Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

index posts

Filed under: Software

Media Catalog 4.0 faster, supports Quick Look

Media Catalog 4.0People who are religious about backups, especially those who use removable media like CDs or DVDs as backup media, often find themselves in a world of hurt when they try to find individual files on a pile of discs. It's worse than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack!

Developer Robert Kuilman released version 4.0 of his Media Catalog application today (July 7, 2008). Media Catalog makes quick work of cataloguing all of those archive CDs, DVDs, and external hard drives.

While test-drivng Media Catalog, I popped in a few old backup CDs. The application catalogued hundreds of files in a few seconds, then popped the CDs out. You can also drag-and-drop volumes onto the application to add them to the catalog. Searching is extremely fast, and you can use Quick Look to preview documents as long as the original media is mounted.

Kuilman rewrote his indexing code and speed has improved up to 770% over version 3.9. You can try out Media Catalog 4.0 for free (limited to five media), or purchase it for $24.95.

Filed under: Macworld, Analysis / Opinion, Humor, Apple Financial, Steve Jobs

Tracking the Keynote Index Fund

Matt Haughey has worked up a little analysis/thought experiment of just how much money could be made by buying stocks before every Macworld Keynote of the past ten years-- he calls it the Keynote Index Fund, and has the stock prices before every keynote, directly after every 'note, and a day after every 'note.

And the fact is that buying the stock a day before and holding it for 48 hours (until the day after) would have made you money over the past ten years-- he calculates 1.2% growth over 24-hour period, and 2.2% growth over a 48 hour period. Of course, that doesn't hold a candle to what you would have earned if you just kept Apple stock the whole time (holding on to $10,000 of Apple stock since 1997 would have you holding shares worth $525,187 today).

But the fact is that Macworld keynotes can make wily stock traders money. The worst performing keynote so far was in 2005, when only the Mac mini and the shuffle were announced, and the best was last year, when the iPhone was first introduced. So just standard common sense just tells you that if the iUltraportable does appear, you could probably make money with a little day trading*, but if it doesn't show up (and there are no other major announcements), you could take the worst bath so far on the Keynote Index Fund.

*This advice is given by a nonprofessional and should not be listened to under any circumstances or by anyone-- past performance of a stock means nothing to future performance. Plus, I'm still hungover from New Year's Eve, and in no condition to give stock tips anyway.

[Via Waxy]

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools

VacuumMail: Automate Vacuuming Your Mail Index

A while back we mentioned a neat trick for speeding up Mail.app by "vacuuming" its SQlite database. Now the original source of the tip, Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings, points to Leland Scott's VacuumMail, which utilizes a little AppleScript and launchd to automate this process. Tim also notes that if the default time of 1pm on Tuesday isn't to your liking, you can change it using Lingon.

VacuumMail is a free download.

[Via Hawk Wings]

Filed under: Software, Productivity, Tips and tricks

TUAW Tip: force Spotlight to re-index some apps

I recently was fortunate enough to upgrade to a MacBook Pro, which means my wife can now get her mobile on with a MacBook. After I moved everything over and got to work with the new machine, I noticed some strangeness with Spotlight and Yojimbo: apparently, thanks to some quirk of bits and bytes, Apple's fancy schmancy search wasn't bringing up any of my Yojimbo items. After requesting some support from Bare Bones Software, a most useful employee of theirs shared a handy trick that forced Spotlight to re-index my items. It worked like a charm, and it was simple to pull off.

If you have a 3rd party app that isn't behaving well with Spotlight, you could try surfing to ~/Library/Caches/Metadata. This is where apps, especially database-driven ones that want to be indexed by Spotlight, place cache data in order to make it into search results. For me, simply quitting Yojimbo, tossing out the Yojimbo folder sitting inside that Metadata folder and restarting Yojimbo forced Spotlight to get to work. The little magnifying glass began flowing on and off, and my Yojimbo items were soon appearing in my Spotlight search results just as they should.

Now I don't know if this is the end-all solution to Spotlight indexing issues like this. I only know it worked for me, and judging from the emails that occasionally bounce over the Yojimbo mailing list, I'm not the only one who's ever tangled with Spotlight's indexing quirks. I hope this tip can help you unravel any Spotlight searching issues of your own.

Tip of the Day

Holding the Command key (aka the Apple key) and pressing Tab will cycle through your open applications. It's easier to Cmd-Tab if you are Copy (Cmd-C) and Pasting (Cmd-V) to and from various applications.


Follow us on Twitter!
 TUAW [Cafepress]

Featured Galleries

DNC Macs
Macworld 2008 Keynote
Macworld 2008 Build-up
Google Earth for iPhone
Podcaster
Storyist 2.0
AT&T Navigator Road Test
Bento for iPhone 1.0
Scrabble for iPhone
Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer Briefcase
Apple Vanity Plates
Apple booth Macworld 07
WorldVoice Radio
Quickoffice for iPhone 1.1.1
Daylite 3.9 Review
DiscPainter
Mariner Calc for iPhone
2009CupertinoBus
Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D
MLB.com At Bat 2009
Macworld Expo 2007 show floor

 

More Apple Analysis

AOL Radio TUAW on Stitcher