Punctuality, one of the most often praised qualities in individuals, is also one of those that most of us lack. But when trying to give a good impression and make things happen, it is probably best to be on ones best behavior, put the best foot forward, and not miss your appointment with your dream client, or that great job interview. Anyway you slice it, it’s better to be on time for things, than apologizing because you showed up late.

Well Pester is a nice little Mac Utility that attempts to help you make the best first impression possible. This app has a single purpose, to remind you about a single event (what ever that event may be) and then it is left up to you to make the most of that information.

Once you have entered in the event and when you want to be reminded about it Pester sits nicely in your dock, but always has a reminder of how long you have remaining until the anticipated time.

Then when the appointed moment arrives Pester can do a number of assorted actions to GET YOUR ATTENTION and make sure you don’t blow this.

It can jump in the dock, notify you with Growl, play an alert sound, display an alert dialog box, or speak a message using OS X’s built in text to speech engine.

Needless to say Pester takes away your excuses for your lateness. So download it today and arrive on time.

Download Pester

I know what you’re thinking, why should I care about Regular Expressions? I failed in math and don’t like Simple or Advance expressions, so why would I care about regular ones? Well now is your chance to learn something, and it doesn’t really have anything that you will recognize that deals with math… well maybe.

Anyhoo, Regular Expressions or Regex for short, are snippets of symbols that represent the type of content you would like to find within a given body of text or string. They can be very handy, and are extremely useful for developers that are trying to parse content out of a mass of other content. But while they are useful (at least for me) they could be a pain to try and figure out what expression will get to your specific content so you can get on with conquering the world. I’ve used a myriad of online tools to help me with this process, but it is always a seeming inconvienience to have to remember where “that” website is to work out my regex statement.

But no more, a great little app is available called Reggy, this little app gives you the ability to insert a segment of content and then play with your regular expression until you get it to grab exactly what you are looking for. Brilliant if you ask me, I just don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. hehe. So take a look at this very simple but powerful tool that should speed up your development workflow.

Reggy Project Homepage

Download Reggy

Ok, so you’re using your mac with all it’s apple goodness, and attempt to connect to another computer using the built in ScreenSharing capability. Your computer prompts you for a username and password to authenticate with the remote computer with a neet little login window. You put your login credentials in to the provided boxes and hit “connect”, immediately a little spinning wheel appears along with a “Connecting” message. You wait, and wait, and nothing seems to be happening. You attempt to connect again and you get right in to your screensharing session, but that “Connecting” window just keeps hanging around, and even when it’s not in focus it is still overlaying all other windows on your computer. It becomes rather annoying, and finally you shut off your computer out of desperation and restart. Whew the infamous box has been removed, but you also have to reopen all of your programs and documents to get back to a productive state.

I’ve been there myself many times, it is both annoying and frustrating. But there is a sure cure, besides restarting your computer. This little window is the “NetAuthAgent” and can easily be terminated from the Activity Monitor. Here’s how to do it.

From GUI:

1. Launch the Activity Monitor program (in Applications/Utilities).
2. In the Process Name list, look for “NetAuthAgent”. It may show as “Not Responding”.
3. Select NetAuthAgent, and then click Quit Process (the red stop sign button at the top of the Activity Monitor window). Then, click Force Quit.

From Terminial:

1. ps ax | grep NetAuthAgent
2. kill <pid-of-the-process-found-above>

or the Single Command From The Terminal:

$ killall NetAuthAgent

And there you have it, now you can get back to work and share screens all day long!

Visit the: Original forum post that gave me the lead I have just posted about

Unlike most of the other screenshot apps or widgets available out in the interwebs, Paparazzi! takes screenshots of websites. The cool thing is that it will take a single screenshot of the entirety of the web pages contents. That’s right, wether the webpage is 600 pixels long or 50,000 pixels long, it will take a picture of the whole page.

Now I know what your thinking, you could have probably used that on a previous web development/design project, or maybe when you were researching a topic. Then you can put the full contents and layout/design in your archive for future reference. What a liberating thought.

Additionally you can choose a minimum size for the screenshot to be, an optional crop size for the screenshot, a delay to wait before taking the screenshot (in case you want some interactive content to do something before taking the shot).

Additionally you can access your Safari and Firefox favorites/bookmarks, interact with a page (insert content, press buttons, etc…) before taking the screenshot.

You can also process urls or files as a batch, to take care of lists you want to archive without maning the keyboard and mouse.

All in all, this is one slick little utility.

Developers Site

Download Paparazzi!

Deeper has been around since OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and has seen a new version released along with each new version of the OS since then through Lion 10.7.

With Deeper you can change the general look/feel/actions of the basic system interface, Different options that area available in the finders menu, the look and feel of the dock, how Quicktime handles the playback of movies, add information to your login screen, etc… you get the picture, and the list goes on.

The point is, with all this little app allows you to do, and because of its price point (FREE), it seems silly to avoid loading it on your mac and playing with your own user experience.

Developers Site

Download Page (MacUpdate – Lion)

Onyx has been around and free since way back in the good ole days of OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and has released a new version of the software specifically to address certain issues with each of these different releases from Apple. It will clean out your old caches, trim your library files, rebuild your fonts cache, perform routine maintenance on your hard disks, and resetting basic parameters. In the world of mac users, Onyx is like a dog, that is because it is a mac users best friend. 

Many simple errors that users experience can be handled/thwarted with the use of this simple tool. Now honestly does it do any magic? The answer there is NO, it just does all the silly little things that you could do yourself to keep your mac running properly. But the fact is that you don’t do most of those things, and those that you do do, you don’t do regularly. So Onyx provides that nice simple interface that ensures you get the fixes made, and reminds you of some of the things that you forgot to do yourself.

So check it out, it’s FREE, and the worst case scenario is that you will actually have a slightly more efficient mac.

Developers Site

Download Page (MacUpdate)

When you are switching through your apps using the “cmd-tab” keystroke, it can be frustrating that after selecting the application that you want, you still have to figure out which window is the one that you are hunting for… Well not any longer. While switching through your applications, simply press the “Up” or “Down”  arrow keys on your keyboard to reveal the Exposé display for the application that is currently selected. Then Boom, you have immediate access to the window you are searching for.

Depending on the age of your mac there are two different ways to accomplish this:

Leopard and Above (OSX 10.5 and higher) :

dscacheutil – flushcache

Tiger and Below (OSX 10.4 and lower) :

lookupd -flushcache

With either command your DNS cache is completely cleared so that your next DNS query will be forced to be requested from your upstream DNS provider.

I hope this helps someone out there to save some time, effort, and energy,as it did for me.

Originally read at:

Hongkiat.com: Hongkiat – How to Clear DNS Cache In Mac OSX Leopard

Here is a sampling of some of the best (and more) quicklook plugins that I came across in my adventures in digital preview land.

1: Brushview

My last post was about this amazing extension, if you are frequently looking for/at Photoshop brush files, this extension lets you get a good preview of the file before you actually load it up in photoshop to use it. An Invlauable tool.

Homepage | Download

2: QLStephen

With a strange name comes our second extension. If you are a developer or unix administrator that deals with lots of text files that don’t have a file extension, then this one’s for you. This extension allows you to preview the contents of those extensionless “README” files among others, very handy to have around.

Homepage | Download

3: Zip Plugin

Have you ever run across a zip file with a very descriptive name like… “Archive.zip”? And when you run across a file like that it’s a pain to unzip the file just to find out what the contents are. Well no more, the Zip file extension let’s you preview the contents of the zip file before you actually extract the files.

Homepage | Download

4: Folder List

When you are using quicklook and select a folder, by default it displays the folder icon with some basic details about the folder. But what you really want to know is what is inside the folder. This plugin accomplishes just that.

Homepage | Download

5: Quicklook for Markdown

Markdown is becoming increasingly popular for documentation that comes with open source packages. But the question is always “How can I view this effectively?” Quicklook for Markdown solves this problem, making it easy to preview and understand the contents of any markdown syntax files.

Homepage | Download

6: Color XML

XML files are great, and they are being used …. Everywhere now a days. So whatcha need is a way to preview the files and view them with proper syntax indentation and highlighting. The Color XML plugin takes care of that for you.

Homepage | Download

7: QuickCHM

Have you ever wanted to quickly peruse through a chm file without loading up your favorite full blown chm viewer? QuickCHM let’s you do just that, getting fast acces to documentation and books with the click of a spacebar.

Homepage | Download

8: Web Archive Plugin

Whenever you save out a webpage from Safari, you get a nice little webarchive file. And they can be annoying, since they are an archive of images and text rather than just the source code for the webpage. Once again Quicklook comes to the rescue with the Web Archive preview plugin.

Homepage | Download

9: Suspicious Package

Protect yourself against any potential malicious attacks with Suspicious Package. This plugin provides detailed information about any install package that may or may not pose a threat to your system.

Homepage | Download

10: And Finally…. Your Extension

Quicklook plugins appear to be quick and easy to develop, so grab some documentation, combine your skills with a fantastic idea, and go to town creating that idea. Here are some Resources to get you started.

Apples Quicklook Programming Guide

Add File Extensions to Quicklook

Apple Quicklook Dev Mailing List

CocoaDev – Quicklook Wiki

One of those resources (in my case at least) is a significant number of Photoshop Brushes to add accents and textures to my designs. And a bit thank you to the many individuals that have created them and provided them for download.

My biggest frustration with Photoshop Brushes was the fact that if I didn’t keep them loaded up in Photoshop, then it became virtually impossible to find the ones that I wanted to use for a specific project. Sure I could hunt through all the files that had the right name associated with them, but in the end it was a pain, opening each one in photoshop to see what one I wanted to use. That is it Was a Pain until TODAY!!!

I had the fortune of finding a nice little freeware extension to Apples built-in QuickLook capability called BrushViewQL. This little extension has made my day, allowing me to not only preview the contents of the .abr files in finder, but also blow up the preview images with QuickLook. It is a great little extension, with some great potential. So go get it and save yourself some effort!

BrushViewQL Website

Original Post that I read about BrushViewQL