Macworld Guides vol3 hints

BONUS COLLECTION aCWOT www.macworld.com The Mac Product Experts Power Guide: Mac 0S X Hints VOLUME TWO COPYRIGHT © 2005, MAC PUBLISHING LLC. REPRINTED FROM MACWORLD MAGAZINE. UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION IN ANY FORM IS PROHIBITED. SECRETS BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints The Insiders’ Tips You Won’t Get from Apple Create Subgroups in Address Book In both Panther (OS X 10.3) and Tiger (OS X 10.4), Address Book supports nested groups. That is, you can create a group and then place that group within another group. This is a great way to combine lists of people whom you occasionally need to contact en masse. For instance, assume that you have two existing groups—Family for your relatives, and Friends for, well, your friends. If you sometimes invite all these people to parties, then with each invitation, you’d have to put both group names into your new Mail message's To field. You can save time by creating a third group in Address Book. (e)) UNIX TIP OF THE MONTH Save Time Navigating Directories Ifyou spend much time in Terminal, you probably know how much of a pain it can be to switch directories. For instance, if you want to do something in your user folder's Pic- tures folder, you type cd ~/Library/Pictures. If you finish what you're doing, close Terminal, and then want to go back, you have to type the path all over again. Terminal does have some useful shortcuts. You can use the up arrow to access recently used commands, you can create an alias pointing to often-used directories, and you can use tab autocompletion to finish what you're typing (for more details, see macworld.com/0526). You can also use a bash shell variable called cDPATH. Think of CDPATH as a directory-switching cheat sheet. It provides a list of directo- ries in which the cd command will look for the directory you specify. (The command will look only within the specified directories, not the subdirectories thereof) You give the command a list of directories, separated by colons. For example, if you often switch to both your Home folder and your Library folder, type this: CDPATH=" /Library" The first dot means “within the current directory.” The tilde (~) is the shortcut for your Home folder, and ~/Litsrary will look within your Library folder for matches. Type the command and press enter. Now you can search for directories in those places without retyping the entire path again and again. For instance, type cd Pref - erences and press enter. Terminal responds with the name of the directory into which it's switching: cd Preferences /Users/robg/Library/Preferences If you'd like this command to become a regular part of your Terminal environment, add it to your .bash_profile file, which lives in your Home directory. Type pico ~/ bash profile and enter the CDPATH command you'd like to use. (You can add as many directory paths as you want; just separate each path with a colon.) To save your work, press control-O and then press enter. Press control-X to exit pico. The next time you open a Terminal window, you'll be able to use your newly created shortcuts. Click on the plus sign (+) under the Group column and name your new group “Friends and Family.” Now drag both groups, Family and Friends, into the new group. ‘To reach the whole gang, you can now simply address a new message to “Friends and Family.” In Panther, subgroups are basically like aliases in the Finder—when you delete one from a group, its ori nal entry remains. ‘Tiger, however, gives you choices: it lets you either remove the subgroup from the group or delete the subgroup altogether, so be careful. Search Smart in Mail In Apple’s Mail, search options seem needlessly lim- ited—you can search either all mailboxes or the cur- rent mailbox, but nothing in between. Here’s a quick way to search exactly where you'd like. Start by selecting the mailboxes you want to check: i-click to pick noncontiguous mailboxes, or shift- click to pick contiguous ones. If you’re running Pan- ther, click on the magnifying glass next to the search box. When you do, you'll see that the top section of the pop-up menu now reads Search Selected Mail- boxes. In Tiger, there’s no pop-up menu. Instead, if you run a search after selecting multiple mailboxes, Mail will search only those mailboxes. Avoid Account Mix-ups in Mail If you use Mail to check more than one e-mail account—your work and your personal accounts, say—chances are you’ve sent messages from the wrong account by accident. Mail is actually trying to help you when it causes this annoying mistake. Nor- mally it notices which mailbox is currently selected, and it uses this as your default sending account when you create a message. The mishaps begin if you work with your inbox selected so you can see all your mail- boxes in one consolidated view. In that case, Mail uses whatever message is selected to determine the sending account. You can, of course, select the correct account from the Account pop-up menu whenever you create a new message. You can save a bit of time, though, by mak- ing sure you’ve selected the proper account or mes- sage before you start a new message. Get Creative with Pages’ Table Cells When you're working with tables in Apple’s new word processor, Pages, you can resize cells by drag- continues ICON BY PAUL HOWALT MAC OS X HINTS Show Me the Movies By entering the name of a land- mark in the Find Near field of Sherlock's Movies tool, you can find films playing nearby, even if you don't know precisely where you are. ging either the horizontal or the vertical dividing bar. Just click on the divider and then drag it. Here’s a trick to open up some more creative cell sizing: try holding down the option key before you click on a divider. Instead of selecting the entire divider, Pages will highlight only the portion of the divider associated with the nearest cell. You can now drag and reposition this portion of the divider. No longer are you constrained to tables in which every cell in a column or row must be the same width or height; you can have a large image in a cell that’s directly above a narrower cell, for instance. This allows you to get very creative with the look of your tables. Note that this technique won’t work on all cells. A row must be of a certain minimum height before you can move portions of the horizontal divider (you may have to increase the whole row’s height first). Also, some borders may not be movable, depending on how they’re positioned relative to other lines. Still, by using option-drag, you can create some very free-form tables. Slim Down iPhoto’s Window iPhoto 5’s new bottom toolbar is a great time-saver— if you've got a big screen and you run iPhoto ina large window. But if you shrink the iPhoto window so you can multitask in other applications, the toolbar icons that don’t fit vanish to a subtly marked pop-up menu. If you prefer a smaller iPhoto window but still want to see all the toolbar icons, two tricks can help. Your first option is to hide the Source column. Locate the small dot on the bar that divides it from the photo- viewing area. Then drag the dot to the left. The Source column will vanish, providing more toolbar space. Another option is to remove the icons you rarely (or never) use. Some icons can’t be disabled, but you can see the ones that can (and others you may not have discovered) by selecting Share: Show In Toolbar. If you don’t have a Mac account, for instance, make sure the HomePage and .Mac Slides options are disabled. ICON BY PAUL HOWALT Don’t ever e-mail images from iPhoto? Toss that option. When you're done, you may find that you have room to add an additional button, such as Send ‘To iDVD, and still see the full toolbar on screen. Find Movies Anywhere with Sherlock Sure, the latest Star Wars release is old news, and the next Harry Potter movie is still on the horizon, but if you'd like to spend $9 or so on a couple of hours of wide-screen entertainment, Sherlock’s Movies tool is quite handy for finding theaters and show times in your area. By default, the Find Near field uses the address from your card in Address Book. If you've entered your address there, the Movies tool will display a list of locally playing movies without your having to do a thing. But what if you’re traveling with your laptop? You know what city you’re in (I hope), but you may not know the lay of the land. Sherlock’s Find Near search has a couple of features that can help. First, you can search by landmarks—not everything is in there, but many big names are. A search for Space Needle, for instance, shows you movies in Seattle; Disneyland nets you the Anaheim, California, area; and Epcot will get you a list of theaters near Disney World’s Epcot in Orlando, Florida (see “Show Me the Movies”). Q. CHECK IT OUT Peekaboo Calendars Apple's calendar application, iCal, lets you set up as many calendars as 9 you'd like. This is a great way to organize your tasks. You can create sepa- tate calendars for home, work, travel, and so on, as you need them. However, if you view the calendars all together, the picture can get pretty cluttered with events. Of course, you can disable any calendar by deselecting it in the Calendars column. But here are some tricks that will make disabling and enabling multiple calendars somewhat easier. To hide all calendars, 1 -click on any currently visible calendar’s check box. If you 1- lick on any hidden calendar, you will bring all currently hidden calendars into view. Finally, if you 1 -option-click on any calendar, you will show just that calendar while hiding all others. This is probably the most useful shortcut, as it allows you to see the specific calendar you're focusing on at the moment. ‘The real power of the Find Near field comes from its ability to work with zip codes—just enter the one you're in, and you'll see a list of all the local theaters. Between the zip code and landmark searches, there’s no reason not to go to the movies tonight—unless, of course, there’s nothing worth seeing. Senior Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Pan- ther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004), and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site (wwwmacosxhints.com). SECRETS BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints Change the default column order in list-view windows, relocate appli- cations from the Dock, manage your Mail recipients list, always send Windows-friendly attachments from Mail, modify graphics from Ter- minal, and combine multiple PDFs into one. Relocate Applications from the Dock If you like to download and try out lots of shareware and freeware, you probably put the apps in a special downloads folder (or just leave them on the desktop) until you decide whether they’re keepers that belong Q. CHECK IT OUT Merge PDFs into One Document Ifyou have a folder full of single-page PDFs—say, a collection of your favorite recipes— that you'd like to make into one large document, Apple's Preview app can't help you. But TextEdit offers an easy way to do the job. Launch the app and make sure you've got a blank window to work with (File: New). Next, make sure you're working with a Rich Text Format (RTF) document by selecting Format: Make Rich Text. Switch back to the Finder and ‘open the folder containing your PDFs. If you'd like them in a certain order, drag and drop them one at a time onto the TextEdit window. But if you have a series of PDFs in numeri- cal or some other order, set your PDF folder to View: As Columns, and then select all the PDFs in the folder (1-A). Drag and drop them into TextEdit, and they'll flow in the order in which they appear in the column-view window (see “Merge Ahead"). Once you've combined everything in the TextEdit document, select File: Print. Then click ‘on the Save As PDF button, give the file a new name, and click on the Save button. To pull off the trick of combining a number of multipage PDFs, you'll need a third-party tool; check out MonkeyBread Software's free Combine PDFs (www. monkeybreadsoftware.de), an application that makes combining single and multipage PDFs a snap. Dae aetna Merge Ahead Joining a series of one-page PDFs is easy—just create a new TextEdit document and then drag and drop your files from the Finder. in your Applications folder. And when you've found a program worth hanging on to, you probably quit the program, switch to the Finder, and start moving windows around to file the program away. Here’s a little time-saver for next time: Assuming that you’ve put the app in the Dock for easy access, you can sim- ply 1-click on its icon in the Dock and drag it to your Applications folder (or any folder you choose). Release the mouse button, and you’ve moved the file. (You can also move an open application, whose icon automatically appears in the Dock, but it’s always safer to quit the app first; otherwise, it might not open when you next launch it.) Manage Autofill of Recipients in Mail You may have noticed that Mail seems to recognize some people when you start entering a name or e-mail address and completes the address for you—but that’s not always a positive thing. For example, even after a friend has changed her e-mail address, Mail keeps showing the old one—despite the fact that you’ve updated her Address Book entry. Or you get a list of 20 entries when you start typing Dave, Susan, or another common name. Why? Mail remembers all the addresses of people to whom you've sent previous e-mail messages. To tidy things up, open Window: Previous Recipients, and you'll see a list of everyone to whom you've sent messages—regardless of whether they're in your Address Book. Here you can easily remove people from Mail’s internal list. You might want to start cleaning up the list by sorting by Last Used, highlighting older entries you don’t want any- more, and then clicking on the Remove From List button (the delete key won’t work for this). This list is also a quick way to add new names to your Address Book, and to search for someone when you know you’ve sent a message to that person but you can’t recall his or her e-mail address. Send Windows-Friendly Attachments in Mail Are you a lone-wolf Mac user in an office full of Win- dows PCs? If so, you may get tired of always having to tell Mail to send Windows-friendly attachments (it’s a check box at the bottom of the Attachments dia- log box). Forget to select it, and you'll confound your Windows recipients, who will see multiple attach- ments to your message (Mail causes this by sending the file’s data fork and its resource fork). ‘There's an easy workaround, and it’ hiding in plain s Send riendly Attachments when you don’t have a new message window open (the option will be grayed out if you do). From now on, all attachments will default to Windows-friendly mode. After you choose this option, if you attach files to e-mail mes- sages going to Mac users, the missing resource fork may render the attachment unusable for those recip- ients. In those cases, deselect the Send Windows Friendly Attachments option that appears when you click on the Attach icon. Change the Column Order for List View If you rely on list-view windows on a daily basis, you may have discovered a limitation of the Finder. While it’s quite possible to choose which columns you want new list-view windows to display (just use View: Show View Options or type 1-J), you can’t control the order in which those columns appear. That is, if you prefer to see Size to the left of Date Modified, for example, you can drag the columns into that order for the window you're viewing—but then paste them in the order in which you'd like them displayed. For example, to see the Label column after the Name column (Name must be the first column), scroll down to the <aict> sec- tion that has the 141 key and cut the entire section, including the opening and closing tags. Now scroll back up to the top of the StandardViewOptions section, and paste the 1a section directly below the closing (</dict>) tag for the dnam section. Arrange the other sections as you like; note that sections with a ColumVisible key of 0 are those you’ve chosen not to see, so there’s no reason to reorder them. When you're done edit- ing, save the file and quit TextEdit. To see your changes, you'll need to restart the Finder. You could log out and log in, or use Activity Monitor 20¢ ear we Serene MN yom + weasot federal ea leone ot sotapetd stokes The Key to Listing Happiness By rearranging these <dict> blocks in the Finder's preference file, you can control the default order of columns in list- view windows. the change isn’t global, so you'll have to do it again every time you open a list-view window. Here’s how to work around this limitation. ‘The first thing you need to do is set global options. So open a folder in list view, select View: Show View Options, make sure it’s set to All Windows, and then pick a few columns to show—just make sure you change something. This ensures that the file you're about to edit has all column headers in it. Next, navigate to your user folder/Library/Prefer- ences folder, make a backup of the com.apple finder.plist file, store the backup somewhere safe, and drag the original file onto the TextEdit appli- cation icon. Now press 1-F to bring up the Find box, type StandardviewOptions, and press enter. ‘TextEdit will highlight that string in a line that reads <key>StandardViewOptions</key>. This is the section of the file that controls the default look for list, icon, and column views. If you scroll down just a bit, the first section you'll see should be for list view, and it starts with a line that reads <key>Nisv</key> (see “The Key to Listing Happi- ness”). Below that, you'll see eight separate <aict> sections. Each one of these sections represents a list- view column; the value below the ColumnPropertyID key identifies the column. The eight possibilities are dnam (Name), phys (Size), kind (Kind), moda (Date Modified), asca (Date Created), iti (Label), shvr (Version), and cmmt (Comments). (Applications/Utilities) to quit the Finder, and then click on its Dock icon to relaunch it. When you do, you should find that all list-view windows open in your preferred column order. =) UNIX TIP OF THE MONTH Scale Graphics and More in Terminal There are tons of Mac OS X-compatible tools for manipulating graphics, from the top- ofthe-line Adobe Photoshop to Lemke Software's much simpler Graphic Converter — but sometimes these tools are overkill for the task at hand. For instance, if you simply want to scale a folder of images down to 120 pixels wide for the Web, you could launch Photoshop, go into batch-processing mode, and get the job done. However, there's an even quicker alternative—take advantage of Unix's sips (scriptable image processing system) command. Open Terminal, change to the directory containing the images (type cd and a space, and then drag the image folder into Terminal and press enter), type sips --resampleWidth 120 * pg, and press enter. Want to flip an image horizontally? Try sins --flipHorizmtal file name. Rotate a picture 235 degrees clockwise? Type sips --rotate 235 file name. Convert a TIFF to a nor- mal-quality JPEG? Use sips --setProperty format jpeg --setProperty formatOptions nonral input file.tif --out output _file.jpg. There's much, much more you can do with sips; to learn about it, type sins --help and sips -H in Terminal. Contributing Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, ‘ONS BY PRUL HOWALT ‘To rearrange the default column order, you need to cut the entire sections from <dict> to </dict>, and Panther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004) and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site (www.macosxhints.com). BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints The Insiders’ Tips You Won’t Get from Apple See Dashboard Widgets without Clicking Dashboard is amazingly handy, but it does have some annoyances. Having to click on the big plus sign (+) to bring up the Dashboard bar is one of them. But a little-known (and undocumented) keyboard shortcut can help you out. After activating the Dashboard (the default shortcut on most computers is F12), just press 1 -equal sign (<) to bring up the Dashboard bar. Press the combo again to make the bar vanish. Unfortu- nately, you can’t activate the widgets without resort- ing to the mouse. Customize Tiger’s PDF Print Services When you press 1-P to print in Tiger, you'll notice that the Print dialog box sports a new PDF disclosure triangle. Click on it and you'll see a series of Automa- tor actions that you can apply when creating your PDE. The Compress PDF option, for example, slims your PDF file by compressing the graphics. What's cool about this is that you can easily modify the system-provided actions—or create your own. ‘The system-provided workflows live in the root- level /Library/PDF Services folder. Just double-click on any workflow to open it in Automator. (You may want to duplicate the file first in case you decide to go back to the original version.) Make the changes you want, and then use File: Save to save the modified workflow. The next time you print, you'll be able to (ei TOTAL TIGER UNIX TIP Paste File Paths Fast in Terminal Prior to Mac OS X 10.4, inserting the path to a file or folder in Ter- > minal without typing it—for example, to edit a deeply buried pref- erences file—required a multistep process. You had to start typing in Terminal (for instance, pico), press the spacebar, switch to the Finder, navigate to the file in question, then drag and drop it on the Terminal window. It was often easier to just type the path to the file. But Tiger includes a new timesaving trick—simply copy the file or folder in the Finder, switch to the Terminal, and use the Paste command. The full path to the chosen object will appear. Say, for example, you want to open a nested folder in Terminal. Make sure the folder is selected in the Finder. Press 1-C to copy it, switch to Terminal, type ca fol- lowed by a space, and then press 1-V to paste in the path. You can open a selected file directly in the editor by following the same steps using pico. | Modifying the Workflow It's easy to customize Apple's PDF workflow actions, Here we're modifying the Compress PDF workflow to apply less compression to JPEG images. access your modified workflow from the PDF menu. For example, you could modify the Compress PDF workflow to move the Quality slider to a more bal- anced position (see “Modifying the Workflow”). ‘To use your own workflows, create a PDF Services folder in the /your user folder/Library folder. Use Automator to create the desired workflow, and then save it to the newly created folder. Your workflow will appear at the bottom of the PDF pop-up menu, below the system-provided workflows. Avoid the New Mail Account Wizard When you create a new account in Mail 2.0, a wizard walks you through all the steps. But sometimes you don’t want or need the wizard’s help—for example, if you're adding an account you’ve had for ten years and you know its settings by heart. In those cases, just hold down the option key when you click on the plus sign (+) in the Accounts section of Mail’s preferences. You'll get a blank account. Fill in the fields on the right, and you’re done. Access the Clipboard from Terminal Although you can use the mouse to highlight, copy, and paste text between Terminal (/Applications/ Utilities) and other OS X applications, you can also access the Clipboard directly via the Unix com- mands pbeopy and pbpaste. Why use the Unix com- mands instead of the mouse? Consider 1s al, a command that offers a directory listing of a particu- lar folder, including its ownership and permissions. You may want to e-mail the output to your IT per- son to troubleshoot a problem you're having. If you were using the mouse, you'd first run the command and then highlight its output on screen (scrolling up ICONS BY PAUL HoWALT and down as necessary). Next you'd press 1-C to copy the selection to the Clipboard, and then you'd paste it into a document or e-mail message. If you use pbcopy, however, the proce: simpler and faster. Just type 1s -al | pbcopy. This com- mand creates the directory list (1s <1), and then sends the list to the pbcopy command, courtesy of the pipe (the vertical bar [1]). On screen, you won't see any output from your command. But if you switch to your e-mail program and press 1-V, the directory listing will magically appear. much Wipe Out Preview’s Slide-Show Controller ‘The Preview app in Tiger has some nice enhancements its predecessors lack, including basic support for PDF forms and for annotating PDFs. It also lets you view multipage PDFs in a slide show (just press 1 -shift-F). When you do, you get an on-screen slide-show con- troller (see “Under Your Control”). But if the con- troller is covering some of the PDF's contents—or if you just find it distracting—you can get rid of it. While in Slideshow mode, click on the second icon from the right to make your PDF fill the screen. To remove the toolbar, just click outside it—the toolbar will come back if you move the cursor over the image, so you may want to click beyond the PDF's bound- aries. Once you've hidden the controller, you can use the left- and right-arrow keys to move backward and forward through the PDE. Move (Don’t Copy) Files between Disks If you have more than one hard drive or partition in your Mac, you're probably well aware that dragging an item from one volume to another copies it instead of moves it. If moving is what you're after, you then have to go back and delete the original. Here’s an easier way to achieve the same result: start the process as usual (click and drag the item), but before you release the mouse at the destination, hold down the 1 key. Release the mouse button, and the Finder will copy the file from the source to the desti- nation and delete the original. Disable Guest Access to Your Mac In the pre-OS X days, an easily accessible option let you disable guest access to your computer with Per- sonal File Sharing running. With the advent of OS X, however, that easy option vanished—now anyone can. connect to your machine and see what's in your Pub- Under Your Control. This handy controller appears when you view a PDF in Previews Slideshow mode. Unfortunately, it can sometimes get in the way. To hide it, just click on an area outside the slide show. Moving the mouse will restore the controller. Q. CHECK IT OUT Revert to Old System Preferences In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple has integrated Spotlight into almost every aspect of the OS. But in some cases, such as with System Preferences, it replaces shortcuts that were already perfectly functional—and sometimes more efficient. Here are two ways to reclaim your old shortcuts: 1. Return the Toolbar to System Preferences Tiger's updated System Preferences application adds a nice feature—the integration of Spotlight searching, which highlights results as you type. However, it also takes away one very useful feature—the customizable toolbar where you could store often-used preference panes for quick access. If you prefer the old way, there is a relatively simple solution: use the previous version of the application. if you installed Tiger using the Archive & Install option, you'll find the previous Sys- tem Preferences application in your /Previous System/Applications folder. Give it a new name (for example, Old System Prefs) to avoid overwriting the new version, and then copy it to your root Applications folder. When you launch the program, you'll get basi- cally the same view you do with the new application, plus you'll have the toolbar to work with. What do you lose? For one thing, you'll no longer see the integrated Spot- light search box. The Spotlight panel relocates to the Other section. Apart from these changes, the application is fully functional—and you'll have the toolbar again. 2. Navigate System Preferences via the Keyboard One of the other niceties in the prior version of System Preferences was the ability to ‘open any pane quickly by typing a few letters of its name and then pressing the space- bar: typing E-N-spacebar opened Energy Saver; Q-spacebar opened QuickTime. In the new version of System Preferences, those keystrokes appear in the Spotlight menu. That's fine for newcomers to the Mac, but if you know what you're doing and want the old navigation method back, here's the secret: Open your Keyboard & Mouse preferences, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and make sure the All Controls option is enabled in the Full Keyboard Access section. You can now skip the Spotlight assistance in the main panel by simply pressing the tab key. Unfortunately, System Preferences doesn’t retain this behavior between sessions, so you'll have to press tab each time you start it up. lic folder (even if it’s just your Drop Box, someone can exploit it to add a file to your computer secretly). If you want to close this security hole, here’s how to disable guest access. Open ‘Terminal and type ca /Library/Preferences. You'll be editing a system-level preferences file, so make a backup of it first by typing the following: sudo cp com.apple.AppleFileServer list com.apple.AppleFileServer .bak In Tiger, -plist files are now binary, which means you can’t easily edit them—the trade-off for a tremendous speed boost. Luckily, Apple includes a command-line utility that makes it easy to convert the binary files to text (and back), which is what you'll do now. Type this command: sudo phtil -convert xml1 com.apple. AppleFileServer.plist ‘This will convert the binary file into XML. Next, use a Unix text editor such as pico to edit the file. Open the file by typing sudo pico com.apple. AppleFileServer.plist and providing your password continues MAC OS X HINTS Zl OS X 101 The Many Faces of Get Info One thing that seems to change with each major OS X revision is the functionality of the Get Info window and its cousin, the Inspector. These windows display all sorts of useful information on the selection, such as actual size, comments, ownership and permissions, languages, and more. True to form, as of OS X 10.4, things have changed again. So here’s a recap and an overview of how the Get Info and Inspector windows work in Tiger: Get Info The Get Info (1-1) window is static; once you've opened it for a selec- tion, that window will always display information on that selection, regardless of any new selections you may make in the Finder. If you have multiple items selected in the Finder when you press 1-I, you'll get a separate window for each item. However, you can only open ten separate Get Info windows at a time. Select 11 or more items and you'll get one summary Get Info window for all of them. You can opt for this summary behavior, regardless of the number of items selected, by pressing 1-control-I, which changes the Finder's menu item to Get Summary Info. The Inspector In Tiger, the Inspector window (1 -option-l) is dynamic. It will always reflect the current Finder selection—regardless of how many items you've selected. You will only see one Inspector window on screen. This saves you the trouble of having to open multiple windows if you need to check several different items quickly. Of all the iterations of Get Info and the Inspector, Tiger's makes the most sense: you can either get individual information windows or a summary win- dow, depending on which menu item you choose. About the only thing you can’t do is open more than ten Get Info windows—but most people don’t have a monitor large enough to display them anyway. Ck me) est att ase The 411 The Get Info pane and the Inspector both give you insight into the contents and details of a selected file. Now they work even smarter in Tiger. 1» emeriee A Fem nomen when asked. Press control-W to search, type guest, and press return. You should see these lines: <key>guestAccess</key> <true/> Change true to false. To save the file, press control-O and then enter; to exit, press control-X. The last step is to convert the -plist file back into binary form. Type the following command: sudo phtil -convert binaryl com.apple. AppleFileServer plist ‘To make your changes take effect, you need to restart file sharing. You could do this in the GUI, of course (in the Sharing preference pane), but since this is a Unix hint, here’s the command-line solution: sudo Kill -HUP AppleFileServer Now when someone tries to connect to your com- puter, the Guest option won’t be available (see “No Guests Allowed”). Use Page Scrolling in Safari and Mail Both Mail and Safari seem to suffer from the same scrolling bug (or is it a feature?). The page-up and page-down keys don’t seem to work in the very places they’d be most useful. 6 Connect te Server = Consectto the fle server “Rob Griffahs! Power a) Mac G5." Consact as: @registered ser § Name: &oe Griffiths Password. | _ Remember password im keychain 2. (Gre) Gap No Guests Allowed if you're paranoid about security, disable File Sharing’s guest access mode. Once you've turned it off, this dimmed-out Guest button will greet any visitors, letting them know your machine is reserved for registered users only. In Mail, for example, if you have a long list of mes- sages, you can’t scroll through them by pressing page up and page down—those keys affect only the messages displayed in the preview pane, not those in the message list. And in Safari, if you're viewing your Bookmarks or History, page up and page down don’t work at all. But for both applications, a hidden keyboard short- cut can save you some scrolling time. Press and hold the control key before pressing page up or page down. You'll get page-at-a-time scrolling. Easily Edit Smart Mailboxes in Mail With Tiger, Apple has incorporated smart folders into many areas of OS X—the Finder, Address Book, and Mail, to be precise. Smart folders are a great way to consolidate information according to a set of rules you create. For example, you can create a smart mailbox—Mail’s version of the smart folder— containing only messages received in the last week that had attachments. ‘To edit a smart folder, you normally control-click on it and then choose Edit Smart Folder from the contextual menu. (In the Finder, you open the folder and then click on the Edit button). In Mail, though, you can take a shortcut: just double-click directly on the smart folder’s icon and you'll jump to edit mode. Recognize Speech in Less Space If you use OS X’s Speech Recognition feature, you're quite familiar with the floating bubble that manages the process. Unfortunately, if you’re working on a small screen, the floating bubble often seems to be located exactly where you don’t want it (see “Down. in Front”). There’s an easy solution, though. Mini- mize the speech bubble. Just double-click on the gray lines in the bottom half of the controller, and the bubble will glide into the Dock. Don’t worry—Speech Recognition will still work just as well. In fact, the icon even updates when you press the speech activation key and speak. Control the Finder’s File Sort Order If you used a Mac in the pre-OS X era, you probably continues ICON BY PAUL HOWALT MAC OS X HINTS Down in Front The speech bubble controls OS X's Speech Recog- nition feature. On the downside, it also often controls what you can see on your screen. But you can minimize the window to the Dock by double-clicking on it. learned the tricks of the trade for controlling the Finder’s file-name sort order. For instance, if you added a tilde (~) at the front of a file name, that file would jump to the end of the list in List view. Simi- larly, adding a space or underscore at the front of a file name would move the file to the top of a li In OS X, though, the rules have changed. The spe- cial characters that moved files to the end of the list in OS 9 move them to the front of the list in OS X. So what can you do if you want a certain file or group of files to appear at the end of a list? Ifyou’re running OS X 10.3 or 10.4, you could use the Labels feature to assign a label to each file, and then sort by label. But you may not want to look at colored file names all day long. The less colorful solution is to use one of four special characters at the front of the file’s name: HU (mu; option-M), Tt (pi; option-P), Q (omega; option-Z), or @ (the Apple-logo character; shift- option-K). Placing any of these characters at the start of a file’s name will force that file to the end of the list, in the order shown (pi is first in line and the apple logo is last). Banish the Dock without Killing It Do you hate OS X’s Dock? Although you can with relative ease kill the Dock for good, you’ll lose a num- ber of other services if you do, such as Exposé, the 1-tab application switcher, changeable desktop pic- tures, and more. A much better solution is to make the Dock invis- ible. You can do this by positioning the Dock at the top of the screen (yes, the top) and then hid- ing it. But how do you do this, since the Dock pref- erences only let you position it on the left, bottom, or right? To start off, make sure that the Dock isn’t hidden (Apple Menu: Dock: Turn Hiding Off). Launch ‘Ter- minal and type defaults write com.apple.Dock orientation-string top. After you press enter, nothing seems to happen. ‘To move the Dock to its new home, you need to restart it by typing sudo kill dock. When you press return, the Dock should vanish, and then reappear at the top of the screen (the Dock autorestarts when you quit it). The last step is to enable Dock hiding again via the Apple menu. The Dock is now hidden above your menu bar, and you'll find that it’s nearly impossible to activate it accidentally with the mouse. To do so, you have to hover in a very thin region just below the menu bar— or press 1-option-D to unhide the Dock. If you ever want the Dock back in its usual position, just choose a position from the Apple Menu’s Dock option, and the Dock will return to the chosen location without requiring a restart. Spend Less Time Folding Sheets Sheets are dialog boxes that gracefully slide out of a window’s title bar (see “Neat Sheets”), instead of floating freely in their own window. Their opening and closing animation is a thing of beauty. It’s also a huge time-waster when you consider how many times you'll open and close various sheets in a day’s work. You can make your machine feel much, much faster with a simple command in Terminal. Launch Termi- nal and type defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001. ‘This command changes the amount of time used to display a sheet’s animation from the default of two- tenths of a second (0.2) to one-thousandth of a second (0.001). In other words, sheets will appear and disap- pear instantly. To put the change into effect, quit and ne = rormerry Asad eed -_ = © teed anes - cae tee rate tree eomsgee Qriecone res A fi — |enenemms restart any running applications. After you do, test the change by calling for the Print sheet (1-P) in Text- Edit, and notice that it simply appears and disappears when closed—no more animation. You can also experiment with slower sheet dis- plays—try using a value of 1.5 or 2.0 instead of 0.001. While this setting isn’t one you'll want to keep (unless you enjoy working very slowly), it will show you the incredible detail in the animation. Once you’re done admiring it, rerun the command with your 0.001 value to get back up to speed. 1 Senior Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Pan- ther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004), and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site (www.macosxhints.com). Neat Sheets Sheets are dialog boxes that are attached directly to windows, as in this example of the Firefox browser's preferences. With a little effort, you can greatly speed their display. SECRETS BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints The Insiders’ Tips You Won’t Get from Apple Light Up Your Desktop The Desktop tab of the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane contains a Solid Colors option—just in case you're sick of the gorgeous full-color images and patterns Apple provides. At first glance, it looks as though you have 10 colors to pick from, but there are actually 11: if you click to the right of what appears to be the last color (Solid Mint), you’ll set your desktop to solid white. Why might you want a white desktop? It’s pos- sible that you just like white, of course, or maybe you want a neutral background behind a screenshot. But one interesting use of this setting is as an addi- tional light source for an iSight. If you’ve ever tried conducting a video chat in a dimly lit room, you’ve probably noticed that your face takes on a blue cast (from the standard Aqua background). Set the desk- top to all white, though, and you'll not only add light to the room but also prevent yourself from turning blue in the face. Group Movies with iPhoto Smart Albums Apple’s iPhoto (part of the iLife ’05 suite, $79; www .apple.com) isn’t just for photos anymore—it can also store most movie clips. Given the program’s organi- zational strengths, this is a great way to keep track of Q CHECK IT OUT Extend Safari’s History Safari's History menu lets you easily revisit sites you've seen recently, The key word here is recently—by default, Safari stores the last 100 sites visited within the last seven days. But if you'd like to keep a longer history, you can. With Terminal, it’s easy. Quit Safari and launch Terminal (/Applications/Utilities). Type this command: defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitHistoryItemLimit 9999. Press return. Then type this command and press return: defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitHistoryAgeInDaysLimit 365. The first line tells Safari to remember 9,999 items; the second tells it to remember things for up to a year. That's it. Now you'll find that your history file just keeps grow- ing and growing and growing. One caveat is that large history files can really slow Safari down. To set a differ- ent time period, just change the 3 6 5 in the second line to a smaller number of days you'd like to record in your history, and reduce the number of items to a level that suits your browsing habits. For instance, 30 sites a day for 90 days would be 2,700 entries. Movie Magic Using this special smart album, you can easily collect all your movie clips in iPhoto 5—clips marked with the Movie keyword and unmarked clips those 30-second snippets you record with your digi- tal camera. Here are a couple of ways to use iPhoto 5°5 skills to organize your clips further. First, iPhoto automatically attaches the keyword Movie to imported movie clips. That makes it easy to use a smart album to find movies. Just select File: New Smart Album, or press 1-option-N. Give the album a name, and set the three pop-up menus to read Keyword Is Movie. Click on OK when you're done, and you'll have a new smart album that con- tains all marked movies. But what if you've been playing around with key- words and you've unmarked some imported movies? In that case, you can modify the smart album to find movies by their file type as well. Control-click on the smart album and select Edit Smart Album from the contextual menu. In the sheet that appears, click on the plus sign (+) next to the first rule. Create a new rule and set the conditions to Filename Con- tains .avi (including the dot). Click on the plus sign again and create new versions of this rule, changing just the file-name portion each time—add a rule for files ending in mov, mp4, and .mpg. You need each file to match only one of these conditions, so go to the Match pop-up menu at the top of the sheet and select the Any option. Click on OK (see “Movie Magic”). This revised rule will find a// the movies in your iPhoto database. Quickly Size iPhoto Thumbnails If you’re an iPhoto 5 user, three keyboard shortcuts can save time and make iPhoto more responsive. In Edit mode, press 0, 1, or 2 to change the zoom level ‘ONS BY PRUL HOWALT ‘Sunshine Stickies If you have a bit of time and an image- editing pro- gram, you can free yourself from pastel- hued Stickies notes. of your image—0 zooms the image to the largest size that will fit in the window, 1 makes one pixel on your screen equal to one pixel in your image, and 2 makes two pixels on your screen equal to one pixel in your image (a 2x zoom, in other words). You can also use these shortcuts in normal Browse mode, though the keys have different effects. Pressing the 0 key produces very small thumbnails. Pressing the 1 key sets each image’s thumbnail size to fill the avail- able space. Pressing the 2 key displays thumbnails at their native resolutions (240 pixels in either height or width). This last shortcut offers a huge speed boost; when iPhoto displays thumbnails at their native res lutions, it doesn’t have to waste time scaling them, so thumbnails appear very quickly. Change the Stickies Widget’s Colors Tiger’s Dashboard application lets you instantly access a number of useful utilities (Apple calls them widgets), including weather, stock charts, iCal events, and more. One of the included widgets is Stickies, a Dashboard version of the longtime Mac application. While the widget is great, you may tire of its pastel tones (accessed by clicking on the small letter / in the lower right corner of the note). Luckily, they’re quite easy to change, although you'll lose some of the stock colors when you add your own. To do so, you'll need an image-editing program, such as Lemke Software’s GraphicConverter or Adobe Photoshop, that sup- ports PNG images. In the Finder, navigate to the top-level /Library/ Widgets folder. Control-click on the Stickies widget and choose Show Package Contents from the contex- tual menu. In the new window that opens, navigate into the Images folder. Here you'll find each of the col- ors used in the Stickies widget. You'll need to decide which color you don’t mind losing. If you want to change the default Stickies color, use the yellow.png file; otherwise, choose a color that you don’t use very often. Once you’ve decided on a color, drag and drop it onto the desktop to create a copy. (Leave the Finder window open; you'll use it again shortly.) Duplicate the file on your desktop by pressing 1-D, and keep the duplicate copy a) UNIX TIP OF THE MONTH Make Terminal Output More Humane There are three very handy Unix commands for looking at the stuff on your drive. If you delve into Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) at all, you're probably familiar with 3, which lists the contents of a folder. But you may not be aware of ae, which reports on total disk-space utilization, and du, which shows disk usage at the folder level. Though each of these tools is useful in its own right, they don’t necessarily present ‘the output in the most user-friendly format. Consider the du command. If you run du /usr/1ocal, the output will include something like this: 25056 ./php/bin 80 -/php/doc/Libiconv 80 —. /php/doc The first number shows the size of each folder, stated in the arcane measurement system of file system block usage. While that may be useful for the ultrageek, it doesn’t give you a real sense of folder size. Enter the -h option. This flag, which you can add to du, dé, and &, is the human-readable flag. For example, if you changed the previous example to du -h /usr/local, you'd get output that included the following: 12M ./php/bin 40K — ./php/doc/libiconv 40K ./php/doc It's now much clearer that the bin folder takes up 12M, or 12MB, of your hard drive. The abbreviations you're likely to see, in addition to m (for megabytes), are K (kilobytes), 8 (bytes), and c (gigabytes). As you play with the human-readable option, you'll probably find that 1s -Ih is a much more useful version of 1s 1 (the 2 in both commands gets you long output, which includes file-size information). If you'd like to make it easier to use the com- mand often, create a new alias for it. This sets up a shortcut that types the modified command for you. To do this, put a .bash_profile file in your Home folder by typing pico ~/.bash profile. (If the file already exists, this command will just edit it.) Then add this line: alias Ist="Is -Ih". When you're done, press control-X, and then press Y to indicate that you want to save the changes. Finally, press return to save the file. The next time you open a Terminal window, you'll be able to type just 1sh to run the human-readable version of the command. The command 1sh ~/Documents, for instance, will show your Documents folder in its full human-readable form. ina safe location. You'll need this backup if you ever decide to revert to the original color. Next, open the original image in your image- editing program. Here you can do basically anything you want—add gradients and text, for instance (see “Sunshine Stickies”). Once you're done editing, save the file back to the desktop, using the same name as the original and applying the PNG format. Switch back to the Finder. Drag and drop your mod- ified file into the still-open Images folder. When you do so, the Finder will tell you that you can’t move the item because you can’t modify the Images folder. Click on Authenticate. When asked, choose to replace the origi- nal file. Enter your password when prompted. And that’s it. Reactivate Dashboard by pressing F12. Click on the plus sign (+) in the corner of the screen to bring up the Dashboard bar. Drag the Stick ies widget off the bar to create a new S ‘s instance. Click on the i button to turn the Stickies note over, continues MAC OS X HINTS Zi OS X 101 Secrets of the Dock, Part 1 The Dock is OS X's command center. Although it seems to be a simple thing, it has more features than you might imagine, and it has power over things you might not expect it to. The Dock lets you know which programs are running (any application with a black triangle underneath its icon). It lets you store applications for easy launching. (Drag the application from the Finder into the left side of the Dock.) And it allows you to store folders, other objects, and—temporarily—program windows in its right pane. Custom Dock You alter the Dock’s behavior through the Dock preference pane. This is where you can control the Dock’s size, magnification (whether it uses the zoom-in effect when you mouse over an icon), screen position, and bouncing-icon effect, and it's where you choose whether it remains visible at all times. You can also set some of these items by choosing Apple: Dock or by using the hidden contextual menu in the Dock itself. Just control-click anywhere near the Dock’s dividing line, and you'll see a secret pop-up menu that offers the same entries as the Apple menu item. And each icon in the Dock has a contextual menu associated with it. You can activate these menus by clicking and holding on the icon for a second. To avoid the delay, con- trol-click on the icon, or use the right mouse button if you have a multibutton mouse. In OS X 10.3 (Panther), the standard contextual-menu options let you choose any pro- gram’s open window, show the program in the Finder, hide its windows, or quit it. OS X 10.4 (Tiger) also lets you add the program to your login items—a handy time-saver. Application-Specific Tricks Some programs may have additional useful fea- tures buried in their contextual menus. The iTunes menu, for instance, includes infor- mation on the currently playing song, and it lets you switch tracks or pause the player. This is a great way to manage your music without having to stop what you're doing. (Contextual-menu selections from the Dock don’t activate the associated application.) System Preferences’ contextual menu lets you quickly select any preference pane, which is great when you know exactly what you want to do. Click on other programs’ Dock icons to see what they have to offer (see “Pop-up Mail"). Dock Shortcuts Want to find a docked program in the Finder without using the con- textual menus? Just 1 -click on the icon: the folder holding the program will open in a Finder window. To hide the current program's windows when Pop-up Mail The Docks useful options vary by switching to another program, —_ application. Mail's contextual menu lets you hold down the option key compose a message or check for new messages. before clicking on the new pro- gram’s Dock icon. You can hide all open windows, other than the next program you'll use, by pressing 1-option and clicking on the icon of the program you want to switch to. To restart the Finder, hold down the option key, and then click and hold on the Finder icon. You'll see a Relaunch entry at the bottom of the pop-up menu. This is different from clicking and holding on the Finder icon and then pressing the option key: that changes the Hide option to Hide Others (the latter works for any program in the Dock, and it changes Quit to Force Quit for everything but the Finder). Big Dock, Little Dock Sure, you can resize the Dock by dragging the vertical bar that splits the two sides. But the Dock also has a series of preferred sizes. If your com- puter relies on these predrawn icons, it doesn’t have to spend time interpolating (or guessing) what an icon should look like, based on the nearest defined size. Using the preferred sizes makes your icons appear sharper. Hold down the option key before dragging the divider line; the Dock will resize in steps, showing only its preferred sizes. Next month, we'll discuss the right side of the Dock and some of the great things you can do over there. Logical Keywords Using iPhoto's ability to exclude certain keywords, you can build powerful searches, Here, I'm selecting only New York City images that don’t deal with kids or vacations. and then choose your modified color (if you changed the default yellow, you can skip this step). You may lose your changes during system upgrades, so keep a copy of all your modified colors in a backup directory. To undo these changes, drag the original file into the Images folder and authenticate as required. Just make sure that this file has the same name as the modified color you're trying to replace. Soup Up iPhoto 5 Keyword Searches If you take a lot of photos, iPhoto’s Keywords feature can make finding the right ones a lot easier. For instance, select a bunch of photos from your most recent vacation, make sure the Keywords tion of iPhoto is visible (click on the small key icon), and then drag the selected photos onto the Vacation key- word. Now you'll be able to find these in a snap. One of iPhoto 5’s nicer features is that it lets you search for images using more than one keyword. Click on the keywords you'd like to include (they'll turn blue), and iPhoto will run an AND search, find- ing all photos that have all highlighted keywords. But what if you want to run a search that excludes one or more keywords? For example, you want to see pic- tures of Aunt Jeanne at your birthday party, but not those with Uncle Jeff hovering in the background. Here’s the secret: option-click on the keyword you want to exclude. The chosen keyword(s) will now appear in red, not blue (see “Logical Keywords”). iPhoto will find images that have the chosen (blue) keywords but not the unwanted (red) keywords. In the previous example, you'd click on the Birthday Party and Aunt Jeanne keywords, and then option-click on the Uncle Jeff keyword. Using this technique, you can quickly find the photos you'd like to see—but for maximum flexibility, assign your key- words liberally when you import new pictures. You can assign keywords by clicking on the small key icon in the main iPhoto window and then dragging images onto the keyword you'd like to assign to those pictures. (1 Senior Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Panther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004), and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site (www.macosxhints.com). ICON BY PAUL HOWALT SECRETS BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints The Insiders’ Tips You Won’t Get from Apple Clean Up Text Using Summarize Service Have you ever come across a selection of text you’d like to keep—for example, a how-to on a Web page or an article on your local paper’s site? You may have tried copying it and pasting it into TextEdit or Stick- ies, only to end up with the text and all its distracting formatting, links, and spacing. Here’s a quick and easy workaround. If the program you're using supports OS X’s Ser- vices feature (as is the case for most Apple apps, as well as The Omni Group’s products and Bare Bones’ BBEdit), you can use the Summarize service to clean up the text for easy saving. Start by selecting the text within the source application, and then choose appli- cation name: Servict A new window will open, and you'll see a cleaned- up version of your text. Next, move the Summary Size slider to the 100% mark; this will force the ser- vice to show every word in your original selection. ‘Then press 1-C to copy the text to the Clipboard (it’s already all selected by default), switch to your final destination (a Stickies note, a Word document, or whatever), and press 1-V to paste. Q. CHECK IT OUT Trash Images in a Flash Apple's Preview tool is a useful way to scan and review | ie 4 a bunch of images quickly. Select them all in the Finder and then drag and drop them onto Preview. The application opens one main window with a side drawer that contains image thumbnails. Click on any thumbnail to view the full-size version. Typi- cally, you might then make note of the ones you SS don’t want to keep, switch to the Finder, and send the unwanted images to the Trash. Here's a time-saver—instead of deleting images from the Finder, delete them right from within Preview. Just drag the image you don’t want directly from the drawer to the Trash. You can drag only one image at a time, but this is still faster than switching to the Finder to get rid of images. You can also drag images to other locations from Preview's drawer—directly into Photoshop for addi- tional editing, for example, or into other Finder folders to create copies. If the text isn’t in a Services-aware application, drop it into TextEdit as your first step. If you have TextEdit in Plain Text mode (go to TextEdit: Preferences), doing so will get rid of almost all the formatting. Using the Summarize service will then remove any remaining excess line breaks and other oddities. Enter URLs Quickly in OmniWeb 5 Autocompletion of URLs can be a real time-saver in browsers. If you’ve visited www.cnn.com before, for instance, you'll probably only have to type cn before your browser figures out that you’re heading there again, and it will complete the URL for you. Most browsers complete starting from the front of the URL only, but The Omni Group’s OmniWeb 5 ($30; www.omnigroup.com) also autocompletes from the end of the URL. So if you often visit a deeply buried page on a large site (www.example_bank.com/ balances/checking/jun05/, for instance), you can type only the end of the URL (juno05), and Omni- Web will fill in the entire address for you. Preview Multiple Fonts with Font Book and Exposé Do you work with a large number of typefaces and often add new ones to your system? Do you wish you had an easy way to preview a number of them simultaneously without first installing them? You can preview a font without installing it by double-clicking on it in the Finder, or by dragging and dropping the font onto Font Book’s icon (either in the Dock or in the Applications folder). Drag and drop multiple fonts at the same time, and Font Book opens a new preview window for each one. Unfortunately, Font Book cascades these windows, so you can see only one ata time. Using Exposé, though, you can easily review all the previewed fonts at one time. Just press F10, the Exposé Application Windows keystroke, and the windows will arrange themselves across your screen. As long as you haven’t opened more fonts than your monitor can fit, you'll be able to see enough detail to determine which fonts you want (see “Line ’em Up”). To install a font, just click on its window to make it come to the foreground, and then click on the Install button. Press F10 again, select the next font, and repeat. ICONS BY PAUL HOWALT Line ‘em Up Using Font Book by itself to oo — preview many fonts c= 8 © | simultaneously is diffi | ACPEPCHEIKEI cult 0. So press F10 soransTtvwxYs x ‘abedesqhijicim to access Exposé's weparnevexys Application Windows a Ei maaserave mode @ and clearly ee | Preview each font in its own window. ee roe — 8 ABCOEFGNLIKLN - MOPQRS TUVWXYZ aed sbcdet ght jieln al | noparstuvexye — “Eésersse | Asoeramma - — oot ese uséTIM NOPORSTUVAKYZ a ate aboktyqer oo ———; TR ae serensttverrs ete faith tow Add the Latest Java Support to Mozilla Browsers If you use a browser other than Safari or OmniWeb, you might find that there’s a slew of interesting Java- based Web apps you can't see. For instance, the physics applets at www.walter-fendt.de/ph14e won’t work in Mozilla-based browsers such as Foxfire, Camino, or Mozilla (all free; www.mozilla.com). Why? The Mozilla-based browsers don’t use the latest version of the Java Virtual Machine. (See macworld.com/0380 for the deeply technical explana- tion if you’re interested.) Thanks to the open- source nature of the Mozilla browsers, though, this problem has a solution. Start by visiting the Java plug-in site (macworld .com/0381). Download the latest available package by clicking on the file name below the Latest File Releases header. A new Web page will appear. Click on the first entry (javaplugin) in the Latest File Releases list. As of this writing, the file is called JavaEmbeddingPlugin0.9.0.zip. After the download completes, quit your Mozilla- based browser and open the JavaEmbeddingPlugin folder. Open the Binaries folder inside, and then drag and drop the two files located there (JavaEmbedding- Plugin.bundle and MRJPlugin.plugin) into your Mac’s top-level Library/Internet Plug-Ins folder. You may have to create this folder if you haven’t installed Internet plug-ins before. Before you can use the plug-in, you need to check one last thing. Its functionality depends on the order in which your plug-ins load: the MJRPlugin.plugin continues (#) UNIX TIP OF THE MONTH Quick-Access Encyclopedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a large, community-driven encyclopedia. Any- ‘one can add new records or modify existing ones. The idea is that over time com- munity members correct each other, and you'll wind up with a very detailed col- lection of facts. It may not be the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, but it's a great starting point for learning. However, loading the Web site, entering your search terms, and clicking on the search button can be time-consuming. Lo and behold, by writing a simple script, you can run your queries from a Terminal window instead. Unix holds executable programs in a folder called bin, so go ahead and create a bin folder in your Home directory, at the same level as Documents, Pictures, and so forth. You can do this via the Finder or type mkdir ~/bin in Terminal. Once you've created this folder, make sure Unix knows about it when it looks for programs to run. In Terminal, create a file named .bash_profile in your home folder (or edit that file if it already exists). Start by typing pico .bash profile. Next, add the line export PATH=~/bin:$PATH. Now press control-O (for Write Out) and then press return (to save the file). Then press control-X to exit the pico editor. Close and reopen your Terminal window; this will read the newly created .bash_profile file, telling Unix to look in your local bin folder for executable files. All that's left to do is to create the Wikipedia script. Type cd ~/bin, press return, type pico wp, and press return again. You're now editing the new script. Enter the following two lines: #!/bin/bash open http: //en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Special :Search? search=$ (echo $@ | sed 's/\ /+/s") When you're done, the entry should look like the image in “Wild Wiki Ways.” As before, press control-O, return, and then control-X to save the file and quit the editor. The final step is to turn your script into an executable file. To do this, type chmod +x wp. Press return to turn those two lines of text into a simple program. To use your new script, just type wp some text to search for and press return. Replace same text to search for with your search topic. Short phras- @S—wp racehorse Of wp macintosh, for example—will probably lead to broader results. When you press return, your default browser will open and load the Wikipedia results page for your search terms. Here's a short bonus tip: If you've already installed a text-mode browser such as links or lynx (fink.sourceforge.net), then modify the above script so that the results dis- play directly in your browser. Just replace the second line of the script with this text, replacing lynx with links if appropriate: lymx http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Special Search? search=$ (echo $@ | sed 's/ /+/g') Tervinal = poco = Baxdé = #2 1 otevbash pen bete://en. wikipedta.org/wiki/Spectol Searcr?searcheb(echo BE | sad '3/\ /4/g") Arteeoue duatity Gut Text Untut Text Read rile JB prev ry Gur res Moore ix JB Next Py To Spell Wild Wiki Ways With this simple two-line script, you can use Terminal to browse entries quickly on the community-built encyclopedia Web site known as Wikipedia. MAC OS X HINTS Zl OS X 101 Sidebar Savvy As of OS X 10.3, Apple added something new to the left side of every Finder win- dow: the sidebar. You can activate items in the sidebar with one click, as opposed to the double-click required in a normal Finder window. In its stock form, the side- bar contains useful time-savers, but if you customize it to fit the way you work, it can become a truly useful tool. Take a look and you'll see that the sidebar has two halves, separated by a light gray line. (Can't see the sidebar? Double-click on the small dot located on the left side of your Finder window). The upper half contains icons for your computer; hard drives and partitions; and any connected servers and removable media, such as CDs or your iDisk. You can store pretty much anything you like in the lower half, but by default it contains shortcuts to your main user folders, including Desktop, Docu- ments, Movies, Music, and Pictures. It also contains a shortcut to the systemwide Applications folder. To make your sidebar more useful, go to the Finder: Preferences menu, select the Sidebar tab, and deselect any of the items you don't want to see. Alternatively, you can remove shortcuts by dragging their icons off the sidebar and dropping them into the normal Finder window—when you release the mouse button, the shortcut will vanish in a puff of smoke. Don't worry—only the shortcut gets erased, not the original item. To add something to the sidebar, drag and drop it into position (see “Places, Everyone!”). You can add anything to the bottom portion, including files, folders, and appli- cations. For example, do you have a particular file you use regularly, such as your Quicken data file or a presentation you reference often? If so, consider giving it a spot on the sidebar. Deeply buried folders are also good candidates. Instead of opening a whole bunch of folders to reach the depths of your filing system, jump to the right spot with one click. Likewise, store frequently used applications in the sidebar, and you won't have to make a trip to the Dock to activate them. If you're choosing between the sidebar and the toolbar, here are a couple of things to keep in mind: The relative size and position of shortcuts in the sidebar will change with the window size, but they will stay put in the toolbar. Shortcuts in the sidebar support pop-open folders, but those in the toolbar do not. You might want to consider keeping your application and document shortcuts in the toolbar, and your folder shortcuts in the sidebar. For more-advanced sidebar tricks in previous Mac OS X Hints, see the tip on viewing paths when using folders from the sidebar (July 2004); the advice on using a superskinny sidebar (November 2004); and the very cool but very advanced tip on colorizing the side- * Ta were aie ~ eee ms CES ay a ar's backgroun S7tse (lanuary 2005). Be cent Qu Places, Everyone! rere + Adding an item Gan to the sidebar is easy; simply drag and drop it from a normal Finder win- dow into place. ; narvenemre use Fo ® eo | = ‘ | Scents You can store files, yaa folders, and even [°y cxcasien applications here. 6 de c When you want to = remove an item, iw 4 5 t cwewne, owemors just drag it off the ~ °) sidebar and watch it disappear. a Be tees 8 O enite file must load before two Apple-provided files, Java Applet.plugin and Java Applet Plugin Enabler. To ensure that this is the case, view the Plug-Ins folder by date (choose View: As List, then click once on the Date Modified column header to order the files from newest to oldest). If MRJPlugin. plugin is listed above the other two files, you're home free. If it’s not, open Terminal, type touch "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/MRJPlugin -plugin", and press return. You’ve just changed the plug-in’s date stamp to the present date and time; it will now appear at the top of the list in the Finder. Launch your Mozilla-based browser again and load the physics site mentioned earlier. You'll find that the applets now all work as expected. Skip Clicking on Samples in the iTunes Music Store Listening to 30-second song snippets at the iTunes Music Store is a great way to get acquainted with a new band. Just search for an artist’s songs and then click on each song in turn to get a sense for the artist’s sound. But all this clicking just to get an earful can bea pain. ‘The following AppleScript takes care of that prob- lem. Open Script Editor (in Applications/Utilities), and type in the following code: cm idle qd tell return 29.5 end idle Select File: Save, give your new script a name, and select Application from the File Format pop-up menu. Choose the Stay Open option. It doesn’t matter where you save the script; you just want to store it where you can get to it quickly. (Consider dragging it to the Dock, the sidebar, or the toolbar for truly fast access.) Now visit the iTunes Music Store and search for something. In the results box, double-click on the first sample. Before the clip ends, switch to the Finder and launch your saved script. When you do, iTunes will jump to the next sample, play it for 29.5 seconds, and keep going until all samples have played. Yes, you’ll miss the last 0.5 seconds of each one, but there’s a good reason this figure is set below 30 sec- onds. If you set the script at 30 seconds, iTunes will reach the end of the first sample and stop. By using a value just below 30 seconds, iTunes doesn’t quite fin- ish playing, so it jumps to the next sample. Since you selected the Stay Open option, this script will keep working until you quit it. Contributing Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Panther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004), and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site (www.macosxhints.com). 2 SECRETS BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints Redistribute your .Mac storage, mark e-mail addresses for unspecified domains in Mail, change the order for List-view columns, burn more data onto CD-Rs, and create a navigable pop-up disk-drive folder in the Dock. Choose How to Allocate Your .Mac Storage When Apple increased storage for .Mac accounts from 100MB to 250MB, it didn’t clearly explain how to change the way that space was divided between iDisk and your .Mac e-mail. Start by log- ging in to your account at www.mac.com. Then click on your login name in the top menu (right next to Log Out); .Mac will ask you to enter your password again, and then it'll take you to the Account Settings page. Click on the Storage Settings button, and you can then use the Manage Your Storage pop-up menu on the next screen to control how your 250MB is divided—choose a ratio that makes sense for your (@) UNIX TIP OF THE MONTH Utilize Extra Space on CD-Rs When you burn a CD-R from the Finder, you may be wasting precious space. Many CD-Rs today ship with 700MB of capacity, yet the Finder will only use 670MB of that space. How, then, can you use the extra space? It requires a quick trip to Ter- minal, but the answer is pretty simple. Start by creating a new folder in the Finder, and then drag in all the items you wish to burn (up to 700MB). Open Terminal and type cd ~/Desktop; then press the enter key (this changes Terminal’s active directory to your user's Desktop folder). Now type hdiutil makehybrid -o myburn.iso (note that there's a space after the o in | iso), but don’t press enter. Instead, switch to the | Finder, drag and drop the folder you just created onto | the Terminal window, and press enter. Terminal | _ should fill in the full path to the folder, and the enter key will then execute the command. What have you just done? You've just used the haiutit. Unix command to create a hybrid disk image named myburn.iso (you can choose whatever name you like, but use .iso for the extension). You'll see the message “Creating hybrid image” in your Terminal window, as well as an indication of the task’s eZ progress. When finished, you should see a disk image called Se myburn. iso on your desktop. x You can now either use Disk Utility to burn this image, or you can just type hatiautit burn ~/Desktop/myburn. iso in Terminal—insert a blank CD-R when prompted, and then just sit back and wait. When it's done, you should have a burned CD-R with needs. As a general rule, you'll probably find that the minimum allocation of 1SMB is more than suf- ficient for e-mail; this leaves 235MB free for all your glorious photo galleries. See Warnings for Unspecified Domains in Apple’s Mail Application In Mac OS X 10.3% Mail app, you can visually differ- entiate outbound messages that are headed for a domain other than one you specify (as long as the recipients are in your Address Book). This can be useful if, for example, your company requires that you add a confidentiality signature to e-mail messages bound for people outside the office. To enable the option, just select the Mark Addresses Not In This Domain option in the Composing tab of Mail's pref erences. Type in the domain you want to use as the control, and press the enter key. From now on, if you address a new message to recipients outside your con- trol domain, those addresses will turn red as soon as you tab out of the To field. While this is quite useful, what if you want to specify more than one safe domain? Although Apple doesn’t clearly document this feature, you can add multiple domains to the option’s field—just enter each one and follow it with a comma (see “Outside My Domain”). Even though you can’t see all the domains, Mail will include them—a message composed to any domain not on the list will result in the same red address in the To field. (eka) Composing eS hom © ws 4Ai\4 mm » General Accounts Junk Mail Fonts & Colors Viewing Composing Signatures Rules Format: (Plain Text 1) check speting as ype Catways (Ce: BB) myself ‘Addressing: (4 Automatically complete addresses (Configure LDAP. {ven sending toa grou, show ll member {& Mark addresses not in this domain:| mac. Responding: “Use the same message format as the original Quote the text of the original message increase quote level ‘When quoting text in replies or forwards: O include all of the original message = @ include selected text if any, otherwise include all @ Outside My Domain Apple's Mail can warn you when you've addressed a message to a domain other than those you specify as your controls. Change the Order of Folders Sorted by ae presets Q. CHECK IT OUT If you use List view and sort a folder’s contents by Kind, you'll see that any folders within the folder : : are alphabetically sorted right into the middle ofthe | Create a Fully Functional Drive mix—since their kind is Folder. To most people, PQp-Upp Menu in the Dock however, folders are special entities and shouldn’t be sorted with other files in the folder. Here’s how to You can use any folder you store after the divider mark in the Dock as a navigable make all your folders go to the top (or bottom) of pop-up menu. Just click and hold on the folder, and a new window showing the the list when sorted by Kind. folder’s contents will appear; any folders within that folder will pop open when you roll the cursor over them. This works fine—for everything except your Volumes Ttbeaized.svings i i aan i CX folder, which contains all your hard drives, CD-ROMs, and other mounted media Bc a, devices (you can open this folder in the Finder by selecting Go: Go To Folder and aopticetion" = “toptication entering /Volumes). If you try putting your Volumes folder in the Dock, you'll find opiicotion" = "Classic Application that your boot disk is hierarchical and that other volumes and CD-ROMs are not. But by using the power of Folder Action Scripts, you can easily create a self-updating, fully navigable Dock pop-up folder. Start by creating an empty folder called MyDrives in your Documents folder "Unix Executeble "Volume" = "Vol “Unix Executoble File”s "We Docunene™ = “Document”; : 3 Bs : ss os rt (you might also want to give this folder a nice hard-drive icon from www.xicons LAUNCH. CONSENT. DOCUMENT. HEADLINE = "The doc sn aren Hevewrongatsn pie fag Se-sarradl Whit magrenat nok tet dtty .com). Next, download the Update Drive List script at find. macworld.com/0192. sed eteey ch Wd ci ait earraaldoaaton souerwioandi Double-click on it to open it in Script Editor, and replace usernamehere in ASS sen op tense Soe Fer Ai Len Ss Ans gaat’ yes the first line with your user name, Save the script and click on the Run button. inant £0 open this opplication?”; “LAUNCH CONSENT.BODY" = “The opplication is located in the folder ‘IF you were not expecting this application to open, click Cancel"; “LAUNCK_CONSENT.OK" “Open”; LAUNCH_CONSENT_CANCEL” Then move the script to your user's Library: Scripts: Folder Action Scripts folder (create the last two folders if necessary). This script takes care of updating your MyDrives folder when you insert or remove an ejectable drive, such as a CD-ROM Sort My Folders Add a space to the Folders line (highlighted or FireWire device. ‘Concel"; above) in this deeply buried system file, and your folders will In the Finder, choose Go: Go To Folder, and enter /volumes. Control-click on the float to the top of lists sorted by Kind. Volumes folder and choose Configure Folder Actions. In the dialog box that appears, make sure that the Enable Folder Actions option is selected, and then click on the plus- ‘The hardest part of this hint is navigating to the sign (+) button at the bottom left. In the Open dialog box that appears, press 1-shift- file you need to edit. In the Finder, go to System: Genter /volumes again, click on Goto, and then click on Open. You'll see a pop-up Library: Frameworks: ApplicationServices.framework: list of scripts to attach; select the script you just put in the Folder Action Scripts folder Versions: A: Frameworks: LaunchServices.framework: (it should be near the top), and click on the Attach button. You can close the Folder Versions: A: Resources. Whew. Within that folder, Actions window when it reappears. you'll see the English.Iproj folder. Highlight it, and Drag your MyDrives folder into the Dock, and you're done. You've now got a fully then select File: Get Info. In the Ownership & Per- navigable pop-up folder that will always show your currently mounted drives (see missions area, click on the Details triangle, click on the “Show Me the Path”). Note that every time the script runs, it sends the old aliases to lock icon, and then click on the Owner pop-up menu __ the Trash. So if you often mount or unmount CDs, FireWire drives, and the like, your and set it to your user name (enter your password if Trash will get pretty bloated. asked). Leave this window open; you'll be changing it : back in just a minute. gy Inside the English.lproj folder is a file named Localized.strings. Drag it onto TextEdit. Find the 4 Adobe Solutions Network i $ "Folder" = "Folder"; i 3 Adobe(R) PhotoshopiR) Elements line that reads der! Folder"; and insert a Butea prasnin uemeeea space before the F in the second Folder (see “Sort Ti Adobe Support info. pdf Customer Support ‘@ thelibrary My Folders”). To sort folders to the bottom of eee ren Coen mrieones a Ls Goodies 2 xperimental the list instead of the top, you'll have to use one of B How To install.hem! boxtatic four special characters: [ (mu), T (pi), Q (omega), ‘ Install Adobe Photoshop Elements. D show m Finder “5 Photoshop Elements 3.0 ReadMe or @ (the Apple-logo character)—see Mac OS X Hints, November 2004, for more information). Save the file, approving any dialog boxes that may re — appear. In the Get Info window that you left Show Me the Path Create an autoupdating Dock folder that contains your open, change Owner back to System and then close mounted volumes to navigate to anything, anywhere, with a simple click-and-hold. the window. Now you need to restart your computer—these values are read only at startup, so a simple logout and _ Contributing Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, login won't do the trick. Once you've restarted, you'll Panther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004) and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site © be rewarded with improved sorting. (1) (wwnumacosshints com). ICONS BY PAUL HOWALT SECRETS BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints The Insiders’ Tips You Won’t Get from Apple Quickly Add Titles to iPhoto Images When you're working with Apple’s iPhoto 5 ($79 as part of iLife; www.apple.com), the left- and right- arrow keys are useful keyboard shortcuts for moving from one photo to the next. But if you’re working in the Information panel (click on the small / in the lower left corner) to set titles, dates, times, comments, and so on, you'll find that the arrow keys no longer switch photos. Instead, they allow you to move within the text you're modifying. This makes changing informa- tion for multiple photos difficult, since you're forced to use the mouse to move between them. ‘There are, however, two not-so-obvious shortcuts that can save you some mousing time. After you’ve clicked on one of the Information panel’s text fields, () UNIX TIP OF THE MONTH oa Examine Your Battery’s Lifeline Ever wish you could get more information about the state of your N » laptop's battery? The Unix command ioreg displays the contents of the 1/0 Kit registry, which contains a ton of information about your machine. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) and type ioreg -1 | more. You'll see data on everything from CPUs to peripherals. Buried deep in the output is information about your battery's overall health and cur- rent charge, but it's not easy to find on your own. Instead, let the Unix search tool grep do all the hard work for you. Just use this command: doreg -w0 -1 | grep Capacity The -w0 flag tells icreg not to truncate the output lines, and the 3 flag is the tis: command, which is what actually generates the output. The pipe symbol ( )) then sends the output to grep, which searches for any line containing the word Capacity. The output will look something like this: I|| "IoBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=3971, "Amperage" =18446744073709550895,"Cycle Count"=61, "Current"=2160, "Voltage"=11370, "Flags"=4, "AbsoluteMaxCapacity"=4200}) What does it all mean? The values you care about are Cycle Count (the number of times the battery has gone through a discharge-charge cycle), Current (the current charge in the battery), Capacity (the highest charge the battery can hold), and AbsoluteMaxCapaci ty (the battery's original highest-charge value). As your battery ages, the Capacity value will slowly decline in relation to AbsoluteMaxCapacity—the battery is losing its ability to take a full charge. If a bat- tery is giving you very short usage cycles, you may need to replace it. You can find out by checking the capacity value. The Cycle Count value shows what remains of your battery's useful life. Studies indicate that PowerBook-style batteries have a useful life of between 300 and 500 cycles. just use 1-[ (left square bracket) and 1-] (right square bracket) to move to the previous and next images, respectively. Your cursor stays in the text field you were working in, so it’s easy to quickly update infor- mation for a large number of photos (see “Quick Pics Info”). Note that if you’re setting the field to exactly the same value for every photo in your selection, it’s faster to select Photos: Batch Change. Add Photos to iPhoto 5 via the Dock In earlier versions of iPhoto, you could add images to the library in only two ways: by using the Import fea- ture, or by dragging and dropping images directly into the iPhoto library. Both of these techniques required that iPhoto be running. In iPhoto 5, there’s another option: drag and drop an image, or a group of images, onto the program’s Dock icon. You can do this even if iPhoto isn’t running, and it works from most applications—drag an image out of Microsoft Word, say, and onto iPhoto 5’s Dock icon, and the image joins the library. Unfortunately, this trick won’t work with Apple’s Safari or Mozilia’s Firefox; if you want to put Web images in your iPhoto library from one of these browsers, you'll have to save the images to your disk from the browser and then import them into iPhoto. Fine-tune Fonts in iPhoto 5 Books The Settings button in iPhoto 5’s Book toolbar lets you control a photo book’s font particulars—you can. set the font size and type for the cover title and sub- title, headings, and more. But you’re not limited to just this kind of global control. Once you've created your book, you can modify any text as you see fit—just press 1-T to bring up the Font panel, select some text, and change the size, color, shad- ow, and so on. Since iPhoto sends a book as a series of images, not text, to the print house, what you see on screen will be what you get back from the printer. Alert Others to iCal Events If you're an iCal user, you're probably familiar with the alarm function—you can set up alarms that alert you to upcoming events via a pop-up message or via an e-mail message sent to the address stored in your own Address Book entry. Therein lies the rub—for whatever reason, iCal will not let you send alarms to e-mail addresses other than yours. This might make sense for personal events, but if you use iCal to track your whole family’s Q. CHECK IT OUT Don’t Settle for Standard Finder Font Sizes When you view a folder's contents in the Finder, you can customize the font size by choosing View: Show View Options (1 -]). However, you're limited to text between 10 and 16 points in size. What if you'd like a smaller or larger size? For instance, a smaller font will show many more entries when you're in Column view (see “20/20 Vision Required"). A larger font might be useful if you use Icon view or have a limited number of items on your desktop. If you edit the Finder's preferences, you can choose font sizes outside of Apple's predefined range. To start, navigate to /your user folder/Library/ Preferences, find com.apple-finderoplist in the long list of files, and drag and drop it onto TextEdit. Make a duplicate of this file before you start, in case you make a mistake. The preferences file is quite large, but you're looking for four particular things. The first thing to look for is the settings that control the desk- top. Press 1-F to bring up the Find dialog box, type DesktopViewOptions in the search box, and click on Next. If you don’t find any matches, close the file, click on your desktop, and then select View: Show View Options. Toggle one of the options twice and then close the window—this will write a DesktopViewOptions entry to your Find- er's preferences. Now reopen the file in TextEdit, search again, and look for this section: <key>DesktopViewOptions</key> <dict> <key>ArrangeBy</key> <string>%00%00%04%01 </string> <key>FontSize</key> <integer>12</integer> Once you find these lines, you adjust the desktop’s font size by changing 1 2 to a larger or smaller number. The next three options (called Keys) are all in one section of the file, so switch back to TextEdit's Find window, type StandardViewOptions in the Find field, and click on Next. The three keys you're looking for are Nisv (List view), clmv (Column view), and ice (Icon view). You'll have to scroll to reach each one. Within each area, you want to find and modify the FontSize key, changing the values to the size you prefer. If you don't see this key in a par- ticular section, that means the Finder's defaults haven't been changed. The safest way to fix this Rem se ar ont T Pe Co tereie roe ewe vce 20/20 Vision Required Ever wish you could cram more text into your Finder windows? You can if you edit the Finder's preferences file. Here you see the Finder with the standard 12-point font ® and the same window using a 9-point font ®. is to close the preferences file, use the Finder's View options to set a font size for the missing entry, and then reopen the preferences file. When you're done, use File: Save to save the modified file, and then quit TextEdit. To see your changes, you need to restart the Finder. The easi- est way to do this is to hold down the option key and then click and hold on the Finder's Dock icon until a contextual menu appears. Choose Relaunch to restart the Finder. ICONS BY PAUL HOWALT commitments, it might be nice to use iCal’s alarm func- tion to remind everyone. With a bit of trickery, you can. This tip takes advantage of the fact that Address Book will let you associate more than one e-mail address with any one person. Open Address Book, select your own card, and click on the green plus sign (+) next to your e-mail address. Address Book will cre- ate a new e-mail entry for you. Type in the address of ts ! ! ’ ‘ Quick Pics Info When editing text fields in iPhoto 5's Informa- tion panel, you can use a keyboard shortcut to navigate between photos—no need to reach for the mouse. the person to whom you'd like to send a message from iCal, and then click on the label to the left of that e-mail address. Select Custom from the pop-up menu, and type the person’s name for easy identification. Repeat this process for each person you want to be able to include. When you’re done, click on the Edit button to return to normal browsing mode. Launch iCal (or quit and relaunch it if you already had it running), and select or create an event. Click on the Alarm field, set the alarm type to E-mail, and then click on your e-mail address. In the pop-up menu, you'll see all the new e-mail addresses. Select the one you'd like to use, and you're done. But what if you want to send a message to more than one person? When you add a new e-mail address to your Address Book card, don’t type an individual’s e-mail address; instead, type the name of any already existing Address Book group. For instance, if you've set up a group named My Family, just type that name, complete with the space, in the e-mail address field. ‘Then click on the pop-up menu to the left of the e-mail address, select Custom, and type a descriptive name for the group. When you next launch iCal and set an e-mail alert, you'll see your newly added group in the list of addresses. Select it, and everyone in the group will receive the alert when the time comes. continues MAC OS X HINTS Zi OS X 101 Secrets of the Application Switcher Productivity mavens probably already know that you can press 1-tab to switch programs quickly in OS X 10.3 and later. But there's a lot more to the Application Switcher. When you press 1 -tab, the icons for active pro- grams appear at the center of your screen, in order of use from left to right. The program you're cur- rently using is in the leftmost position, the one you used before that appears to the right, and so on. This makes it very easy to toggle between two pro- grams—for example, if you're copying and pasting multiple items from Microsoft Excel to Word. Just press and release 1 -tab. You don’t even need to wait for the window to appear; as soon as you release tab, you'll switch to the prior program. This isn’t an ideal solution, of course—if you syne Address Book with your phone or PDA, you'll find The standard method of moving between pro- grams in the Application Switcher is to hold 1. and just keep pressing the tab key. As you do, the selection moves left to right across the Switcher. What if you want to move right to left? The hard way is to hold down 1-shift-tab. An easier method is to press 1-tab once and then press the backtick key (°) while continuing to hold 1. That's one less key to press, and it’s much easier on the fingers. Depending on your predilection, you can try other means of navigating the panel. If you have a scroll wheel, activate the Application Switcher by pressing 1-tab, and then spin the wheel while holding down 1. Or just move the mouse itself, and the cursor will highlight each applica- your data record clogged with multiple e-mail addresses. A more elegant workaround is to create an AppleScript that sends an e-mail message to a bunch of users simultaneously, and then have the iCal alarm trigger that AppleScript. However, that tion icon it touches. You can also use the left- and rightarrow keys to navigate across the Switcher. The home and end keys will jump to the left and right ends of the Switcher, and you can activate a selected application by either releasing 1 or pressing enter. Finally, here are two keyboard shortcuts you can use with the Switcher. After you press 1-tab, hold down 1 and press H to hide the highlighted application. Press Q, and the program will quit instead. This is a great way to quit all your apps at the end of the day—just press 1-tab once to bring up the Switcher, then keep pressing Q (no need to press tab again, as the Switcher will move through the list as each program quits). method is much more complex. The one I’ve described will work just fine for most people. Avoid Chart Snafus with Excel and iWork Using Apple’s new $79 iWork productivity suite— the Pages word processor and Keynote presentation continues ICON BY PAUL HOWALT MAC OS X HINTS A Waste of a Paste If your chart data in Excel has a numeric first column, such as Year @, you'll have trouble pasting that column into Apple's Pages or Keynote. The Year column will become the first data column, which is not what you want @. You can get around this by adding a char- acter to the first year @s0 that Pages and Keynote treat the col- umn as labels, not data. Delete the letter, and you're done. program—you can create gorgeous charts with data you've copied from Excel workbooks. Most of the time, this works just fine. Copy the data range in Excel, and then insert a new chart in Pages or Keynote using the Objects toolbar button. In the Chart Data Editor window that appears, click on the leftmost column (named Region | by default), and select Edit: Paste. If all goes well, the labels from your data will show up in the first column and first row, and the remaining cells will contain the data points to graph. But what if things don’t go well? For instance, you'll run into problems if you’re trying to create a chart that has an axis labeled with numbers. Say you're charting something across multiple years (1997, 1998, and so on). In that case, the paste will fail—the iWork applications will interpret the num- bers as values that appear on the graph, instead of treating them as labels. A simple example demon- strates both the problem and the solution. Consider the Excel spreadsheet in “A Waste of a Paste.” If you were to copy all of the spreadsheet’s data and paste it into the Chart Data Editor in Pages or Keynote, you'd find that the Year column would become the first column of data on your chart, and the Cost column would become the sec- ond column of data. ‘To prevent this, you need to fool Pages and Keynote into thinking that the entries for the x-axis are real text, not numbers. The easiest way to do this is to just add a letter to the first label—change 1997 to 1997a, for instance. Then when you copy and paste, Pages or Keynote will properly place the labels in the label por- tion of the Chart Data Editor, as seen in the bottom half of “A Waste of a Paste.” Remove the a, and you’re done. You'll have the same problem if your row labels are numerals; the solution is the same. (1 Contributing Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Panther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004), and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site (www.macosxhints.com). SECRETS BY ROB GRIFFITHS HELP DESK macosxhints@macworld.com Mac OS X Hints The Insiders’ Tips You Won’t Get from Apple Put PDFs in Their Place with PDF Services If you're taking advantage of all that OS X has to offer, you're already “printing” things to PDF. Just press 1-P and click on the PDF button in the Print dialog box. It’s a great way to store tidbits of infor- mation—from funny e-mail messages to online receipts—without killing a tree in the process. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a PDF and automatically file it in the right folder, without navigating through your entire file system to do so? Here’s how: First, set up folders (Receipts, Funny E-mails, Recipes, and so on) where you'll archive this stuff— within your Documents folder, perhaps. Next, navi- gate to your user folder/Library and create (if you don’t have one) a folder named PDF Services. Q. CHECK IT OUT Reduce Search-Results Eyestrain When you run a search in the Finder, a Search Results box pops up, showing each match. The results box uses space-efficient small icons and a 12-point font. That's dandy for squeezing lots of results into a window, but it’s not great for those of us with aging eyes. It's also awfully hard to distinguish icons at that size when you're looking for one Word document in a sea of TextEdit results. You can't change the Search Results window to icon-view mode. (If you try clicking on the button at the top left of the window, nothing happens.) But you can alter this window by going to View: Show View Options. Pick larger icons here, and you'll get larger, more legible results (see “Jumbo-Size Search Results"). You can also use the View Options box to change the font size, as well as to choose which columns appear in the results window. You'll have to change these settings only once. ee oO a S— 2 = a awe ie -oeen cane: cua cian = ene a S Pew cMe emmy Comet on 12. ees, Sa sree Beer Buty) iter» iteerteer - e eetCUnren ea Jumbo-Size Search Results You probably didn’t know it, but you can set view options for the Finder's Search Results box—for example, here we've made the icons larger and more legible. Now make an alias of each of these storage folders and put the aliases in the new PDF Services folder. The quick way to do this is to select all your storage folders and then press and hold 1-option. The cur- sor will change into a small arrow inside a circle (the alias symbol). Drag and drop the aliases into the PDF Services folder. ‘That’s it; you’ve enabled the hidden PDF Services feature of OS X. Select File: Print in any open docu- ment, and when you click on the PDF button, you'll see that the Save As PDF pop-up menu now includes your folder aliases. Select one of them, a