MUST HAVE MAC APPLICATION

After years--Yes Virginia, years--of hearing Kaizar proselytize about this particular free application for macs, I finally downloaded it and gave it a whirl. Called "Quicksilver," the best way I can describe it is that it's an automated workflow program that offers a shortcut in the UI experience on OS X.

I've only scratched the surface of what it can do--there's a lot of customization that's available--but in particular one feature I was able to activate and immediately use sold me on this program. I'm working on a Word document and I have a few other programs running, such as iChat, Camino (my web browser), TextEdit (a light word processing program that I heart for some reason), and lastly iTunes. And just as I'm getting into my zone as I type, an annoying song playing on my iTunes takes me out of my groove. Typically, I'd stop typing and have a variety of choices to rectify this music situation:

1. Use pointer to manually select the iTunes program in my dock and click on next song.
2. Tap apple+tab and cycle through all my open programs until the iTunes one is selected.
3. Tap the F8 button to activate Expose and then manually select iTunes.

Regardless of which above option I go with, they all force me to stop my typing and in some manual manner "get to" iTunes thus interrupting my previous flow.

With Quicksilver, without switching out of my Word document or any other program I'm in, I can click a designated keyboard combo I created (apple+control+"right arrow") which would automatically instruct iTunes to skip to the next song. As a result, in the middle of a sentence I'm typing, I can quickly and efficiently skip a song on iTunes (and conversely go back a song) as quickly as it takes me to type any other letter. The first time I used this I had a Eureka moment and "got" what the obsession with this program is about.

Anyhoo.

This is just one tiny small example of what you can do with this fantastic program (moreover it doesn't appear to be a memory hog). Go download it here.

FREEING UP SPACE ON YOUR MAC HARD DRIVE

The past year or so I've been struggling with my iBook G4's diminishing hard drive space and I did the following to try and create more space. 1. MUSIC. I deleted mp3s (all legal of course).

• I used my iPod as a back-up, and so with great pain, I removed Lionel Richie's Greatest Hits from my iTunes. This didn't work out so well, since my iPod is currently comatose.
• I deleted songs whose novelty factor had worn off. Avenue Q was a great listen the first time...but did I really want to hear it over and over again? No.
• I deleted random downloads. What's this? Electronic folk rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot remixed with Mozart? DOPE!
• And lastly, I deleted classical music.

2. PHOTOS. My iPhoto was next. I deleted those random photos of grass. Seriously, I don't know why but I took a photograph of grass. Not of the inhaling variety, but of the playing frisbee on sort. I deleted photos that through the looking glass of hindsight wasn't that funny, or memorable, or 'artsy.'

Also, when you import photos to Apple's native photo program, iPhoto will save the original image if you decide to crop, remove the red eye or in any way manipulate that photo. This is a great feature if you want to go back and look at the original after you edited it. Not so great if you don't have that much free space on your hard drive. This might not seem like much, but if you have hundreds and hundreds of photos, those 500k - 2 MB photo duplicates start adding up!

I use a FANTASTIC program called iPhoto Diet that automates the extremely tedious act of going through and removing from each folder the duplicate photos.

Also, I lowered my digital camera's setting from the highest quality photos to a medium quality: I realized that I actually didn't need a 3 MB photograph of my friends and I jumping around like idiots. Although the day that I'm invited to the Playboy Mansion or have a date with Kristin Kreuk, I'm totally jacking up my camera's setting back up to ultra-mega-super quality.

I don't think Flickr is going to go out of business any time soon (Cue my parent's saying, "Never say never..."), so even the photos I've deleted, I have them backed up on my Flickr Pro account.

3. APPLICATIONS. I deleted/uninstalled applications.

I love Apple Works, but I came to deal with the fact that I haven't used it since high school when I used to explicate Frost on my mom's old Apple Performa. And although my hatred for Microsoft Word is up there with bigots, cauliflower, and diarrhea (seriously, this is possibly the most deceptively difficult word to spell in the English language--I can NEVER remember how to spell it correctly), I'm still a slave to this program. Damn you Gates. DAMN YOU.

So Apple Works--pfft. Gone.

Also deleted:

• iDVD. I don't think I even opened up this program a single time.
• iMovie. I used this twice. Once, to make a video of my dog Rudy chewing to pieces a ginormous rawhide bone. The thing was seriously 2 feet long. I think I set it to the "Flight of the Bumblebees." I'm not going to lie. It was pretty awesome. But even a short uncomplicated thing such as this was a tedious process on my then blazing fast G4 iBook. The other time I made a video was when Samantha and Carla came over and we all split a couple bottles of wine. I think I set it to the song "Eye of the Tiger." I'm not going to lie. It was pretty awesome. Okay, one of these two videos did not happen, but I'll leave it up to you to figure it out.
• Garageband. Considering the fact that my musical career consisted of four years with the viola and I never learned to tune it on my own or get beyond the double digits in chair assignments for concerts should make it clear how unuseful Garageband was for me.
• World Book. What year is this? 1997? If you're still using this, stop. Delete it. Open Camino or Firefox or Safari (is it me or is Safari really effing slow??) and go to "www.google.com" and "www.wikipedia.com" and also, immediately go to "mrod.wordpress.com" for rad stuff.
• Chess. It's a great game if I actually enjoyed it. I went through a chess phase when I was younger; I even purchased with money I'd saved up from my allowance a computerized chess toy thingy from Sears. I still enjoy it, but something about playing it on a computer doesn't work for me. I think I'm more tactile in this way.

4. MAIL. I have my Mail application synched with my gmail account (feel free to email me fan mail, love letters, or that great offer from the king of Nigeria). It's great to use a desktop based email program, but sometimes I let my old emails pile up, along with the attachments (mp3s, LOLCATS e-mai1z, and photos of Britney Spears mentionables) people send me. So I've been diligent about deleting old emails (which are backed up on Gmail anyway).

5. PRON. Believe it or not, but I have zero, nadda, zip pr0n on my hard drive.

6. DOCUMENTS. Individually, they hardly make a dent, but in combination my documents took up an annoying quantity of my hard drive. So I deleted:

• PDFs, for those that don't know, can sometimes be surprisingly large files. So I deleted all the old journal articles from my college and grad school days.
• Old friends' documents: the notes they emailed me when I was uh, too sick to go to class, resume samples, et cetera. I doubt they'll need their notes any more.
• iChat can save your IM conversations which has come in handy in the past, but I make it a point to clear it out every once in awhile, except for those that are good for blackmail.

After doing all this, I STILL did not have much space left, which didn't seem to make sense to me and I really didn't want to delete my complete collection of Tupac's music or my Aaron Neville's Greatest Hits.

So I went to Apple's Support Discussion pages for help and eventually ended up on this link which turned out to be a revelation.

They wrote:

Trashed iDVD or GarageBand? Don't forget the loops and themes…

If you plan to uninstall iDVD® or GarageBand™ by moving these applications' icons from the Macintosh HD > Applications folder to the Trash, be sure to also trash the corresponding iDVD or GarageBand folders within the Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support folder. These folders contain iDVD themes and GarageBand loops and instruments, respectively, and consume several gigabytes of disk space.

I was intrigued. I had deleted iDVD AND GarageBand for the reasons stated above. Now, I followed their instructions and deleted the both programs's supporting files (drag and drop into Trash).

BAM!

I instantly had 2+ gigs of more hard drive space!!!

So for those of you with macs and need to free up some space on your hard drive, and don't use either of the above programs, delete them as well as the support files.

Also, in this Mac Support discussion thread, someone suggested deleting the printer drivers that I don't use. I don't have a printer, so I really don't need any of them. As they also noted, if at a later point I purchase a printer then it will come with a driver or I can download it off the Internets. If you already have a printer, say a Lexmark, then delete the other printers. The Epson driver is around 1 gig. Yea, what the fuck, right? By deleting these annoying drivers I squeezed out some even more hard drive goodness.

WORD OF CAUTION: Do not delete files willy nilly from the Library.  Many of those files are crucial to the operating system, and deleting them will result in catastrophic failure.  If you're going to mess with the Library, then treat it like a virgin.  Mess with it delicately; do your research; and don't probe and move things about indiscriminately.

If any one has any other ideasfor freeing up hard drive space, let me know por favor!