Delivered as a workshop at ITP Camp 2014.

1. Stahp Making with the Clicky-Clicky
Improving Your Mac Productivity!
Julian Dunn
June 2014

2. Some Handy Global Mac Shortcuts
• Command-Space – open Spotlight
• Virtual desktops
• Ctrl-Up to zoom out (hot corners do this too, but I find them irritating)
• Ctrl-Left/Right to go to other virtual desktops
• Move windows around your virtual desktops
• Turn on extra options to get Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+5 to go to specific desktops
• Command-Shift 3, 4 – screenshot
• Option-Command-D – get rid of Dock
• Lots more in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts

3. The Command Line!
• Use Spotlight to start the Terminal
– it comes with all Macs
• Scary Unix! Looks like MS-DOS!
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng

4. Learning the Command Line
• Many programmers use the command
line exclusively
• Even if not, you can use it to save time
instead of using the Finder!
• Some command-line basics:
• ~ is your home directory (/Users/you)
• tab completion and history
• ls, cd, mv, pwd
• man – open manual pages for commands

5. A better terminal than Terminal: iTerm2
• iTerm2 – www.iterm2.com
• Looks a lot like Terminal, but more
customizable

6. Handy Mac-Specific Things
• Applications are actually in /Applications
• Each app is a directory called .app
• "unzip –l" to look inside zip files
• "open" to open a thing with the associated app
• e.g. "open xyz.pdf" will open Preview, "open ." will open current directory in Finder
• USB keys, DVDs, network drives get mounted under '/Volumes'
• e.g. your USB disk is "MY USB KEY", you get a '/Volumes/MY USB KEY'
• "diskutil –eject /Volumes/MY USB KEY" is like dragging it to the trash (note, "" needed to
escape spaces)

7. Alfred
• The most awesome productivity application evah!
• www.alfredapp.com - basic version is free
• Basically, adds Option-Space shortcut to Mac, and lets you do really powerful
things
• Try it:
• Install Alfred
• Option + Space
• "airspeed of an unladen swallow" – then Enter to search Google, Command-2 to search
Amazon, Command-3 to search Wikipedia
• or "maps 363 Broadway, New York, NY"
• or "1 + 2" – and Enter to copy result to clipboard

8. Alfred PowerPack
• http://www.alfredapp.com/powerpack/
• £17, is that about $30? (Let's use Alfred to find out…)
• Additional features not in regular Alfred
• Custom workflow example
• What it looks like behind the scenes

9. Dash – Docset Browser
• http://kapeli.com/dash
• Immediate & offline access to many documentation sets
• Ruby
• Python
• Arduino
• Funny, I didn't see Processing
• Alfred integration!

10. Other Tools I don't have experience with
• AppleScript
• Others that people use?

11. Thank You!
Subtitle – Arial 20pt