RSS FeedThey mentioned the killall Dock thing... if you hold shift and collapse a window it goes slowly into the dock. if you do a killall Dock command in the terminal while it's collapsing, the window freezes in it's squished state, while still allowing you to scroll in it and click links (although the links will be in their original location).
SleepingInsomniac | Homepage | 03.21.07 - 4:42 am | #
This is great fun, and also a little weird. As mentioned, you will need to press Shift while clicking minimize to slow things down and give you enough time to run the command. Have Terminal open with "killall Dock" ready typed so you just have to press enter. When the Dock relaunches, your currently minimizing window gets stuck half way, but is still treated like a normal window. Drag it around, scroll up and down, browse web pages. It's not perfect however - as SleepingInsomniac notes, the links on web pages are still where they were before you minimized, making things a bit confusing.
Check out the image below to get an idea of what it looks like.
To get your windows back to normal you just need to close (Command-W) and reopen them.
Thanks to SleepingInsomniac for this!
You'll find the 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. For the most part, applications will need restarting before changes take place. For most applications you can just quit and open them again, and for the Finder you can use the Force Quit dialog, just log out and log in again or type "killall Finder" into the terminal after the command.
Feel free to add any of your favourites in the comments.
1.
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden
-bool YES
Makes hidden applications' dock icons translucent. NO to reverse.
2.
defaults write com.apple.iTunes
invertStoreLinks -bool YES
Normally the arrows next to artists and albums in
your iTunes library search the iTunes store when
you click them. This command changes them so that
clicking will search your iTunes library instead.
Put NO at the end to reverse.
3.
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode
YES
This allows you to drag widgets out of Dashboard onto the desktop. Requires the dock to be relaunched to take effect, so type "killall Dock" and press enter. Now, if you click and hold onto a widget in the dashboard and press F12 to return to the desktop, the widget won't disappear with the rest. Put NO at the end to reverse.
4.
defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText
-bool TRUE
Forces all mail to be displayed as plain text.
Replace TRUE with FALSE to reverse.
5.
defaults write -g
NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool
TRUE
Sets expanded save dialogs as default (showing
column/list view of folders rather than a drop down
menu). Replace TRUE with FALSE to reverse.
6.
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine
-background
Displays the currently chosen screen saver to be
shown as the desktop background. Press Control-C or
Command-. to stop.
More details here.
7.
defaults write
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow
AdminHostInfo SystemVersion
Displays useful system stats in the login window.
More details here. Replace "SystemVersion" with
one of the following for different stats:
SystemBuild
SerialNumber
IPAddress
DSStatus
Time
HostName
8. sudo
defaults write
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow
HiddenUsersList -array-add shortname1 shortname2
shortname3
To remove accounts from the login window type this
command with the short name of each account you
wish to remove. More
details here.
9.
com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify
TRUE
Skip disk image verification. Potentially risky,
use with disk images from trusted sources. Replace
TRUE with FALSE to reverse.
10.
defaults write "Apple Global Domain"
AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBothPuts double
scroll arrows at both ends of scroll bar. Use
Appearance pane in system preferences to reset.
11.
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter
DialogType none
Disables the unexpectedly quit dialog that normally
appears when an application crashes. Replace "none"
with "prompt" to enable again.
12.
defaults write com.apple.Safari
WebKitHistoryItemLimit 2000 and/or
defaults write com.apple.Safari
WebKitHistoryAgeInDaysLimit 30
Sets the history limit in Safari to a certain number of items and and/or a certain age.
13.
defaults write com.apple.finder
AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
Shows hidden files in the finder. Replace TRUE with FALSE to hide hidden files again
14.
defaults write com.apple.safari
IncludeDebugMenu 1
Enables the debug menu in Safari. Type again but with 0 instead of 1 at the end to disable.
15.
defaults write com.apple.dashboard
mcx-disabled -boolean YES
Deactivates Dashboard. Requires the dock to be relaunched to take effect, so type "killall Dock" and press enter. Replace YES with NO to enable again.
If you want to customize the items in your toolbar (and there’s nothing wrong with that), just Command-Option-click the little white pill-shaped button at the top right of your window’s title bar, and the Customize Toolbar dialog will appear, right there in your window. Now you can just drag-and-drop icons onto the toolbar.
As well as dragging the customize items to your toolbar, you can also now drag files or folders as well. However, if you are only adding files to the toolbar you can just hold Command-Option while dragging them there - you don't need to bring up the customize dialog box.
From the customize dialog that appears you can choose from a number of items (shown below) and change the view options - icon, text or both.
The added benefit of Command-Control clicking
this button is that it works in every application
that allows you to customize the Toolbar. Note that
these other applications don't allow you to drag
your own files, folders, applications etc. to the
toolbar. You can only choose items from the dialog
box.
There's quite a few quick Mac Tips over at
Technoforest, be sure to check them out!
However robg, the man in charge over at Mac OS X
Hints notes that this tip is pretty useless - if an
application is stuck so much that you want to force
quit it, it is unlikely to respond to menu clicks.
To access force quit through the Apple menu you
often have to switch to a working application
before clicking it. The keyboard combination
(Command-Option-Escape) still works no matter what
the frontmost application is, but at first
appearances adding in the shift seems to do
nothing.
This is where the Mac OS X Hints community step in
through a discussion in the comments. Turns out you
can use the shift in the keyboard combination, but
you have to hold it for a few seconds. Hold
Command-Option-Shift-Escape for about 2 seconds and
the current application will force quit without the
hassle of the dialog box. Neat!
You can also
force quit using the dock as noted before here
on Mac OS X Tips. Right-Click (Control-Click) an
application's icon in the dock and if it is not
responding there will be a Force Quit option in the
contextual menu. If the application appears to be
fine, you will need to hold Option to change 'Quit"
to "Force Quit". Note that with the Finder you need
to hold Option before you Right Click to make
"Relaunch" appear.
• Normally you just double click to open an item, but if you hold option while doing it the current window will close as the new one opens.
•
• Look in the Finder Preferences (located in the Finder Menu) for more window options. For example you can change the delay for spring loaded folders, set the default location for a new finder window (Command-N) and set folders to always open in a new window.
• You can change the view of your Finder windows by pressing Command-Option-T. This shows and hides the toolbar and sidebar. The contents of both of these are customisable by dragging files and folders to them (Hold Command and Option if dragging to the toolbar) or by choosing Customise toolbar from the View Menu. You can also resize the sidebar and turn it into icons without names.
• To close every single Finder window, hold option while clicking the red X in the corner. Alternatively press Command-Option-W.
• In column view it is sometimes easier to navigate through the file structure using the arrow keys. In the other views this is still possible, but to go inside the selected folder press Command-Down. In list view Command-Right will expand the currently selected folder. This can be used with multiple folders selected to look inside them all at the same time.
• You can do many tricks to resize column widths to the right size in column view.
• Command-1, 2 or 3 will change you to
icon, list or column view. Command-[ and Command-]
will take you back and forward.
• You can use the Go menu to quickly navigate to common places such as Home, Applications and your 10 most recent folders. Most of these places have keyboard shortcuts associated with them.
If you have decided that you don't want your originals any more, getting rid of them can reduce the amount of hard drive space that your photo library takes up. There are two ways of doing this - using a few terminal commands, or using a free application called iPhoto Diet.
The terminal commands are from this MacRumors forum and come with a brief explanation of what they do. To run them, paste the following into the terminal:
mkdir ~/.Trash/iPhoto-Originals
cd ~/"Pictures/iPhoto Library/Modified/"
find . -type f -exec mv "../Originals/{}" ~/.Trash/iPhoto-Originals/ \;
This gives you a folder in the trash so you can check all the right photos are there before emptying it permanently. A summary of everything in the MacRumors forum has been made by Adriaan Tijsseling on his blog.
iPhoto Diet is a free application by Martin Fuhrer that does the same thing, but with more options and a nice user interface. This may take a little more time than the terminal commands, but it is much more user friendly and gives greater flexibility. It allows you to reduce you photo library size in the following ways:
• eliminate duplicate photos created internally by iPhoto or imported by yourself
• remove iPhoto's backups of rotated or modified photos
• strip the thumbnail icons of your photos
• remove thumbnail photos that have become mixed up with your high resolution photos
• identify photos which have not been added to albums
• weed out unnecessary folders and files from the library
• and more!
Download Links, installation instructions and an FAQ are available from Martin Fuhrer's site.
Why not just upload your email addresses from Address Book to gmail. Using AddressBookToCSV you can do just that. It will export your Address Book to a format read by the gmail internet application so that no matter where you are, you can have you addresses!
This tip was written by MacTipper, a great blog with loads of tips for Mac OS X. Check it out.
It gives you the details in terms of the iPods
storage capacity, that is, in bytes. However, you
can also use the graph to display a count of how
many songs, photos and videos your iPod contains or
how long it would take to listen to all the songs
and watch all the videos.
Change to this mode by clicking on the graph itself. Clicking once will cycle to the number count, clicking again will change it to the time count, and clicking one final time will change it back to the storage capacity.
The way it works is that ratings are stored as a number between 1 and 100 as increments of 20. For example, 1 star is 20, 2 stars is 40 and so on. Using a little bit of trickery you can set the rating at 10, 30, 50, 70 or 90 giving a half star rating between two of the normal ones. Note that setting the rating to something like 31 just breaks the whole thing and your rating will just show up as one star.
To set a half star rating, just open up script
editor (search spotlight or go to
Applications/Applescript) and paste the following
line:
tell application "itunes" to set rating of
current track to 30
The number at the end can be changed to one of the
following:
10 gives ½
30 gives *½
50 gives **½
70 gives ***½
90 gives ****½
To make the change, click "Run" at the top of the
window. To get rid of the half star rating just
click on a normal rating in iTunes, or run the
script again with 20, 40, 60 or 80 instead.
This method is slightly inconvenient if you have
to load up script editor every time you want to
rate a song, so luckily iTunes has built-in script
support. Doug Adams has even made a whole site
dedicated to providing scripts for it - Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes.
From there you can download Add-Substract A
Half Star which is a script like the one
above, but compiled into an application. Save
this file in
Users-->[username]-->Library-->iTunes-->Scripts
If the scripts folder doesn't exist, you will
need to create it.
Quit and re-open iTunes if it is already open, then
in the menubar next to the Window menu there will
be a little script icon. From there you can choose
to add or subtract a half star from the rating of
the current song.
On his site, Doug also explains how you can
assign a keyboard shortcut to
the script.
You can get the color details in many different ways, the most common being RGB values. In web design it is useful to have the RGB as an 8-bit Hex value, and in the Mac OS X color picker you can type in the actual 8-bit RGB values.
Using the DigitalColor meter is pretty straightforward - Move the cursor over the pixel you want to sample, and read off the values. There are some extra tools to help you do this however.
You can change the size of the area sampled by sliding the "Aperture Size" slider. On the far left it looks at each single pixel, but to the right it averages multiple pixels to give the overall effect.
When you are using the mouse to choose the color
from an area of the screen, you obviously can't go
up to the menus at the top to choose any options.
Therefore everything has to be done with keyboard
shortcuts. (The options are still located up in the
menubar, so you can check what shortcut does what
if you forget). They are as follows:
- Command-X : Lock Horizontal Position
- Command-Y : Lock Vertical Position
- Command-L : Lock Position
- Command-Shift-H ; Hold Color
Once you have chosen the colour you want, you can
use the following shortcuts to copy it:
- Command-C : Copies the Image in large box on the
left
- Command-Shift-C : Copies the RGB values as text
- Command-Option-C : Copies the solid color as an
image
It is also possible to save the image as a TIFF
file by pressing Command-S.
First off, you need to check your settings are
right. Load up iPhoto and go to the Preferences
located in the iPhoto menu. You can only access the
advanced editing mode if you have iPhoto set for
image editing. Also, if you have iPhoto set to edit
in a separate window, the advanced editing mode
will be reset every time you enter edit mode.
Choosing "Edit in Main Window" will make the
advanced editing mode stay active until you quit
iPhoto.
As usual, you need to double-click any image to enter edit mode. Choose the tool that you need (either retouch or red eye) by clicking on the icon at the bottom. Once this is selected, press Control-Caps Lock-9 at the same time, then release them. At first nothing will happen, but you are now in advanced editing mode. Pressing tab will cycle through the different advanced features, which will be shown by the cursor changing shape.
If you chose red eye, pressing tab once will
switch the small cross hairs cursor to a large
oval. Now, pressing the [ and ] keyes will allow
you to resize the area of red eye correction.
Pressing shift while clicking to apply the red eye
correction will result in a lighter fill than with
the normal tool.
If you chose retouch, pressing tab once will change
the cursor to a circle with a number below it. This
shows the size of the retouch tool. To resize it,
press the [ and ] keys as with the red eye tool. To
change the strength of the retouch, press Shift-[
and Shift-] and the number will change to show
this. If you press tab a second time, the retouch
tool changes into the lighten tool, which just
lightens the area under the circle. As with the
other tools, press [ and ] to resize it. Pressing
tab again will bring you back to the normal retouch
tool.
Quitting and re-launching iPhoto will return you to
the normal editing mode, so you need to redo the
Control-Caps Lock-9 keyboard shortcut if you want
to enter the advanced mode again.
