It turns out the problem is to do with the iPod having a low battery. If you run the battery until it’s flat, iTunes won’t try and sync it until it has about 10 minutes worth of charge in it. Since this affects Windows and Mac I thought I’d tell you about the fix that worked for us. If it works for you, please let us know in the comments below:

• Attach the iPod and launch iTunes.
• iTunes in the Task Manager (Windows) and the ⌘ + ⌥ + ␛ Force Quit Menu (Mac) will show as non-responsive and give the spinning beachball of doom.
• After 10-20 minutes iTunes should mount the iPod touch as normal. You should then continue to charge the battery fully before ejecting it from the iTunes sidebar as usual.

It’s actually recommended that every now and then you let all chargeable batteries go completely flat before completely re-charging them—so it’s unclear as to why Apple have yet to fix this bug, which basically stops you from using iTunes at all, until your iPod battery has at least some charge.

If I hear about a fix to this bug in a future version of iTunes I’ll update this article. Please leave a comment below if you’ve found another way to fix this issue.

Key

⌃ + F3 – Enables keyboard navigation of the Dock. Highlight a Dock item using left and right arrow keys, choose a selection using the Return key or invoke the equivalent of the right-click menu using the up arrow key. Holding ⌥ and left or right arrow keys swap nudges the current selection with its neighbouring icon. Escape cancels.

⌘ + escape – Opens the Front Row media player.

⌘ + F5 – Enables / Disables Voiceover.

⌘ + ⌥ + Spacebar – Switches to Finder and opens advanced Spotlight search window.

⇧ + ⌘ + 3 – Saves a PNG on the desktop of the current desktop and any additional monitors. Hold ⌃ to instead place the screenshot in the clipboard.

⇧ + ⌘ + 4 – Changes the mouse to a crosshairs selection. Drag around an area of the screen to save that selection as a PNG image file named ‘Screenshot + today’s date and time’ on the Desktop, or hit the spacebar to select an entire window. You can also take a screenshot of only the desktop icons, by ensuring to pass through any one of them before choosing, with the desktop background image as an alpha channel, or inversely you can snap only the desktop background image without the desktop icons visible in the foreground by clicking in any blank area of the screen. Hold ⌃ to place the screenshot in the clipboard instead of into a PNG file. Also, you can hold a combination of the ⌥, ⌘ and ⇧ to proportionately resize the selection before releasing the mouse. Escape key cancels.

⌘ + ⌃ + D – Pops open a short dictionary definition of any word under the mouse. Use it to quickly look up a word you’re unfamiliar with or if you simply want to check you’ve used a word in the right context when working on a document. You can also access the full built-in Dictionary / Thesaurus / Wikipedia application by clicking More or by choosing from the menu in the lower lefthand corner of the box itself.

⌘ + ⇧ + L – Instantly searches Google with the current text selection using Safari in a new tab.

⌥ + Brightness up / down – Opens the Display Preference panel.

⌥ + ⇧ + Brightness up / down increments / decrements the display brightness by units of 1, as opposed to 10.

⌥ + Volume up / down – Opens the Sound System Preference panel.

⌥ + ⇧ + Volume up / down increments / decrements the sound output by units of 1, as opposed to 10.

⌘ + , (comma) – Opens application preferences.

⌃ + Eject – Opens the Sleep, Shutdown, Restart dialogue box.

⌃ + ⇧ + Eject – Instantly blanks all screens.

⌘ + ⇧ + Y – Makes any selected text a new sticky note.

⌘ + ⌥ + escape – Opens the Force Quit pane—similar to Control + Alt + Delete for Microsoft Windows task manager or NT log-on. Yeah, only Microsoft would make the shortcut key for panic the same as the one to start a new session. Dick heads.

⌘ + M – Minimises the current application to the Dock.

⌘ + ⇧ + Q – Logs out of the current user and presents the log-in screen.

⌘ + ⌥ + ⌃ + 8 – Inverts the screen colours. Handy for reading black on white text or to quickly check the gamma for too-close-to-call colour shades in brightly lit environments.

⌘ + T – In any rich text input area, e.g., Pages or TextEdit, but not a browser text input area, this opens the advanced Font Pane, which enables fine control over a wide variety of text output controls from font family to size and glyph.

⌥ + arrow keys left or right – In any text input area enables whole word skipping.

⌥ + arrow keys up or down – In any text input area enables whole paragraph skipping.

⌥ + ⇧ + arrow keys left or right – In any text input area enables highlighting of the preceding or proceeding word.

⌥ + ⇧ + arrow keys up or down – In any text input area enables highlighting of the preceding or proceeding paragraph.

⌥ + backspace – In any text selection area deletes the previous word.

⌥ + delete – In any text selection area deletes the proceeding word.

⌘ + H – Hide the current application and switch to the previous.

⌘ + ⌥ + H – Hide all but the current application.

In versions previous to Snow Leopard, double-clicking any window’s Toolbar minimised it to the Dock. In OS X 10.6 you can minimise all open windows to the specific application icon and open them again using Exposé.

• Open the Dock System Preferences panel by either right-clicking on the dividing line between Dock Folders on the right side of the Dock and Application Icons on the right side of the dock, or open System Preferences > Dock from the Apple Menu.
• Check the button marked “Minimize [sic] windows into application icon” and close Dock Preferences
• With several windows open in Finder, either double click the title bar of any one of them or ⌘ + M to minimise it into the Finder Dock icon. Hit F10 to invoke Exposé and you will see the currently visible windows above a dividing line, below which is the Finder window you’ve just minimised.
• Select the minimised window and it will re-open in Finder.
• Now ⌥ + double-click or ⌥ + ⌘ + M any Finder window and all open windows will minimise into the Finder Dock icon.
• Invoke F10 Exposé once again to navigate all minimised windows for the current application.

If you have more than one set of windows minimised, i.e., more than one application with minimised windows into the Dock you can use F9 to display all currently minimised windows for all applications and switch to them using TAB. Holding ⌥ + clicking any minimised window in Exposé will re-open all minimised windows for that application.

Finder Keystrokes.

⌘ + I – Shows the information panel for all currently selected Finder item.

⌘ + ⌥ + I – Shows a floating information pane for the current Finder selection.

⌘ + ⇧ + Backspace – Empty Trash.

⌘ + ⇧ + D – Opens the Desktop in a new window. Also works in Open and Save dialogue boxes.

⌘ + ⇧ + A – Opens the Applications folder in a new window. Also works in Open and Save dialogue boxes.

⌘ + ⇧ + C – Opens the root directory, showing all your connected drives and network connections. Also works in Open and Save dialogue boxes. Also works in Open and Save dialogue boxes.

⌘ + ⇧ + U – Opens the Utilities folder, inside the Applications folder. Also works in Open and Save dialogue boxes.

⌘ + ⇧ + O – Opens the Documents folder. Doesn’t for some reason work in Open and Save dialogue boxes.

⌘ + ⇧ + K – Opens a new Finder window showing all Network connections.

⌘ + ⇧ + H – Opens your Home folder.

⌘ + ⇧ + G – Allows you to enter the full path to any directory in the UNIX tree structure.

⌘ + ⇧ + F – Opens Spotlight in a new advanced search window.

⌘ + 1, 2, 3 or 4 – Switches between Icon, List, Column and Coverflow views of the current window.

⌥ + ⌘ + S – Hide sidebar of the current window.

⌥ + ⌘ + T – Hide sidebar and toolbar of the current window.

⌥ + ⌘ + Y – Show current selection in Fullscreen QuickLook.

⌥ + ⌘ + W – Close all open windows, information panes and preferences (also works in applications).

⌘ + J – Opens and closes the View Options pane for the current window, which can be used to set the default view of newly opened Finder windows.

⌃ + ⌘ + 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 – Sort current window by name, date modified, date created, size, kind and label—assuming all 6 view options are enabled in View Options.

The ⌥ (or alt) key is a really useful modifier key in most Cocoa applications. For example, in Finder, holding it down with a file of a certain type selected and choosing “Always open with” from the File Menu is much quicker than the older OS X method of changing which application opens a file by default, of having to open Get Info… (⌘ + I) choosing “Always open with” from the pop-down menu, and selecting “Don’t show this again”.

The ⌥ key modifier also performs the following:

• Suppresses the “are you sure” confirmation box in Safari ‘private browsing mode’
• Suppresses the “are you sure” dialogue box when choosing Restart or Shutdown from the Apple Menu
• Opens System Profiler instead of ‘About This Mac’ in the Apple Menu
• Has the opposite effect of Select All (⌘ + A); deselects all in Finder

Open / Save dialogue boxes

⌘ + ⇧ + D – Switch to Desktop.

⌘ + ⇧ + N – New Folder.

⌘ + 1, 2, 3 – Switches between Icon, List and Column view.

Full Finder-like file details are now available in Open / Save dialog boxes

You can also double click the dividing line between any column view item to snap to the longest width of that column. This also now works in Finder after being originally introduced in iTunes for OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Dragging and dropping any icon from inside the Open / Save dialogue box into the Desktop or into a Finder window creates a shortcut to that file or folder. You can also drag and drop photos, videos and audio files from the Media sidebar onto the desktop to make a copy of any file in your iTunes Music Library, iPhoto Library or iMovie Library.

Now let’s look at some modifier keys which when used in combination with the mouse or other keystrokes open extra functions.

⌘ + click on any window title bar – Shows the full path leading up to the current window. Handy in Safari for traversing the full path of web addresses. Also works in Finder and almost all application windows that use the standard OS X presentation layer, for showing the full path which leads up to the last known save location of the currently displayed document. Clicking in any of the folders leading up to the current selection opens it in Finder.

Exposé + TAB – By default the Function keys across the top of the keyboard from F8 to F12 invoke Spaces, All currently visible windows, All windows of the current application, Hide all windows and Dashboard. With the exception of Dashboard, hitting the TAB key after invoking Exposé will have the following effect:

• In Spaces each Space will be selected. Hitting Return selects that Space. Hitting either F9 or F10 works as normal, but without exiting Spaces.
• Hitting F9 followed by TAB switches one by one between each currently visible application.
• Hitting F10 followed by TAB one by one between each currently visible window in the current application.

Spaces and Exposé – As well as being able to swap the order of Spaces by dragging inside Spaces and moving one Space on top of the other, you can also invoke F9 and F10 Exposé inside Spaces. You can also move individual application windows around inside Spaces.

⌘ + Click – On any item in the dock to show the location of that file or folder in Finder.

⌘ + Double-click any folder in Finder to open it in a new window.

⌥ + Double-click any folder in Finder to open it in a new window and close the one behind it.

⌥ + Click from any application, including Finder, to any other application to hide the application you’re leaving.

⌘ + ⌥ + Drag and drop any icon in Finder to create a shortcut.

⌘ + click + drag any icon indicator item in the menu bar to change the order or remove it altogether.

⌥ + click the Airport icon in the menu bar to show more detailed information about available WiFi hotspots.

User defined System behaviours.

By example, although turned off by default, you can see that OS X already has 1 / 2 (without the spaces) set to become ½—which is a standard unicode symbol for half that will therefore show up correctly even on non-Apple operating systems. Similarly typing a ‘c’ inside an open and closed bracket will become the copyright © unicode symbol, typing ‘t’ and ‘m’ will become the ™ trademark symbol and brackets around a lower case ‘r’ will produce the registered trade mark ® unicode character et cetera.

Note: Certain input boxes are smart enough to ignore Substitutions. For example Spotlight and Safari’s Google search bar will not alter the text you input, rather simply function as normal.

Characters Pane (⌘ + ⌥ + T)

In any text input area hit ⌘ + ⌥ + T. This pane enables you to either manually find or search for a whole range of technical symbols and mathematical expressions in the unicode character pallet, by category, radical or from a list of previously defined favourites. This also includes an extensive list of Korean, Japanese and Chinese characters.

Find the symbol you want to insert and in the Language and Text System Preferences Panel choose to Add a new Symbol and Text Substitution by clicking the + (plus) icon beneath the list of defaults. In the first column type the key combination you would like the system to automatically replace with the symbol on the second column, which you enter by double clicking it in the Characters Pane.

For example the place of interest sign, or ⌘ (command) symbol, also known as the Apple Key (from the fact that up until the early 2000’s standard Apple keyboards had the corporate logo stamped on them) is located in the Symbols section of the Character Pane under Technical Symbols. Similarly the euro symbol € is in the Currency section, the ❝ and ❞ heavy double comma quotation mark ornaments are in the Punctuation section and ʥ, θ and æ are in the Phonetic Symbols category.

Terminal hacks

To place a grey highlight behind items in the Stacks View in the Dock:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES
killall Dock


To set the maximum size of icons in the Magnified dock. (Warning! Don’t set any higher than 512):

defaults write com.apple.dock largesize -int 512
killall Dock


To change the format of screenshot images from PNG to JPG, or GIF:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

or

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

or

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type gif


Drag a Widget out of the Dashboard onto the regular Desktop by hitting F12 to close Dashboard when you have a Widget selected. Reverse the process to put it away again:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard demoed YES


And finally some quick and dirty practical tips. You should experiment with finding your own quick work-arounds and let the rest of us know about them in the comments box below.

You can drag and drop any selection between applications using the ⌘ + TAB application switcher. This is useful for moving and copying text between open documents in different applications or for choosing a file from the Finder to open in an application Open File dialogue box. Anything you can drag and drop from either an application to the Finder or from the Finder to an application can be held onto under the mouse while you ⌘ + TAB application switch.

Tapping the spacebar when you hold a selection of files over a folder icon will spring open that folder, without having to double-click it to open.

The ⌘ + TAB application switcher also supports certain modifier commands, such as H to hide the currently highlighted application or Q to quit the currently highlighted application. This means you don’t have to switch to an application you’re no longer using to close it or hide it from view.

If you want to drop a selection without moving it, for example if you have a large amount of files selected and currently ‘under’ the mouse, if you drop the selection on the menu bar at the top of the screen your mouse will drop the selection back where it came from rather than move or copy it. This is especially handy if you want to let go of something that would otherwise take a long time to carry out—such as accidentally grabbing a large selection of files which you don’t really want to.

Just as you can drag and drop files and folders you want to regularly access onto the Dock, so you can also drag, hold and drop them onto the top toolbar of any Finder window. You can rearrange Finder and application toolbar areas with the right-click Customise menu, or pop an icon out of the toolbar by holding down ⌘ when you drag it out of the toolbar area. Here’s a short video:

As of Snow Leopard, QuickLook enables you to preview video and audio files in the background, without them stopping once you switch away from Finder. You can also skip and pause audio and video recordings in Icon Preview by opening QuickLook, but as soon as the current Icon Preview goes out of view playback stops. Here’s another short video:

If you have any tips and tricks you want to share, please feel free to leave a comment below. Enjoy!

Since writing the below review, Andreas Schwarz, gBroswer’s developer, has implemented one or two of my suggestions for how gBrowser might be improved. See the end of the article for details.

Ever since OS X Tiger 10.4, the beloved Finder has come on leaps and bounds in terms of giving us a clear view of what folders and files contain. QuickLook, first in Leopard and now much quicker in Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 takes file previewing to a whole new level. But Finder still isn’t quite there in terms of quickly labelling, opening, editing, moving and managing files.

When I first began using Mac, GraphicConverter was the only game in town for batch image manipulation and sorting. Indeed GC introduced many of the concepts now more familiar in Applications like Adobe’s Photoshop and Bridge, as well as newer titles like Lightroom and Aperture. But in recent years GC’s quaint interface, which in parts harkens back to the days of Mac OS System 7, has begun to really show its age; desperately slow loading thumbnails and preview display times, its become a painfully unstable memory hog.

What we really need is something which looks like Finder and sorts like GraphicConverter with the uncluttered simplicity of QuickLook.

gBrowser
gBrowser navigates folders much as you’d expect from any thumbnail browser. What puts gBrowser way ahead of the rest, however, is its speed. It feels like Finder crossed with iPhoto, but without the slow load times or lack of shortcut keys for the everyday tasks graphic artists, designers and photographers need.

In many cases, gBrowser uses Finder shortcut keys for things like ⌘ + ⬆ go up a level, ⌘ + ⬅ go back and ⌘ + ⇐ to move to trash and so on.

You can also nominate number keys to a folder on any drive, so you can quickly move a selection to one of 10 ‘Drop locations’ with the keystroke ⌘ + ⌥ + 1-0

The main viewer pane can display as much detail about the image as you want and can hide details just as quickly.

You can sort by all the usual Finder-like properties, such as size, date created, date modified, name and so on, as well as by portrait or landscape, colour depth, file type, megapixels, label, image height and width and other EXIF data embedded in the image file itself.

Both the thumbnails and the preview image are rendered by OS X’s built-in CoreGraphics layer, so you can slide the size of the preview all the way down to 64 pixels and all the way up to 1024 pixels without having to embed a newly drawn JPEG preview into the EXIF resource fork, as you would in GraphicConverter and Adobe Bridge. This makes the whole feel of gBrowser very much quicker than you’re used to for the same day-to-day operations and it makes skipping from a one folder to the next, no matter how many large image files it contains, quick and painless.

Settings
There are two main Preference panes. The first sets up hotkeys and general application preferences, the second sets options for the currently displayed folder, or ‘collection’.

Batch Operations
The fact that there’s a whole ‘Tasks’ menu given over to just one task suggest that in the future gBrowser’s developer would like to add some of the more powerful features offered by some of the incumbent image processing apps, such as image cataloguing (index sheet) and output to HTML gallery.

What we have in the Tasks menu in the meantime, however, is a very nifty batch Find and Rename panel. This part of the application reveals the power of OS X in way only those clever clogs who aren’t afraid to delve into a bit of AppleScript and Automator Actions have previously known how to fully unleash. Indeed there are titles specifically dedicated to batch rename processes, such as Name Mangler, which don’t carry out these functions as well as gBrowser can.

As well as bundling with some handy batch rename presets, such as JPEG to .jpg, Lowercase Extension and Underscore to Space you can also define your own set of commonly used tasks based upon a set of user-definable rules—familiar to anyone who has used Finder’s expanded version of Spotlight, ⌘ + Shift + F.

Wish list
As it is, Version 2.0b11 of gBrowser is so very nearly close to being the perfect thumbnail organiser I almost feel bad for wishing it did more. But, if you’re going to be picky about it, it might be nice to see the following added at some point:

• A more Finder-like folder tree in the side-bar
• Sort selection into sub-folders
• Tighter vertical spacing between thumbnails
• Hide second monitor preview pane when application is in the background, instead of ‘always on top’ by default
• Slide-show all images in folder (and / or subfolder) starting with current selection
• Blank other monitors / hide preview selection on entering slide-show
• User definable modifier keys for Drop Location keystrokes instead of having to use ⌘ + ⌥ + 1-0
• Fullscreen thumbnail browser and rudimentary image editing such as crop and straighten might also be a welcome addition

Summary
There are a couple of bugs which could do with being ironed out—such as occasionally having to click and pause for a second before a selection can be dragged & dropped. There’s also a glitch where Select All (⌘ + A) causes the current folder to deselect and all the folders in the side-bar to be chosen instead, unless you click twice in a blank area of the thumbnail pane first, when moving to a folder in the side-bar tree.

All in all gBrowser is a fantastic donationware title from immaterialgoods.com with the exciting prospect of more improvements to its overall functionality to come. It feels very stable and is more than ready for primetime if your main need for a thumbnail navigator is quickly finding image files for editing in another program or sorting through outline and projects folders at the end of a photo shoot or brainstorming session—where lots of files get generated very quickly, without necessarily having the time to sort and save them in a more organised fashion.

Update Wed 24th Feb 2010: Myself and gBrowser’s developer Andreas Schwarz, have been in contact about the above wish list of added features and I’m delighted to report beta 12, out now, includes the following:

• Removed drag delay time in Thumbnail pane.
• Added option (on by default) to hide Image Viewer when gBrowser is in the background.
• Added option (on by default) to blank other screens when displaying slideshows.
• Added option to immediately expand folders when they are selected in the sidebar.
• Added option to make “New Slideshow in Current Folder” start from the first selected file in the Thumbnail Pane.

Andreas also adds that Fullscreen thumbnail browsing, User Definable key-combos for Drop Locations and Auto-Subfolder Sorting should be ready for version 2.1.

Now THAT is what I call attention to detail! Maybe someone should hire Andreas to work on their next project?

UPDATE Thursday 26th Feb 2010: Andreas has now implemented fullscreen thumbnails and a few other tweaks. Here’s a screen-cast:
http://commandshiftq.com/blog/2010/02/gbrowser-updated/

Many Mac users spend their day staring at Photoshop and other design software. It’s important in that creative process not to let anything distract your eye, while at the same time avoiding being too bland so as to end up designing something overly sympathetic.

Avoiding glaring colours or complicated patterns without staring at the same old macro photographs of grass and soft focus sweeping curve-art that ships with OS X requires some careful consideration. Luckily there are plenty of sites that have done a bit of this hard work for you. Here’s a selection of some of the best I’ve seen. If you know of more, please post a link in the comments.

socwall.com

http://www.socwall.com – Describes itself as “a community effort to classify, rank, and distribute high resolution images for use as desktop wallpaper”. It has a very clean, fast loading interface. Good dual monitor support. An annoying float-over info box on thumbnails page is unnecessary design for design’s sake. Very nice pop-down menus to browse by genre, but this does tend to move out of your way when you least want it to. A decent sized collection of very good quality images.

interfacelift.com

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/ – Tends to attract a very high level of contributions from professional photographers and graphic artists. Good support for dual and triple screen set-ups. Per-entry facebook and twitter share buttons with artist profiles. Frustrating pop-down menus to choose the right resolution, which doesn’t always guess the maximum size of your screen correctly, making the download process a bit too long. Doesn’t open the image selected in a new tab / window. Massive selection of high quality graphics and high resolution photographs to choose from.

desktopnexus.com

http://www.desktopnexus.com/ – Good categorisation and regularly updated. RSS feed for latest submissions. User generated uploads and image hosting. Browse by tag cloud is nice. It’s a little cumbersome to click through to the actual image but there’s a nifty screen resolution detection script which automatically delivers the appropriate scale image to fit your desktop.

4walled.org

http://4walled.org/ – Allows good filtering of content, ranging from Not Safe For Work through Borderline NSFW down to Safe—although some NSFW did appear to have leaked through at the time of trying—although nothing that you wouldn’t see in a very mild lad’s mag. Looks like a fairly new site but still a fairly large collection nonetheless.

wall.alphacoders.com

http://wall.alphacoders.com/ – Plenty of fantasy artwork in the top voted section, even if it all tends to be a little too dark and gothic. Fast enough loading pages. Requires three clicks to get to the full size image, but this allows all sizes from 50×50 avatars up to 1600×1200 full size versions to be individually selected.

wallbase.net

http://wallbase.net/ – Very slick interface based around keyword search. The top 10 page tends to be mildly Not Safe For Work, but delve a little deeper and there’s plenty of generally pretty high quality fantasy artwork, super-cars, sunsets and star-fields, pastel shades and abstract 3D to get your teeth into. Features a really nice scroll to reload java script.

skins.be

http://www.skins.be/ – Claims to be “the biggest wallpaper and high quality picture portal in the world”. Specialises in celebrity models and actresses. A very pretty if a little cluttered interface with annoying float-over buttons and page footer. Huge database of high quality images but very slow loading.

nik.bot.nu

http://nik.bot.nu/browse.fu – Great fantasy artwork on this site. The interface is easy to use if a little basic looking, but here’s another site with neat scroll to reload java script I’d like to see on a lot more sites of this kind—so much quicker than constantly clicking ‘next page’.

A selection of my favourites from the above sites:

I recently discovered the wonderful world of copyright free recordings. Hundreds if not thousands of hours of music, by some of the greatest musicians in the world—who actively encourage and support the sharing of their legacy concert recordings and studio out-takes.

But the world of ‘by collectors for collectors’ has a down-side. Many of the files which are shared on sites like rapidfind.org and drfusion.blogspot.com are hosted on one of a number of wait-and-see hosting sites, which require javascript and browser pop-ups enabled. Which means hours and hours of waiting for the separate parts of each archive file to download.

Of course you could just bite the bullet and sign-up for the premium service many of these sites offer—which would be fine if there was one download site to rule them all. But, unfortunately, the whole business seems to be carved up between 10 or more sites and signing up for all of them could be an expensive business, just for the sake of accessing perhaps one or two must-have out-of-print recordings.

Jdownloader to the rescue. A cross-platform application, it takes the pain out of waiting for free download slots on all the major hosting sites and a whole bunch of some of the more obscure ones besides. yourhostfile, ziddu, imagefap, xvideos, soundcloud, rapidgator, megaupload, filefactory, mediafire… the list goes on.

You can customise many different aspects of how JDownloader works and it is worth spending a little time in the settings pane to do this, as the default configuration does feel a little Windowsish—for example persistent pop-over balloons and seemingly endless ‘are you sure / don’t show again’ dialogue boxes.

The up sides of using JDownloader as your main download queue, however, outweigh the initial tedium of finding the one control panel you’re looking for among the many you don’t really need. For example:

• Automatic extraction from and trashing of archives into customisable folders.
• Automatic capcha reading
• Bandwidth limiter
• Clipboard monitor
• Premium password storage

Considering, on top of all that, JDownloader is free, it kicks the likes of paid for apps like SpeedDownload into the dirt.

Apart from the fact it isn’t a native OS X application (the same version of JDownloader will run on Linux and Windows in a Java VM) and ignoring the occasional hanging bug where just as your list of URLs are about to be moved from the clipboard link checker to the download queue the whole thing stops responding, all-in-all JDownloader is perhaps the best of the best queue managers there are.

Add to that the fact that it is still in active development with a vibrant user community constantly improving the way it works and performs and it’s hard to imagine how anyone could get along without JDownloader for very long.

Here is a screenshot of the cookies which match ‘youtube’ in Safari’s cache:

If I then go ahead and remove all YouTube cookies and open a video I know to be in HQ with annotations I see this:

The annotations are turned back on and the HQ button is deselected.

So, big deal, we’ve proven that YouTube account settings are stored in a cookie and not on YouTube’s side. But why? If I want to browse YouTube in Firefox and Safari on the same machine, or in Konqueror and Opera browser on Linux, I shouldn’t have to manually go in and set up the same account every time for each individual browser. It should be a setting stored along with my account.

But that’s not the most annoying part
One of the most frustrating things, which all of these people on YouTube’s own support forum have been complaining about since the feature was first introduced, is that YouTube will periodically simply “forget” the user’s settings when the user logs out of his or her Google account.

Yes, that’s right. Because you can sign into YouTube using your Google credentials, when you log-out of, say, your main GMail account and into one you’ve perhaps set up for spam or general mail, the session cookie for YouTube expires at the same time.

So you have to manually go back into your account settings and start over again, simply to watch clips without the annoyance of annotations and in the higher quality playback format your high speed connection can handle.

YouTube. Pretty please with a cherry on top. Fix this annoying and pointless “feature”!! We want our account settings to be stored with our account, not in the individual browser we happen to be using at any one time. Thanks in advance!

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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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.