This is one of those things I’m blogging about mostly so that I always know where I can find it.

If you ever find yourself working on a Mac, but without a Mac keyboard with an Eject button on it, you can still open the keyboard with a mouse click by installing the Eject Menu Extra. You’ll find it in the following folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Eject.menu

Just double-click it and it’ll install to your menubar like so:

This comes in really handy at times. Recently, I was using an old PowerMac that we have here in the office for some stuff, and rather than clutter up my desk more with the extra mouse & keyboard, I was using Teleport to control the machine. While using this setup, Teleport wasn’t sending the “eject” command from the Mac keyboard I was using, so I installed this Menu Extra, and was able to control the drive, regardless of the keyboard I was using.

SSBs? Site-Specific Browsers, courtesy of Fluid.app.

Fluid is a slick little app that allows you to create unique browsers for a particular website. These new browsers appear as regular applications that you can leave in your Dock, or Applications folder. In the screenshot above, you can see the Unfuddle app that I made in about five minutes earlier today.

Pretty handy for those sites you tend to visit a lot, and leave open all day long. Plus, if a site supports it, you can get some fancy Coverflow browsing of the links in the page as well.

FluidApp.com

Because all my friends are on Twitter.

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I often work with two Macs at a time - my PowerMac and a MacBook Pro. I navigate between the two of them using Teleport, which allows you to control multiple Macs with one mouse and keyboard, simply by mousing over to the other machine, as if it were a second display. It even lets you copy and paste from one machine to another, and drag and drop files across machines. Pure hotness.

As I’m usually glancing back and forth between the two machines, it can sometimes get to be irritating when one of them switches on it’s screensaver or sleeps. To prevent this, just give the Mac a healthy dose of Caffeine. When running, the app is a simple little icon that appears in your menubar, and takes only one click to toggle on or off, preventing your Mac from entering sleep mode or activating it’s screensaver. The best part? It’s free!

Though you’ve probably heard the news already, SCPlugin for OS X was recently updated to 0.7. This release is a big improvement over earlier versions of the plugin, and makes working with Subversion on the Mac much easier.

However, if you’re also using the Subclipse plugin with your FlexBuilder install, you may run into some problems after using SCPlugin. Specifically, I was receiving the following error:

Unsupported working copy format
	svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '/path/to/workingCopy/';
please get a newer Subversion client

To fix this, I simply went into FlexBuilder > Preferences > Team > SVN, and changed the SVN interface option to use SVNKit (Pure Java) instead. So, if you’re having a similar problem, then give it a try. May not fix your exact issue, but it’s at least worth a shot.

Thanks to Jack Repenning of the SCPlugin mailing list for helping me figure this out!

I’ve really liked MarsEdit for blogging, but I’ve always been too cheap to pull the trigger and buy it. (I know it’s only 25 bucks) Especially since the news that MarsEdit 2 is coming in the near future.

If you’ve been in the same boat, you might as well upgrade now - in a recent blog post, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater announced the upgrade pricing for MarsEdit 2. Essentially, if you purchased ME before July 1, 2007, you’ll need to upgrade for $9.95. If you purchase on or after that date, you’ll get the upgrade for free. As a result of this, I bought it and will now be using it for all my blogging needs, as I’m sure many other folks will be as well.

Eric twitter’d earlier today about FlexBuilder needing a square icon. I’m not sure if this is what he meant, but I liked the idea, and whipped up a CS3-style icon using the Flex logo from the Wheel-o-icons on John Nack’s blog.

Sure, the icon for FlexBuilder may really be the “FB”, and not the “Fx”, but I like the “Fx” more, so that’s the one I made. I’ll try to post an “FB” later.

This icon is for OS X only, and you’ll need to use something like CandyBar, or some other way of changing your application icons.

Download: http://www.joshbuhler.com/downloads/FlexIcon.zip

I’ve also made a wallpaper based on the icon (nothing fancy - I’m not a designer), and have included the Fireworks source files for the icon if you’d like to produce a Windows version.

http://www.joshbuhler.com/2007/04/05/flex-icon-wallpaper-icon-source/

I’ve been using Synergy for a while now to control both my MacBook Pro and PowerMac when I’m working at home. It’s worked great, but I just found something that blows it away if you’re only controlling Macs.

Teleport is a freeware app by Abyssoft that’s similar to Synergy, in that it allows you to control multiple computers from one keyboard & mouse.

The biggest advantage it has over Synergy is that it’s GUI-based, and installs as a preference pane into your System Preferences. Install, setup, & starting to use it only took about 30 seconds. Compare that to Synergy, where setup took longer due to my needing to edit config files on both machines, and then each time it needed to be launched via the command line.

Another nice feature of Teleport include a status icon that’s displayed on the host Mac (in my case, the PowerMac) - when I’m controlling the MBP, a large icon is overlayed on the host’s screen, displaying the name of the Mac currently being controlled, with an arrow pointing in the direction of where your cursor would be. I was constantly losing my cursor with Synergy, because I wasn’t sure where it was at times.

Teleport also allows drag & drop of files from one machine to the other. I don’t think I need to explain how cool that is.

The bottom line is that if you need to control multiple machines, and have a mix of Mac & PCs, then Synergy is going to be your best bet. However, if you’re only going to be working with Macs, then Teleport is hands down the best way to go.

When I first heard about Tangerine! from Potion Factory, my first thought was along the lines of “big deal. I can make my own playlists, thank you very much.” Since then, I decided to actually try it, and see if it really works.

It does.

My song library isn’t huge, but it’s good sized - just over 5400 songs. And Tangerine took just 30 minutes to analyze the whole library - with the exception of 300 or so ITMS purchases - on my PowerMac Dual 2.0 GHz G5.

So what is Tangerine!?

From the site:

Tangerine lets you easily create playlists with upbeat music, or playlists for relaxing. It does that by analyzing the BPM and beat intensity of the songs in your iTunes library.

Once it finished analyzing my library, it was pretty simple to create playlists based on the speed of the song. It even helped me create some good playlists for working out or working in the garage, that included songs I forgot I even had. It’s not perfect though, as there were a few songs that didn’t exactly have the correct tempo assigned to them, but still, this thing blows the doors off of manually entering in the tempo information for each song individually.

Tangerine! is for Tiger users only, and the UI looks great. It uses a UI nearly identical to iTunes for browsing your music, so you’ll immediately be able to find your way around. The rest of the app is very easy to use, and intuitive. I didn’t need to look for an instruction manual once.

Tangerine is currently in beta, so it’s free for the time being, and as a beta, it may very well still have bugs. But check it out, and see what you think.

Download the latest version of Tangerine!

That’s a beautiful sight:

Thanks Adobe, and everyone on the Flex team!