Chris K Designs

I love using Twitter. That being said, I’m SICK of the redundancy! Raise your hand if you are with me in saying that you are a bit tired of seeing the same tweets between all your devices. I’ve got UberTwitter on my Blackberry, the Web Interface, Tweetie for my Mac…I just want to TWEET! I don’t care what others are doing, I just want to get my thoughts out! Finally there is an AMAZING way to do this, using Quicksilver. Check out what codahale (blog.codahale.com) has done with Applescript. Drop his script into your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ folder, re-start Quicksilver, and you are in action.

Tweeting from Quicksilver is fun!

You can get the whole story and the easy installation instructions over at blog.codahale.com.

All you have to do is engage Quicksilver, hit ‘.’ to enter the text mode, then type your tweet, hit tab, then select ‘Tweet’ as the action. It’s easy, quick, and you don’t have to be constantly bothered by what other people are doing at the moment, which helps you get more work done

Most of us get the whole Twitter idea. Some, still can’t grasp it. This week Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com, put a video up on his blog explaining Twitter is possibly the most simple way. Check it out below. When you are done watching, head over to bobparsons.me for more videos and blog posts from Bob.

When you are done, go ahead and follow me on twitter @cklosowski.

Video after the break. Continue reading “Still don’t get this Twitter thing?” »

I spend way too much time on my Blackberry Curve. I won’t deny it. But it wasn’t until recently that a found some great tricks to make my time spent on my Crackberry more efficient. I found it rather annoying having to scroll around my menu so often as I bounced around from application to application. Being a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts, I wanted to find shortcuts for my Blackberry. Here are my findings for the home screen.

Home Screen Shortcuts

*Dial from Home Screen must be turned off for these to work.  Phone>Options>Dial From Home Screen>No.

I hope these help you as much as they have helped me! I’m working on a list of all the little tips and shortcuts I can find for the message services next. Stay tuned!

Update: For those of you who ask about my ‘cover’ for my Curve, I am using this one:
BlackBerry Rubberized Skin

I take a lot of flack at work for being a Mac user and using mostly all Apple products to compute, listen to music, and manage my media. I had tried out Songbird quite a while back in the early beta days and I just never could get used to it. Well, the developers have released version 1.0 and guess what!? Nothing has changed. I still can’t peal myself away from the slickness of iTunes’ media management and overall experience. You want examples? They are after the fold.

Continue reading “Songbird release 1.0” »

While I am quite the fanboy of Apple and I fully support freelance program development, there are few things I wish Apple would admit would make their products better. In the past they have done this with things like Cover Flow and iTunes so I know that they would at least consider it.

1. Integrate a method of “Letterbox View” in Mail.app
I’m sick of having to add a plugin to Mail in order to have a simple “letterbox” view of my mail. Ever sense the popularity of widescreen monitors, the real-estate for programs like Mail has increased so much potential for the availability of more information without scrolling. Even worse is the fact that Outlook has this as a setting you can simply just enable.

Download LetterBox for Mail from harnly.net

2. Add an auto-rate system for iTunes
I love my music, and this in turn means that I love using my iPod Touch and iTunes. Something I do is base my playlists to sync with my iPod off of the ratings, play counts, and last played meta data. Something that has made my music listening more explorative and interesting is using an auto-rating program which rates based off of previous rates, play counts, and play frequency to rate songs for my play lists. This can’t be that hard, and I think could be pretty intuitive to include with the addition of Genius now. But alas, I still have to use AutoRate.

Download Auto-Rate from Tzi Software

3. The ability to unarchive .rar files
This one I just do not get. I can work with .zip files, but I’d have to go to command-line to mess with a .rar? This doesn’t make sense at all. For this I can only offer one thing, UnrarX.

Download UnrarX from Sourceforge.net

So there are a few things I think would be simple to add into OS X that Apple shouldn’t have a problem including. For the mean time, enjoy those downloads and I hope they help you out with using your Mac a little more efficiently.