A post on Mac Rumors this weekend shows us how to enable four finger gestures on older (pre-October 2008) Mac notebooks. This is not an easy hack, and it does require that you get ahold of an install disk from a new unibody Macbook.

If you can do that, though, here’s how to pull it off.

1) Install the system from the unibody Macbook. To do that you will need to hack Apple’s installer to ignore machine checks. You can find instructions here.

This will give you the latest version of 10.5.5 (you can check by looking at the energy saver light bulb in System Preferences…it should now be an energy efficient bulb)

2) examine the kernal extension “AppleUSBMultitouch.kext - the Info.plist of this kext contains several entries for different makes of trackpads. Some of the makes have two keys and others do not:

TrackpadFourFingerGestures

If you’ve ever wanted to integrate Twitter with Growl, then you’ll want to thank Richard Stelling over at Echo Tech because he’s taken the time to not only put it together, but also to show us all how to make it work.

Here - take a look at how he put the whole thing together….

1. Installing the Modules
You will need only 3 modules Mac::Growl, Net::Twitter and Date::Format, if your lucky Date::Format might even be already installed. Type the following commands into terminal.
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
This will launch a CPAN command line session to install the modules type (at the prompt):
> install Mac::Growl
Agree to any dependancies, when it done type:
> install Net::Twitter
Again agree to all dependancies, and lastly:
> install Date::Format
> exit
If you had any problems it may be because You need Apple’s Development tools installed, these are a free download form Apple. Please leave any problems in the comments.

2. Coding
Now for the code, just copy the following into a empty text file and save as some thing sensible like growl_tweet.pl:
#! /usr/bin/perl -wT

use Mac::Growl ‘:all’;
use Net::Twitter;
use Date::Format;

my $app = ‘Growl/Twitter’;
my @names = (’New Tweet’);
RegisterNotifications($app, \@names, [$names[0]]);
my $tweet = Net::Twitter->new( username=>’##REPLACE WITH USERNAME##’, password=>’##REPLACE WITH PASSWORD##’ );
my $last_id = undef;
my $switch = 0;
while(1)
{
my @tt = ();
if($last_id)
{
@tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 200, since_id => $last_id });
}
else
{
@tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 5 });
}
foreach my $t (@{$tt[0]})
{
if(!$switch) { $last_id = $t->{id}; $switch++; };
PostNotification($app, $names[0], $t->{user}{screen_name}, $t->{text});
printf(”%s: %s\n”, $t->{user}{screen_name}, $t->{text});
print “sleep 4\n”;
sleep(4);
}
$switch = 0;
print “sleep 37\n”;
sleep(37);
}
exit;

3. Running
Now, simply run the script:
$ perl ./growl_tweet.pl
And bingo! All your tweets appear! Leave a comment if it works and especially if it doesn’t - if there is enough interest I might consider adding features and real installer!

Thanks to Richard for sending this our way. Please be sure and check out his site for more cool stuff.

Subversion is a free/open-source version control system that is popular among developers. It manages files and directories and the changes made to them over time. What this does is allows you to recover older versions of your data, and examine the history of how that data has changed.

Doing this is traditionally a command-line affair, but there area a few GUI applications out there that are changing that.

Still in Beta, Versions gives you a much nicer interface for interacting with your Subversion Repository. This can be particularly helpful if certain members of your team aren’t familiar with Subversion - or the command line.

The only real problem with the application is that the developers have yet to reveal what the final pricing for the application will be. It’s not really something that you can get too excited about - until you know what kind of costs you’re talking about when its all said and done.

Fortunately, there is another alternative.

Cornerstone from Zenna-ware is out in version 1.0.3 and it not only serves as GUI for Subversion - it actually has the ability to create Subversion Repositories built in - with no command line required.

The software is available for a 14-day trial, and will cost you $59.

You can check it out here.

I recently reinstalled Leopard from scratch on my Mac Mini and getting the software up to date after a clean install can be very frustrating. So when I say this handy tip on Mac OSX Hints today, I thought I’d pass it along.

This is a script that will install all required software updates. It will run Software Update, then runs those updates, restarts, and repeats the process until there are no more updates left.

Full script after the jump.

The original poster notes: “remember to make it executable: chmod a+x initswupdater.sh”
Continue Reading This Article…

While working in Finder, sometimes I need to jump to Terminal.app to perform a command.

To do this I generally:

• Launch the Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app)
• Type cd
• Then drag the little icon from the Finder toolbar on to the Terminal

This copies the current path from Finder in to the command line.

This works fine, but there are a couple of unnecessary steps here. Fortunately MacWorld points us to a good solution: Open Terminal Here.

Open Terminal Here is an AppleScript that opens the current Finder window in Terminal.app.

To install Open Terminal Here:

• Unzip
• Drag on to your Finder toolbar

Your done:

Now to open the current directory in Terminal.app, simply click the icon.

Another utility that does this is the similarly named OpenTerminal. With OpenTerminal you can add this to the right-click menu and more.

Also, to quickly open Finder to your Terminal’s directory type:

open .

Other things you can do include customizing the icon:

Or making Open Terminal Here create a new tab if Terminal.app is already running.

Notice something different about the above, Safari menu bar? If you look in between Bookmarks and Window, you’ll see a menu that most of you, probably don’t have. It’s called Develop and in my opinion, it’s one of the coolest features that Safari has.

In order to activate this menu, hit command + , to bring up Safari’s preferences. Then click on the Advanced tab and click the checkbox next to “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. This activates the Develop menu and when you click it, you are presented with the menu below.

This little menu is neat for a lot of reasons. First, if you’re stuck on a slow connection, you can choose to browse the web without bandwidth-hogging images. Also, if you’re attempting to read a site which has annoying text styles, you now have the option of disabling them. My favorite part about this menu, however, is the ability to emulate other browsers by clicking User Agent and selecting from a wide variety of browsers ranging from Internet Explorer (shudder) to FIrefox, or Safari for the iPhone (which you can use to take advantage of “free iPhone content”), and everything in between.

Take the following situation into consideration: “We’re sorry but you are using an unsupported browser”. Just a few clicks of your mouse and that problem is solved. In the off chance that this does not work, don’t bother opening up FireFox and pasting the URL; just click Open Page With, and select the required browser.

A few months ago Travis wrote a great post on installing MacPorts. If you’ve never heard of MacPorts:

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

MacPorts makes it extremely easy to find and install tools.

As an example, let’s install wget.

First, we search by typing

port search wget

We can see here there are 3 packages that match wget. We want the one named wget in net/wget.

Let’s find out some more information before we install:

port info wget

We get the following package information:

wget 1.11.2, net/wget (Variants: universal, no_ssl)

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc.

Library Dependencies: openssl, gettext

Platforms: darwin freebsd

Now to install we type:

sudo port install wget

You should see something like the output below. Ports will automatically install every dependency so your install times will vary.

Additional Commands

Update

sudo port update wget

Uninstall

sudo port uninstall wget

Update Packages: Retrieves the latest package information

sudo port selfupdate

Installed Packages: A current list of installed packages

sudo port installed

MacPorts are Great

Note: You should always exercise caution when using the sudo command. You can mess up your system if you don’t know what you’re doing.

MacPorts is a great solution for installing common Mac applications and utilities. It’s much more efficient and works quite well. One downside is MacPorts doesn’t have as extensive collection as say FreeBSD Ports, so there are some holes.

Also, the ports are often a release or two behind (Firefox is at 2.0)–so don’t expect the latest version for many of these packages. For the most part these are known stable releases.

If you’re not comfortable with the terminal, there is a GUI solution Porticus. I haven’t tried it, so I would use at your own risk.

What are your favorite MacPorts packages?

Mine are wget and lynx.

On any given day, my desktop is filled with screenshots and images I’ve saved while writing tips. Often my desktop looks like the following:

There are a couple of methods to get around saving images to the desktop–including saving them to the clipboard–but I actually really like this method.

I have my bottom right corner of my screen set to show the desktop, so while writing a post I mouse over–grab whichever image I need and jump back into Ecto. The whole process takes about 2 seconds–it makes me extremely productive while writing tips.

But when things get cluttered, I spend extra time searching for an image. Not to mention it looks ugly having so many icons on the desktop.

This is where a quick bash script paired with Quicksilver comes to the rescue.

Note: This will overwrite any old files inside ~/Documents/Backup.

#!/bin/bash

mkdir ~/Documents/Backup
mv ~/Desktop/* ~/Documents/Backup

This creates a directory inside your Documents folder named Backup and moves all the files from your desktop to that folder. I’m sure there’s some error checking that could help this script, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible.

Save this script somewhere you can access it like your home directory called clean-desktop.sh.

Launch quicksilver and type the name of your script. You may have to press Command+R to rescan your catalog.

Press enter and voila. Now you’re only a few keystrokes away from cleaning up your desktop.

Alternatively you could use the Quicksilver Terminal plugin to run this command directly from terminal, but I like having a script with an easy name.

Eliza is a psychiatrist, and best of all, she offers her services free of charge to anyone with Mac OS X. To find her, open Terminal.app and type:emacs and hit enter/return. Then hold down Shift and press Esc. Now type:xdoctor then press enter/return. You have now entered Eliza’s office. She will ask you a series of questions. All you need to do is type in your answer and hit enter/return twice after each answer. Who knows, maybe you’ll rediscover yourself, but then again, probably not.

Mutt is one of the best email clients out there, it’s fast, efficient, you can keep your fingers on the keyboard, it has key bindings and macros, threading, regular expression, pattern matching and more.

With a little tweaking you can get Mutt to also integrate into the Mac environment, for example here’s how you can get Mutt to use your contacts in your Address Book:

1. Install the Little Brother’s Database (lbdb) (we’re gonna use MacPorts, if you haven’t installed it first do that) and do the command:
   sudo port install lbdb
2. Modify the lbdb’s configuration so that it uses the Address Book by opening the lbdb.rc file in /opt/local/etc/ and change the following lines: (line 43) # METHODS="m_inmail m_passwd m_finger" To this:
   METHODS="m_muttalias m_osx_addressbook"
   and uncomment (delete the # on the beginning of the line) the following lines (68-69):
   #MUTT_DIRECTORY="$HOME/.mutt"
#MUTTALIAS_FILES=”.muttrc .mail_aliases muttrc aliases”
3. Modify Mutt’s configuration:
   open your ~/.muttrc file and in it put:
   set query_command ="/opt/local/bin/lbdbq '%s'"

And you’re done, restart Mutt, compose a new email, start to type the first characters of a contact’s name or email address and press Command-T, select a contact and continue your email.

[Via:macosxhints.com(modified to work with lbdb MacPort)]