Command Shift Q

You find a story you like on a social bookmarking site and you want to share it with your twitter followers.

You could cut and paste the link to the story manually into twitter, but if you use an automatic RSS to Twitter service you don’t need to have your favourite twitter client open. You also have the added advantage of automatically managing which of your twitter accounts your up-votes get sent to. Meaning you can have an up-vote RSS feed for work related tweets and another for friends and family.

However, for some far-too-boring-to-go-into technical reasons, it’s not always as simple as cutting and pasting your RSS feed address into one of the many RSS to Twitter services and clicking ‘go’.

More often than not the type of RSS feed your social bookmarking service churns out is pre-formatted, which means you get all kinds of error messages when attempting to re-publish your feed. What you need is some way of stripping out that formatting to convert your RSS feed into one which is compatible with a variety of reading and re-publishing tools.

Let’s set-up a basic RSS to twitter feed for reddit.com:

This will mean every 30 minutes you will automatically tweet a link to the stories you have ‘liked’ or submitted to reddit.com

• Create an account at rss2twitter.com or an RSS to Twitter service of your choice.
• Create an account at feedburner.com or sign in with your Google.com details.
• Go to reddit.com and click ‘Preferences’. In ‘Privacy Options’ tick the box, “Make my votes public”. Click ’save’.
• Click on your username and choose the ‘liked’ tab.
• For Safari and Firefox users your address bar will now display an RSS icon. Click it. When the address URL changes to something like:

  'feed://www.reddit.com/user/**YOUR_USERNAME**/liked/.rss'

  copy this address to the clipboard (⌘ + C) and switch back to feedburner.com.

• In feedburner, you will now see a box marked “Burn a feed right this instant”. Paste (⌘ + V) the feed address from the previous step into this box, removing the ‘feed://’ part. For some reason feedburner.com doesn’t like seeing this at the start of your RSS feed address. Click ‘Next’
• If feedburner throws an error, saying it can’t recognise the feed address, remove the ‘feed://’ part of the address again, as sometimes (for some mystery reason) feedburner re-inserts this part of the address automatically despite that it can’t read it. Go figure. It’s been like that for years, so I doubt they’re about to fix it any time soon.
• Click ‘Next’ again. You should now see a ‘Congrats!’ screen with your feedburner address at the top, saying something like:

  "http://feeds.feedburner.com/reddit/nkck"

  Copy this address to the clipboard (⌘ + C).

• Open your Rss2Twitter.com Dashboard, after signing in. Click ‘Add account’. This shows a link which will ask twitter to authorise rss2twitter.com to post to automatically post any changes made to your RSS feed to your twitter account. At this point, when repeating these stages if you want to add more than one twitter account, you should sign in to the twitter.com account you want to authorise first, before clicking, “Click here to go to twitter to authorize your account”.
• Once twitter.com returns you to rss2twitter.com, click ‘Add a feed’ in your Dashboard. Paste (⌘ + V) the feedburner RSS feed from above into the box marked “RSS Feed URL”. The other settings in this window should be self-explanatory, but be sure to set the “Number of updates to post” option no higher than ‘2′, so as not to spam your twitter followers with everything from your RSS feed all at once.

Hope that helps! If you find this useful please vote it up using the social bookmarking sites linked below. Thanks to @palanski for the idea.
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There’s no doubt Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 is a far more stable Operating System than later versions of vanilla Leopard. But amid some of the “very Apple” subtle tweaks and refinements, I think there’s also legitimate concern that Apple may have stripped away, in the pursuit of stability, some of the magic dust which separated it from the competition.

In a series of articles over the coming weeks, I’m going to look at how many babies Apple have thrown away with the bathwater and look at a worrying trend in which we ordinary users are being increasingly ignored and cut out of the infinite loop, when it comes to feedback on Apple’s products.

Quicktime X
The default media player in OS X has needed an overhaul for some time. But overhaul and cripple are two very different things.

For example, previous versions of Quicktime enabled a number of handy, quick editing functions. Such as the ability to cut and paste sections of a video and audio into a blank file and export the result out in a variety of formats.

In Snow Leopard, however, any kind of editing above and beyond very basic end to end trimming must be done in iMovie, which means having to import an entire clip simply to normalise audio levels, or join two shorter videos together into one clip, or any number of basic clean-up tweaks which could be previously done in Quicktime Player alone.

Also gone is the ability to alter the aspect ratio of a clip which has been encoded incorrectly on the fly. For example, certain types of video playback, like SECAM (used in France) and NTSC (used in the USA), when converted to PAL (used in the UK) can sometimes inherit a 14:9 aspect ratio akin to watching Standard Definition 4:3 content on a 16:9 widescreen display. Quicktime used to have a number of controls which would compensate for this kind of stretching and squeezing, which have now been removed entirely.

That, in addition to this, there doesn’t appear to be any way of re-enabling these functions in iMovie, it’s hard to see why Apple might have done this, especially given the ubiquity of prosumer digital video and stills cameras which are designed around the Quicktime video format, such as the Canon G series of compacts and the Panasonic Lumix range of DSLRs.

Stealth downgrading of this kind, where users are expected to turn a blind eye to the removal of functionality because the whole thing is dressed up in a fancy new interface, is exactly the kind of own goal Apple has rightly been criticised for scoring the past and it not one likely to go down well with users who only occasionally call upon these functions, when they need to use them the most only to find they are no longer available.

It is undoubtably easer than ever before to open a video file, taken from a digital device, trim out unwanted sections and upload it to YouTube or export it into a variety of other playback formats. Quicktime X supports exporting direct to MobileMe and iTunes—the latter making it even easier than it already was to get content from the desktop and on to your iPod.

But anyone who already used Quicktime for such things as this, as opposed to some piece of freeware, is unlikely to be very happy when they find they can no longer do so depite having “upgraded” to the latest version—which begs the question why the old version of Quicktime needed changing at all, especially when so many useful aspects of it have been thrown away, rather than simply moved somewhere else, like into iMovie or iPhoto.

New Contextual Menus in OS X Snow Leopard from Jim Gardner on Vimeo.

How to manipulate addresses and text in OS X 10.6

Much has been written about OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard being not so much a revolutionary new Operating System as more of a gradual, natural evolution of the Mac we already know and love.

This might seem like a fancy way of saying, “no new features”. But dig a little deeper and it soon becomes clear that Snow Leopard is more than just a few tweeks here and there which only Developers can gain from.

Under-the-hood improvements to the system architecture, mean that we ordinary users can look forward to much greater stability and more functionality. Chief among these improvements is a much needed overhaul of the Services menu.

In their marketing and promo, Apple have made something of a tradition of downplaying the in-depth, more technical aspects of their products, in favour of presenting a cleaner image of an easy to use system. While this is true, and there are some sound reasons for taking this approach, occasionally this “less is more” approach to marketing has frustrated long-time Mac-heads (like me), who think Apple would do well now and then to simply tell it like it is and compare OS X’s like-for-like features with their Microsoft Windows equivalents.

The latest incarnation of the Services menu, in OS X Snow Leopard, and the way it hooks into Automator, is a perfect example of something we dyed in the wool users would shout about a lot more, were we in charge of Apple’s advertising department–not least because there is no feature-for-feature comparison built-into any version of MS Windows currently shipping which comes close to this level of work-flow customisation.

The unique selling point of Services, is that anyone can add or edit their own task to a contextual menu, available throughout the Operating System, no matter which application is currently active. OK, not the most catchy of billboard slogans, but when you see what you can do with Services, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

History
The Services menu is one of the many revolutionary features of OS X which were inherited from the way ahead of its time Nextstep, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer, a company which Apple acquired in 1996, which also lead to NeXT Computer founder Steve Jobs returning as CEO of Apple.

The purpose of Services is to have a set of commonly used system level tasks available to all applications, regardless of which application is currently active. This can be as basic or as advanced a task as the user would like.

So, for example, if you want to add a bullet point to a text selection or alphabetise a list of names, you simply navigate to the Services menu or hit a keyboard short-cut and no matter which application you happen to be using, Services will carry out this task.

Similarly, if you want to view an entire content rich presentation as it would appear on an iPhone and the three main web browsers simultaneously, Services you have either written yourself, or downloaded and customised to suite, are there to help you out.

In practise, however, Services in previous versions of OS X, have been located in cluttered and esoterically labelled nested menus, with keyboard short-cuts that sometimes conflicted with those already assigned to another task in the application currently running. So Services became largely neglected–despite that they clearly showed potential as a time saving asset to workflow.

Action!
In OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the Services menu is now available from within the Action menu in the Finder. It is also contextual, meaning only Services which are relevant to the current selection are shown. This has had a dramatic effect on cleaning up the look of the menu as well as enabling a much tighter integration with Automator Action Scripts.

What’s especially neat about this, is that this replaces the similarly powerful but just as neglected Automator Actions Contextual Menu, when right-clicking a selection. Now, in place of the Actions Menu, you can see only Automator Services which are relevant to the file type, or selection you currently have highlighted.

The original system wide Services menu is still available in the Application Menu, at the top left of the screen, next to the Apple Menu. This is also where you will find the new Services Preferences Pane, which is a sub-category of the revamped Keyboard Preferences.

Video
Sal Saghoain is one of the lead developers at Apple who gave the world Automator and AppleScript.

In this series of demos, with Alex Lindsey, Sal shows us how the much neglected Services menu, in OS X Snow Leopard, has been updated into a slick new way to bring dynamic content into the Finder and other applications we use everyday.

http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak235 – Part 1
http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak236 – Part 2
http://www.pixelcorps.tv/node/878 – Part 3