About a week ago I stumbled upon a problem on my MacBook. The ATSServer process was eating my processor capacity and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t stop. It was really strange since I wasn’t doing anything at that moment, and even after rebooting (sorry, still some Windows habits) it started processing again. I started searching on google if other people had the same problem. First I got a search result from someone who had that problem which had something to do with quicktime components, but after removing all components and rebooting multiple times, the problem was still there. The cause for the problem in my case was descibed on someone’s blog (sorry, don’t know which one it was anymore). Apparently ATSServer is (part of) the font server in Mac OS X, and with this person the process started processing when he copied a lot of PDF’s to his harddrive, which sounded very familiar, since I just unarchived 1100+ PDF’s. The conclusion was that it was spotlight indexing the PDF’s. Solution to this problem is to add the folder with PDF’s to the excludes for Spotlight, drawback of this solution is that your PDF’s are not indexed, and thus you cannot find them through spotlight. In my case, the PDF’s where a couple of e-books and since I didn’t care about spotlight for these files, I moved the PDF’s to an external disk which I already excluded from spotlight.
Finally some BarcampLondon3 blogging from my side. I know it’s late, but I needed time to set up my blog and arrange payment for my domain.While at BarcampLondon3 Melinda and I gave a presentation on obscure mac applications. This is an overview on the apps that were discussed during that session (and a couple that were mentioned afterwards).
KeyCue – On a mac there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts which you have to remember. KeyCue shows an overview of available shortcuts, when the command button is pressed for a short period of time, depending on the active program.
iStat Menus – iStat Pro is commonly known widget for monitoring the system. iStat Menus puts the monitoring in your menubar. Another nice feature is the time display with a calendar icon next to the time as an alternative for the time menu in Mac OS X. When an iStat Menu icon is clicked a menu pops up with more detailed monitoring statistics.
Caffeine – Caffeine is one of the simplest and useful applications I use on my mac. The only thing it does is preventing your mac from going to screen saver or standby. It creates an icon in your menu bar which you can click on the switch caffeine on and off.
NameChanger – A visual file renamer with a photo viewer to change the order of images in numbered sequences.
Yojimbo – A database program for all your stuff.
Keyboard Cleaner – A handy program when you want to change your keyboard. It ignores all button presses on the keyboard except Apple-Q.
Audio Hijack Pro – Personally I sometimes wish the volume of my MacBook would be a little louder. For instance, when I want to show a funny youtube movie to friends. With Audio Hijack Pro this is one of the things you can do. I has possibility to apply a wide variety of effects on the capture sound. Also you can record the sound to an audio file.
BibDesk – Allows you to create an overview of sources you use for some essay you work on, and allows you to easily create references to the sources in the document you are working on.
Papers – A PDF-organiser in iTunes/iPhoto style.
Sim R2D2 – A very useless progam to annoy other people. All it does is play random R2D2 sounds.
Picturesque – Picturesque can be very useful for making pictures web-site ready. You can easily create rounded corners, shadows and some other stuff.
ImageWell – I mainly use ImageWell as a mass image-resizing tool. It also allows you to directly send your images to a web-location, like a FTP-server or even Flickr.
XLD – XLD stands for X Lossless Decoder. When I switched to Mac in January this year, I really missed Lossless audio support. FLAC can be played by VLC, but Monkey’s Audio isn’t supported by any media-player on the mac I know of. XLD enables you to convert almost any audio format into any other audio format.
ZAPMac – ZAPMac enables you to speedread any text on your mac. Just press Apple-Shift-V after selecting the text you want to speedread and ZAPMac will pop up and start flashing the words on your screen.
Nocturne – A useful program if you use your mac in the dark. It will convert colors to grayscale and invert it, which will make your screen a lot darker. This will make it nicer for your eyes to work in the dark.
Remote Buddy – With Remote Buddy you can control your mac with the remote control that ships with every intel-mac. Also it can enable use of a third party remote control on your PowerPC-mac. The latest addition in the feature allows you to control your mac with an iPhone.
Open Terminal Here – This is a very simple applescript that you can put in your Finder toolbar. Basically, all it does is open a new terminal window which changes to the directory you had opened in your finder window.
iSquint – iSquint is a very easy video compression tool. It compresses video to a format that’s suitable for your iPod or TV. For users that want more control over their video compression there’s visualhub, from the same authors.
SimpleMovieX – Another video-editing tool, it uses Quicktime for compressing video. One feature I particularly like is playback of a video without the black-letterbox-bars, even if they are embedded in the video.
This concludes the overview of programs that were discussed during the session. If you think we missed an application that should really be on this list, leave a comment below. My apologies for finishing this post this late, I started writing it a couple of weeks ago, but I have been pretty busy. Also I want to thank Adam Cohen-Rose for putting a post about this session on his blog. This really helped me memorize the applications we covered.
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