Download Google Books
March 11th, 2010 - OS X Apps, Utilities
Google Books is a pretty amazing virtual library filled with who knows how many books, magazines, periodicals, and whatever else you might expect to find in a brick and mortar library. Some of the books can be downloaded and saved as a PDF with just a click, others are restricted, but thats where Google Book Downloader comes in. Simply give the program a Google Book URL or Book ID, and Google Book Downloader will generate a PDF of that book (or at least the portion that is accessible via the web). This is so useful for anyone who wants a virtual copy of a book stored locally on their Mac (or iPod Touch, or iPhone, or even the iPad!). This is about as easy as it gets.
So you want to save a Google Book for later? First, find a book on Google Books

Now just paste the URL or book ID into the application and it will start the download:
Your Google Book is now saved as a PDF and it can be read or viewed from anywhere, independent of the web and an internet connection. Awesome! Google Book Downloader is free and open source, so if you feel like poking around the code it’s freely available on the developers site.
HacThePlanet: Google Book Downloader
Download Google Book Downloader now

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It’s no secret, I hate Flash. It’s the plastic pink flamingos of the web but worse, it’s crass, it’s loud, it’s obnoxious, it will crash your web browser, and on a Mac it is a literal drag on the machine, sucking up the CPU and memory as if there’s no tomorrow. Adobe really laid a pile of dung with Flash on the Mac, which is probably why
I use QuickLook constantly for everything from pictures, movies, text files, and of course, source code. Source can be a pain to view in QuickLook because there’s no syntax highlighting by default, but this plugin changes that. QLColorCode is a must-have QuickLook plugin for developers, it allows color syntax highlighting of nearly any type of source code from directly within QuickLook, making a quick glance at code infinitely easier. It’s free so download it now, you’ll thank me later.
A colleague of mine is a recent Mac switcher and he was complaining to me that virtual desktops are not included in Mac OS X, the irony is that they are, they just have the name Spaces (coming from a heavy Linux background, I guess the naming convention just threw him off). Virtual Desktops are a very common and popular feature in most Unix GUI’s, and as of Mac OS X 10.5 they are included within Mac OS X too. Instead of being called “Virtual Desktops” though, Apple named them “Spaces”, but the concept is identical, multiple virtual workspaces on one machine. Spaces in Mac OS X lets you have up to 16 different workspaces to work within, you can even designate specific applications to run just within a particular space, which is very handy for creating a tidy work environment.
I just came across a really useful QuickLook plugin called SuspiciousPackage that lets you inspect those .pkg package installer files that so many Mac apps and downloads come in. Using this plugin, you can determine if an admin password is required, how many install scripts are in the package file, where the installation locations of files is going to be, and if a restart is required. 