MacBreak Weekly 45: Talk Time

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay

iPhone gets a better battery and screen, MacGPS rumors, and Safari holes…

Here’s a direct MP3 download of MBW 45.

Gotta tell you: I’m really excited about the imminent arrival of the iPhone for an unconventional reason: the possibility that we can eventualy stop talking about the iPhone. (sigh)

Anyway. Two things related to this episode:

1. If we can scare up a video jockey, I’ll be at the Stockton St. store here in SF next Friday to shoot some stuff about that evening’s iPhone release for MacBreak. Maybe interviewing people in line; who knows?
2. My tip of the week in this episode is a very cool Quicksilver trick called mouse dragged triggers. Explaining how it works is — as you’ll hear — difficult, to say the least. So, herewith, I present my favorite tutorial on the topic, from the lovely and talented Dan Dickinson. He also has some great ideas for what to do with the trick:

• If you have a shell command you need to run frequently, you can bind that and save yourself opening the terminal and typing the command.
• If you’re frequently asked the same question and want a polite way to imply that you’re tired of it, bind Answer Text -> Large Type to a key and hit it the next time you’re asked. Trust me, this works.
• I always found it annoying that there’s no hotkey to jump to your downloads folder (or any other folder you’d like), but this is easily resolved using triggers. Set them up just like Apple does - heck, you can even overrule the Apple ones.
• To crib from my last tutorial: using the Search Contents action, you can create specialized Quicksilver instances just to search smaller pools. Try “iTunes -> Browse Tracks” for a subject, “Search Contents” for the action. Bind it to something similar to your existing invocation keystroke (I’m using Option-Space, since my primary is Command-Space), and voila, iTunes-specific Quicksilver queries. Way faster than switching to iTunes and messing with the search pane, and even a bit quicker than going through a basic QS query.

Read Dan’s post: Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog: Another Quicksilver Tutorial: Gold Trigger