Yes, I like knowing “where” of things, especially me. I find it fascinating to know what other strangers have been to the place I’ve been – the way our paths cross without really realizing it (or being able to without them participating in the same way).

However, “most of the programs” eventually means “not the program I was using.” Then I came across this article – by using the Automator “Watch Me Do” recording function and a little bit of trickery, you can get the Applescript code to do whatever you need.

Random Useful Mac OS X User Tips: “I lamented this in one of my posts about Leopard, but I noted that there didn’t seem to be a way to directly access the AppleScript code from the Watch Me Do feature — Automator only creates run-only plugins or scripts. This is annoying if you want to modify the UI script later to do something slightly different. In this situation, you’d have to redo the whole set of actions all over again.”

Way cool.

Alexander Kjerulf posted pictures of the Best Business Card. Ever.

(Via Geekdad.)

I so totally want the “Hello My Name Is Inigo Montoya” shirt.

What caught my eye, though, is that it also offered the option to export the data it had – so that if I needed to, I could quit and still have access to the data through another software package… rather than holding my data hostage.

So, while I don’t need Yojimbo, I’ll certainly keep Bare Bones Software towards the top of the list for other packages I might want.

Then I started thinking. For work, every week I copy a bunch of files from where I work on them out to a shared folder on the network, then send an email to management saying “hey, they’re updated.” I then attach them to an email to send to one manager who doesn’t have access to the networked folder. I realized today that the entire process could be automated via Automator, linked to a Quicksilver trigger and *poof* the whole thing would be done.

This is the kind of stuff I was looking forward to doing on the Mac that I couldn’t do as easily on the Windows side.

Growl is another stop on the tour here. It’s neat because every application tries to let you know something is happening in a different way – a pop-up here, a bouncing icon there, some use sound and some don’t. Growl can be used to corral these notifications so that all applications (at least, all that are aware of it) use the same method.

As I keep playing and working, I’ll keep updating as to what else I’ve found that’s made my switch easier,

Parallels is probably the biggest one – it allows me to run Windows programs on the Mac. Sure ,you could do it with Apple’s BootCamp but who wants to reboot each time? And the beta version I’m running allows Coherence Mode, which hides the Windows desktop so the Windows programs appear to be running in OS X.

Qucksilver started with me looking for a way to emulate the ability to use Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog – I got good at using that to open Excel, Word and Notepad rather than hunting through the menus. OS X appears not to have that functionality built in, but Quicksilver fixed that – and gave me a whole lot more. I’m just getting started with it but it appears to be one of those “how did I live without this before?” type of programs.

Geektool is interesting because it allows an updated textfile to be displayed as part of the desktop. I use it to keep track of my todo.txt file.

Finally, something to help with my inability to keep track of what I already have – Delicious Library. It’s a media (DVD, CD, VHS, book & video game) library system. This would be incredibly tedious to catalog if it weren’t for one thing which appeals to the geek in me – I can use the camera built into the MacBook to scan the barcode, then Delicious Library goes out and find out what the barcode is for. This is an entirely unexpected way to use the camera and I think it’s a pretty neat idea.

I’m sure there’s more, but I can’t remember them right now.

An interesting project to show where people think they are (for lack of a better way of putting it). An interesting way to look at the influence of cities.