Clean-up the “Open With” Menu of your Mac

The “Open With” menu of your Mac, that you get when you right-click (or control-click) a file in the Finder window, may become extremely cluttered with time containing duplicate entries or even stale ones pointing to applications that are no longer installed on your Apple computer. Here’s an example:

If the “Open With” menu of your Mac is also messy and filled with applications that you no longer use, you can easily clean it up by rebuilding the Launch Services database with a simple Terminal command.

Open the Terminal app of your Mac and switch to the LaunchServices.framework folder using the “cd” command and then run the “lsregister” command to rebuild the database.

 $ cd /System/Library/Frameworks
 $ cd CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support
 $ ./lsregister -kill -r -all local, system, user; killall Dock;

That’s it. All the erroneous entries are removed and here’s how the cleaned up “Open With” menu of the Mac now looks like. I no longer have to scroll through that confusing array of applications I no longer use.

And if Terminal commands aren’t your forte, you can always download a GUI based application like Onyx to rebuild the Launch Services database and thus clean up the menu with the click of a button.

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This story, Clean-up the “Open With” Menu of your Mac, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 25/07/2014 under Apple Mac, Software

A Chrome App Helps You Stop Procrastinating

Most anti-procrastination apps on the web help you stay focussed and increase productivity by blocking time wasting websites. The thinking goes that if these online distractions are gone, you are more likely to focus on actual work.

Alex MacCaw has created Motivation, a Chrome app that takes a slightly different approach. It replaces the new tab page of your Google Chrome with a real-time counter that displays your incrementing age.

Every time you launch Chrome, or open a new tab in the browser, the extension works as a sobering reminder that the clock is ticking away. That may motivate you to exit the Bermuda productivity triangle and focus on the more important things.

The source code for the Motivation Chrome app is available on Github. See other useful Google Chrome extensions.

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This story, A Chrome App Helps You Stop Procrastinating, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 25/07/2014 under Google Chrome, Productivity, Internet

Extended Google Play Music Trial for Chromecast Users

To celebrate Chromecast's first birthday, Google extended the Play Music All Access free trial from 30 days to 90 days, but only in the US. You can redeem Chromecast offers from this page. "In order to check for available offers, we require you to share your device's serial number with Google. We use the serial number to provide your device with offers that may be relevant to you," informs Google.

The extended trial is only available if you haven't subscribed to All Access and you haven't used the 30-days free trial. There's more information in the help center:



"Promotion only open to users in United States who have purchased and set up a Chromecast on or before September 30, 2014. Users must set up their All Access account and redeem their code by September 30, 2014 to be eligible for the offer."



{ via +Google Play }

Google Shows Images Next to Search Answers

I mentioned in a previous post that Google answers complicated questions using information from web pages. Now Google also shows images next to the relevant snippets. Here's an example for [galaxy s5 focal length].

Here's another example for [iphone 5s focal length]. This time, Google highlights the wrong answer:

A search for [iphone focal length] returns a row from a table that compares focal length for the latest 4 iPhones.

A Twitter Search Trick You Didn’t Know About

Tweetdeck, the popular app for Twitter, offers a very useful search feature that helps you discover the more popular (viral) tweets for any search term very easily. While setting up a search column inside Tweetdeck (see screenshot), you can define an “engagement level” so that tweets that have been retweeted or favorited at least ‘n’ times only show up in the search results.

The engagement filter surfaces the best tweets and removes the noise from Twitter search results but the most surprising part is that Twitter has not made this filter available outside Tweetdeck. You don’t even have it inside the official Twitter app.

Well, here’s the trick. You can actually filter tweets by engagement level on the Twitter website or inside any Twitter app using an undocumented search operator that Twitter doesn’t want us to know about.

Go to the Twitter search box, type any search term and append the operator min_retweets:[number] or min_faves:[number] to filter your search results. For instance, here’s a sample search that will only shows tweets pointing to the labnol.org domain that have been favorited or retweeted at least 5 times.

labnol.org min_retweets:5 OR min_faves:5

If you are brand manager trying to find out the most viral tweets generated for an event or a content, the min_retweets and min_faves search operators may save you several hours. You can also archive tweets to a Google Spreadsheet automatically.

You can further enhance your search queries with search operators like filter:news to show tweets emanating from news sources or use filter:images to only show tweets that contain images.

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This story, A Twitter Search Trick You Didn’t Know About, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 25/07/2014 under Twitter, Internet