![]() ![]() ![]() For the first time in my computing life, a GUI interface gave me a way to search for things on my computer without having to wait ~20mins for my hard-drive to be re-indexed, then something crashes, then it slows the whole system down, then something else happens. I was blown away by OS X’s inbuild Spotlight omnibar when I first got a Mac. ![]() Basically me Alfred You thought Spotlight was good? Let me explain you a thing. It supports loads of others too, here look, and the icon looks like me. That was until I discovered BeardedSpice! It sits in your menu bar and performs the seemingly simple task of making whichever media source is playing in one of your browser tabs respond to the input from those little Mac media keys, instantly making three little pieces of black plastic that I’ve been carrying around with me actually useful for the first time. It works with sites I regularly use YouTube, Pocket Casts, Spotify (web), and even Subsonic – a bit of a niche media streamer, but one I’ve been a daily user of for the past five years or more. In fact the only time I see the iTunes app appear on my laptop is when someone else wants to charge their iPhone from my laptop’s USB ports and it pops up trying to sync with the new device, or when I forget that those media buttons don’t do what I expect them to, and I accidentally launch it when trying to pause an audio track or podcast that I’m listening to… BeardedSpice Prevent iTunes from hijacking your media keys, use them for streaming mediaĪs an Android user, I never use iTunes. So here are a few of the tools that I use to minimise the number of times a day that I want to throw my lovely slab of Hall-Héroult-refined Bauxite off the apartment balcony. Prior to that I was a staunch PC advocate, but it’s funny how often that coincides with being a student/generally unable to afford to drop a few thousand on a computer that does the same job as much less expensive one, albeit much less stylishly.īut reformed fanboyness aside, if you’re going to use it as a day-to-day machine, there are some things that it could do better. Out of the box, a Mac is a thing of beauty, from the clean lines and cool-to-touch aluminium case to the slick, jitter-less OS, I’ve not gone back to a Windows machine from the first time I seriously started using an Apple laptop (which was only a few years ago!). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |