Upgrading to Mavericks for free

Mavericks for free - Yippee!

Of course all of the Apple fans are so very happy with the updates that Apple announced yesterday at the October Apple event, but one of them stands out from the rest. The fact that Apple have made this major update to the operating system, OS X Mavericks free, surprised just about everybody. It would be nice to think that Apple have done this to give something back to the Kool-Aid drinking, Apple loving Mac community. There is a possibility that this is the case, but we do have to remember that Apple is a multibillion dollar company, that quite possibly has business and marketing motives for giving us Mavericks for free. This may seem cynical, but we should remember that this is the way the world really works. Whatever the reasons are for giving away the Mavericks for free, there is no reason why we shouldn't do our happy dance anyway.

Mavericks a big download

With the updates weighing in at over 5 GB it is taking a very long time for the update to download over my slow Internet. I started the download at about 11 PM last night, so that is about 14 hours ago and I still have more than 1 GB left to download. No problem, as during that time I will be able to do all of the necessary backups and setup work to be ready to do the Mavericks upgrade.

A completely clean install of Mavericks

Not long ago I added an SSD to my iMac and I did an unclean install onto that drive. I decided that seeing as Mavericks was coming quite soon it would be a good opportunity to set it up right at that time. No point in me doing the job twice and besides I wanted to do a quick job while I had the new SSD drive in my hot sticky fingers. The plan now is to create an SD card installation drive and to wipe clean both the SSD drive and the data drive on the iMac. This way I will have a completely virgin installation of the operating system on the SSD and I will be sure that I don't have any old and unwanted bits and pieces on the old hard drive. I know that this needs to be done because the booting into the SSD drive over Thunderbolt should be extremely fast and at the moment it isn't.

SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner

The first part of the job is the most important and that is to do bootable backups of all of my system and data drives. I will be using Superduper or possibly Carbon Copy Cloner to do this. Then I will go through the applications folder and get a list of all of the applications that I have installed. I plan to go through this list of applications one by one, first of all marking the applications which I can just grab from the Mac App Store. Then I will mark applications that are just to be forgotten about and not to be reinstalled. Then I will go through the rest of the applications which will be applications needing up-to-date software licenses and serial numbers. I will make sure that I have all of my software serial numbers in one place and I will also see that I can download any software installers that I need. I was pleased to see that GPGMail Plugin has been updated for Mavericks.

It is going to take a couple of days probably to get everything just the way I like it. But it is a job that is going to be worth doing correctly so that it will last a long time before I need to do a rework of the operating system on my iMac. When I have the iMac job finished off, the next thing to tackle will be my wife's computer, a MacBook Pro. I am thinking that I will buy an SSD drive to install in her computer so that with the new drive and new operating system it should fairly fly along for her. I'm sure she will be delighted and she can repay me in kind.

There's Writing, Blogging And Note Taking

Part One - Mac text entry

One of the things that we all do with our computers and our mobile devices, portable computers, is that we are creating text documents of one sort or another. There are a lot of different types of writing that we do and therefore we are going to sometimes need to use different tools for different jobs. Over the years with using the Mac and iOS I have been using applications such as SimpleNote, Notational Velocity or NVAlt, Evernote, Mou, Drafts, Scrivener and even Pages. I have absolutely no need whatsoever for Microsoft Word which I regard as a legacy type application. I often get the feeling that people use Word because they know no better, although I suppose if you do need to make a document that is for a presentation and it requires more layouts along with pictures and tables it might be a possibility. Obviously though, being a Mac user I would be more likely to use Pages as it does all that I would need to and looks good while doing it too!

Doing it with Markdown

Whatever sort of writing I do it always starts off as Markdown for me, I just think that sort of way now. I like to know that I will be up to open up the text based files of markdown with any application now or in the future. Keep it simple is a good philosophy to use for many things in life and that includes writing. Can you imagine trying to open a WordPerfect file with the application that you have on your computer now?

Blogging

So the sort of writing I do mostly is blogging and for the most part I am writing longer articles using dictation in Dragon dictate. I have the workflow for this completely sorted out that I don't really have to think about it too much. I dictate directly into the DragonDictate window because that is the best place for the dictation, then I use a Keyboard Maestro key combination which will select all of the text and open it up in Mou. When I have the text in Mou I do the reading out aloud text editing of the markdown text. I like the dual pane which allows me to see the finished version of the text alongside the markdown. I also add the links to other articles at this point using some Mac OS X services automation.

 

MarsEdit best blogging tool

The next stage of the game for me is to do a special copy which gives me the HTML of that text so that I can put it into the Mac blogging software that I prefer to use called MarsEdit. Some people would ask why don't just dictate directly into MarsEdit, but I have found that the dictation doesn't work quite so well that way. It worked well for me to have the process separated out into separate stages. It is in MarsEdit that I add the images and video embedding.

Part Two

DragonDictate to Control your Computer

Controlling your computer using DragonDictate

Most of the time when I'm using DragonDictate it is to turn speech into text in OS X. I find this to be most successful when I'm using the actual DragonDictate text input window. Due to this my workflow has evolved into me dictating into this window and using a Keyboard Maestro shortcut which selects all of the text, copies it and then pastes it into my text editor that I use for a read through and editing process. I use Mou Text editor for this. To a certain extent I also use DragonDictate when I want to dictate into other applications like Day One the journalling application, into the various social networking pages on the Chrome browser. If I have my Twitter client open on the desktop I will also dictate into that and I find that DragonDictate works well with the Messages application. It is really quite simple to dictate the message and at the end of it simply say "Send message" and the message is sent. What I should really do though, is to spend some time learning other commands that I can use in applications such as Apple Mail, Safari and maybe some of the global commands. I already use the global command to switch from one application to another, most often when I am dictating into DragonDictate and I want to see the HTML results in the Marked application. All I have to do is to say "Open Marked" and the application is there in front of me ready to go.

Learning more by using the available commands window

When the available commands window is open it shows you the various types of available commands that you can use. As I am looking at it now, I can see three words in the list, Dictation, Global, DragonDictate and each of these have disclosure triangles. Click on the dictation disclosure triangle and you get another list of command types such as Capitalisation Commands, proofreading, special symbols and text editing and movement. So if I want to learn more commands that I can use specifically with regards to text editing and movement, I can quickly see the available commands within the DragonDictate window. There are a huge number of commands that are available. I would suggest that the best way to learn how to use these and to get them so that you know them, is to choose a couple of commands and concentrate on them for as long as it takes to get them into your head. It could be that you will need a number of sessions using these commands before you have them in your working vocabulary for DragonDictate in memory.

Controlling Safari with DragonDictate

I have been testing the available commands that are in DragonDictate for Safari and to be honest it is quite overwhelming. I have started to learn some of these, two commands at a time. I just choose a commands that I think will be useful and use them over and over again until I remember them. You can use the commands to do things like scrolling to the bottom of the page and back again to the top. You can open new windows of Safari and you can also open a new tab. There is a command that will let you do a web search which puts the cursor into the text area for creating a search and all you have to do is to dictate in what you want to search for. I find it quite useful to open the find on page command, enter a word I'm looking for and this can save an awful lot of clicks and typing.

 

You don't need a Mavericks to be able to tag files

I was kind of wondering why there was such a fuss about tagging files in Mavericks by the Apple people at the WW DC event that happened to the beginning of June. It is already possible to tag your files using free software called Tag it and also if you use useful utilities like Default Folder X or Houdaspot. So for at least a year or two years I have been tagging my files as I create them and for me I find these his way to do this is using Default Folder X.

 

A better system of tagging in Mavericks

I have seen recently that it is going to be possible to tag files by doing a drag-and-drop. I don't have the full details on that yet but it does look like it could be something that would be very useful for quick and easy tagging of files. I can already do a drag and drop files to Tag It, but obviously it is going to be much better to be able to do all of that in the Finder. With the other enhancements to the finder that is coming with Mavericks maybe I will be drawn away from using the application Pathfinder. Often I find that I don't get the full use out of Pathfinder as I haven't spend the time yet to delve into all of the extra functionality that there is available within it.

OpenPGP/ GPG get started

This is the best way to encrypt your emails. Using GPG Tools and the Public / Private key pair does take a bit to get your head around the way it works but it is not rocket science really. It is a cross platform solution and you can easily get sending encrypted emails that can't be read by governments around the world. Think PRISM and how un protected your emails are now. It is like you sending a postcard - Anyone can read whatever you have written as it travels across the internet.

Now there is the plug in you can get for Apple Mail as well as one for Thunderbird if you prefer which makes it really easy to use. This is the first in a series of videos about how to use GPG Tools so that you can be an expert without having to try too hard.