A few OS/X apps to save & make time

Jumpcut

“Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.” — Jumpcut website

Jumpcut is a huge time saver for me (every microsecond counts :-).  Although I have a 27″ display, and can put applications side-by-side, it is still quicker to select, command-C; select, command-C; etc… to get all the various bits of content I need to copy all at once.  Unfortunately Jumpcut does not have a stack that pops as you point, command-V; point, command-V; etc…  IOW, command-V will behave as expected.  To access your buffered clips you will have to use the Jumpcut icon in the menu bar and then select from the drop down the clip you need.  The instant your clip is selected it will be pasted, so position your pointer first.


Source: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~psgendb /local/public_html/setup.jds/desktop.html

MiddleClick

Most OS/X users don’t use the command line; the ones that do probably use Terminal or something similar.  What’s left are the old UNIX users like myself that use X11 xterms.  In an xterm, if you want to select a bit of text you can select it the same way you would expect to select text within any GUI environment.  However there is also the option to left click to mark the start, and then right click to mark the end.  But to paste, you need that middle click.

OS/X does provide the “middle click” via option-left-click.  However if you are a UNIX console jockey, you expect to copy and paste with just a mouse.

MiddleClick is a small utility that allows a three-finger tap or click to be registered as the middle mouse button.  There are other utilities that export custom mouse events, but not all of them worked with X11.  Finally, one handed copy and paste.


App Tamer

Firefox and Safari suck the life out of my battery. I’ll take the blame for having 50 Firefox tabs open and allowing Flash to run in Safari.  Given that most content and many of my apps are delivered via a browser, then it makes sense to just leave them open.  The problem is that they take up about 20-30% of the CPU.  Firefox is the worse.  As I write this Firefox is consuming 31% of my CPU with no Flash content running (blocked).

Other apps are fine.  I have Photoshope CS5, Microsoft Office 2011, Adium, Skype, Twitter, and a bunch of other apps that I leave running all the time, and they are all well behaved.  As for the misbehaving, I use App Tamer.

App Tamer will automatically suspend all applications in its list sans the focused (foreground) app.  Alternatively I could kill -18 the process ID to get the same effect, but I prefer to be lazy and let App Tamer handle it automatically.  App Tamer is also smart enough to not suspend a browser with a download in-flight.  Suspended apps are dimmed; to unsuspend, just click on the app.

Ask me now, how is your battery life? Well, it is measurably longer.  With my old Pro without App Tamer (or kill -18), I could not make it from the US East to West coast on a single charge.  Now I can.  And if you have read the reports of Flash sucking the life out of the new Airs, then rest easy, App Tamer fixes that too (unless you really are looking at all that Flash content).  Increase battery life is how App Tamer will help you make time.  $15.  Free trial.

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