launch

Launching applications via keyboard shortcuts can increase your productivity. Quicksilver for Mac studies your habits and helps you achieve better control over your Mac. It functions very similarly to the Mac address/search bar, but with extra functions and even quicker launch options.

Quicksilver for Mac comes packed with its own installer, which makes the installation quick and easy. Once the free app has been installed, you can access it by pressing the Quicksilver hot key. To extend the functions of this app you can download some additional plug-ins available from the developer's Web site. There are default preset … Read more

Twitter's new music site went live this morning.

Well, almost. Users can currently log in with their usual Twitter credentials, but there are no features as of yet.

According to AllThingsD, only a select few will get access to the service over the coming days, with Twitter planning a more extensive rollout after that.

Reports that the service was set to go live began circulating last night, and were fueled earlier in the week by celebrity Ryan Seacrest, who bragged about having access to it in a series of tweets.

Twitter yesterday confirmed that it had purchased music discovery … Read more

For every application installed on your Mac, OS X will scan its document-handling capabilities and store them in its Launch Services database, which it then uses to pair up document types with the applications that are built to handle them. Therefore, if you install a new image-handling tool on your system, when you right-click image files or get information on them you should see this program be available in the "Open With" section as an optional handling program.

This service is convenient for ensuring that documents can be opened directly from the Finder; however, it assumes you always … Read more

The little blond boy from the latest, oddly bland commercials tap-danced.

There was a mother-in-law joke.

There were actors being forced to spout lines of the same quality as reality show producers foist on overly-lipsticked, neophyte administrative associates.

Somewhere, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd were weeping into a banana daiquiri.

Samsung's live event to launch its Galaxy S4 was bathed in all the taste of budget-free vaudeville.

As my colleague Molly Wood fulminated, the depiction of women as Stepfordian drunks was quite spectacularly myopic, ancient, and slightly tawdry.

The general level of humor had a sell-by date of September … Read more

Apple's XProtect system (aka File Quarantine) in OS X is a rudimentary anti-malware scanner that will perform a quick check on downloaded files to make sure they do not contain known malware, and will block any versions of Web plug-ins like Java and Flash that have known vulnerabilities.

XProtect runs in the background with no interaction with the user, which is convenient, but it does mean that when it gets updated, users may find themselves unexpectedly unable to access some Web content. Even though quickly updating plug-ins should get you around this inconvenience, it may be useful to know … Read more

Although it's possible, configuring daemon by editing its PLIST file can seem obscure, and reading all the documentation can by overwhelming. To save you the trouble, LaunchControl for Mac lets you access all the documented p-list keys and apply them with relative ease. All the rules come with a clear explanation of their effect and expected values.

With LaunchControl for Mac you can use either an abstracted, more graphical interface or toggle on the expert mode, which will then let you see a more familiar PLIST editor to directly edit values for each item. The selected action will then … Read more