footle

I recently set up a Mac Mini at home, and have found using Screen Sharing to access it invaluable. Not wanting to open up anything other than SSH on my home router, I created the following script to open up a Screen Sharing session over SSH:

One of the more annoying things about Leopard is that when you plug in an external monitor that is set up to be your primary, your open applications don’t move over to the monitor. I was having to manually drag everything over. Then I realized that if I hid all my apps before plugging in the monitor, when I brought them up again, they’d be in the right place.

So now the question was: is there an easy way to hide all your apps without cycling through them all? It took a bit of digging, but it turns out there is. Cmd-option-click on an app in the Dock and it will hide all other apps. So I tried Cmd-option-click on the desktop itself and…voilà!

Update: Technically, you’re Cmd-option-clicking on the Finder, so if you have any Finder windows open, they won’t hide. Bummer.

It took me a bit of digging to find this, so I thought I may as well spread the word here. I’ve started using Adobe Lightroom for managing my photos, but every time I connect my camera or card reader to import photos, iPhoto would launch, and I couldn’t figure out where I could change that. I finally discovered that the setting is in the Image Capture application. Run that, then go to Preferences and you’ll find it there. Why they wouldn’t also put it in iPhoto, Lightroom, or even on a preferences panel is beyond me.

We live in Campfire at Wesabe, so naturally we’ve developed a number of tools and hacks around it. One of these days I’ll get around to writing about the Campfire bot framework we’ve developed, but right now I’ll start with something simpler: a way to upload screenshots to Campfire with only a few keystrokes (riffing of my colleague Coda Hale‘s desire to eliminate the need for a mouse). Note that this is for Mac users only, so if you’re one of the poor souls who hasn’t seen the light yet, you can stop reading now.

Two prerequisites (other than a Mac): Quicksilver and Pyro. Quicksilver should be familiar to most Mac users already. It is an incredibly powerful application that can be quite obtuse but can save you gobs of time if you learn how to use it. Pyro is a client for Campfire. Why do you need a client for a browser-based chat app? Getting message notifications in your dock is one reason, but the biggest reason is that there seems to be a memory leak in Firefox that causes it to grind to a halt if you’ve had Campfire up for too long. But I digress.

You first need to enable the Screen Capture Actions plugin in Quicksilver (go to Plugins -> Recommended, and check Screen Capture Actions). Then to go Catalog -> Quicksilver and make sure that Internal Commands is checked). This should give you Capture Region, Window, and Screen commands.

Next, the secret sauce: a bit of AppleScript that uploads a file to Campfire via Pyro:

on open theFile
  tell application "Pyro"
    upload theFile to room "[your campfire room name]" in campfire "[your campfire].campfirenow.com"
  end tell
end open

Paste that into Script Editor and save it as PyroUpload in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions (if this folder doesn’t exist, create it), and restart Quicksilver.

Now you can upload a screenshot with just Cmd – Space – [Capture Window|Region|Screen] – Return – [take your screenshot] – PY – Return.

Have fun!