Obvious Ideas

I’ve been doing quite a lot of Facebook development in the last few months. At first I was using my own account to do most of the testings for the apps I was working on. I always have (at least) two versions of the app – production and development. The development version is marked as sandboxed, so any action I do in it (including posting to the newsfeed) isn’t shown to my friends.

At first I felt that this is enough, and didn’t feel the need for a test account. But after some time I realized that while developing, anytime I get to my profile or newsfeed, I get distracted by my friends’ posts. So I started using another account to do the testings. This way, whenever I get to the profile or newsfeed I practically see nothing there that can distract me from what I’m working on.

Another benefit of using a test account is that whenever you test something on the production (un-sandboxed) version of your app and need publish a lot to your newsfeed, you don’t spam your friends (or reveal upcoming features).

Of course, we can rely on our self discipline to avoid this distractions, but who are we kidding?

Arik

I really like the built in screen capture ability of OS/X. I specially like the ability to easily take a screen capture of only part of the screen by using Cmd+Shift+4. What I didn’t like was the fact that it created a hell of a clutter on my desktop with all that screenshots.

Cluttered Desktop

For long time I’ve been just manually moving the screenshots to different folders / deleting them. But today I decided that enough is enough and looked for a solution. And of course a simple solution exists. To save you the reading here’s a summary of what you need to do:
1. Open the Terminal.
2. Create a new folder for the screenshots by using mkdir, i.e.

mkdir /Users/Arik/Desktop/Screenshots

3. Run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location [the-folder-you-created-in-step-2]

That’s it. Almost. Now you need to logout and login again in order for the changes to take effect. Instead you can use the following command (from Terminal):

killall -HUP SystemUIServer

Now you really done.

Hope it helps.
Arik