Mac OS X Tips

Here's a neat trick that is fairly pointless, but fun nonetheless. When minimizing a window, or bringing it back out of the dock, hold down the shift key, and watch as it shrinks/expands in slow motion. This also works with some other aspect of the UI, such as Exposé, opening multiple mail threads, using the login window and changing view in address book.

If you want to see any application do something in slow motion, hold down the shift key and see if it works!

Isn't it annoying when you click a link in an email and Safari pops up in front when you want to continue reading and check the web page later? Mac OS X offers a way to open and manipulate windows without bringing them to the front, by holding down command whilst doing things.

For example, command-click a link in an email. Safari opens up in the background, without disturrbing your reading, allowing you to go to the page later.

This also extends to moving, closing and resizing windows. If you can see a Finder window behind your iTunes library for example, command-clicking on close, minimize or holding command whilst moving or resizing performs the action without switching to the finder, instead staying within iTunes.

It is possible to access the Mac OS X Dictionary and Thesaurus from any Cocoa application (Mail, TextEdit, Safari, etc.) using a simple keyboard shortcut.

To access the dictionary, place the mouse cursor over the word you want to look up., and press Command-Control-D. a small window pops up giving you a quick definition, and you can easily select thesaurus or Morefor more information on a word.

To look up multiple words you can just move the mouse whilst keeping command and control held down (you can release D).

Apple offers a great way to sync all of your data via .Mac, keeping your email messages, keychains and bookmarks up to date on all your computers. However it doesn't allow you to sync or back up your Junk mail filter training data. Moreover, this isn't stored on the IMAP server either, meaning it is very much stuck on one computer.

While you can't keep your junk filter training data syncing automatically, you can manually copy it from one mac to another.

Go to your user folder and navigate to Library -> Mail. Copy the LSMMap2 file to a backup or another mac. Before overwriting the existing LSMMap2 file on the second computer, you may wish to temporarily copy it to the desktop, just in case everything goes pear shaped (i.e. you copy the wrong one)

Some people make it a habit of adding everyone who mails them to their address book, something that happens automatically in services such as Gmail. In Mac OS X Mail this is possible thorugh a simple keyboard shortcut.

When reading an email, press Command-Y to add the sender to your address book straight away. Mail will even add the persons name, it it appears in the From field. To add more details like a picture or address you will need to actually open up address book sepereately though.

At the moment Gmail doesn't offer IMAP, but it does allow you to access your mail from Mac OS X Mail using POP. This means all your mail will be downloaded to Mail.app, but will leave a copy on the Gmail server, even if you delete or move message in mail. This means that its only really feasible to use your Gmail account from one computer, as messages marked read in mail, will still be marked unread in Gmail.

First you must enable POP access in hte Gmail settings. Go to your Gmail inbox and click Settings at the top. Go to the Forwarding and POP tab, and Enable POP from all mail (or just mail from now on if you wish).

Now switch to Mail and open up the preferences (Mail -> Preferences) then navigate to the Accounts tab, creating a new account with the following details:


Account Type: POP
Description: Gmail (or something similar)
Full Name: Your Name
Email Address: example123@gmail.com (your gmail address)
Incoming Mail Server: pop.gmail.com
User Name: example123@gmail.com (your gmail address)
Password: Your Gmail Password

Make sure Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is checked.

Authentication: Password
Outgoing Mail server: smtp.gmail.com

Make sure Use Authentication is checked.

User Name: example123@gmail.com (your gmail address)
Password: Your Gmail Password

Make sure Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is checked.

Authentication: Password

Click continue then Done. With the new Gmail account highlighted, click server settings, under outgoing mail server. In server port, type 465.
Close and save the account preferences.

An alternative to setting up Gmail with Mail is to use this stripped down web browser, intended solely for Gmail.

Whereas Gmail is fairly open and easy to implement into Mail.app, Hotmail is slightly more complicated if you don't have a Hotmail Plus account. Hotmail Plus offers access to your mail through Mail.app, and there is a workaround for standard Hotmail accounts, using FreePOPs.

If you have an MSN Hotmail Plus account, you can easily access your mail through Mac OS X Mail by installing the HTTP Mail Plugin.

Once installed, open mail and go to Preferences -> Accounts and create a new account with the following details:

Account Type: httpmail
Description: Hotmail (or something similar)
Email Address: example123@hotmail.com (your hotmail address)
Full Name: Your Name
Incoming Mail Server: hotmail.com
User Name: example123 (your hotmail user name)
Password: Your Hotmail Password
Outgoing Mail server: None

Close the window and Save the Account.

By now, most people know about the PDF button in the Print dialog box. It allows you to "print" web pages, receipts, recipes etc. to a PDF file, a useful way of archiving things.

This is useful, but the PDF services are even more extendable. You can create aliases to folders to go in the menu that appears when you click the button, allowing you to automatically archive items to specific folders without navigating through your entire file system.

First set up folders, possibly within your documents folder. For example have one for web receipts, one for recipes, one for important emails etc.
Next, go to your library folder, located within your user folder, and create a new folder named "PDF Services" (if you don't already have one).

Now add an alias of each of the storage folders within this PDF services folder. This can be done clickly by holding command-option and dragging the folders to the PDF services folder.

Now if you select print in any application, clicking the PDF button will reveal options to save in each of your folders.

For the more adventurous users, try adding aliases of applications such as Mail or Preview, and see what happens!

One feature that Safari lacks is the option to email a web page to someone. This can easily be done by creating a bookmarklet to place in the bookmarks bar.

A bookmarklet is a small piece of Javascript that you can save as a bookmark and reuse. For the email page bookmarklet, enter the following into the address bar in Safari:

javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href)

Now drag the globe icon at the start of the URL to the bookmarks bar, and name the bookmarklet "Mail this page" or something similar. When you click it, your email client will open with a new message containing the web address and the title of the web page. Now all you need to do is choose who to send it to.

If you find yourself with a Microsoft Word document that is password protected and you don't know the password, there is a work around to remove the protection, and allow you to edit the document again.

First open the document, and save it as a Rich Text Format (RTF) file. Close the file and then reopen it again in word. Select Tools -> Unprotect Document, and now the password is no longer required. Finally save the file as a word document again.

Heres an unexpected file hidden in the Mac OS X system files.

Go to the Finder's Go menu, and select Go to Folder. In the window that appears, type:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/test/
and hit Go. In the window that opens, double-click on the audiotest.au file and voilà!

In the System Preferences it is easy to make your desktop cycle through a series of images. Just open up System Preferences and click the desktop and screen saver section.

At the bottom of the desktop tab there is an option to change the picture for a given amount of time. With this selected, your desktop will cycle through the images in the iPhoto album or folder you have selected.

But what if you want a selection of photos that aren't in an album together, or want to use multiple albums? Open up iPhoto and click on any image. Clicking on the "desktop" button at the bottom will set this image as your desktop background. Select multiple images using shift-click (if they are in a row) or command-click (if they are separated by other photos), and click the desktop button. If you open up system preferences now, you can see that your desktop is set to cycle through these images.

An added quirk is that your screen saver is also set to make a slideshow of these pictures.

If you are are one of those people who hates the dock, you probably already know it is fairly easy to remove it for good. However when you do this you also lose other features such as Exposé, Command-Tab switcher and Dashboard.
A much better solution is to move the dock to the top of the screen and then hide it - making it invisible, but still around.

The easy way to do this is to download a copy of Tinkertool (free) that allows you to modify lots of hidden preferences.

The more hardcore solution is to use the terminal. Before you start, make sure Dock hiding is off by going to the apple menu, choosing Dock then "Turn Hiding off" . Alternatively open up the dock section of system preferences and turn hiding off there, or control-click on the gap in the middle of the dock (or even press Command-Option-D).

Then launch the terminal (Applications -> Utilities) and type

defaults write com.apple.Dock orientation -string top

and press enter. Nothing will happen at first, until you log out then in again or restart the dock process in Activity Monitor (Applications -> Utilities).

Once you do this you should see your Dock appear at the top of your screen, and all you need to do is turn hiding off again, and your Dock will be invisible, only activating if you hover over a very thin line below the menu bar.

If you work with lots of Fonts, sometimes you might want to preview them before installing.

Do this by double clicking on them in the finder or dragging them to the Font Book icon (in the Applications folder). Font book will open a new window for each one, with a large sample of the font. However these windows will cascade and overlap, so you can only see one at a time.

Using exposé (F10), you can spread out all the windows and preview all the fonts side by side. To install a font, click on its window to bring it to the front, then click install.

Sometimes copying from websites or odd applications leaves your text with strange formatting, links and spacing when you paste it into word or TextEdit.

One way of clearing this up is using the Services menu, if your source application supports this. Start by selecting the text you want to copy, and going to Application Name -> Services -> Summarize. A new window will open and you will see a clean version of your text. Drag the slider to 100% so all your text is included, then copy to the clipboard and paste into your text editor.

An alternative method, for when you are pasting into TextEdit, or if your source application doesn't support the services menu, is use the make plain text option. Paste your text into TextEdit and choose Format -> Make Plain Text (Command-Shift-T). This should strip most of the formatting, and to be on the safe side you can summarize the text as well.

Technically only your ISP can truly block messages from a specific sender, but you can get near enough using Apple's Mail app. This can be done by creating a rule that deletes messages from a particular sender.

Open Mail and go to Mail -> Preferences, then click on the Rules section. Add a rule and give it a name (Blocked, Barred etc.) in the description field. Then use the pop-up menus to select all mail from an email address, the delete it

e.g.

If ANY of the following conditions are met:
FROM
IS EQUAL TO
i_am@blocked.com

Perform the following actions:
DELETE MESSAGE

Alternatively make the rule move the message to another mailbox, so you can check though the emails just in case you ever change your mind.

In all cocoa applications (TextEdit, Mail etc.), two adjacent characters can be swaped by positioning the cursor between them and pressing Control-T.

This can be useful if you often end up typing "teh" and "becuase".

To create an On-The-Go playlist on your iPod, navigate to a song, artist, album or genre then press and hold the centre button until you see the selector blink. Repeat this until you have chosen all the songs you wish to add to the playlist.

Next go to the playlists menu, and select On-The-Go, which should be at the bottom. You will see that there is a save option, select this and the playlist will be named Playlist 1. You can now create another On-The-Go playlist in the same fashion as before, but when saved, will be named Playlist 2.

In iTunes and on your iPod it is impossible to sort your playlists other than alphabetically.

To sort your playlists you could just use punctuation marks, but a more interesting way of doing this is using hearts, stars and musical notes, which the iPod can also display.

Using the character palette, under International System Preferences or Menu Item, these symbols can be found in the Miscellaneous category of the Roman lettering. These don't just have to be for sorting your playlists, they can jazz them up too!

Yet the iPod can't display more complex symbols, however this is even more useful. It leaves a blank space, but still sorts your playlists into the order of the symbols, meaning they are sorted in your own order, but without anything before them.

If you visit the same collection of website every day, this will save you making multiple trips to the bookmarks menu.

Launch Safari and make sure tabbed browsing is enabled. (In the Tabs section of Safari preferences make sure Enable Tabbed browsing in clicked)

Click on the bookmarks button and create a new folder, giving it a descriptive name. Copy/Move all your favourite bookmarks into it, and drag it to the bookmarks bar.

Then enable the "Auto-Click" option next to the folder. Now a small square will appear next to your bookmark folder instead of a downward arrow, and when you click it, each site will open in a separate tab.