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Windows: Back in November we highlighted TouchFreeze, a small utility designed to prevent you from accidentally moving your mouse cursor and messing up text what you’re typing while you’re typing. Reader bobbo33 made an improved version with a clever AutoHotkey script.

Photo by Patrick Denker.

From bobbo33 at the Productive Geek forums:

A few months back, LH posted a link to TouchFreeze:

This program was designed to stop you from accidentally hitting your laptop/netbook’s trackpad with your thumbs while you are typing. However, this program didn’t really work for me—I still accidentally jumped the cursor from time-to-time.

So here’s my Autohotkey version, which has been working very well for me for the last couple of weeks since I created it. (Note that you can tweak the timer line if the 500ms default still isn’t quite long enough for you.) I’ve noticed no performance lag at all with method, since it’s a keyboard hook.

I think it’s always better to add little functions like these to my AHK master script, rather than installing YAU (yet another utility) for these small tweaks.

; Script Function:
;       Disables trackpad for 500ms any time a key is pressed (prevents accidental mouse clicks)
;

#NoEnv  ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%  ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.

;keyboard hook code credit: http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/post-127490.html#127490
#Persistent
OnExit, Unhook

hHookKeybd := SetWindowsHookEx(WH_KEYBOARD_LL   := 13, RegisterCallback("Keyboard", "Fast"))
Return

ReenableTrackpad:
BlockInput, MouseMoveOff
Return

Unhook:
UnhookWindowsHookEx(hHookKeybd)
ExitApp

Keyboard(nCode, wParam, lParam)
{
   Critical
   If !nCode
   {
      BlockInput, MouseMove
      SetTimer, ReenableTrackpad, 500
   }
   Return CallNextHookEx(nCode, wParam, lParam)
}

SetWindowsHookEx(idHook, pfn)
{
   Return DllCall("SetWindowsHookEx", "int", idHook, "Uint", pfn, "Uint", DllCall("GetModuleHandle", "Uint", 0), "Uint", 0)
}

UnhookWindowsHookEx(hHook)
{
   Return DllCall("UnhookWindowsHookEx", "Uint", hHook)
}

CallNextHookEx(nCode, wParam, lParam, hHook = 0)
{
   Return DllCall("CallNextHookEx", "Uint", hHook, "int", nCode, "Uint", wParam, "Uint", lParam)
}

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Bugs/Recalls, Snow Leopard

Ahhh, Labor Day – the weird U.S. holiday that celebrates work by encouraging people to take the day off. Since it also coincides with the beginning of September, many Americans associate Labor Day with the end of summer, which isn’t until 3:18 PM on September 22nd. Since the colder temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere will soon mean no more picnics, it’s a great day to get out and have one more al fresco meal.

Like a picnic, where a good time can be spoiled by a group of aggressive little ants, my first ten days of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard have been a lot of fun, interspersed with some tiny, nagging annoyances:

• Preview, an app I use constantly to resize screenshots for TUAW, crashes way too frequently
• Without having changed any preferences, the OWC Mercury Elite Pro 1 TB drive I have attached to my iMac now spins down between Time Machine backups (this actually saves power, so I’m not complaining — I just find it strange that it didn’t happen before!)
• An unexplained kernel panic the other morning when I woke up my MacBook Air by opening the “lid”
• Having to reset the synchronization between my two Macs, MobileMe, and my iPhone after duplicate calendar entries began to multiply
• Occasionally having to physically remove and plug back in the USB receiver for the Logitech wireless mouse on my iMac when the mouse refuses to work upon waking up from sleep
• Exports from iMovie ‘09 to YouTube aren’t working properly for me

There are no real show-stoppers here, just those little oddities that have kept life with Snow Leopard from being pure bliss. What are the ants that are showing up at your Snow Leopard picnic? Leave a comment below.

TUAWThe few ants at my Snow Leopard picnic originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted 2009-09-07 18:25:16. Republished by Old Post Promoter

If you’ve taken the leap and hosted your domain email and other services with Google Apps, no doubt you’ve noticed that you miss out on services that “regular” accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Analytics, and right now, Buzz. Here’s why:

After complaining about the disparities on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a helpful Googler unofficially got in touch to clarify. Let’s call her/him “Helpful McGoogler.” Here’s what HM said.

To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there’s only one kind of account: a Google Account.

Helpful McGoogler explains:

Abstract the idea of a “Google Account” from being associated with Gmail or Google Apps. You can tie ANY email address to a “Google Account.”

Check out https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and notice that it asks you for your “current email address.” So let’s say I go to school at Big University and I have an email address helpfulmcgoogler@biguni.edu… I can use that email address while signing up and that will be my login name to access Google services.

Some of the confusion that leads to “you must have a gmail.com address” to access Google services is because a “Google Account” comes “for free” when you open a Gmail account. So using a gmail address always ‘just works.’

Google Apps accounts provide “hosted services,” which don’t include everything vanilla Google accounts get.

Helpful McGoogler says:

When you open a Google Apps domain account. You are essentially creating a branded Google Account world for the Google services your domain is hosting. You can see your services at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/[domain.name]/Dashboard.

So, let’s say you have a Google Apps domain that is example.com and you created a user gina@example.com. You will be able to log-in with gina@example.com for all your Google Apps hosted services. Typically this is email, docs, calendar, and contacts… but you can click the “add more services” link to expand that. Right now, you won’t find stuff like Reader, Google Voice, AdWords, Finance, Analytics, etc… but still there is some interesting stuff in there.

But what if you want to access ALL services through a single email address?

Helpful McGoogler says:

What you do is create a NORMAL Google Account (described at the beginning) and associate it with your gina@example.com email address. That “vanilla” google account will now have access to all (well, I think all) Google services. You can have a Reader account, a Voice account, an Analytics account, etc all associated with your non-gmail address. It can even have the same password—but it doesn’t need to—to make it seem like it’s the same account… but in reality, it’s a very separate account.

Still, this just means you have two different Google accounts, with different Contacts and Calendar and Google Docs data on each. Google Apps accounts provides a subset of the services you get with a regular Google Account, and so duplicates those sets of data on those services. This is the scenario I complained about on TWiG.

Helpful McGoogler acknowledges that this is indeed a problem:

Here is a scenario that really trips people up… Let say you are using your gina@example.com email and are all happy that you have your contacts all in-line and organized and filled out. Now you go and create a vanilla Google Account using your gina@example.com email address (mostly because you want to use Google Voice and Google Reader with the same log-in as your Apps account—btw, this was totally me a couple years ago). When you set up something like Google Voice, you will expect your contacts to be full of all the goodness you set up in your gina@example.com “hosted gmail” instance… you will be disappointed to find your contacts are empty.

This is because the vanilla Google Account that is being used for Google Voice will be accessing a DIFFERENT “Contacts” service which has no data (sadness). My ugly solution was to initially export the contacts from my Google Apps Account and import them to my Google vanilla Account and try to keep them in sync when I make edits.

This double set of Contacts especially stinks for Android users who sign into Android with their Google Apps account, because your Google Contacts and Calendar are baked into your phone setup.

Helpful McGoogler is with me on this:

When you add Android into the mix, Contacts get weird. Because, I think, you can add your Google Apps account to Android and not your gina@example.com “vanilla” Google Account. (GT: Yes, this is true.) But, when you sign in to Google Voice on Android, you will need to enter the password (which might be the same) of your vanilla Google Account. BUT, on Android, your Contacts are read from the system’s phone book. Not necessarily the vanilla Google Voice Google Account that has its separate contacts (accessible through the normal Google Voice webapp). Ugh. The “Contacts” issue is by far the most ‘hurting’ in this whole scenario.

Yup. Calendar is also an issue.

I thought this was the full extent of the problem, so it’s nice to have even unofficial confirmation from the horse’s mouth. Helpful McGoogler DID say s/he thought the teams at Google are aware of the issue and are working to address it. It also sounds like some bits of Android need to get refactored to work seamlessly with both vanilla Google accounts and Google Apps accounts.

After that episode of TWiG aired, at least three listeners emailed me saying they use third-party service Soocial to sync Contacts across their multiple Google/Google Apps accounts. I haven’t tried this myself—and you may have to enter your Google account password into Soocial to set it up, which is a big red flag—but it’s something.

Are you having the Google Apps account dilemma? What are you doing to deal with it? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Smarterware is Lifehacker editor emeritus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the latest from Smarterware, be sure to subscribe to the Smarterware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarterware feature here on Lifehacker.

After a week’s worth of complaints and confusion, Google is updating Buzz to address many of the privacy concerns and annoyances raised by the new social networking service. The update brings three major changes.

First, they’ve replaced the auto-follow feature with auto-suggestions, letting you choose who you follow individually rather than automatically following everyone Google thinks you’d want to. Second, Buzz will stop automatically connecting to public Picasa Web Albums and Reader shared items. You can still connect these things, but you’ve got more choice. Finally, they’ve added a Buzz tab to your Gmail settings to give you finer control over how Buzz integrates with Gmail. From there, you can easily change whether or not other users can see who you’re following via your Google Profile, turn off Buzz in Gmail, or turn off Buzz completely—something I suspect a lot of people will want to do. (The Buzz tab isn’t available yet, and they do say “we’re adding“, but hopefully it’ll be there soon.)

The mea culpa from the Official Gmail Blog:

It’s been an exciting and challenging week for the Buzz team. We’ve been getting feedback via the Gmail help forums and emails from friends and family, and we’ve also been able to do something new: read the buzz about Buzz itself. We quickly realized that we didn’t get everything quite right. We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We’ll continue to do so.

What do you think? Do these changes make Buzz a little more attractive, or are you already turned off by all the negative buzz about Buzz? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Fans of This American Life, a weekly Public Radio show hosted by Ira Glass, were thrilled to discover that a dedicated iPhone app had been released. Developed by Public Radio Exchange, the This American Life (TAL) app not only gives users unfettered on-demand access to the show’s entire archives going back to 1995, but provides the content in a user-friendly and interactive format.

Now, instead of buying those back episodes for 99¢ apiece on iTunes or getting stuck listening on the Web, you can grab those episodes anytime for a flat app cost of $2.99. We gave the TAL app a whirl—being the huge TAL fanboys and girls that we are—and found that it was definitely worth the money, despite a few of the typical annoyances that come with third-party apps.

Do you get inopportune IM chats on your Android phone, even if you haven’t activated the Google Talk application? There’s a setting in the app that always makes you available. Here’s how to turn it off.

The Tech Recipes blog points out the semi-hidden setting in Google Talk. Fire up the application, hit the Menu button, then choose Settings. Un-check the “Automatically sign in” option, hit your back button, and then hit Menu and sign out of Google Talk. Now you’re only signed in and receiving chats when you consciously activate Google Talk.

From experience, many Google Talk chatters aren’t using Gmail to access you, and can’t see the little Android icon indicating you might not be at your computer, but at the grocery store instead. Unless you’re in love with your notification sounds, turning off the auto-chat feature is probably a good move to make.

Linux: Skype doesn’t update its Linux beta too often, but good things arrive when it does. This go-round, screen sharing gets added to the mix, interfaces can be styled, and a lot of annoyances were chopped down.

Image by Kabatology.

If you were irked about being unable to quote IM sections from Skype conversations, that got fixed in Skype 2.1 Beta 2. If you’re amazed at how irksome it is connecting Skype through PulseAudio, the default audio engine in Ubuntu and a few other distributions—you’re not getting much help here. With that out of the way, your Linux-friendly editor will point out the big list of improvements and fixes in this release.

Skype for Linux 2.1 Beta 2 is a free download for Linux systems only. If you’ve discovered a few smart Skype fixes on your Linux system, or want to see something else fixed up, tell us about it in the comments.

Mac only: Many users have been unhappy with OS X’s Finder for a while, wishing for tabs, fixes for hidden file annoyances, and other conveniences. TotalFinder is a plug-in containing all this and more, creating a Finder worthy of a power user.

We’ve all been itching for new features in Finder, and the latest upgrade to Snow Leopard did little to help that on the surface—but its rewriting in Cocoa has opened Finder up to all the possibilities of SIMBL plugins, which TotalFinder has taken advantage of. The biggest upside to this approach is that, unlike current Finder-replacement favorite PathFinder, TotalFinder integrates into the existing Finder so you don’t have another application to launch. Also, it’s free (albeit less feature-rich).

Some of the highlights include things like Visor-like activation—making Finder accessible at all times with just a hotkey. In addition, it has some hidden features that most of you Finder power users have probably already implemented, like showing hidden files. However, it adds to this by redirecting those annoying .DS_Store files to another folder, rather ingeniously—they’ll still be accessible by Finder, but never again will they clutter up every Finder window you open.

Possibly the coolest and most wished-for feature TotalFinder adds, though, is tabbed browsing. The plug-in adds tabs to the title bar—similar to Chrome’s (okay, they’re exactly like Chrome’s)—to save on some of that oh-so-precious screen real estate. Simple, but a huge boon to anyone who spends a lot of time in the app.

The biggest downside to TotalFinder is that it’s still in alpha stage. In fact, it’s more unstable than your average alpha—if there were such thing as super alpha, TotalFinder would certainly fall into that category. So make sure you have your Time Machine backup prepared just in case, and be forewarned! But if you back up religiously and love the thrill of over-tweaking your computer with unstable software, have at it. If you don’t like it, there’s an uninstall script that will remove it completely from your computer. Also, because it’s in such early stages, the developers have a lot of things planned for the future—so, in theory, TotalFinder won’t always be the unstable, feature-minimal upgrade it is now—god willing, we may all have a nice PathFinder replacement on our hands one day.

TotalFinder is a free download, Mac OS X 10.6 only.

When sending email attachments, etiquette and convention often dictate that you compress the attachment when sending large files or a lot of files. But when you’re only sending a few small files, do the recipient a favor: Skip the ZIP.

The other day I received an email attachment containing two extremely small image files in a ZIP, and—embarrassingly—got a little annoyed that I had to go through a multi-step process to see the tiny files. (Download the ZIP, find it on my hard drive, unzip it, then go into the folder to view the images.)

The fact is, most email clients (like Gmail) have handy links to view many different attachment types without downloading anything at all, and it’s especially good with images—its “View all images” link is great. What’s more, if you want to download all of the attachments in one fell swoop, you can click the “Download all attachments” link, which will produce a ZIP file of all the attached files. But a lot of the time attachments these days are ephemera, anyway—files you need to see briefly, but often don’t have to download to your hard drive to save.

Furthermore, a lot of us are accessing email on-the-go from our cellphones, and ZIPs are, unfortunately, not generally supported.

That’s why we’d suggest that, if you’re sending a few small files, most of the time you’re going to make life easier on your recipient by skipping the ZIP compression altogether. Here’s a pretty simple rule of thumb I live by:

• Don’t ZIP attachments unless you’re sending more than three to five files and they’re over 1MB each.

Of course, like any rule of thumb, this one’s subject to tweaking to your own preferences, and to exceptions. To be honest, I rarely ZIP single file attachments no matter how large they are (as long as they fit beneath Gmail’s 25MB limit). There may be instances when compressing your files is still useful—say you’re on an excruciatingly slow internet connection, for example, and every bit of compression helps. But overall, our internet pipes are large, our email clients are smart, and adding to the workflow required to access attachments by compressing them isn’t necessary.

Agree? Wholeheartedly disagree? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.

Did you pick up a Nexus One phone after the well-covered release and seeing its Android 2.1 features? Are you wondering why your new “superphone” seems to constantly flip between EDGE and 3G data service? You’re not alone. Users have been flooding Google and T-Mobile with support issues over the weekend, and one user went so far as to post semi-scientific tests showing that the phone has an issue with sticking to 3G, even when it’s readily available. The upshot? Expect a software update to fix the problem very soon, now that it’s going to be hard to ignore. [via Gizmodo]