New Magic Mouse...meh...with MagicPrefs...Oh My!!!

Santa was kind enough to leave me a new Apple Magic Mouse under the tree this year. Now, I took the Magic Mouse for a test run at our local Apple Store before Christmas and thought it was very well designed, nice to look at and somewhat useful with it’s very limited set of touch commands. What kept me from purchasing on the spot were three things:

1. No middle button – I’m a SketchUp user and that is a requirement
2. Very few gestures – No pinches and touch gestures: that’s just a crime
3. It was too close to Christmas to make any personal purchases for fear Santa was planning on the same purchase

As I said, Santa is one jolly ol’ tech savvy elf and when I unwrapped the gift, I couldn’t wait to try it out on a regular basis; however, I left an old three button USB mouse connected for those CAD moments, that is until I ran into MagicPrefs. Let’s learn a bit more, after the click, about this wonderful piece of free software that gives the Magic Mouse the features Apple left out.

Merry Christmas from Doc!

Doc wishes all his readers a Very Merry Christmas and hopes Santa leaves you all kinds of tech goodness under your tree! As a gift from Doc and to enhance your holiday joy, please enjoy these Christmas images from the 2009 Bethalto, IL Spirit Christmas Walk.

Did you receive a gift that will make Doc jealous? Leave a comment and tell me about it. I’ll share my list a bit later.

Another keyboard shortcut stocking stuffer

I've had quite a few comments regarding my previous post that shared how to quickly activate your favorite browser's address bar using ⌘ – L on a Mac or CTRL – L for Linux/Windows users. Today we are going to carry on the keyboard shortcut theme and integrate two more similar keystrokes into our browsing work flow. These keystrokes, presented below, will open a new browser tab and close the currently active browser tab without the need to move your hands off the keyboard.

Open a new browser tab:
Mac | ⌘ – T
Linux/Windows | CTRL – T

Close a browser tab:
Mac: ⌘ – W
Linux/Windows: CTRL – W

I showed these to my MacBook using wife and she loved them! Give them a shot and combine these with the previous keystroke you learned. You'll notice your browser productivity will skyrocket! You know, it's the little things during the holiday season...ain't it? Merry Christmas!

BTW...would like credit to the "Escape key escaping" image, but couldn't find the original source. Anyone have that info?

Quickly jump to your address bar

I have a short, but very useful, tip for Mac, Linux and even Windows users today. It’s a keystroke that will save you a bit of time when browsing using Safari, Chromium, FireFox or most other Mac and/or Linux browsers. When you are ready to enter a new URL in the address bar of your browser and find that that it is not active or already has a URL in place, before you move your hands off the keyboard and grab for the mouse hit:

Mac | ⌘ – L
Linux/Windows | CTRL –L

This keystroke combo will activate the address bar (as shown in the image below) and allow you to immediately begin typing a new URL. For newbies...no need to delete the content that is highlighted. As soon as you type your first character, all the old excess URL baggage will be deleted. If only life’s baggage was as easy to delete!

That’s it. Short and sweet. Consider it a nice little Doc’s Tech Notes stocking stuffer. Give it a shot and let me know if you find this keystroke as useful as I have. If you have other simple keystrokes that enhance your productivity, drop a comment and add to the note.

Transfer photos from Flickr to Picasa on your Mac

When I first started blogging, I purchased an unlimited Flickr account not only for blogging images storage, but also for personal photo storage. Lately I’ve been moving to Google services for all of my blogging needs. That meant moving my images from Flickr (my subscription is set to expire in one month anyway) to Picasa, and I have to say, the move has been an extreme productivity enhancer from a Blogger user’s standpoint (more on this in later posts).

Google made the notion of switching a bit more appealing recently by providing a couple of storage upgrade options that should make any photo-bug or blogger perk up and take notice:

• 20Gb of storage for $5 per year
• 200 Gb of storage (plus free 4Gb Eye-Fi card) for $50 per year

Being the gadget geek I am, I chose the 200 Gb (shared between Gmail and Picasa) of storage with the free Eye-Fi card. I can always downgrade my storage requirements next year if I find I didn’t use the 200 Gb. I probably won’t need that much cloud storage but, hey, I get the Eye-Fi card and that alone is worth $50.

Now the time consuming part; moving my images from Flickr to Picasa. Here’s the easiest way I have found on a Mac to move images from Flickr to Picasa. Take a look after the click.

Export all Google Docs with a couple of clicks

This post may give you that sense of deja-vu given my recent Google Docs post on a similiar export topic; however, Google has made the liberation of your data from Google Docs even easier. Learn how it is even easier to download and archive your Google Docs data in just a few simple steps. Yep, it's as easy as 1-2-3 and you can learn how right after the click. What are you waiting for? The liberation of your data is at stake!