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Butler serves as:
• A file launcher to open applications and any other kind of document by browsing fully customizable system-wide spring-loaded menus, pressing hot keys, clicking hot corners, or entering abbreviations. Butler will learn from your habits and remember what you want a certain abbreviation to do (e.g., enter "abo" to launch "Address Book").
• A bookmark manager to manage your bookmarks without depending on a certain browser. Butler's bookmarks are always accessible through its system-wide menus, hot keys, etc. You can accessing bookmarks by entering abbreviations and Butler lets you access the bookmarks of all the browsers on your hard drive from a central menu.
Butler supports bookmarks from:
- Camino (was Chimera)
- Firefox (was Firebird/Phoenix)
- iCab
- Internet Explorer
- Mozilla
- Netscape
- Omniweb
- Opera
- Safari
- iChoose
- RADBookmarks
- Roadbook
• A web search utility that lets you search the web from the menu bar, in which it can place a search field similar to the ones in Safari and other browsers.
If your menu bar is too crowded for an input field (mine is), you can also use hot keys to pop up dedicated web search windows.
Butler supports a large number of search engines by default, but you are not restricted to those and can easily add your own search engines.
• A Clipboard extension utility that lets you access items you have previously stored in your clipboard, effectively turning it into a stack. You can also take a snapshot of your current clipboard contents and store it scrapbook-style. This feature is particularly useful for text snippets you need to enter on a regular basis.
Adding files or URLs from your browser to Butler's menus is easy: Just drag them to the active screen corner (default: top left), see Butler's main window open, and drop your items in the appropriate spot. You can import external bookmarks / e-mail addresses by choosing an application from the "Import / Export" pop-up menu in your toolbar, and alias external bookmarks / e-mail addresses using the "Browser bookmarks"/"Address Book" submenu of the Smart Items pop-up menu in your toolbar and choose the data you want to alias.
You can use Butler to move and copy files, control iTunes, access the System Preferences, change the current user, and so on. If your menu bar too crowded, you can use Butler's own pop-up docklet that can be positioned in your choice of twelve positions around the periphery of the screen.
You can configure a menu for each mounted volume or have a menu to pop up when you press a certain hot key. You can set all running applications to appear in your menu bar. Or do everything with the keyboard only.
The downside to all this feature richness is that Butler is, how shall I say? -- somewhat less than intuitive to figure out and configure. Its constellation of features and options are great, but deciphering how to make them work the way you want is to varying degrees a challenge, and the help documentation is sketchy and sometimes unclear, and the terminology applied sometimes unnecessarily vague and jargony. For example in the list of new features below, it says: "You can now switch the Inspector's state between full and simple mode." Huh? Quick: what do the Inspector, Full and simple mode, duplicates, remnants, level of recursion, abbreviations, Smart Item, System Control, or active corner mean to you? In the context of Butler, probably little or nothing useful.
You can find out by carefully perusing the FAQ documentation, but it takes effort and perseverence.
Here is another example. The "Quick Start" instructions read"
• press one of the pre-defined hot keys
• enter an abbreviation after you have brought up the abbreviation prompt by pressing [control]-[space] (which is just another pre-defined hot key)
• choose something from the menus
Yes, but how does one know what those pre-defined hot keys are, or what the abbreviation prompt is? Mercifully, the menus are reasonably intuitive.
One of the FAQ topics is:
"I don't have access to a "Customize..." control anymore. How can I open Butler's main window to customize my configuration, to access my preferences, or to quit Butler?"
The answer reads:
"If Butler is not running, launch it and wait until the rotating status indicator in your menu bar has vanished. Then, launch Butler once more to have its main window displayed. In brief: Double-click on Butler until you see its main window."
Not exactly intuitive or simple.
Don't get me wrong. Butler is an amazingly capable little utility that will reward those willing to put the time and effort into figuring out how to make it work the way they want it to. Unfortunately, I fear that many who try it will give up in frustration before they finish climbing the formidable learning curve.
The irony here is that an application designed to make your computing life more convenient is extraordinarily difficult to learn itself. It is a very clever piece of work, but it needs some streamlining to enhance its user-friendliness, and better, more clearly worded documentation.
New in this version:
• You can now specify the size of pasteboard menu items in your preferences.
• You can now specify the font Butler uses to display a given menu/submenu (Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" only).
• You can now switch the Inspector's state between full and simple mode by clicking on the four stripes in the top right corner of Butler's main window. Simple mode means that only the most frequently used options will be displayed.
• You can now have the abbreviation you are currently entering expire after a certain time interval (see the "Abbreviations" category in your preferences).
• Fixed a bug where selecting a menu item via keyboard didn't work if the mouse was still over the menu's icon in the menu bar.
• Fixed a bug where pasting from recent pasteboards with indices higher than 9 did not work.
• Fixed a bug where the "Fast user switching" Smart Item did not work under certain conditions.
• When populating menus, Butler now sorts files with respect to their localized names.
• Re-enabled launching items by releasing the mouse button while the mouse hovers over a menu's icon in the menu bar/docklet - as an option (see the "Menus" category in your preferences).
• Various interface improvements.
• Available language: English. Please DO NOT LOCALIZE this beta version. The resources might still change before the final release of Butler 4.0.
System requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
Butler is donationware
For more information, visit:
http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=butler&sprache=english
Re: OS X Odyssey 520 - Are These Guys Using The Same OS I Am?
http://www.applelinks.com/pm/comments.php?id=888_0_1_0_M
From: Christopher Smith
What a shame that technology has progressed beyond what Mr. Raskin finds useful, as well as others but thats why I'm in business to be of help to them. Please Mr. Raskin if you or anyone else needs good Mac onsite tech support in New Jersey or Virginia try http://macguru.biz and contact me to work out your issues. And to believe that a 1984-87 operating system is going to be anywhere near the same as a 2003 operating system is very foolish, as Mr. Raskin's comments are those likely someone not grasping how technology has changed over the years-or perhaps how WE have matured as to our technology needs.
Re: OS X Odyssey 520 - Are These Guys Using The Same OS I Am?
http://www.applelinks.com/pm/comments.php?id=888_0_1_0_M
From The Bo'ster
Raskin may have fathered the Mac project, but he was not responsible for the Desktop interface that the Mac would eventually use. His preliminary designs were quite different, and the evetual UI would be developed after he had left. Apparently, he was never a great fan of that interface concept, and has been moaning about it for quite a while.
While things certainly could be improved, to say that there's no difference between the Mac and Windows is pretty delusional. I do however welcome his efforts toward making technology more accessible and hope he keeps up the research and continues to point out where and how things can be improved, I think he should err more on the constructive side though. As for the other guy, he seems to have had something seriously screwed up, and I'm quite amazed at his assumption that his problems were normal for Panther. That suggests both a general cluelessnes and arrogance. Just because it's like that for HIM, it must be like that for everyone else. It certainly doesn't help him to generalise and rant about it. Maybe next time he could politely solicit help rather than embarrassing himself.
DEVONthink Tidbits review
From Michael E. Scott
Charles,
I'm probably the one-thousandth person to tell you about the Tidbits review of DEVONthink, but here's the url.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07575
-Mike Scott
Hi Mike;
Nice review. Matt Neuburg's take on DEVONthink is pretty much consonant with my own. And he was bang-on with this prediction:
"And I'm told that there are already plans to address most of these issues in future versions of the program - some as soon as 1.8.1, which could emerge any day now."
It has and it did.
Charles
Panther Printing
http://www.applelinks.com/pm/comments.php?id=888_0_1_0_M
From BD Marsh
A program that can save the day when it comes to printing is "Printer Setup Repair" for 10.3 (Print Center Repair for 10.2 or 10.1)
http://www.fixamac.net/software/psr/
It can check permissions specifically relating to the printing system, as well as other possible problems.
Thanks for the helpful tip, BD.
Charles
Re: OS X Odyssey 520 - Are These Guys Using The Same OS I Am?
http://www.applelinks.com/pm/comments.php?id=888_0_1_0_M
From George
GET A LIFE!
***
Charles W. Moore
Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context.
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