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Resolutionator Makes It Easy to Switch Your Mac’s Screen Resolution

Resolutionator is a handy new utility from the great team at Many Tricks which is the best and easiest way that I have found to quickly switch between different screen resolutions.

Why would I need to do this? Well, one of the things I have started doing with my my new 12” Retina MacBook is adjusting the resolution between its “native” size (1280x800) and the “more space” (1440x900) options, depending on what I am doing.

I also need to adjust the resolution on my Dell UltraWide U2913WM 29” Monitor when I connect to it via screen-sharing, because 2560x1080 is a lot of pixels, and 1280x960 is a lot easier to manage over VNC.

My favorite feature is a keyboard shortcut which brings up a quick list of the available resolutions:

If I had one feature request it would be the ability to exclude resolutions that I don’t use or somehow easily select between just options that I do use. That Dell UltraWide has a myriad of resolution options, but I only ever use about two.

Download Resolutionator (requires 10.8 or later) and check out the free trial, and then you can buy it for $3.

Suspicious Package Lets You Inspect .pkg Files Before You Install Them

Suspicious Package is a free Quick Look plug-in which allows you to inspect package files (.pkg) on the Mac.

Package files on the Mac are awesome, because they can install all of the various files that you need in the right places, and do all of the right things to make sure that you can use them.

Package files on the Mac are terrifying, because they can install all of these various files all over the place and you probably have no idea what they are doing.

If you download a .pkg file from a reasonably trustworthy source, chances are extremely high that the package is completely safe and won’t do anything nefarious. But .pkg files also have the potential to do a lot of damage, especially because they almost always require that you enter your administrator password. Suspicious Package allows you to see inside .pkg files, including the any scripts which will be run during the installation process. All of this gives you a much better chance of understanding what a particular package will do before you install it.

Plus, it’s free, so there’s no good reason not to install it. You can download it here either as a .pkg file (yes, irony) or manually. If you want to see a good example of why .pkg files can be a very helpful thing, look at the instructions for installing this manually!

I’m not trying to make you paranoid, I just want you to be able to make more informed decisions.

Set Up Your Own OmniFocus Sync Server→

The fine folks at The Omni Group offer a free service called, logically enough, the Omni Sync Server. It will sync your OmniFocus and documents from your other Omni* apps. I use and love this service.

But what if, for some reason, you don’t want to use someone else’s sync service? What if you want to host it all privately? Well, the good news is that you can do that, and pretty easily too. The sync feature of the Omni* apps will work with any standard WebDAV server. If you don’t know how to go about setting up a WebDAV server, the OmniGroup folks have two options for you:

  1. If you use OS X Server, see Setting Up an OmniFocus Sync Server With Server.app.
  2. If you want to use a Mac without OS X Server, see Setting Up an OmniFocus Sync Server With WebDAVNav Server which uses the free WebDAVNav Server app which you can download from the Mac App Store.

You can use either of these options to sync your devices on your home network, or even across the Internet if you configure the appropriate ports in your router. If I didn’t use OmniGroup’s server, this would be yet another thing I would host on my Macminicolo machine.

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Apple Publishes Updated Employee Diversity Data→

Apple yesterday published updated data on the diversity of their employees, for the second year in a row. Some of the news is good (Apple hired 65% more women in the last 12 months than they did in the previous year) but the picture is still bleak in other respects (only 22% of “tech” employees are female). Apple’s updated Diversity webpage includes a letter from Tim Cook, in which he says:

Last year we reported the demographics of our employees for the first time externally, although we have long prioritized diversity. We promised to improve those numbers and we’re happy to report that we have made progress. In the past year we hired over 11,000 women globally, which is 65 percent more than in the previous year. In the United States, we hired more than 2,200 Black employees — a 50 percent increase over last year — and 2,700 Hispanic employees, a 66 percent increase. In total, this represents the largest group of employees we’ve ever hired from underrepresented groups in a single year. Additionally, in the first 6 months of this year, nearly 50 percent of the people we’ve hired in the United States are women, Black, Hispanic, or Native American.

You can view all the numbers on Apple’s Diversity page, including some interactive statistics, the full letter from Tim Cook and information on what Apple is doing today to improve diversity at Apple, and steps they are taking to improve the numbers in the future.

Some people will read this page and see our progress. Others will recognize how much farther we have to go. We see both. And more important than these statistics, we see tens of thousands of Apple employees all over the world, speaking dozens of languages, working together. We celebrate their differences and the many benefits we and our customers enjoy as a result.

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Google App for iOS Gets Support for Smarter “OK Google” Questions→

Clever update to the Google app for iOS released today: because Google can’t replicate the system-wide Now on Tap overlay on iOS, they have enabled a similar experience for webpages displayed inside the app. Now, when you’re looking at a webpage that contains information you want to look up, you can say “OK Google” and ask a contextual question that Google will likely know the answer for.

I just took it for a spin, and I was able to get a smart answer for a webpage that mentioned Liam Gallagher (“when was he born”, I asked) and another for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (“when is the release date” was my question). This, of course, isn’t as flexible as Now on Tap’s deep integration with Android apps and the OS, but it can be handy to save a bit of time when browsing in the Google app.

The technical achievements of Google’s Now and smart answer technologies continue to impress me, although I wonder about their practicality for most people in everyday usage.

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Quartz Analyzes a Month of Beats 1 Tracks→

Fascinating findings by Quartz after collecting a month worth of songs played on Beats 1:

To get a sense of the station’s tastes and habits, we analyzed data on more than 12,000 songs played on Beats 1 from early July to early August. The song data was collected by Callum Jones, a programmer at Nitrous, who has open-sourced his tool over on GitHub. Jones also has a Twitter bot that automatically tweets whatever song is playing.

And:

Beats 1 has something that is rare in the world of digital music: scarcity. Listeners can’t choose a song and play it over and over. (They can do that elsewhere on Apple Music.) But curation doesn’t mean songs aren’t repeated. We counted 12,445 tracks but only 3,371 unique songs, meaning each track was played an average of 3.7 times. Eighteen of the 20 songs in the table above were played over 50 times.

“Edgy enough” seems like a fitting description. I’m an avid listener of recent releases, but I discovered a lot of new stuff with Beats 1 so far.

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Twitter Removes 140-Character Limit From DMs→

Twitter also removed the 140-character limit from direct messages today (as promised). Surprisingly, this will be rolled out to the seemingly forgotten Twitter for Mac as well:

We’ll begin rolling out this change today across our Android and iOS apps, on twitter.com, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac. It will continue to roll out worldwide over the next few weeks. If you can’t wait to try out longer Direct Messages, be sure you’re using the latest versions of our apps so you get the update right away. Sending and receiving Direct Messages via SMS will still be limited.

I tried to send a long DM from Twitter for iPhone and iPad, but I’m still stuck on the 140-character version there. However, sending a 600-character DM from Tweetbot for iPhone worked fine.

As I wrote in June:

The strength of Twitter DMs is, for me, the existing graph between users (people I’m interested in), speed, and the lack of baggage from email. Lately, I’ve come to like the ability to easily share links and pictures in DMs as well. I don’t know if raising the character limit to 10k characters will by itself improve DMs, but Twitter is wasting an opportunity with DMs, so maybe their new CEO could use this as a starting point.

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Twitter Rolls Out Full-Archive Search API→

Twitter has added support for full-archive search to their API, allowing – in theory – third-party clients to retrieve every tweet ever posted on the service. From their blog:

The Full-Archive Search API combines the best aspects of two of Gnip’s most popular offerings to solve enterprise business needs with user experiences not previously possible. By pairing instant accessibility with the full archive of historical Tweets, we’ve created a new premium solution for our ecosystem of partners to deliver historical social data to their own clients.

Since Twitter added full-archive search to their app last year, I’ve been using the feature every day to find old stuff I or others tweeted in the past. There’s no word on pricing for Gnip customers, but hopefully apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific will be able to take advantage of it. Developer documentation is available here.

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Visualizing Apple’s Historical iPhone Lineups, Guessing the Next One

We’re rapidly approaching that time of the year when Apple introduces new iPhones, and BuzzFeed’s John Paczkowski reported last week that the event will be take place on September 9. There will almost certainly be a lot to talk about after the event (Paczkowski says that the event will include a new Apple TV and iPads), but one thing that I’ve been thinking about is what the new iPhone lineup will look like. This was all precipitated by the discussion on last week’s Talk Show with John Gruber and John Moltz.

Because my mind was a bit fuzzy on the historical iPhone lineups (particularly the early years), I decided to go back and make a graph to simply and clearly show what Apple has done in the past. The dates I used were based on when each iPhone was available in the US (not the announcement date). Tier 1 represents the newest and most advanced iPhone available at the time. Although there are slight differences between the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, they are largely identical (both have an A8 processor with 1 GB RAM, etc) and as a result I’ve characterised them both as Tier 1. Tier 2 represents the next best iPhone available (often the previous year’s Tier 1 model) and Tier 3 is the next best again.

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