Inkscape Spray Tool

Create cool effects with the spray tool in Inkscape

Have you wondered how to get this done?

Lots of BBEdit Icons!

Here's a neat way to empathize wearing a mask:

"Wonder if we should wear a mask?"

On the Macintosh, the only application that I found to get this effect is Inkscape. You can't do this in Photoshop Elements or Affinity Photo. The nice thing is that Inkscape is free, so you don't have to worry about paying for an application just to use this tool.

Inkscape Spray

The spray tool in Inkscape basically sprays whatever the selected object is. Simply select an object, click on the spray tool and then start spreading the image the way you would like. Each spray creates a new image on the current selected layer.

You can get tricky by creating different sizes on different layers. In addition, there's a lot of configurations that may make your image unique.

Spray Options

There are several options that impact what happens when you click the mouse button:

Width - How big of a spray area do you want. That is, how big of a spray nozzle do you want.

Amount - How often should a image be placed as you move the mouse.

Rotation - Set if you want the image to rotate as you spray.

Scale - Each image sprayed will randomly change in size. Don’t want this? Then use 0.

Scatter - Do you want the scatter the images around?

Focus - Where should the image appear relative to where you are spraying? A large number means that the image will not appear directly where you click.

Cool Effect

This is a really cool effect to use for blog post or category headers. You can combine the images, change color and so much more.

So if your out of a clue for a blog post graphic, why not try the Spray Option in Inkscape.

Reset Preview Icons

How to reset Macintosh Preview Icons

Every so often I find that my preview thumbnails through my Mac finder disappear. They don???t disappear entirely, they just stop displaying the preview of the file and show only the generic jpeg icon. It???s a fairly cumbersome problem, especially when the icon previews help determine which files I may want to use.

Fortunately, there???s an easy fix for this and it???s basically nondestructive.

• Open to the Preferences folder of your home directory
• (your home > library > preferences)
• Delete com.apple.finder.plist
• Right click on Finder icon in the dock and select Relaunch.

Note: This may not fix all icons. I find that it works best with EPS files and AI files.

Apple Notes

Some Things I have learned why playing with the app

This week I have decided to go "all in" with using various note-taking tools. I have made the decision of moving away from the Evernote subscription service. One of the reasons that I have decided to move on was that that I haven't been using Evernote much and couldn't justify paying for the services.

On of my note-taking apps is Apple Notes. It's great because it's available on my iMac and iPhone. I don't use my Samsung Galaxy Tab E as much because of working from home due to COVID-19.

I have been playing around with Apple Notes and I like it. It does take some time to get used to using the applications. (I had to promote it to my iPhone Homepage so that I would use it more frequently.)

Three Things I have Learned

Here are some things that I have discovered.

Limited AppleScript Support

Works With Apple Script - No surprise, but it works with AppleScript. At this time it's not possible to create a new Note using AppleScript. I checked the dictionary and it doesn't support it. (Weird that EverNote has better AppleScript support) Right now you can basically show an Apple Note file.

This is my AppleScript that I was trying to run:

tell application "BBEdit"
	set docname to name of text window 1
	set doctext to contents of window 1
end tell
tell application "Notes"
	create note name docname with body doctext
end tell

No Text Services

There's No Text Services Actions - In the Keyboard preference panel, there's a service section. This is where you can enable services such as "Search in Google" or "Send Message." There's no ability to send selected text to Apple Notes.

Checklist

You can create a checklist and when things are done, the item gets moved to the bottom of the list. When starting a note, to get to the checklist format simply type in Shift-Command-L.

You can also add list levels by typing a Tab next to an item to make it a sub list. So if you're putting together a Saturday morning shopping list, you can have the top-level be the stores to visit and the sub-items be the things to pick up in the store.

Combine in Template in Snagit 2020

Snagit Combine feature lacks functionality.

One of the features of Snagit 2020 is the ability to use templated for combine images. This makes it really easy to show a side-by-side comparison. It's a nice feature to quickly put together some professional-looking designs.

Simply select the images in the Recent Capture tray or in the Snagit Library, right-click and select "Combine in Template." You'll see the following dialog box:

At this point, you pick the template that works best for the message that you want to communicate. The thumbnail images help

Note: If your use to how combine worked in previous versions of Snagit, simple select the first option "Custom Steps" as it will show you the previous combine functionality.

Some Thoughts on Snagit Combine Feature

There's very little flexibility with combine images. I find the combine options in PhotoScape X to offer choices with margins, spacing between images and size of the combined image.

I don't like how TechSmith Snagit appears at the bottom of every template. You can select the bottom object and remove them, just an extra step that I don't feel that I have to do. Snagit should do what BBEdit does when creating a new HTML document, add a setting to "Give BBEdit credit."

The other thing I don't like about the templates is that they are small size: 612 x 792. It doesn't really work when you combining 5 images. Sure you can resize the canvas but then you're having to adjust everything else.

If I need to put together a quick comparison, I'll probably use Snagit. But for detail combinations, I'll probably just export the images in Snagit and put it together in PhotoScape X.

iTerm2 Shortcuts

Use Keyboard Shortcuts to replace common copy and paste

iTerm2 is a very popular replacement application for Apple's Terminal. The application makes using terminal services a lot more productive. One great tool is the Key Mapping.

iTerm2 KeyMapping

If your copying/pasting the same commands every time you open up iTerm2, you should know about the Key Mapping functionality. You can easily set up keyboard short cuts to perform some common commands.

Examples

• ps -ef | grep chrome ## Show active processes
• tar -cvf- . | gzip -9 > files.tar.gz ## Tar and Compress the current directory
• bbedit /etc/hosts ## Change the local host file
• su - apachectl restart ## Restart apache
• mysqldump website >mysql-backup.sql # Quickly Backup the mysql database
• sudo -u company /home/company/.virtualenvs/dev-ppc-two/bin/python run_report.py

Follow the steps below to put your own KeyMapping

Setting up the KeyMapping

It's really easy to set up KeyMapping. You do it for each profile. Which makes it great as you may have different commands for each server that you are connecting to.

1. Open iTerm2
2. Type Command , to open up Preferences
3. Select the Profiles on the Top
4. Select a Profile Name in the left panel
5. Then Select the ‘Keys' sub menu
6. Click the ‘+' under the row of "Key Mappings"
7. Click on the "Click to Set" and define your hot key
8. Under the Action Menu scroll and search for "Send Text"

As you can see there are a lot of action items. iTerm has a nice document of all the capabilities that you can do. Some tricks you can do:

• Quickly open up a profile that is tailing the error log file using the "Split Horizontally with Profile."
• Switch between live and dev sites using the "Change Profile" action.
• Search for ‘Errors' and ‘Warnings' that you may have missed using the "Find Regular Expression.."
• Check out various AWS instances by opening the profile in a new tab via "New Tab with Profile."

All-in-One Snag-it Capture

Snagit makes it easy to capture screen objects

The Snag-it's "Capture All" feature is my new go-to screen capture. It really is an upgrade to the standard MacOX screen capture. If you're using Snagit - you should use it instead of the "image Capture" shortcut.

When you type the shortcut Control - Shift - O, you bring up the standard capture crosshairs to select the area you want to select. When you let go you get a little post-capture option - including the option to change the selection. Which is great because I can't tell you how many times when I do the capture and the selection wasn't 100% correct.

Five Reasons to Use All-in-One Capture

As mentioned above, the ability to change the selection after the initial capture can save a lot of time later.

You can select the Panoramic capture to capture webpages. This is great when you want to capture a page that has an internal webpage frame. The panoramic capture depends on you moving the page, whereas the Chrome webpage capture depends on the page scroll.

Movie Capture - maybe you want to take a video instead of a screen capture. This is a quick way to start that process.

Undo - If the capture was taken at the wrong time, you can undo the selection. Saving you from generating useless files when doing bad screen captures.

LaunchBar Search

Easily Add Twitter and Google Photos search

Launch Bar is a great Macintosh productivity utility. It makes using the Macintosh so much easier.

One of the cool features is the ability to quickly enable a search action. With a couple of keystrokes, you can instantly open up your browser to whatever search results that you want to see. Potentially saving a lot of time doing it the old fashion way.

Use LaunchBar to Search

Here's a quick way to search for something on Twitter:

First you'll need to add a new Search Template. This is done by opening the LaunchBar Index, and selecting the Search Templates (UTF-8):

1. Trigger the LaunchBar Action (Command Shift)
2. Open the LaunchBar Index: Option-Command-I
3. Select the "Search Templates (UTF-8)" in the left panel
4. Click the '+' button at the bottom left of the main window.

Now Your Ready!

Now your ready to create your own search templates. The key thing to remember in a search template is to grab the URL from search results and replace the keywords that you used with a '*'.

A basic example:

If you had the following URL from a Bing Search for GusODog:

Your Search Template might look like this:

I filtered out some of the text in the URL that I didn't think was important.

Twitter Search

You can now search Twitter for what people are talking about:

For Twitter Templates:

Name: Twitter

Template URL:

Google Photos Search

If you have a lot of photos in Google Photos, now you can quickly search for the one you're looking for.

Name: Google Photos

Template URL:

Instant Search

Now when you want to search for something on twitter:

1. Command Space
2. Type: Twitter
3. Click Space
4. Type in your Search Term and then click the return

Advantage of Snagit 2020 over MonoSnap

Snagit is way better than MonoSnap

If your a frequent user of MonoSnap, you should consider upgrading to Snagit. It's a much more powerful application that offers a lot more capabilities. It's certainly a step up to making screen captures.

While MonoSnap might be an attractive solution because MonoSnap is free. For some, Snagit seems a "bit pricey" at $49.95 (one-time fee). However, when you see the overall features it becomes clear that Snagit is the screen capture for champions.

Editor Windows

MonoSnap Editor Window

Snagit 2020 Editor Window

Five Reasons to Upgrade to Snagit 2020

There are a lot of reasons to use Snagit. Here are just some of the ones that I have come up with:

Better Annotate Tools - A lot more annotate tools. MonoSnap has 11 tools, while Snagit has 19 - including Stamp, Step, Simplify, and more that are not in MonoSnap. The nice thing is that you can create your own theme. This means that you can create company color styles for any arrow or shape tool. In addition, you can share those themes with other Snagit users.

Advance Editor - Ability to combine screenshots, add effects and more. Basically the editor has everything you need to modify a screenshot so that you can communicate your message. You can even combine screenshots into a video and dictate over it.

Snagit Full page Capture with Chrome - Snagit makes it easy to capture a full page in Chrome. Simply click on the arrow for Scrolling Capture. If the scrolling capture doesn't work, you can always use the Panoramic Capture to capture full web pages, long documents and more.

Time Delay Captures - You can set the record to start whatever duration you want. In Monosnap you can only do a 10-second delay for full screens. Snagit allows you to set a delay in any capture type - Image, Video or Panoramic.

Advance Video Functions - You can record your WebCam and/or Microphone while recording videos. This makes it easy to talk over the video and explain more about what is going on.

Rotate Images in the Finder

Cool Keyboard Shortcut to rotate any image in the Finder

A cool hidden trick in the MacOS Finder is the ability to rotate an image or video without having to open up an application. There are 2 hidden keyboard shortcuts - rotate right and rotate left.

Simple Steps

1. Select any image or video.
2. Type in Command R to rotate the file 90-degrees to the right.
3. You can Command R several times to keep rotating the file.

Note: Using this method will change the modified date of the file, it won't change the Created date.

Installing legacy Font Suitcase files

You can still install old fonts in Font Suitcase in macOS Catalina

Do you have any old CDs/DVDs of old fonts? Wonder if it's still possible to use them? Are they in the legacy Font Suitcase format.

Good News! You can still use them in the latest version of macOS (macOS version 10.15.5). When you double click on the file it won't be discovered by any application in the system.

How to import Fonts in legacy Font Suitcase into your computer

1. Open the Font Book application
2. Go to File > Open
3. Find the file that you want to import
4. Select it and click Choose

That's it!

I have found that my Fontographer fonts work well in any application. I was able to use them in Affinity Designer, Swift Publisher and OmniGraffle.