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| Mac OS X Tips |
| www.macosxtips.co.uk - Tips and Tricks for Mac OS X Tiger. Mainly simple hints for new users, but even the lifetime mac user will find something new. Tips for iLife, Finder, Mail, Safari and much much more! |
| Language: English |
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| Change the default text for pretty much anything in OS X |
| 2008-09-04 09:42:47 |
By tweaking one file within the System folder, it is possible to change almost any string of text that appears in Mac OS X. Amongst the endless possibilities are things like the default new folder name and the suffix added to duplicates and aliases. You can customize things like the categories in the iTunes and Finder sidebars or the System Preferences categories, or, for a bit of fun, you can change the the message you get when an application crashes.Change the default new folder nameWhen you create a new folder in the Finder, it is automatically named "untitled folder". This annoyingly buries deep within a list when sorted alphabetically, rather than at the top or the bottom where it is easy to find. Luckily, it is surprisingly simple to change it.First, navigate to Macintosh HD/System/...
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| Volume Change Shortcuts |
| 2008-07-12 08:13:57 |
All Apple keyboards now come with volume keys, so you can easily increase, decrease and mute the volume. But did you know there is more functionality to these keys.Holding down the Option key while pressing one of the volume change keys will bring up the Sound System Preference pane. Here you can change the alert sound, alert volume, and when different sound effects are played. You can also change the sound input and output, incase you have an external microphone or speakers.Holding down the Shift key when pressing the volume keys will disable the sound that is normally played when you change the volume. You can disable this permanently from within the Sound Preference Pane by un-checking the box "Play feedback when volume is changed". Now, when you hold shift it does the opposite, tempora...
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| The Ultimate Mac Screenshot Guide |
| 2008-07-09 09:27:01 |
I've noticed a lot of recent articles around the web about taking screenshots on a Mac. There's just the odd tip here and there, so I thought I'd do a complete guide. If you are familiar with taking screenshots, you might want to scroll down to the bottom, where there are some more advanced tips.Keyboard ShortcutsThe quickest way to take a screenshot is to use a keyboard shortcut. Annoyingly, these aren't particularly intuitive. There are two main ones:Command-Shift-3 - Take a screenshot of the entire screen.Command-Shift-4 - Allows you to click and drag around the area you want a shot of.Each of these will save a file to the desktop named Picture 1.png, or a higher number if that file already exists.Now there are a few...
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| 12 Hidden Firefox Settings |
| 2008-06-18 09:58:41 |
With the Firefox Download Day almost over, there is likely to be a whole load of new Firefox users as of today.Even if you are a regular Firefox user, you still may not know about the advanced configuration options. To get these options, type about:config into the Firefox address bar. Once you hit return, you get a warning because modifying these preferences can (in rare circumstances) cause strange behaviour.Clicking "I'll be careful, I promise!" brings up a huge list of preferences, most of which aren't accessible from the normal Preferences dialog. As the list is so long, the best way to find things in it is to start typing the name of the preference into the "Filter" box at the top. Once you have found the one you want, double-clicking it allows you t...
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| Add content to every page in Pages |
| 2008-06-16 11:31:26 |
This tip was submitted by Tom from OS X Gear.Often on Mac forums users ask how to put watermarks in their Pages documents without having to copy and paste them on every page. Doing this for headers and footers doesn't present a problem, as Pages provides you with a neat little box to place content for every page. Here's how to do it for any media, anywhere on the page:1. Arrange the media you want as a watermark (or text box, shape or image) as you want it on one of the pages. The only limitation to this method is that they cannot be inline objects. To ensure they are floating, select the objects and go to the "Wrap" tab in the inspector and use the radio buttons to correct this setting to "Floating".2. With the watermark object selected, open the Format menu, go down to Advanced, and sele...
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| 5 Commonly Overlooked System Preferences |
| 2008-05-21 14:47:39 |
MacTips.org recently published an article on 5 Commonly Overlooked System Preferences. I am quite familiar with the System Preferences panel and wasn't expecting to see anything new, so I was quite surprised to see something I had completely overlooked until now.Number 5 on the list, smooth scrolling, is something I have never noticed before. You can find it in the Appearance section of System Preferences. When enabled, it means that pushing page up/down or hitting space bar makes the page glide instead of jumping straight to the next position. This small feature is fantastic when reading long web pages or news feeds, as you can just tap space to scroll down a page while keeping a good idea of where you are on the page.The other 4 overlooked preferences are a bit more well known, but are probably still pretty useful for newer users. Head over to mactips.org for the full article.
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| Drag and drop onto "Choose File" buttons in Safari |
| 2008-05-20 10:03:40 |
When a website prompts you to upload a file to the internet, it will probably use a "choose file" or "browse" button. For example when choosing an attachment in Gmail, or when uploading a photo to Facebook. In Safari, you can speed things up by simply dragging and dropping files onto this button, instead of first clicking on it and then looking around your hard drive for the file you want.Simply drag your file from the Finder, hold it over the button and then let go.
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| Reset a lost OS X account password in single user mode |
| 2008-05-14 09:50:05 |
Last August I wrote a detailed article about the different ways to reset a user's password, however the instructions I gave for changing the password in single user mode don't always seem to work, especially in Leopard. Here is a new way to do it that should be more reliable.Remember, only use this if you have lost the Mac OS X install DVD. Also, don't do this if you have FileVault enabled in your account, and note that this will not change your keychain password.First, we need to restart in Single User mode. To do this hold down Command-S while the computer is starting up. A command line prompt should appear on the screen instead of the login window or ...
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| Let Stacks keep your Dock tidy |
| 2008-03-26 09:06:44 |
This tip was submitted by David.Just as desktops get cluttered because they're handy, and an easy place to put and find things, the Mac OS X Dock gets easily cluttered with every application that you might want to launch at the click of a button. A cluttered dock means it may take so long to find the (tiny) icon you're looking for that you may as well have opened your application folder and searched through. But come to mention it, the Applications folder gets rather cluttered too. You can move things around, but so many programs assume that Safari and other standard applications will be sitting right there in the Applications folder. Is there a better way to group applications sensibly, without using any special software?With Leopard's new Stacks feature, I...
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| Enable Single Window Mode in Safari |
| 2008-03-25 08:45:40 |
In the latest version of Safari, Apple have added a new hidden preference. Using a Terminal command, you can now enable one-window browsing.If you use Safari regularly, you may notice that certain links refuse to open in the same window. If a link is set to open in a new window, normally holding down Command while clicking it will make it open in a tab instead. However, in certain places (like Gmail messages) links open in a new window no matter what you do.This command changes the behaviour such that links that would ordinarily open in a new window now open in a new tab instead. Start by opening up Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities), and paste in the following line:defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksC...
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| Temporarily change Dock magnification settings |
| 2008-02-27 13:15:54 |
Here's a quick tip about a keyboard shortcut new to Leopard (OS X 10.5) that I didn't know about.If you normally have Dock magnification turned off, holding Control and Shift while moving the mouse along it will temporarily turn on magnification. As soon as you let go of the keys, the magnification will turn back off again.The Dock will magnify based on the settings in the Dock section of System Preferences, which you can only change when magnification is turned on. As a result you'll have to turn it on, choose your preferred magnification level and turn it back off again.The keyboard shortcut works the other way round too. If you normally have magnification on, holding Control and Shift will temporarily turn it off.I'm not sure how useful this feature is, but it's interesting none the less.
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| New features in Open and Save dialogs |
| 2008-02-24 13:37:09 |
You should be familiar with Open and Save dialogs - they are the windows that appear whenever you go to open or save a file. In Leopard, these dialog boxes now have new view options for browsing your files. In addition to the list and column views that were in Tiger, you can now use icon view, just like in a normal Finder window. Moreover, if you hold down the icon view button, you get a menu with options to change the icon size and the label position.In column view, there is a new contextual menu for changing the column widths. Simply right-click (or hold Control and click) on the handle at the bottom of each column, and the menu will appear. You can choose from Right Size this Column, Right Size All Columns Individually and Right Size All Columns Equally. Strangely, this menu is unique t...
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| Install hidden screen savers in Leopard |
| 2008-02-12 07:27:13 |
You may already know that some of the screen savers in Mac OS X are Quartz Compositions. The RSS Visualizer, Arabesque and Spectrum were all made with Quartz Composer, which is included with the Developer Tools.While those ones are automatically included as screen savers, there is actually a whole folder full of other compositions hidden in the system files. These files simply need to be dragged onto the Screen Saver section of System Preferences to install them.To find these hidden screen savers, go to Macintosh HD, and navigate to /System/Library/Compositions. In here there are almost 90 Quartz Composition files. They aren't specifically made to be screen savers (it's actually a collection of iChat effects, slideshow tra...
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| Move all Windows to the Main Display |
| 2008-01-28 12:33:56 |
If you have more than one monitor, you may be familiar with the problem of windows getting stuck off the edge of the main screen. When you disconnect a second monitor, Mac OS X is normally quite good at bringing all the windows back to your main monitor. However, every now and again, windows get left behind, off the edge of the main display and out of reach.Luckily, this blog post has the solution - a simple AppleScript. When run, it automatically finds all the windows that are off the edge of the screen and clusters them in the top left of the main monitor. To run it, start by opening up Script Editor (located in Applications/AppleScript) then paste in the following:property processesToIgnore : {}tell application "Finde...
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| Automatically Insert the Date and Time |
| 2008-01-23 09:51:10 |
Mike writes:How can I set my MacBook to insert today's date, short version or long version, into whatever I'm keyboarding in??? QuicKeys is too expensive for Mac OS X and this Mac should do that! The best way to do this is using an application called WordService. You can download it for free from the Devon Technologies site.To install it, create a new folder in your Library folder called "Services" and drag the the WordService.service file into it. Log out then back in again to enable the service.WordService is now accessible form the Services menu. This is under the Application menu in the top left, next to the Apple menu. You will probably have a lot of things in this menu, even if you have never installed any services before. This is because many applicat...
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| Disable Tooltips in Safari and Firefox |
| 2008-01-22 11:59:49 |
Tootips are the little yellow boxes that appear when you hold your mouse over certain interface elements. For example, if you hold the cursor over a link in Safari, a tooltip will appear. In some cases this is useful, but often the yellow box will get in the way of other things.Most of the time you can solve this by hitting return or enter. The tooltip should disappear. If you want to completely disable them, it is a little bit trickier. Annoyingly, tooltips are applications specific, so you have to enable/disable them in every application. Some applications have a preference to do this. Frustratingly, many do not.Safari has a hidden preference to do this. To disable tooltips in Safari, open up the Terminal application (...
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| Make the Most of Quick Look |
| 2008-01-16 16:12:35 |
Quick Look is a way to quickly preview files in Leopard. Simply hit the space bar and whichever file is selected in the Finder will expand to give you a sneak peak of the file. This means you can watch videos, listen to songs, view presentations and flick through the pages of a PDF document without even opening it. Here are a few ways to enhance Quick Look.Index SheetIf you select multiple files before activating Quick Look, you'll just be shown a preview of the first file. There are buttons to flick forward and backward through the different previews, but much more interesting is the Index Sheet button. Clicking this is just like using exposé, only with the previews rather than windows. The previews will shrink down to show you them all in a grid. Clicking on one of the thumbnails ...
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| Change Backspace Behaviour in Firefox |
| 2008-01-10 11:44:38 |
So you've just spent ages filling out all your details on a long web form, or have just written a 5000 work blog post. You are about to hit submit, but you notice a mistake. Going to correct it, you hit the delete key — but wait — the text field wasn't highlighted. You watch in horror as Firefox takes you back a page in your history, deleting everything you just wrote.If that horror story sounds familiar, you might want to try changing the behaviour of the delete key in Firefox. Luckily, this is quite easy and doesn't require any Add-ons.Start by opening up Firefox and typing about:config into the address bar. After you press return, you should see a huge list of Firefox preferences that you can change. Start typing browser.backspace into the filter box at the top, until you see the item called Browser.backspace_action. Double-click on it, and type one of the following:Type 1 to make the backspace key scroll up a page in the current window. Shift-Backspace will scroll down. This is essentially the opposite hitting the space bar, which will scroll down a page and Shift-space will scroll up a page.Type 2 to make the backspace key do nothing. Except delete when text is selected, of course.Type 0 to change back to the default behaviour of going back a page. Note that Command-Left and Right also do this, as well as Command-[ and ].
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| Terminal Commands for Hidden Settings in Leopard |
| 2007-11-26 08:09:02 |
Back in March I did a tip listing 15 Terminal Commands for Hidden Mac OS X Settings. Since Leopard has been released, there are a whole load of new ones so I thought I'd do another list.In general, these will only work with Leopard. I have slipped in a few that will work with Tiger, but you should check out the old list for commands that will definitely work.If you don't already know, here are some quick instructions of how to use them: You'll find Terminal in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder. To carry out any of the following commands you will need to copy/paste or type in the line of text then hit enter. Most of the commands change settings that can't be done through the application or system preferences.For the most part, application...
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| Get to grips with the "Open With" menu |
| 2007-10-29 11:10:04 |
When you double-click a file it will open in the default application, which is fine for most situations. Often, each file format corresponds to a single application. Word documents open in Microsoft Word, MP3s open in iTunes and movies open in Quicktime Player. But there are times when you might want a file to open in a different application. For example, you might want a image to open in Photoshop rather than Preview, or a Word document in TextEdit instead of Microsoft Word. In this situation, you have a few options.Firstly, if the application is in the Dock, you can simply drag the file onto its icon in the Dock. Alternatively you can open up the application first, and choose "Open" form the File Menu. A third method is to use the "Open With" menu. You will find this by right-clicking (...
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| Disable the Dock icon for any Application |
| 2007-10-17 07:35:26 |
There are many applications on your Mac that don't need a Dock icon. Having a Dock icon for applications that are accessed through a menu bar item or constantly run in the background would just waste space and clutter up your Dock. Many applications like this automatically hide their Dock icon (Google Notifier, Quicksilver) however some don't (Launchbar, HardwareGrowler).Luckily, if it is a cocoa application, you can hide the Dock icon yourself. To see if it is possible, right-click (Control-click) on the application icon. If "Show Package Contents" is in the menu that appears, you can hide the icon in the Dock.If this is the case, select "Show Package Contents" and look for the "Info.plist" file inside the Contents folder. Open this file using TextEdit by right-clicking on it and choosing "Open With - Other" from the menu.In the file, paste the following two lines just after <dict> on the 6th line:<key>LSUIElement</key><string>1</string>Save the file and close it. For the changes to take effect, you need to move the application to the desktop and them back to its original location (OS X keeps a cache of the file, so you need to trick it into checking it again).Now when you open the application, no icon will appear in the Dock. I wouldn't recommend doing this with your regular applications like iTunes and Safari as this also has the side-effect of disabling the menu bar. This means that you will have to quit the application using the keyboard shortcut Command-Q. If the application doesn't have any windows, you will have to quit it from Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities).To bring back the Dock icon, simply open up the Info.plist file and remove the lines you added.If you are too lazy to do this yourself, FoggyNoggin Software has created an application called Dock Dodger that automates the process.
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| Tips for Safari 3 |
| 2007-10-16 13:20:00 |
The Safari 3 public beta has been out for a while now, and will be included with leopard when it comes out. If you haven't tried it out yet, you can download it for free from the Apple site. The following tips include things that will be useful to the average user as well as some more interesting tricks for more experienced users.Merge WindowsSafari 3 now allows you to drag and drop tabs. You can drag a tab off the bar to create a new window or drag it onto an existing window to add it. You can also use this to rearrange the order of your tabs. If you have lots of open windows each with different numbers of tabs, there is an easier way to get them all into one instead of dragging and dropping. In the Window menu you will fin...
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| 5 Login Window Tips |
| 2007-09-28 12:02:59 |
For all of these tips you will need know the password to an administrator account. You can check whether an account is an administrator in the Accounts section of System Preferences.1. Add a message to the login windowYou can add a string of text above the list of users in the login window. To do this, start by opening up Terminal. This is located in the Utilities folder, inside the Applications folder. Once it has loaded, paste in the following line and press return:sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText "Hello There"Replace "Hello There" with your text. To remove the text, type the following line:sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText ""2. Hide...
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| Change the Image in the Tile Game Widget |
| 2007-09-25 09:09:27 |
Amongst the widgets that come with Mac OS X is the Tile Game. You shift around the tiles to reveal an picture of a tiger. If you play the Tile Game often, you might find the tiger image a bit boring.Luckily, changing the image is easy. Start by finding an image in iPhoto or the Finder to replace it. To avoid stretching, go for an image that is roughly square. Now click on the image and hold. While holding down the mouse button, press F12 to load up Dashboard. Now simply drag and drop your image onto the Tile Game.Annoyingly, the image will change back to the tiger if you close the widget. Permanently changing the image is a bit more complicated. It essentially involves replacing an image file hidden within the widget file. If you are familiar with delving into package files, this is quite straightforward. The image you want to replace is called game.png. However, if you aren't used to doing things like this, the easiest way is using an AppleScript.The great thing about AppleScript is that this can be achieved with a few lines of fairly legible code. For the lazy people, you can just download a clickable application I made. When you open this, you will get a dialog asking you to choose a new image.Alternatively, the more adventurous can download the AppleScript to see how it works. Paste the script into Script Editor (in Applications/AppleScript) and click Run. If you can think of any improvements or you notice any mistakes, let me know.
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| 5 Tricks for the Activity and Downloads Windows in Safari |
| 2007-09-12 11:44:07 |
Both the Downloads and Activity windows are accessible from the Window menu in Safari. Most people are familiar with the Downloads window as it pops up whenever you click a link to download a file. On the other hand, the Activity window is not as well known even though it is just as useful. Both can be easily accessed using keyboard shortcuts: Command-Option-L for downloads and Command-Option-A for activity.When you first open the Activity window, it will show a list containing the titles of every Safari window you have open. Clicking the disclosure triangle next to one of the names will expand it to list every item on the page. As well as the HTML files and scripts, this includes medi...
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| Remove Quotes in Email Messages |
| 2007-08-20 11:38:36 |
When an email message is forwarded and replied to, email clients add quotes to make it easier to see exactly who wrote what. While this is normally quite useful, multiple quote levels can often make a message quite cluttered.In many email clients (such as Gmail), quotes are shown as a symbol at the start of each line. If the text has been quoted twice, the symbol is repeated.Now obviously you could click on each line and press delete, but this would take ages if there are multiple quote levels in a long message. The trick to getting rid of this type of quotes is to use the box selection method. To do this, hold Option (Alt) and drag a selection around the quote marks. This makes it so only the quote marks are selected, not the entire line. Annoyingly, this method doesn't work in some applications (such as Firefox). If you find it isn't working, try pasting your message into TextEdit before removing the quotes and then pasting it back into the email.In the Mac OS X Mail program things are slightly different. Quotes are shown by vertical lines instead. While this may look nicer, it's not quite as obvious how to get rid of them. The answer lies in the Format menu, under Quote Level. From here you can increase or decrease the quote level of the selected text.If you have multiple quote levels you want to remove it would be quicker to use the keyboard shortcut instead. To decrease the quote level simply select the text and press Command-Option-' (the apostrophe key). Every time you press this, one quote level will disappear, much faster than navigating the Format menu multiple times.
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| Access hidden Preview features through Automator |
| 2007-08-15 08:23:09 |
Most people see Preview as a fairly limited application, and only use it for quickly viewing images. However, it is capable of much more than that, and a couple of months ago I outlined some of Preview's lesser known features on this site.One topic that came up in the comments of that tip was Preview's inability to scale and resize images. I explained a trick involving zooming and using the Mac OS X Screen shot tools, but this is far from ideal.Interestingly, it turns out Preview can resize images, but you can only access this through Automator. In fact, there is a whole load of features that are only accessible this way.If you have Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, you will find Automator in your Applications folder. It is an application designed to do repetitive and...
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| Reset a Lost OS X Account Password |
| 2007-08-11 10:18:42 |
Over the past few weeks, lots of people have been contacting Mac OS X Tips asking how to reset a forgotten Mac OS X user account password. Depending on the circumstances, this task could take 5 minutes or could even be completely impossible. Here is a run through of the different ways you can reset an account password depending on the type of account, whether FileVault is enabled and whether you have the Mac OS X Install Disc.If you still know the Administrator PasswordIf you still know the password to an administrator account, it is very simple to reset any standard or managed user's password. While logged in as the administrator, open up System Preferences and click on the Accounts sec...
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| More Hidden Settings for Google Notifier |
| 2007-08-08 12:06:07 |
Apologies for the break being slightly longer than expected. Everything is back to normal now, so you can expect a few tips per week from now on.Google Notifier is a menu bar item that alerts you when new mail arrives in your Gmail inbox. Back in February I wrote a tip on Google Notifier's hidden features that showed you how to access two hidden settings. Recently, someone at Mac OS X Hints found a third hidden setting in addition to the ones I mentioned in my tip.All of these settings can be accessed through Google Notifier. Bring down the notifier menu and hold Command and Option while clicking on Preferences. This brings up a hidden settings editor where you can easily edit the notifier preferences file. The three set...
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| No tips for 2 weeks |
| 2007-07-10 14:01:10 |
I'm away for the next 2 weeks so no tips. If you can't wait, here's a few sites to check out that have some good tips:MacTipsiUseApple.comMac OS X HintsMurphy MacSee you on the 29th of July!
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| Quickly Jump to Address Bar in Safari |
| 2007-07-06 17:11:35 |
Zachary writes:Hey... Is there anyway to keep the URL address highlighted when I start Safari? It would be so much easier rather than having to always keep clicking the address bar when I want to switch sites as soon as I run Safari... Thank you so much!When you start Safari or open a new Safari window, normally the address bar is highlighted. This means that you can start typing an address straight away. However, if you have Safari set to automatically display your home page when opening a new window, the address bar is not highlighted.For example, if you have Google as your home page, when you load up Safari or open a new window the Google home page will load and the search box will be highlighted instead of the address bar. If you type an address and pr...
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| 5 Ways to Speed up GarageBand |
| 2007-07-03 15:08:04 |
GarageBand is everything you would expect of an iLife application. It's intuitive and easy to use for even the newest users, and produces great results. While it definitely isn't one of Apple's Pro Apps, it does use professional quality instrument loops and effects and these can take quite a toll on your Mac. If you are using an older Mac you may find GarageBand is very slow and might even crash when performing certain tasks. Here are a few tips for speeding up things up.1. Turn Software Instrument Loops into Real Instrument Loops. If you didn't know, Software Instrument Loops are green and have dots on the track while Real Instrument Loops are blue and have audio waves on the track. The Software Instrument Loops are more customisable as you can change the instrument that plays them and th...
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| Borderless Quicktime Movies |
| 2007-07-02 16:40:28 |
Recently I read on Murphy Mac about how to create your own Quicktime skin. This is basically a border to go around your movie to replace the normal Quicktime window.The thing I found more interesting than the skins though is that you can use the same idea to create a borderless Quicktime movie. What's even better is that you can make borderless movies with the regular Quicktime that comes with your Mac, unlike skins that require the extra features Quicktime Pro ($30 from the Apple Store).Murphy Mac has a great screencast about creating Quicktime skins, but luckily it is a lot easier to create a borderless movie. It involves creating an image file and a text file to go with your movie, and then combining all three files ...
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| Export an iPhoto book to movie |
| 2007-06-22 16:46:14 |
iPhoto 6 now allows you to create a slideshow of a Photo Book. Before you could only watch a slideshow of single, full screen photos but now you can do this will the pages of your photo book. iPhoto has always allowed you to export a normal slideshow to a Quicktime movie, but this option doesn't appear to be available for photo book slideshows. However there's a secret way of doing this.Start by creating your photo book. Do this by clicking on the new book button at the bottom of the window and giving your book a name. Notice that it now appears in the sidebar. To add photos to the book, browse your library and drag the photos you want to the photo book entry...
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| One year of Mac OS X Tips |
| 2007-06-21 19:43:48 |
Mac OS X Tips has been around for about a year now, so I thought I'd do a post on the how the past 12 months has gone.The very first tip, on how to Auto-Tab Bookmarks was posted on the 22 June, 2006. Since then I have added 128 articles, giving an average of 2 or 3 tips posted each week. Here are the top 10 posts in terms of the number of page views they receive. These are the best tips to check out if you are a new reader.1. Top 15 Terminal Commands for Hidden Mac OS X Settings2. Hidden File3. Address Book Tips4. Peek inside Mac OS X Packages5. Another Way to Force Quit6. Multiple Music Libraries in iTunes 77. Set a Screen Saver as the Desktop Background8. Tips for Deleting Stubborn Files9. The Ultimate Customize Toolbar Shortcut10. Get useful system stats ...
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| 13 things you didn't know about Preview |
| 2007-06-20 20:16:50 |
1. Exposé your PhotosIf a number of images are open in Preview at the same time, you can view a full screen slideshow by choosing Slideshow from the View menu or by pressing Command-Shift-F. Once the Slideshow has started, press I or click the "Index page" button in the toolbar. This make a contact sheet of all the images, with exposé style animation. Shift-click for slow motion as usual.2. Sort Order in SidebarNormally images appear in alphabetical order in the sidebar (although PDFs appear in page order) but you can choose a different sort order by right-clicking on one of the thumbnails. This brings up a contextual menu with path, kind, size, date and keyword sort options. For your own custom order, just drag the images up and down.3. Qui...
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| Automate Trash Emptying |
| 2007-06-19 19:17:50 |
Recently I came across a couple of scripts on Mac OS X Hints that automate emptying the Trash so you don't have to remember to do it regularly. One of them deletes items that were trashed over seven days ago and the other empties the oldest items once the trash reaches a certain size.The one that empties items that have been in the trash for too long is a bit complicated and involves using the Terminal. The second one, however, is fairly simple and accessible to anyone who wants their trash to empty automatically.It involves an AppleScript that you attach to the trash as a Folder Action. This script checks the size of the trash every time you add a file to it. If the size goes over a limit, it will deleted the item that has been in the trash the longest.The...
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| Customize Sound Sets in Microsoft Entourage |
| 2007-06-15 16:01:20 |
K writes:Is there a way to customize your own sounds for incoming emails in Entourage? In OS9, all you had to do was drop .snd files into the system folder and they were accesible from within Entourage. In OSX, it seems like all you can do is assign the standard sound sets. (like the 'new mail' sound etc..)Microsoft Entourage's Sound Sets are stored in the Microsoft User Data folder located inside your Documents folder. To get there, navigate to: ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Sounds sets. In here should be one file, the default sound set that comes with Microsoft Office.It's not quite as simple as just dropping audio files here though. You need to have special "Microsoft E...
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| Recovering Lost Users |
| 2007-06-07 15:52:26 |
One of the problems that seems to cause the most distress amongst Mac users who contact me is when user folders go missing.In general, there seems to be two reasons why a user account and their home folder can disappear. The first is simply that you have (accidentally) deleted the user. Any administrator account has the ability to do this from the System Preferences.The second way occurs when upgrading or installing Mac OS X from the install disks. If you inadvertently chose an "Archive and Install" installation, all users are deleted unless you choose to preserve them.Luckily, in both of the above cases, Mac OS X keeps a copy of the user folder in case you want to get it back.Recovering Deleted User FoldersIn the Accounts section of System Preferences you ...
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| Boost Quicktime Volume |
| 2007-06-04 23:17:27 |
One of the most useful features of the Finder Column View is its ability to preview movies and music that you would otherwise have to open up using Quicktime. If you haven't seen this before, open up a folder containing music or movies and press Command-3 to make sure you are in Column View. Now click on a movie or music file and it will appear in the preview column with the usual Quicktime playback controls.However, with some files, you might find that the audio is too quiet to hear. If you have turned up the volume to full and your Mac's speakers still aren't playing it loud enough, there is a simple way to get an extra volume boost.If you hold the Shift key before clicking one the Quicktime volume control the slider has more range than normal. This a...
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