Create your own alert sound
Whenever Mac OS X wants to get your attention, it plays an alert sound. For example it does this when a dialog box appears, when you receive an email and as an iCal alarm. Your Mac comes with a nice set of alert sounds, but after a while they may get a bit boring.

You can add your own alert sounds by placing audio files in a certain folder. Before you do that however, you will need to convert your sound file to the AIFF format using iTunes. Open up iTunes and choose Preferences from the iTunes menu. In the Advanced section, click on the Importing tab and choose AIFF encoder from the pop-up menu. Click OK.

If the audio file you want to use is in iTunes, select it and then click on the Advanced menu. In here choose Convert selection to AIFF. If you audio file is somewhere else, hold Option while clicking on the Advanced menu and choose Convert to AIFF. This will bring up a dialog that will allow you to navigate to your audio file. Once the file is done converting, go back to the preferences and change the "Import Using" pop-up menu back to AAC.

Now we have to get this file to show up in the Alerts list in System Preferences, Mail and iCal. Open up your user folder, look in the Library for a folder called Sounds and drag the sound here from iTunes. Your new alert should now be in the list in the Sounds section of System Preferences.

Make your alerts visual
An alternative to the audio alert is a visual alert, which is basically a screen flash. You can turn this on in the Universal Access section of System Preferences, under the Hearing tab. This will flash the screen as well as playing an alert sound. If you want to get rid of the sound and just have the flash, go to the Sounds section of System Preferences and move the Alert Volume Slider all the way to the left.

Annoyingly, this will also mute the feedback you get when the volume is changed and the interface sound effects (like when you move something to the trash). If you're fine with this then use the method above. However if you still want these other sound effects, there is a better (but more complicated) solution.

Mac OS X will also flash the screen if for some reason it is unable to play the selected audio alert. To make this happen, open up TextEdit and press Command-Shift-T to convert the document to plain text. Save this empty file as Flash.aiff in the sounds folder inside your Library. If a dialog asks you which extension to use, choose .aiff.

Now if you look in your alerts list in System Preferences there will be an alert called Flash that does exactly that - flash the screen. This is because Flash.aiff isn't really a sound file. When your Mac tries to play it and can't, it flashes the screen instead to make sure you still see an alert.

The Ask a Question page that I recently added to the site has been surprisingly popular. Here's a few of the latest questions. If you have a question or tip about Mac OS X use the corresponding link in the sidebar to send it to me.

Dan writes:

My one year old daughter attacked my wife's iBook, and has somehow changed the settings so that the computer has gone 'negative' - everything looks like a photographic negative - desktop background, icons, the dock, everything. Does anyone know how to get this back to normal?

The "negative" effect is a feature of the Universal Access preferences. To quickly reverse it, press Control-Option-Command-8. You can change all the settings for this in the System Preferences, under the Universal Access pane. For more information on this, check out this previous tip on Universal Access.

Ignacio writes:

Hello, I accidentally erased the Ical application, i would like to know how to install it again.

The iCal application is included on the Mac OS X install disks that came with your Mac. However, technically you would have to reinstall the entire operating system to get it back.

A shareware application called Pacifist ( http://www.charlessoft.com/ ) allows you to open up the installer files and just install a single application. This should work for iCal or any other application included with Mac OS X.

Sean writes:

I have a delightful neighbor who's 90 years old who uses the net daily. She is sight impaired. I need to find a method of increasing the width of the scrollbars and their arrows to a size she can use. She recently switched from a PC to the Mac. She loves the Mac. It was easy to set the scrollbar size on XP. How can this be done on the Mac? Her Mac is a beige desktop G3 with lots of memory and OS X 10.2.8.

The only tools for the sight impaired that come with Mac OS X are the settings in the Universal Access pane of the System Preferences (in the Apple menu). There is an option here for zooming that zooms in on the cursor when you press a keyboard shortcut. However, this isn't exactly what you want and it involves learning a load of keyboard shortcuts.

Another option is to change the screen resolution. Go to the Displays pane in the System Preferences and choose a lower number from the list of resolutions. The drawback of this method is that everything gets bigger, and there is less room for viewing things like large photos.

I understand that neither of these are perfect solutions, but they may be worth a try.

For those who don't know, Mac OS X packages are simply folders disguised to look like single files. The most common examples are applications. They are just folders containing all the data files for the application that open up as an application rather than folder when you double-click them in the Finder.

Packages are great because they allow the developer to store all the important related files inside the application. They are also great because they make it very easy to tinker with the way applications work.

To view or edit a package's contents, Control-click (or Right-click) on the application and select Show Package Contents from the context menu. This will bring up a finder window containing a folder named Contents. Inside here is the actual package contents.

The following are a few examples of what you can do inside Mac OS X packages.

Warning: It is a good idea to keep a backup of any file you modify. To do this, just Option-drag the file to copy it to a safe place before making any changes to the original.

1. Change Unexpectedly Quit message
With some tinkering it is possible to customize Mac OS X alert messages and dialog box text. For a bit of fun, you can change the message that appears when an application crashes to something more humorous.

Open up your hard drive and navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices. Find the Crash Reporter package and open it by Control-clicking (or right clicking) and choosing Show Package Contents.

In the window that appears, navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj and find Localizable.strings. Copy it to your Desktop and open it up in TextEdit. Near the bottom of the file you will see the line -

/* Unexpectedly quit dialog */

In the lines that follow this it is fairly obvious how to change the message. The symbol "%@" will make the message display the crashed Application's name, and "\n" will make a line break. Save the file and then copy it back to the package to replace the old version. You will have to enter your administrator password.

2. Change an application's default icon
You probably know how to change an application's icon by opening up its Get Info window (Command-I), clicking on the icon and pasting a new one over it. You can use the Cut tool (Command-X) to remove this icon and return to the default. To change this default icon, you have to delve into the package. The icon file is stored in the Resources folder within the package contents, and normally has the same name as the application with the .icns extension. You can replace this file with any other icon file, whether it is downloaded from the Internet or taken from another application.

If you dislike the way the iCal icon always displays the date as July 17 when it isn't open, there is an alternative icon inside the iCal package. If you look inside the Resources folder you will find two icons - App.icns and App-empty.icns. To change which one iCal uses, simply rename App.icns something like AppJul17.icns and make a duplicate of App-empty.icns named App.icns.

Some people also dislike the iTunes 7 icon. This Mac OS X Hints article describes how to change it back to the one used in iTunes 6.

3. Open help files in a Web browser
Anyone who has ever used the Mac OS X help browser will admit that it is a little on the slow side. Annoyingly, it also lacks a Save command, meaning you have to go through the slow process of loading it up and finding what you want every time. Luckily, the help pages are just HTML files stored away inside the application's package. This means you can open them up in Safari, which is much quicker for browsing and allows you to save bookmarks and Save pages.

For example, to open up the iPhoto help, open up the iPhoto package in your Applications folder. Then navigate to the English.lproj folder inside the Resources folder. Here you'll find a folder called iPhoto Help with a file named iPhoto Help.htm inside. Double-click on this file to open it up in Safari.

Annoyingly, every now and again a link will open up in Help Viewer, but generally you can browse the help files from within Safari.

Things like Airport, Applescript, Bluetooth, iPod and Mac OS X itself don't have an Application package to store the help files in, so these are located in the Library folder. To find them, go to your Hard drive and look inside Library/Documentation/Help. Each of the .help files in here is a package.

4. Change Text Clipping Behaviour
This previous tip explains how to make selections within Text Clippings by changing a file within the Finder Package. Normally you can only copy and paste the entire clipping, but by changing one line in a file, you can enable making selections within clippings.

5. Customize System Preferences
All the System Preferences panes are grouped into five categories - Personal, Hardware, Internet and Network, System and Other. It is quite easy to change these category names by going inside the System Preferences package, which is in the Applications folder. Inside it, navigate to the English.lproj folder inside the Resources folder. In here, find a file named NSPrefPaneGroups.strings and drag it to your desktop. Now open this file up in TextEdit and you'll see the following lines:

"personal" = "Personal";
"digitalHub" = "Digital Hub";
"hardware" = "Hardware";
"net" = "Internet & Network";
"system" = "System";
"addons" = "Other";

Don't change the words on the left, these are the ones used by System Preferences. You can change the words on the right. These are the ones displayed in the System Preferences window. Just make sure you don't delete any quotes or semicolons. Also, ignore the "Digital Hub" entry. This isn't used anymore and is probably just left over from a previous version of the operating system.

Now save the file and drag it back to the English.lproj folder from the Desktop. You will have to Authenticate this action with your administrator password.

6. Modify iCal alarm message
You can customize the alarm message in iCal to show something else instead of the alarm clock. First, create a Quicktime movie that is roughly 53 pixels wide and 66 pixels high, and save it as alarmclock.mov. Locate iCal in your Applications folder open up its package. Go to the Resources folder and locate the alarmclock.mov file that is already in there. Replace this with your new alarmclock.mov file.

Using the mouse is not always the quickest way of getting things done. Keyboard shortcuts are great timesavers, but not every command has one. Luckily you can create your own keyboard shortcuts from the System Preferences to speed things up.

To do this, open up System Preferences and go to the Keyboard and Mouse pane. From the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab you can view and edit all existing keyboard shortcuts for the system. To change any of them, double click on the current key combination then type your own. If the one you set clashes with any others, a warning icon will appear next to it. To disable a shortcut, uncheck the box next to it on the left.

Note that this list does not contain any application specific shortcuts. At the bottom there is a section for "Application Keyboard Shortcuts" but this is probably empty. The only ones that appear here are the shortcuts that you create. Click the small plus (+) button below the list to bring up a dialog box that allows you to choose an application and menu command and assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

The drop down menu contains all the applications in the applications folder, but if you want another one, choose other from the bottom of the list. Next enter the exact name of the menu item you want to create the shortcut for. This can be anything that appears in an application's menus, but don't forget to include the "..." at the end if the item has it (e.g. Customize Toolbar...").

The keyboard shortcut can use a combination of the Command, Control, Option and Shift keys, as well as any of the function keys (F1, F2 etc.). For some of the nested menu items it isn't obvious what to type. For example, to choose the menu item "Arrange by --> Kind" you have to type "By Kind".

After entering all the details, click add and your shortcut will be added to the bottom of the list under "Application shortcuts". You will have to quit and reopen the application for everything to start working. To do this for the Finder, Control-Option click on its Dock icon and choose Relaunch.

We all have to admit that we are pretty lazy at times, and would love to make our computers do stuff automatically. And because we are lazy, we can't be bothered with stuff like Applescripts that are far too much effort to create. Here are a few tips to automate your Mac and make your life that little bit easier without going over the top with scripting.

The first thing to do is to make your Mac turn on by itself. You can set it to do this in the Energy Saver preference pane in System Preferences. Just load it up and click "schedule" and choose a time to start up (and/or shutdown) and on which days you want this. This will also wake up your Mac if it is asleep, but this might not work if you have a password enabled screensaver.

Instead of loading up the same web browser, email client and iTunes every time you start up your computer, you can set them as login items in the Accounts preference pane. Choose the login items tab, click the plus and select the applications you want to automatically start up. Popular ones are Mail or Entourage, Firefox or Safari and iCal.

As far a scheduling specific applications goes, you have to use applescripts or automator actions for most of them. If you aren't completely super lazy, it is pretty straightforward to create a workflow in automator that opens up a list of websites, or starts an iTunes playlist going. To get this worklow to be carried out at a certain time, create an event in iCal and set an alarm. As the alarm action, set it to open up the automator file.

However, in some applications you can get the same results without making workflows or scripts. For example, in Firefox you can set multiple websites as your homepage, and all of these will open up when you start Firefox. There are two ways to do this. The first is to create a folder of bookmarks with all the sites you want to load on startup. After creating this folder, go to the Firefox preferences and click "use bookmark" to select the folder. The alternative way is to type in each address into the homepage field with a | (pipe) in between. Be sure to set Firefox to load your homepage on startup using the dropdown menu.

Finally, some applications have built in scheduling capabilities. Microsoft Entourage has tools to set Send and receive schedules that check for email at certain times and Apple's Backup has its own scheduling feature to carry out automatic backups however frequently you want.

You can use all of these features to automate your Mac and make sure that you never have to carry out a tedious task again.

Pressing Tab in windows and dialogs normally just moves the focus between text boxes and lists. To make the focus move to all elements of the window, start by opening the Keyboard and Mouse Preferences (in System Preferences) and going to Keyboard Shortcuts.

Under the "Full Keyboard Access" section at the bottom, choosing "All controls" will allow you to focus on things like pop-up menus and buttons too.

Now, when a dialog box opens up, there will be a faint halo around one of the buttons, which you can move by pressing the tab key. Pressing the space bar will select whatever has the focus. The up and down arrow keys now navigate menus, and right and left arrows for folders and subfolders.

The Universal Access System Preferences pane is an area of OS X that is rarely visited by most users. As well as being really useful for computer users with disabilities, it also contains some of the coolest things you can do with your mac.

While the preference pane is useful for browsing through the features, all parts of it are accessible through keyboard shortcuts, which are a much quicker way of turning the features on and off.

Firstly, you can invert the display by pressing Control-Option-Command-8. This changes most windows from black writing on a white background, making your display look much more funky. Pressing the keyboard shortcut again will change your screen back to the way it was.

Secondly the zoom function can be enabled and disabled by pressing Command-Option-8. Once enabled, this allows you to press Command-Option-Dash(-) and Command Option-Equals(=, also has the + on it) to zoom in and out. These are the two keys next to the delete key, not the ones on the keypad to the right. I could see this being especially useful when giving a presentation or tutorial if you want to highlight a particular area of the screen.

(via Silver Mac)

In the Energy Saver system preferences you will find a button labelled "Schedule." This allows you to schedule your mac to startup and shutdown at certain times, on certain days.

This is just about the only way to schedule things without buying other software or using iCal. Basically you can set your computer to come on in the morning on weekdays and go off in the evening for example.

I combine this with a locked screen saver. In the evening I start my "Big Clock" screensaver, then put my mac to sleep. In the morning it wakes up at a specified time, and loads the password dialog box. Then, when no password is typed in, it goes to the screen saver after 30 seconds. This means when I wake up in the morning I can look over and see the time in big bright letter next to me, without them on all night to wake me up.

You can also combine this with an applescript or automator actions to play music or load web pages every morning. After writing the script to do this, set a daily alarm in iCal that loads it every morning, but make sure to make it a minute later than the time your mac wakes up from sleep.

Here is a tip I discovered on TUAW. To quickly go to the display, audio and keyboard preferences, you can hold down the option key and press the relevant F-key.

On a laptop the use is printed on the keys - keyboard brightness, sound volume and display brightness. On a desktop however, the only keys that show you what they do are the volume settings. F14 and F15 control the display contrast, so pressing Option-F14 (or F15) will take you to the display preferences. Of course desktops don't have backlit keyboards, so you can't do that one.

Sleep, Restart and Shut Down also have their own keyboard shortcuts. To put your computer to sleep, press Option-Command-Eject. To Restart, press Control-Command-Eject. To Shut Down, press Control-Option-Command-Eject. These are obviously very complicated to make sure you don't accidently press them whilst doing something else.

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.