? Does AudioBox sound like the application that’ll solve your problem ? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: RossinaBossioB

Today, I’ll be taking you through another tutorial that involves using SSH to take backups of your remote servers.

As you guys might be aware that I also run a website called Geeky Ninja which is hosted by the nice folks over at Dreamhost on a Linux server.

Even though Dreamhost keeps a backup of my site, as a webmaster I’m a little paranoid about backups and worry about losing my data all the time. That is why I also backup my site to a remote location occasionally. And this is where SSH comes in.

As you guy probably know that SSH is a secure encrypted protocol to communicate between two machines. Since SSH is not a text based protocol like telnet, it is possible to transfer actually binary files using this protocol and SCP is the utility that accomplishes this task on Unix/Linux based systems. SCP encrypts the files given to it using the SSH protocol and copies it to the remote destination that the user specifies.

Getting Started

First of all you need to make sure that the remote system that you want to copy the data from has ssh installed and running. In my case, that’s the remote webserver hosted at Dreamhost.

Login to the remote system and issue the “pwd” command to see your current directory.

Note down the path that pwd prints. Now, from your local system issue the following scp command.

Replace:
username with your real username on the remote system,
Remote_IP with the IP Address/Name of the remote system,
Remote_directory with the output of the pwd command from above and
backup_directory with the name of the directory on your local system where you want to store the backups.

That’s it. This command will copy all the files and directories under the remote_directory to the backup_directory on your local system.

Backing Up in Windows

The above instructions will work well for Unix/Linux based machines, but what if you use Windows as your desktop and want to make a backup of your data from the remote machine to your windows desktop ?

Well, in that case you can just use the excellent utility, WinSCP which is a graphical SCP client for Windows

WinSCP gives you the familiar Explorer like interface with full support for drag and drop. Just browse through the directory you want to backup on the right pane and drag it over to the left pane and say GoodBye to text only unsecure FTP sessions.

How do you guys backup your remote servers ? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Carbonnyc

While that statement may or may not be true, it is definitely a rival to photoshop when it comes to complexity. And I’m not the only one who thinks that the GIMP is complex. Apparently the Ubuntu development team also thinks the same way and have removed GIMP from their default distribution. It is still available in the online repository but the Ubuntu 10.04 CD will not ship with GIMP on it. The point is that with all that power comes complexity and GIMP is definitely not a tool for casual users.

So, what are your options if you’re casual user who just wants to edit a few images here and there and isn’t really interested in all the power that GIMP offers but would rather have a light weight but functional editor.

Enter Pinta !

If you’ve used Paint.NET for Windows that we’ve talked about earlier, you’d be right at home in Pinta too.

Pinta is a GTK based image editor modeled after Paint.NET but because it has been created using the GTK# library, it is available for all the three major platforms, Windows, OS X and Linux.

If you’re using Linux, you most likely already have GTK installed, if not, install it before you download Pinta. For platforms that require you to install GTK, the download page provides a link for you to download the GTK# library easily.

Installation is quick and simple and the first time you launch Pinta and if you’re used to waiting for GIMP or Photoshop to load, you’ll be pleasantly surprised because Pinta opens up in a snap.

I don’t know about you but I took an instant liking to the neat and clean interface of Pinta that sports all the regular tools and features that we’ve come to expect of image editors in general.

Pinta provides for unlimited levels on undo/redo, has support for multiple layers and comes with all the regular drawing tools such as a paintbrush, pencil, eraser and a selection tool.

If you, like me, are a fan of the filters that come bundled with the Gimp, you might be a little disappointed, though. Pinta does come bundled with some filters but the number pales in comparison to what you get with The GIMP.

The current version of Pinta as of this writing is version 0.2 but I definitely felt that it was much more stable than what the version number would imply. The only thing I’d want the developers to work on is the speed of various operations and adding some more Effects to the base install.

Pinta, in my opinion, can definitely fill the gap that exists between Photo organizing software such as F-Spot and Picasa and full blown graphics editors such as The Gimp. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

But, since that is really a far fetched thought, I  decided to spend some thinking of the best ways to make my workflow as a web developer as editor agnostic as possible.

And what did I come up with ?

Online Code Editors. These are editors that run online and are available from any computer anywhere in the world. So, without further ado, here is a list of some of my favorite online editors.

1. Kodingen

The people behind Kodingen call it the cloud development environment. It is an IDE for the cloud, and I absolutely agree with them. Kodingen integrates an image editor, a really excellent code editor and a lot of nifty features into one cool looking package. It displays line numbers, features syntax highlighting and SVN integration. The only hitch is that they’re still in Beta and are only letting limited people through.

2. EditArea

EditArea is a free and open source Javascript based editor that can be hosted on your own server. It offers syntax highlighting, search and replace support, multi language support and a number of other features that you’d expect from a first class editor.

3. Bespin

Bespin is a Mozilla Labs project that aims to create an editor for web development that can be embedded into webpages, much like EditArea. It is based on some of the latest emerging standards such as HTML 5 and so you’d need a fairly recent browser if you’re going to use Bespin. Like Mozilla’s web browser – Firefox, Bespin is designed to be easily extensible using plugins developed in Javascript. In fact, the editor is so good that the guys behind Kodingen also provide an option to use Bespin as one of the editors for their IDE.

4. Amy Editor

Using Amy Editor feels as if you’re using a OS X based desktop application as that is where this editor get it’s visual cues from. Apart from that, Amy Editor is probably one of the most feature rich editors in this roundup. It has support for opening multiple files in different tabs, syntax highlighting support for multiple languages and let’s you manage multiple projects from within the editor. Oh, and there is some basic debugging support present too.

5. PHPAnywhere

PHPAnywhere is one editor that could easily replace my current PHP programming needs without much effort. For one, it comes with a built-in FTP editor that lets me edit files directly on my server. It also has excellent syntax highlighting and project management features. What more could a PHP programmer ask for ?

Those were some of my favorite Online Code Editors. Do you guys use any online editors for your needs ? Do you find them useful ? Let us know in the comments.

Twitter is the darling and a poster child of the new real time web and in some ways, it is the service that actually started the real time web phenomenon.

It is no wonder, then, that from journalists to students, housewives to techies, from company CEOs to marketing gurus, everyone is hooked on to twitter with different people using it for different purposes.

Whatever your purpose for using twitter is, if you’re too tired keeping up with the real time natures of tweeting, and you still want to “keep your timeline alive” throughout the day, we’ve got some really neat twitter schedulers lined up for you.

1. HootSuite

HootSuite calls itself the professional Twitter client and it becomes the first in our list because it is much more than just a tweet scheduler. HootSuite is a whole new interface to Twitter and if you’re either bored of twitter’s default web interface or just think that it’s too simple, please give HootSuite a try. You’d be pleasantly surprised with the power of the simple interface and I’m sure would never want to get back to Twitter’s web interface ever again.

2. Twuffer

Twuffer is probably the simplest Twitter scheduler that you’ll ever use. Just login to Twuffer using your Twitter credentials, select your timezone (the first time that you login), type the tweet and select the date and time you want it to be tweeted out. As easy as that.

3. SocialOomph

SocialOomph is another service that is much more than just a tweet scheduler. Socialoomph provides you with a complete Twitter automation tool that lets you schedule tweets, send automated DMs to new followers, unfollow those who follow you, track keywords and a lot more.

The free account can be used for automating your Twitter tasks and the service also offers a paid account that offers a lot more, including Facebook integration, blogging tools and other nifty that would make Socialoomph a must have tool for internet marketeers and power users alike.

4. Twaitter

Twaitter is a business and marketing tool for Twitter. Using Twaitter you can schedule either one time tweets or recurring tweets, register your blog’s feed and have your new posts be automatically posted to twitter, translate tweets to any language, manage multiple accounts and much much more.

5. TwitResponse

Twitter + AutoResponder = TwitResponse is how TwitResponse describes itself. If you have a need to schedule a tweet, say, 2 hours in advance, use TwitResponse’s dead simple interface to do that and let it take care of tweeting about your new product announcement while you finish up the real tasks.

Judging from the sheer number of web application available for this task, it is clear that there is a definite for people to schedule and automate their tweets for the future. Do you wish Twitter would incorporate this as a feature into their own website ? Do you use any twitter scheduling tool that we don’t know of ? Let us know in the comments.

Apple has spent a lot of time in making this tool extremely easy to use for the beginner and at the same time incorporating enough bells and whistles for keeping the power users happy. For a blogger and a mac user, Automator can be quite handy if used correctly.

Now, resizing images is something that almost everyone with a digital camera has to do these days. Whether you’re an average computer user looking to share your photos on Facebook or a blogger looking to upload screenshots of an application to your website, resizing images is a necessity. Considering how important this small function is, it’s actually surprising that modern operating systems don’t come with a built-in feature to automation this task.

Well, if you’re a Mac user, Automator has you covered.

Let’s suppose you’re an amateur photographer and you want to upload all the photos from your recent trip to your website. The photos have all been clicked at the highest resolution possible and you’d want to resize all the images to a respectable 800×600 to save bandwidth and space on your webhost.

Let’s create an Automator script to do this for us.

Fire up Automator and select the Workflow template.

Now, select and drag the Copy Finder Items action to the workflow area. Select a location where you want to copy the working files. These are the images that the next action in the Workflow will work on. Don’t select the Replace existing files checkbox. This is important because if something goes wrong in the workflow, you don’t want to lose your originals too.

The second step is to add the Scale Images action from the library. Drag the action and select a size depending on your need.

If you want to make sure the images are saved in a “Web friendly” format, add the Change Type of Images action from the library. Automator will ask you if you want to add a Copy Finder Items action since the type of the original image is changing. Since we’ve already saved the original images in the first step, you can safely select No here.

Now, save the workflow that you just created to an easily accessible location and don’t forget to select Application as the file type of the workflow while saving.

To use the workflow on a set of images, just select the images in the Finder and drag them onto the Workflow application.

Now, you can browse over to the location that you chose in the first step of the Workflow. Your resized files will be available over there.

There ! Doesn’t that make your work much easier ?

What kind of other routine tasks do you guys perform on your computer everyday ? Have you tried using Automator to help you ?

One of the best things about the PHP/MySQL stack is that they almost seem to have been made for each other, ie. if the configuration is correct. A lot of people, though, end up moving on to other things when they can’t configure the stack correctly.

We’ve written about setting up a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment earlier on an Ubuntu machine. We’ve also talked about using OS X to install and test WordPress by setting up a MAMP (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server.

So, have we been ignoring Windows over here?

No, and today we’ll tell you how you can setup a WAMP server (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on your Windows based machine without too much fuss.

Download and execute the integrated installer which installs the WAMP server just as you’d install any regular Windows application.

The only question that the installer asks is the address of the SMTP server that you want to use and the default email address for outgoing emails. This information is used by PHP if you use the built-in email functions. If you’re not going to make use of this, you can just ignore the SMTP settings and chose the default ones and continue.

You can now run the WAMP server from the helpful shortcut that the installer places on the Desktop.

The only thing that you’ll see when WAMP is running is a small icon in the taskbar. Click the icon and a menu pops up.

When you start WAMP for the first time, the server is in offline mode and you can select the Put Online option from this menu to get the server “Online”.

You now have a fully functional PHP/MySQL stack on your machine. Fire up your web browser and type in http://localhost in the address bar and you’ll be presented with the default homepage that’s served using the Apache web server.

WAMP also comes with phpMyAdmin already configured to manage your MySQL instance. Just point the web browser to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and phpMyAdmin will take away all your database management nightmares.

If you’re a PHP developer, you can just put all your scripts in the c:\wamp\www folder and then you can use the browser to access them.

I don’t.

Services is a little used but extremely useful feature of Mac OS X that has been around since a long time but only recently with the release of 10.6 became useful enough to be used by regular users like you and I.

What has changed with the release of OS X 10.6 is that Apple has now made the services menu context aware. So, for example, if you have a line of text selected in TextEdit, only the services for working with that selected piece of text will be visible. Similarly, if you have a file selected in the Finder, only the services useful at that point will be visible.

Another useful thing that Apple has done is that they’ve added support for creating services to Automator, the workflow automation utility that is bundled with OS X. So, creating services has also become that much easier.

Today we’ll take you through the simple process of creating your own service using Automator that will password protect any PDF file that you select in Finder and then let you email them to a friend.

1. Launch Automator from the Applications folder and select the Services template when asked to.

2. From the right hand side of the Automator window, select the context in which the service applies. We’ll select PDF files from the first drop menu and Finder from the second.

3. Now, you’ll have to select the actual workflow that makes the service possible. The workflows are categorized in the Library on the far left sidebar of the automator window according to the type of service that they provide.

Double click the Encrypt PDF Documents workflow and it’ll appear in the right hand sidebar as a part of the service that you’re creating.

Now, enter the password that you want the PDF documents to be encrypted with.

4. At this point, our service is capable of taking a PDF document and encrypting it using the password that we provided. The second step is the email this PDF file. For that we’ll need another workflow from the Library.

Under Library go to Mail and double click the New Mail Message workflow and it’ll be added to your service.

If you have more than one accounts defined in Mail.app, select the one that you want to use for this service, or let the Default Account be used for all emails sent using this service.

What Automator will now do is that it’ll use the first workflow and encrypt the PDF document that is selected in the Finder and then pass that document to the second workflow. The New Mail Message workflow then creates a new email with this document as an attachment and waits for you to enter an address in the To, CC or Bcc fields and then send the email.

Save the service with a descriptive name and automator automatically registers it with the Finder.

You can test it by selecting a PDF file in Finder and calling the Service from the Services menu in the Finder.

As soon as you click the Encrypt and Email PDF service, the selected PDF file will be encrypted with the password that you chose and Mail.app will automatically launch with the encrypted PDF as an attachment.

What other ways do you use Services to improve your efficiency?

Take me for example, I used to be an avid Orkut user (Yes, yes, I liked Orkut .. sue me!), but have almost stopped visiting the site since I joined Facebook. I also had an account on Myspace and hi5 before Orkut (and then Facebook) pulled me away. And of course, I use Twitter !

Oh and when I say I moved over to Facebook, that only means that I don’t log-in to hi5 or Orkut anymore. I still have accounts there, though. And I’m reminded of that fact every couple of days when I receive an email from them asking me to “reconnect” with some of my lost buddies.

If you, like me, are sick of such reminder emails, I think it is time to delete your profiles on those social networks that you don’t use anymore.

The social networks, on their part, don’t really make it easy to find the option to delete your profile, obviously, so we’ve listed out ways to do that on some of the most popular networks around.

Orkut

To delete your Orkut data, click on the Settings link and under the General Tab, you’ll find a link that says Delete my Orkut Account. Click on that link.

hi5

hi5 is another one of those social networks that used to be quite popular some time back but most people moved on to other networks when their friends moved on. Your account is still there, though, and to delete your account click on the Account link and click on the button that says “Cancel my account“.

Twitter

Among all the social networks that I’m on, Twitter is probably the most addictive and if you also seriously think that it’s becoming a hindrance to your offline social life and want to get rid off it, click on the the Settings link in the top right hand corner of your screen and scroll down to the bottom of the Account tab. You’ll see a link that says, Delete My Account. Click on it.

Facebook

When it comes to social networks, Facebook, is the big daddy of them all. See how I said Big daddy and not the grand daddy. Facebook is a relatively new network and if you already have friends on other networks that you don’t want to lose touch with, why bother with Facebook, right?

Deleting your facebook profile is probably the toughest of them all, because Facebook doesn’t really provide a method using which a user can delete his/her account. All they let you do is deactivate your account, which means that your data is still with them, but no one will be able to interact with you on the site.

Click on the Settings link in the Top right corner of the page and Select Deactivate from the Settings tab.

To really delete your account from Facebook, though, you’ll have to contact their customer service team and ask them to delete your account.

Which other social networks are you guys a part of? Do they let you delete your Account with them or keep your data locked up forever?

Image credit: liako

Now, screenshots are easy and most operating systems have built-in methods of doing so and then there are excellent freeware applications also to edit images. If nothing else, a simple “Print Screen” works almost always.

But, screencasts are a totally different ballgame. None of the operating systems that I know of come with software to create screencasts and the third party solutions are either expensive or simply not worth the effort. Videos are also difficult to take, edit and store and that is probably one reason why we don’t see too many bloggers making use of this awesome medium.

The latest tool that I’ve come across in the screencasting genre, Screenr, might just change my opinion, though, and I can definitely see myself making use of it.

Screenr is a cross platform web based tool that let’s you make screencasts that can be played almost anywhere, including on mobile devices such as the iPhone.

The best part about Screenr is that it is an absolutely no-configuration-required service and doesn’t even require one to register to use it – Just click on the Record button on the homepage and sit back and relax.

Before Screenr can start recording, though, it requires you to select the portion of the screen that it’ll record.

Use the small squares along the dotted line to re-size the window and click the red button to start recording. As soon as you click the Record button, the Cancel button transforms into a green button that says Done and after a short 3 second countdown the recording begins.

Only the portion of the screen that you’ve selected will be recorded and you can even pause the recording for a while if you want.

Once you’ve completed making the screencast, click Done and you’ll be taken back to the Screenr site where you can describe the screencast that you made and optionally tweet out a link to your Twitter followers to look at it.

If you don’t want to tweet the screencast link, check the box that says so and click the Post It button instead. Screenr will require you to enter your Twitter credentials now.

Screenr makes a web version of the screencast and uploads it to it’s website and while the you’re waiting, an iPhone optimised version of the screencast will also be created and uploaded for all your iPhone wielding friends.

You can now either choose to embed the screencast on a webpage or just tweet out the link to the page to all your followers.

One limitation of Screenr is that it only lets you make screencasts of a maximum of 5 minutes, but I don’t think that should be a big problem for most people and since Screenr lets you download the MP4 files, stitching them together is always an option if you want a longer video.

All this in a free tool, and you won’t be surprised why I’m sold.

Have you guys played with Screencasts for your blog ? Which tool do you use the purpose?

There was a time when web pages had to be written specially for mobile devices and most devices available in the market just couldn’t display regular web sites designed using HTML.

The Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod touch devices is responsible for more than half of the world’s mobile Internet usage and it doesn’t look like that uptrend is going to change soon. The reason behind this popularity is that, unlike other smart phone browsers, mobile Safari can display regular webpages as well as desktop based web browsers.

But, while the iPhone and iPod touch browsers display almost all websites perfectly, using a mobile specific theme you can offer a lot of advantages to your visitors.

For one, the mobile optimized pages will load a lot faster. The fonts will be optimized for reading on a device with a small screen and last but not the least, the user won’t have to scroll and zoom just to read the content.

But, if you’re worried that you’ll have to do a complete rewrite of your blog’s theme to make a mobile optimized version, don’t worry, WPtouch is here to your rescue.

WPtouch is a wordpress plugin that completely changes the way your blog looks on a mobile device like the iPhone, iPod touch or the Android. In that sense, it acts more like a theme for your blog rather than a plugin.

If you’re using wordpress version 2.8 or above, the easiest method to install WPtouch is to login to the admin panel and click on the “Add New” link under Plugins.

Search for the term WPtouch and when the WPtouch plugin shows up in the search results, click on the Install link to install it automatically.

Once the installation is completed, you can activate the plugin by clicking on the Activate link on the same page.

The plugin will now be installed and activated, ready to start serving a mobile version of your blog to your iPhone totting visitors.

If you want, you can just leave it at that and WPtouch will happily keep serving your visitors as long as you want, but if you’re like me and like to customize each and every part of your blog, I’d suggest that you give the Settings pane a look and customize certain aspects of WPtouch to better match your blog.

Click on the WPtouch link under Settings.

This is where you can change the theme’s style, colors and the icons used. When you’re happy with your custom changes, click the Save Options button.

If you use the WP Super Cache plugin on your blog, like I do, then you need to make some more changes to the your setup.

Click on the WP Super Cache link under Settings and check the tick box that says “Mobile Device Support” and click the Update Status button.

Scroll a little further down the page and you’ll find the Rejected User Agents text box. You need to add the following user agents to the list that is already there.

• phone
• ipod
• android
• dream
• cupcake
• webos
• incognito
• webmate
• opera mini
• blackberry9530
• blackberry9500

Save the list.

That’s it. You can now happily declare your blog as the most mobile friendly blog in the neighborhood.

Flash is not being used just for videos, it is also used around the Internet for creating casual games, advertisements and pretty much anything that you can think of.

In spite of all the advantages of the Flash platform, the problem with flash is that other than Windows, it really doesn’t run well on any other platform. Flash is also a notoriously heavy user of your system’s resources.

If you’re a Linux or OS X user like I am, you can forget about timely updates and can also expect your browser’s memory and CPU usage to go through the roof if you like visiting flash heavy websites. In my opinion, that is reason enough to get rid of Flash.

So, what do you do if you’ve had enough of the flash advertisements and videos making an appearance on every website that you visit ?

You give ClickToFlash a try !

ClickToFlash is an extension for Safari on OS X that blocks Flash from appearing on any site that you visit. With ClickToFlash loaded, this is how a site using flash will look like.

So, what’s the great deal about ClickToFlash, you ask ? You could have gotten rid of flash by just removing the flash plugin, right ? And to block advertisements, there are already some excellent freeware out there.

Well, I agree, but with ClickToFlash you don’t have to remove the flash plugin and that is the flexibility that it provides. The flash plugin will not be loaded up with every page you view of YouTube, for example, but you can still see the flash elements on the web page, if you want to, by just clicking on the element. So, to start playing the YouTube video above you can just click anywhere inside the gray area and the video will start playing.

Infact, in the case of YouTube, ClickToFlash also gives you an option to view the higher quality the H.264 video stream using QuickTime instead of Flash. Just right click the inside the gray area and select the H.264 option.

Isn’t that awesome ?

But, if you’re a heavy flash user, the constant clicking required to view the content on all your favorite sites might annoy you a bit. In that case, ClickToFlash provides an option to add certain websites to a Whitelist.

A Whitelist is a list of all websites which ClickToFlash excludes from blocking. Adding a site to the Whitelist is easy too, just right click the flash element on the particular site and select the Add to Whitelist option, as you can see in the image above.

ClickToFlash will then add the site’s URL to it’s Whitelist and the next time you visit that site, you’ll be able to enjoy all flash content as if ClickToFlash never happened to you ! I can already see myself making use of this feature for atleast a couple of sites.

So, do you guys find flash videos and ads annoying ? Have you ever though of ways to get rid of them ?

Note: A similar plugin for Firefox is Stop Autoplay

For all it’s simplicity, a lot of people still shy away from using WordPress because installing and maintaining it requires a certain level of technical knowhow. Specifically, the knowledge of installing and managing a PHP/MySQL stack and dealing with all the problems that can happen with a botched WordPress installation.

So, without further ado, we’ve written this post that’ll not only teach you how to install a complete PHP/MySQL stack on your Mac but also teach you to install and configure a fully functional WordPress install, all without leaving the comforts of your own computer.

MAMP, which stands for Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP and is an all-in-one solution for people who do not want the hasle of installing and configuring the individual components on their system.

Follow the download link on the MAMP site to get hold of the latest DMG image and double click the image to mount it in the Finder. The download is a bit heavy at about 170 MB but it will be totally worth it … trust me.

One of the best things about OS X is the ease with which software can be installed. To install MAMP in your system just drag the MAMP icon to the Applications folder.

Double click the MAMP icon to launch control panel.

MAMP will automatically start the Apache web server and the MySQL database server and also launch an instance of your default browser to tell you that everything is working fine.

Keep this window open – We’ll need it in a while.

MAMP also bundles a version of phpMyAdmin along with the complete PHP/MySQL stack.

phpMyAdmin is a web based software to manage MySQL databases and we’ll use that to create a database for our WordPress install.

Click on the phpMyAdmin link in the browser, and when it loads up in your browser, give a name for the new database and press the Create button.

That was probably the easiest MySQL install I’ve ever done.

Now that we have all the infrastructure in place for WordPress, head over to the WordPress website and download the latest version of the software.

Unzip the file that you just downloaded into the htdocs folder inside the MAMP folder – /Applications/MAMP/htdocs.

You should now see a wordpress folder inside htdocs. Browse to this folder and open the file named wp-config-sample.php using a text editor.

In this file, find the lines which say:

‘DB_NAME’ – replace ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with ‘the name of the database that you created’
‘DB_USER’ – replace ‘usernamehere’ with ‘root’
‘DB_PASSWORD’ – replace ‘yourpasswordhere’ with ‘root’

Save the file and rename it to ‘wp-config.php’ from ‘wp-config-sample.php’.

Now, open this address in your browser – http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.

Follow the wizard and at the end of it, use the temporary password that the wizard created for you to login to your shiny new WordPress Install. That’s it ! You now have a fully functional WordPress install on your computer to play with all the themes and plugins that you want.

But, there is still so much more that OS X is capable of and it is not always possible to harness all that power from the Graphical interface, and that is where our application of the day, Secrets, comes in handy.

Secrets installs in the System Preferences Pane and provides you access to hundreds of hidden OS X settings. Almost all of these settings can be accessed from the command line also and if you’re a regular follower of the Mac OS tips website, Mac OSX Hints, you might have come across some of them earlier. But, with the hundreds of hidden settings that Secrets unlocks, you’re bound to find some that you’ve never come across and will find useful.

To install Secrets, just download the zip file, extract it and double click the Secrets.prefPane file that is a part of the zip archive.

Now, you can just click on the icon in System Preferences and OS X will launch Secrets.

Secrets divides all the settings into various categories that are displayed in a vertical sidebar on the left side of the window. This classification makes it easy to find what you’re looking for. For example, if you want to change the dock style from the default 3D type to the older 2D style dock, just click on Dock in the left sidebar and select the 2D style from the drop down menu under Dock Appearance.

If you follow the popular OS X blogs, you’d recall that this particular setting was widely published for users who wanted to go back to the older Dock style when Apple decided to change the default Dock appearance to the 3D style in OS X 10.5. I, on the other hand, actually like the 3D look more so that’s what I keep.

How about something more useful?

One of the features of OS X that I use most often is Quick Look. This feature lets you quickly preview a document right from the Finder without even opening the document. The feature works even if you don’t have the required application installed, and Apple has been nice enough to bundle plugins for the most common type of documents along with OS X.

I use Quick Look all the time to read Word and Power point documents even though I don’t even have Microsoft Office installed on my system.

By default, if I use Quick Look on a folder all it tells me is the size of the folder and the number of files in it.

The two Finder settings that I like to enable using Secrets is to let Finder display hidden files and enable the Quick Look X-ray folders which enables Quick Look to display thumbnails of all the items inside the folder.

Changing the above settings require you to restart Finder. You can do so by clicking the Quit This button at the bottom of the window.

Now, whenever you use Quick Look to view a folder, you’ll see thumbnail images of all the documents inside the folder. Isn’t that cool ?

Go ahead and use Secrets to customize OS X as you see fit. Let us know which are your favorite Secrets.