Here's a quick tip. When you change the volume using the keyboard, your Mac plays the usual clicking sound associated with a volume change.

You can turn this sound off from the Sound section of System Preferences, but this is a bit time consuming to do every time you want to quietly change the volume.

Luckily there is a keyboard shortcut to silence the volume changing beep on a case by case basis. If you hold the Shift key while changing the volume, you will get no audio feedback, meaning you won't bother anyone with the clicking sound.

You can also get this to work the other way round. If you turn off the feedback in the Sound section of System Preferences, the clicking sound will only play if you hold down shift before changing the volume.

(This is vaguely related to a previous tip - holding option before pressing the volume change keys will open up the Sound System Preferences.)

The Mac OS X Address Book is a neat little application that is often under-appreciated. As a seemingly boring application it has loads of features that are overlooked by most users. While useful on its own for organising your contacts, Address Book's real power is that it works with so many other applications. Here are a few tips to save you time and let you make the most of Address Book.



Add Contacts to your Safari Bookmarks
If lots of your contacts have their own web sites, you might be interested to know that you can automatically add these to your Safari bookmarks bar. Open up Safari go to the Preferences (in the Safari Menu). In here click the Bookmarks tab and check the box that says "Include Address Book" in the Bookmarks Bar. Now a new folder will appear at the far left of your Bookmarks bar. In here will be the web sites of all you contacts who have a home page set in their Address Book entry.

Chat to your Contacts
Address Book integrates quite well into iChat, the Mac OS X instant messenger. If a person in your Address Book is online and using iChat, a little green dot will appear next to their picture. Clicking on the dot will open up iChat, where you can start a new conversation with the person.

Put your Contacts in the Spotlight
In Address Book, select which contact you want to search, and from the Action Menu (looks like a cog, located in the top left) choose "Spotlight [name]". The spotlight window will pop up, and show documents, photos, iCal events, mail messages and iChats related to this person. This is one of my favourite features of Spotlight - it allows you to use it as a personal organiser and links together Address Book, iCal, Mail and iChat.

If you don't have Address Book open, you don't need to bother opening it up to Spotlight search someone. Simply type their name into Spotlight for the same results.

Moreover, Spotlight remembers files that people have sent you. When searching for one of your contacts, Spotlight will list any files they sent as attachments to you, providing you received them in Mail.

Highlight Groups
If you hold down the Option key while you are viewing a contact, all the groups that they are in are highlighted in a lovely yellow.

Get Directions
You can easily get a map of a person's address using Address Book. Just click on their address and choose "Map Of" from the menu that appears. This will load up Safari (or your default browser) with a MapQuest map which allows you to get directions to and from the address. If you prefer to use Google Maps or Google Earth to view a map (or satellite image) of a person's address, there is a Google Maps Plugin available.


Merge two contacts
If somehow you end up with two entries in your address book for the same person, you can easily merge the two. Select the two entries by clicking on one in the list and then Command-clicking on the other. Now click on the Card menu and choose "Merge Selected Cards". If you have a huge contact list and you suspect some duplicate entries, you can also choose "Look for Duplicate entries" from the Card menu.

Large Type
If you want to read a person's phone number off the screen while dialling it across the room, you can make it display in large numbers across the screen. To do this, click on the number and choose "Large Type" from the pop-up menu.

Address Book Sharing
If you want to share your address book (for example with your family or secretary) you can do so providing you have a .Mac account. Open up Address Book and go to the Preferences (in the Address Book Menu). Click on the Sharing tab and check the box titled "Share your Address Book". Now click the plus icon to add people from your address book who have a .Mac account. People will only be allowed to view your address book, but if you select the "Allow Editing" option they will be able to make changes too.

Using vCards
In reality, most people don't have .Mac, so the standard way to share contacts is using vCards. A vCard is a file containing a contact's information that you can attach to an email and send to whoever you want. Luckily, vCards work really well with Address Book.

To create a vCard for a specific contact, select them from the list and right-click (Control-click) on their name. From the pop-up menu choose "Export vCard...".
To create a vCard that contains the information for all the people in a certain group, select the group you want from the list, right-click on it and choose "Export Group vCard...".

If you receive a vCard from someone else as an email attachment, you can add it to your address book in a couple of ways. If you received it in Mac OS X's Mail application, simply drag it from the email message across to Address Book. If not, save it to your Hard Drive and then choose Import vCards (Command-O) from the File Menu in Address Book.

Make Your Own Card
It can be quite useful to create an entry for yourself in Address Book as it is used for things like Autofilling forms in Safari. To do this, create a card as usual and fill it with all your information. Once you are done, choose "Make This My Card" from the Card menu. You will notice that your icon in the list changes and your photo now has "me" written in the corner. Now you can export your vCard using the method above to send your contact details to everyone in your address book.

Restrict Private Information
If you don't want to share all of your contact information with everyone you send your vCard to, you can choose to keep certain parts private. Go to the Address Book Preferences and check "Enable Private Me Card". Now when you edit your own card, you can use the check boxes to choose which information is exported as your vCard.

Printing Envelopes
You can print an envelope addressed to a contact by choosing Print from the File menu with the chosen person selected. In the print dialog choose Envelopes from the Style pop-up menu. As an interesting quirk, Address Book will address the envelope to everyone in the household if you have specified a spouse or child in the person's entry. For more information, check in this Mac OS X Hints page.

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Have HTML emails you want to archive and send to your contacts? Try an html to pdf converter to make their size smaller and more transportable. A PDF converter allows you to do such things to your documents. If you have a Word document to convert, you can convert them to PDF format as well.

Removing stubborn Items from the Sidebar
Iain writes:

I cannot delete a couple of folder shortcuts from my sidebar - Finder just says "the volume for XXX can not be found" - any ideas ?

You will need to delete the Finder's Sidebar preferences file. Go to your user folder and navigate to Library/Preferences and drag com.apple.sidebarlist.plist to the desktop. Control-Option-Click on the Finder icon in the Dock and choose relaunch. If the problem is fixed, you can trash the file on the desktop. If not, you might want to put it back. Be warned though, deleting this file will remove all your other shortcuts from the sidebar as well so you will have to add them all again.

Stopping Filemaker Pro
Brian writes:

I am having trouble with my mac. Every file I try to open defauts to filemaker pro. Is there a way to stop this? It happens with Excel files, Cad files, Etc....

Start by loading up NetInfo Manager, which is in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder. Select Users from the middle column and then your user name from the right hand column. Look in the bottom pane for the uid, which is probably something like 501.

Now quit NetInfo Manager and any other running applications. Navigate to Macintosh HD/Library/Caches and trash the following two files:
com.apple.LaunchServices-0140.csstore
com.apple.LaunchServices-01XXX.csstore
where XXX is the uid. You will need to enter your administrator password to do this. Now restart your Mac and check if the problem is fixed.

If not, go to your user folder, navigate to Library/Preferences and delete the com.apple.LaunchServices.plist file. Repeat the above steps by deleting the two files from the Caches folder and restarting again.

iPod Disk Use
Valentine writes:

How do I use my iPod for both storage and music?

Plug in your iPod and open up iTunes. In the iPod section there is a check box near the bottom that says "Enable disk use". Check this box. A warning will appear that says you have to eject your iPod before removing it from now on.

Your iPod should appear on the desktop as an icon. Double click it and it opens up like a normal folder. You can drag files over to it just any other drive.

If you have ever used Spotlight to search for a phrase within a PDF document, you may have encountered the annoyingly high level zoom in Preview.

When you click on the PDF in the Spotlight results, it opens up in Preview with the search term highlighted throughout the document. This is pretty useful, however the PDF is actually zoomed in 280 percent. This means you can read the word you searched for pretty easily, but you can't see anything else.

Luckily, by changing one line in the Preview preferences, you can change the zoom level to something less extreme. The easiest way to do this is using the Terminal.

First, quit Preview if it is running and open up Terminal from the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Type the following line and press return:
defaults write com.apple.Preview Preview -dict-add PVPDFSpotlightSelectionSize 10

The 10 at the end corresponds to a 100% zoom level. By default, this number is set to 28, or 280% zoom. If you want some zoom, but not quite as much, try a number like 15 for 150% zoom.

If you don't want to use the Terminal, or you are curious to see what the command actually does, you can open up the preference file in Property List Editor (which you will only have if you have installed the Developer Tools from the Mac OS X install Disk). Go to your user folder and navigate to Library/Preferences and open up com.apple.Preview.plist using Property List Editor.

Use the expansion Triangles to navigate to Root/Preview/PVPDFSpotlightSelectionSize. Here you can see the number is 28 (or 10 if you have already changed it in the Terminal).

You probably know that you can drag and drop chunks of text around Mac OS X. For example you could select and drag a paragraph from Safari to TextEdit. It's also fairly well know that you can drag files onto application icons in the Dock to open them in that application. Less well known is what happens when you drag bits of text onto Dock icons.

Doing this with different applications will produce different results. If the application will accept the text, it will darken when you hold the selection over it. Note that some applications will only accept the text if it is in a certain format (a web address for example). Here are the results with a few common applications. If you know of any more, add them in the comments.

1. Safari - If you drop a web address (i.e. something that starts with http://) on Safari, it will load up that address. If you drag any other bit of text, it will perform a Google Search on it. This is mainly useful if the text is from a non-cocoa app that doesn't have the "Search in Google" item in the right-click context menu.

2. Firefox - If dropped text is a web address, Firefox will load it. This is helpful if you want to view a site in a browser other than your default browser.

3. Mail - A new message will load up with the dropped text as the main message body. Annoyingly the text is placed in the body even if it is an email address.

4. TextEdit - As expected, this loads a new document containing the dropped text.

5. Skype - If the dropped text is a phone number, Skype will call it. This will also work with nicknames in your contact list.

6. Script Editor - A new script window will open up containing the dropped text. Script Editor will then attempt to compile it.

7. iTunes - If you drop a podcast address onto iTunes, it will subscribe to it. If the address isn't a podcast, iTunes will attempt to do it anyway (and fail).

8. Acquisition - Starts a new search with the dropped text.

9. Newsfire - Adds a new feed with the text as the address. (Why not try it out with http://feeds.feedburner.com/macosxtipsfeed )

10. Stickies - This will make a new Stickies note containing the text open up.

11. Dictionary - This will show you the definition of the dropped word. If you drop a selection of words, Dictionary will display the definition of the first. (In cocoa apps, it's probably quicker to use this keyboard shortcut).

Most of these also work if you drag the text to the desktop to create a text clipping first, and then drag it to the Dock icon.

Macworld has an AppleScript that is related to yesterday's iPod Notes Tip. This script takes your unread Apple Mail messages and allows you to read them on your iPod as notes. It's a long script so I won't write it here, but head over to the Macworld article to check it out.

Alternatively, click this link to automatically open up Script Editor with the script ready typed. Wherever it says <<your user name>> put your user name. Now when you run it, it will create a folder on your desktop with all your Mail messages as iPod Notes files. Each will be titled with the Subject of the message, and there will be an index file containing links to each of the messages.

If you are confident editing the script, you can set it to create the folder on your iPod instead of on the Desktop (This wasn't done in the original because everyone's iPod has a different name and you have to have the iPod connected to run the script). If you want to leave it as it is, all you have to do is plug in your iPod and copy across the folder from the desktop.

To make things even more automatic, you could set up an iCal alarm that runs the script every morning before you leave the house.

Most people don't even know that the iPod notes feature exists. It is available on all but the oldest iPods, and creating notes is a piece of cake. There's more to note than individual text files. You can use them for ebooks, museum tours or even for reading your email.

Creating Your Notes
To get notes on your iPod you just need to save plain text files in Notes folder on the iPod. To do this, first you need to mount your iPod on the Desktop. Plug in your iPod and load up iTunes. Go to the iPod section and make sure "Enable Disk Use" is checked. Now you can copy files to and from your iPod.

The easiest tool to use to create plain text files is TextEdit. Open it up and press Command-Shift-T or choose Make Plain Text from the Format menu. Once you are done writing your note, choose Save As from the File menu. You'll want to save it in the Notes folder inside your iPod.

Warning: Now you have enabled disk use for your iPod, you will need to eject it before you unplug it. Drag it to the trash or right-click and choose eject.

Each notes file is limited to 4KB by the iPod and if yours is too long, the end will be cut off. To avoid this, Daniel Duris has created a online tool to divide up long eBooks into 4KB sections. At the end of each section is a link to the next one, making it as simple as turning the pages of a book.

Format Notes with HTML
These links are interesting because they show that iPod notes have basic HTML support. You can use this to create links between your notes, just like the links you see on web pages. There are a few HTML tags that are supported by the iPod. <br> will create a link break, and to choose the title at the top of the iPod screen, put it between <title> and </title>. To link to another note file, type <a href="chapter2.txt">Next Chapter</a> where the link text "Next Chapter" links to the file "chapter2.txt" located inside you iPod's notes folder.

Here's an example:
<title>Chapter 1</title>
Once upon a time there was a man named John.
<br>
He lived in a bright yellow house.
<br><br>
<a href="chapter2.txt">Next Chapter</a>

When viewing these notes on your iPod, you can select links using the scroll wheel. If there is more than one link, the active one will have a blue underline. Using the scroll wheel will allow you to activate different ones.

Link to Songs and Videos
These links aren't just limited to notes. You can link to any song, video, album, artist or playlist on the iPod. For example, to link to the song "Song 2" using the text "Play Music" you would type <a href="song=Song 2">Play Music</a>.

Linking to a video works in much the same way as with a song.
<a href="video=Song 2">Link to Song 2 Music Video</A>

To link to groups of songs, you have to use a slightly different tag. Here are a couple of self-explanatory examples:
<a href="ipod:music?genre=rock">Link to rock music</A>
<a href="ipod:music?artist=Radiohead">Link to Radiohead</A>

You can even combine these to create the equivalent of Smart Playlists:
<a href="ipod:music?genre=rock&artist=U2">Combo</A>

Set Notes Preferences
There are a few settings you can change involving the notes on your iPod. The first is a "Notes Only" mode, which was mainly designed for iPods being used as tour guides or in museums. This means that when your iPod loads up you are shown the Notes folder, and can't navigate out of it. You can only get to songs (or a audio tour) via links in your notes.

To enable this mode, create notes file called Preferences (without the .txt extension) and put the following line in it:
<meta name="NotesOnly" content="true">

The second setting you can change is the title of the Notes folder. By default it is just called Notes, but if you are using the Notes Only feature, you might want to call it something like "Museum Tour". To do this, add the following line to the Preferences file:
<title>Museum Tour</title>

The final setting is to do with linking to songs. Normally when you choose a song from a link in a note, the Now Playing screen appears. To set you iPod to continue displaying the note instead, add the following line to the Preferences file:
<meta name=“NowPlaying” content=false>

If you create multiple calendars in iCal, they are automatically assigned different colours. This allows you to easily figure out which events belong to which calendar. The problem is that iCal only uses seven different calendar colours. If you have eight or more calendars, iCal will use these same colours multiple times making it harder to work out which events are from which calendar.



Now iCal does allow you to set a calendar to a colour other than the seven automatic ones, but you have to do this to each calendar manually. To do this, select the calendar from the list and choose "other" from the colour menu in the Info drawer/panel. This is pretty time consuming if you have a lot of calendars, and the more you have, the harder it is to make sure you don't use the same colour twice.


A more interesting way to solve this problem is by using randomly generated colours. To do this, we'll need to write a quick, easy AppleScript.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.3 or later, simply click this link to automatically open up Script Editor with a window containing the script you need.

If you are using an older version of Mac OS X, load up Script Editor (from /Applications/Applescript) and paste the following script into the window that appears:

tell application "iCal"
set calnum to (count every calendar)
repeat with currentnum from 1 to calnum
set calcolour to (the color of every calendar)
set red to random number 65535
set green to random number 65535
set blue to random number 65535
repeat until calcolour does not contain {{red, green, blue}}
end repeat
set red to random number 65535
set green to random number 65535
set blue to random number 65535
set the color of calendar currentnum to {red, green, blue}
end repeat
end tell


Now all you need to do is click Compile (the hammer icon) and then click Run. iCal will load up and each of your calendars will be assigned a new colour. It doesn't work perfectly - sometimes two colours will be very similar. However it is much more fun than going through each calendar individually and this is a great example of just how powerful AppleScript can be.

If you use TextEdit a lot, you may find that the bright white background is a little hard on the eyes. You can change it to something a little more soothing from the Fonts palette.

In TextEdit, go to the Format menu and choose Show Fonts. In the Font palette that appears, you will notice four buttons in the top left - 3 with a T on them and one with a small page icon. If you can't see these icons, your font palette might be too small. Drag the handle in the bottom right to resize it.

The button we want is the fourth one along. It should be a small page icon with a white box next to it. Clicking it brings up the colors palette which you can use to select a new background colour.

You are best off using the colour pickers that allow you to drag around to select a nice subtle colour. The preset colours (like in the crayon picker) are far too bright for a background.

Also note that any background colour that you set will be printed, so you will have to change it back to white before printing to avoid wasting ink.

In Mac OS X many dialog boxes slide out of a window's title bar and are attached to that window rather than being on their own. These dialog boxes are know as "sheets" and can be anything from Open/Save dialogs to the Customise Toolbar settings. They are attached to a certain window to show that they are associated with that particular file or application. If you can't remember seeing this before, open up a TextEdit file and choose Save As.

The sliding animation may be pretty, but it can waste a fair amount of time if you are opening and closing sheets all day. You can speed this up and make your Mac feel much snappier by using a simple Terminal command to reduce the amount of time taken to display the animation.

Launch the Terminal (located in Application/Utilities) and type the following command:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime 0.001

The number at the end is the length of the animation in seconds. With it set to 0.001, sheets appear pretty much instantly. The default is 0.2, so type the command with 0.2 at the end to return your sheet animation to normal.

For fun you can try higher values. This allows you to see just how detailed the animation is. Type the command with 2 at the end and load up TextEdit. Resize the window to as small as possible before selecting Save As from the File menu. You'll see the sheet jump up out of the window then gently fall into place.

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.

In the Dock you can use the section to the right of the divider to store folders. Many people choose to put their user folder or Hard Drive here for easy access. One of the greatest benefits is that you can right click (Control click) on the icon to get a handy pop-up menu containing the contents of the folder. From here you can navigate through to any file contained within.

This works great, apart from with the Volumes folder. If you don't already know, the Volumes folder contains your Hard Drive, CDs, DVDs, Disk Images, iPods, iDisks and any other mounted media devices. To get to this folder, choose "Go To Folder" from the Go menu and enter /Volumes. You'll find that if you put this folder in the Dock you can still right-click to view the pop-up menu, however you can't navigate into any of the drives apart from your startup disk (Probably Macintosh HD).

The work around for this involves creating a folder action using AppleScript to make a self-updating Dock pop-up menu. Start by opening up Script Editor (located in Application/AppleScript). Paste the following script into the window that appears:

property script_folder : ((path to documents folder) as string) & "Drives"
on run
tell application "Finder"
if not (exists alias script_folder) then
make folder at folder ((path to documents folder) as string) with properties {name:"Drives"}
end if
end tell
Update()
end run
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
Update()
end adding folder items to
on removing folder items from this_folder after losing these_items
Update()
end removing folder items from
on Update()
tell application "Finder"
set theFolder to folder script_folder
delete every item of theFolder
set theDisks to disks
repeat with i in theDisks
make new alias at theFolder to i
end repeat
end tell
end Update

Click Compile (the Hammer icon) and then click Run. The first time you run this script it will create a folder named "Drives" in your Documents folder and put an alias to every drive in it. You can drag this to your Dock and you will have a Drive pop-up menu that allows you to navigate through all of your mounted media. However, the list in the menu only updates when the script is run. This is where Folder Actions come in to make the script run every time a new drive is mounted or a drive is removed.

Save the script to your desktop and then go to your user folder and navigate to Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/. You may need to create these folders if they don't already exist. Drag your script from your desktop over to here. Now we have to attach it to the Volumes folder.

As described earlier, to get to the Volumes folder choose "Go To Folder" from the Go menu and enter /Volumes. Right click (Control Click) on the icon and choose "Enable Folder Actions" (If folder actions are already enabled this will say disable - don't click it!). Then right click again and choose "Attach a Folder Action". Choose the script you saved earlier.

If you haven't already dragged the "Drives" folder from your Documents folder to the Dock, do so, and then you're done. Note that every time the list updates it moves the old list to the Trash, so if you insert and remove CDs, external Hard Drives, iPods etc. often, the Trash will get quite full. You might also want to change the icon of the Drives folder to something a bit nicer than the standard folder icon.

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.

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One of the difficulties of creating multiple calendars in iCal is working out how many you actually need. Do you create a "College" calendar and a "Homework" calendar, or should you make just one for all you college activities?

If you start off with two separate calendars it is fairly easy to merge them into one if you later decide to. Luckily you don't need to go through every single event and change the details. You can do them all in one with the export command.

First choose the calendar you want to get rid of. Select it in the calendars list, and go to the File menu and choose Export. Choose any name and location. You aren't going to need this file for very long, so save it somewhere like the desktop so you can easily get to it.

Now you are going to re-import the events into the calendar you are merging them with. Go to the File menu and choose Import. Navigate to the file you saved earlier, and click Import again. In the dialog box that appears, choose the Calendar you want to merge the events into.

If everything went OK and all the events are in one calendar, you can safely delete the other one.