One of the comments on the Terminal Commands tip pointed out something I have never heard of before. Although it is entirely useless, (a lot of the stuff on this site is) I thought it was a nice trick:

They 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!

There is a huge amount of hidden settings for Mac OS X and its applications that aren't accessible from preferences dialog boxes or the System Preferences. Applications such as Tinkertool and Mac Pilot allow you to access some of these, but the real flexibility is from the Terminal. From here it is possible to edit any preferences file for any application on your Mac.

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.

---

A business software can be easily run on a mac operating system. You can avail a proper distance learning through the use of ip phones. Getting yourself enrolled in certifications like 220-601, will help you gain extra knowledge. You will be aware of the usefulness of a backup of your system. It's time you started thinking on the numbers 646-002.

Here's a tip that (vaguely) follows on from 10 Tips for Mastering Finder Windows that I posted a few days ago. You know that little button in the top right of finder windows? Yes, the one that Windows users always click accidentally when trying to close the window. It normally just shows and hides the toolbar, but Technoforest has found some great extra functionality.

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!

A hint over at Mac OS X Hints describes a new way to bypass the Force Quit dialog box. If you click the Apple Menu, then press shift, you notice that "Force Quit..." has changed to "Force Quit [frontmost app]". This allows you to force quit an application without going through the process of loading up the dialog box, selecting the application and pressing Force Quit.

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.

As one of the most commonly used Mac applications, it is worth taking some time to get to grips with the Finder. There is a wealth of little known features and ways to carry out tasks more quickly and efficiently using the Finder's settings, menus and keyboard shortcuts. These ten tips mainly address the basics of working with Finder windows, but hopefully there will be something new to everyone.

1. 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.

2. Spring loaded folders allow you to easily drag a file wherever you want. If you drag the file onto a folder icon and hold it there for a while, the folder will spring open, allowing you to drag the file onto a folder within a folder. You can do this as many times in a row you want, and when you let go of the file all the windows that have sprung open will close again. Hold the Space bar while doing this to get rid of the delay before a folder springs open.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. To close every single Finder window, hold option while clicking the red X in the corner. Alternatively press Command-Option-W.

6. In list view (choose from the View menu or icons in the window toolbar) you can peek into folders using the expansion triangles. Option clicking one of these triangles will expand the folder along with any folders it contains. Option clicking again will collapse all these folders again.

7. 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.

8. You can do many tricks to resize column widths to the right size in column view.

9. Command-1, 2 or 3 will change you to icon, list or column view. Command-[ and Command-] will take you back and forward.

10. Another tip gives details on browsing a website by command clicking on the title bar in Safari. This works even better in the Finder. Command Clicking on the title bar gives you the path to the current location, allowing you to jump to any of the enclosing folders.

11. 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 a large photo album, you can quickly see iPhoto start to take up large amounts of hard drive space. One reason for this is that every time you modify a photo (rotate, enhance, etc.) it creates a backup original. This is to allow it to have that magical "Revert to original" option.

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.

A lot of people use gmail. A small part of those people are mac users with the macintosh address book application. And probabaly 95% of those users use Address Book with Apple Mail. The problem is that if you send an email through the internet based gmail but normally send them through Apple Mail, then, unless you have the address memorized, you'll need to get the address.

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.

When iTunes 7 came out, Apple competely redesigned the iPod section in iTunes. You can now look at all the different kind of files on your iPod using the bar graph at the bottom of the page. This shows the total capacity of the iPod, and how much of that is being used up by Audio, Photos, Videos and Other files. To see this, plug in your iPod and open up iTunes. Click on your iPod in the Devices section in the left hand column.

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.

One feature that I missed back when iTunes 6 came out is the ability to set a song rating to a half star. This can be used if you often find yourself thinking a song is not quite a four star, but definitely more than a three star, then you can carry out this simple tip to make it 3½ stars.

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.

One application that is extremely useful when doing any kind of design work is the DigitalColor Meter. It allows you to get the exact RGB values for any pixel on the screen, which is great for finding out which colours are used in web pages or photos. This is just about the only thing that it does, but it does it well. You will find the DigitalColor meter in Applications/Utilities.

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.

Here's one for the mathematicians. There are a number of ways to cycle through the 3 calculator modes - Basic, Scientific and Programmer. You can find all three in the View menu, or you can cycle through them by pressing Command-1, Command-2 or Command-3. If the mouse just happens to be closer, you can more easily change mode by clicking the green zoom button next to the close and minimise buttons in the top left.

The built-in red eye and retouch editing tools in iPhoto are amazingly easy to use, but pretty basic in what they can do. Luckily, in iPhoto 6 there is a secret advanced editing mode that allows you to make these tools even more useful. When this mode is activated you can control the size and strength of both the retouch and red eye tools.

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.

iCal offers a special customised print dialog, allowing you to print calendars and to do lists in a number of different ways. While iPhoto offers a nicer way to publish complete calendars, the print options in iCal give a great way to print to do lists.

Start by going to File --> Print or hitting Command-P. A large preview window appears, with many options down the right hand side. The default settings will print a normal calendar in month view. To change this to a simple to do list, change the first popup menu from Month to List. Choose your date range using the settings below, and uncheck all the boxes in the Options sections apart from "To Dos".

Your page will show all to dos dated in the range you specified, as well as any undated to dos. If you don't want any of the undated to dos to show up you can delete them, or move them to another seperate calendar that isn't set to print.