Here’s a screenshot of my OS X menu bar. I thought I’d walk you through them one by one in case you find any of them useful. If you would like more information on one in particular let me know and I can write an article on it.
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Category: productivity
Summary: This great little app (costs $2.99) allows you to right-click in any folder and make a new document.
Windows users will be used to the ability to right-click anywhere and make a new file. Unfortunately you cannot do this on a Mac. For many years I have had a quicksilver shortcut which allows me to do this, but ‘New File Menu’ is a new app that is a lot simpler and has more options. After you install it whenever you right-click your mouse it adds an extra option to the contextual menu that allows you to create a new file. As you can see in the example above I have two choices available “text file” and “pages document” but you can choose how many documents you want available in the menu.
To customise the menu you need to run the application. The you just select the files that you’d like to have in the menu. I only have 4 selected – A text file, Pages, Word and rtf. This keeps the menu nice and small.
Click here to go to the App Store and download the New File Menu App.
Quicksilver is one of my favourite apps for accessing documents quickly and doing all sorts of tasks. I use it almost every time I want to open a new app, open a document or find a folder. I also use Devonthink to store all my files. I am converting over to a paperless office. (Hopefully I will write an article about this someday!) If you are a Quicksilver and Devonthink user here’s how to add your Devonthink database to your Quicksilver catalogue so that all the PDF files in Devonthink can be accessible to Quicksilver.
I have lots of ‘subscription’ emails arriving in my inbox. Some I have subscribed to, some I am not sure how I ended up being subscribed. I just found a great tool for unsubscribing from them all in one go. It’s called unroll.me and here are the results, I unsubscribed from 54 email lists!
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Take control of your iPhone use
An article at theatlantic.com
I just read a fascinating interview with Tristan Harris, former Google employee who worked on Google Inbox about the way these companies manipulate us rather than serve us with their software. A must read if you use facebook or any messaging or email app.
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Tab Launcher
Tab Launcher is a great little app that sits on the side or top of your screen. It’s like a manilla folder where you can put commonly used files. It makes accessing them much quicker. The great thing is you don’t have to actually move the files into tab launcher. Your files stay exactly where they are but this is an easy way to access them.
Things is still my favourite to-do app but Wunderlist is free and it’s Android compatible. Here’s how to export your to-do items from Things to Wunderlist.
The menus and dock in OS X change colour to give you an idea of what is under them. I’m sure some people find this attractive but it annoys me because it can make things less clear. Thankfully there is a simple way to turn it off.