MACinations October 03 - Club Mac's magazine

Find The Finder NOW !!

Here is a FAST and EASY way to hide all windows and get to the OS X Finder NOW.
Just hold down the Option and Command (Apple) keys and click on the desktop.
This is the keyboard short cut to activate the Finder and hide all windows of running applications FAST !!

iTunes - Playing songs repeatedly or randomly

You can repeatedly play a single song or all the songs in your library or a playlist, or you can play songs or albums in random order.

Repeat

Shuffle

To shuffle or repeat all the songs in a list, select your library or a playlist and click the Shuffle or Repeat button in the bottom-left corner of the iTunes window.

To choose whether iTunes shuffles individual songs or entire albums, choose iTunes > Preferences, then click Advanced. Select whether to shuffle by song or by album. (If you shuffle albums, iTunes plays the songs in the order they appear on the album.)
To repeat all the songs in a list, select the library or a playlist and click the Repeat button in the bottom-left corner of the iTunes window. To repeat only the current song, click the Repeat button twice (so that a 1 appears).
To turn off shuffle or repeat, click the button again until it's no longer highlighted blue.

If you like the way iTunes has shuffled the play order of one of your play lists, you can use the "Copy to Play Order" shortcut menu command to make the shuffled play order the permanent play order.

To use this command, Control-click the playlist, and choose "Copy to Play Order" from the shortcut menu.
Important : This command will only appear if a playlist has been shuffled.

How to create self-expanding downloadable disk images

Internet-enabled self-expanding disk images are identical to regular disk images except they have a special flag set. You just go and create the disk image like you normally would and then set the internet-enabled flag with the following command in the Terminal.
% hdiutil internet-enable -yes|-no|-query [insert the path to the disk image here]\"

Use -yes to enable the flag, -no to disable the flag, and -query to test whether the disk image file is already internet-enabled. You can set the internet-enabled flag only for read-only Disk images.

Note that Disk Copy will clear the internet-enabled flag after it processes it. So if you test it you will have to re-set the flag again if your are to send it out on the Internet.

Keychain First Aid

Keychain First Aid is a free utility from Apple that can be used to fix the following issues:
Fix a user's .Mac password that is not retained in the Internet preference pane.
When Mail and iChat would continue to prompt you for your password after saving it in the keychain.
When you are unexpectedly prompted to unlock the keychain and or after changing your account information or your Home directory location.
When you have duplicate Mail passwords that appear in the keychain.
When you have multiple references to the same keychain that appears in the Keychain Access app.
When you have applications that are unable to retrieve items from a keychain file located on a networked volume.

Here is where you get it at ...
http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/Mac_OS_X/downloads/061-0285.20021112.BGPb3/KeychainFirstAidApp.dmg.bin

All you do to install the Keychain First Aid is to simply copy it from its disk image to your hard drive.
Just drag the Keychain First Aid icon to any location on your hard disk. The /Applications/Utilities/ folder is is the best place for it.

It is real easy to use. Just do this ...

1. Open the Keychain First Aid utility on your hard drive.
2. You will need to enter your Mac OS X login name and password.
3. Now choose either the Verify or Repair option in the software.
4. Just click the Start button and you are all set to go.

iCal and Text Messaging

You can tell iCal to send you an email reminder to your cell phone or pager
If your cell phone or pager provider will allow text messages to be sent to you by email, you can use the email notification feature built into iCal to email you an alert of an upcoming event.
The first thing you will have to do it to add your cell phone and or pager email addresses to your vCard in the Address Book App.
First open the Address Book app
Then choose "Show My Card" from the Card menu.
Now click "Edit" to edit your vCard.
Next click the "+" button next to the email field so you can add a new email address for your cell phone or pager.
Then choose "Custom" from the pop-up menu.
Now type a label for the new address you just entered.
Next click "OK".
Then just enter the email address for your cell phone or pager in the "Email" field.
And last now click "Edit" to save the changes that you have made to your vCard.

Now we have to add an email alarm to an event in iCal:
First thing you need to create or select an event in the iCal window.
Then choose "Get Info" from the "Edit" menu.
Next click the alarm tab "bell icon" in the event info window.
Now click "Send e-mail to me at" to enable that option in iCal.
So just select your cell phone or pager's email address from the pop-up menu. Then set the alarm time using the time field and pop-up menu.
Last close the Event Info window and you are good to go.

One last thing...
Your Mac must be left on for this to work.

How to Back up an iPod

The iPod holds its music in an invisible folder called iPod_Control. To reveal the unseen, download a copy of Marcel Bresink's free TinkerTool from VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker.com), install it, and, in its Finder tab, enable the Show Hidden and System Files option. Click the Relaunch Finder button and in next to no time, all the invisible files on your Mac (and iPod) will be visible.

If the iPod doesn't appear on the Desktop, launch iTunes, select the iPod in the Source list, click the iPod Preferences icon, and, in the resulting iPod Preferences window, enable the Enable FireWire Disk Use option. This causes your iPod to appear on the Desktop.

Double-click the iPod's icon on the Desktop and open the iPod_Control folder and then the Music folder within. Inside this folder, within a bunch of folders that begin with the letter F, are all the iPod's music files. To move these songs into iTunes, open iTunes preferences, click the Advanced button, and enable the Copy Songs to iTunes Music Folder When Adding to Library option. Now open each F folder and drag its contents into iTunes. The songs from the iPod will be copied to your Mac's iTunes Music Library.

Look no further for a free font editor

If you ever need to make a quick change to a font or perhaps add your corporate logo to it, you might have a hard time finding a good application that provides this feature. But if you have Mac OS X and any Asian fonts installed, the utility is no farther away than your Utilities folder. There, you'll find a program called the TrueType Font Editor that will allow you to modify any TrueType font. For help on using the utility, go to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24435

Speedy screensaver creation

With the release of Mac OS X, Apple introduced the classy screensaver effect that allowed you to display selected photos in a slideshow manner. Problem is, there's no way to save the selection of photos as a screensaver. That is, unless you use a utility hidden deep in the Jaguar version of the Library folder. If you want to create a quick, customized slideshow for a screensaver, navigate to /Library/Image Capture/Scripts/. There, you'll find the Build Slide Show application. Then, just drag the images you want to appear in the screensaver and the application will create the configuration file for the screensaver in the ~/Library/Screen Savers folder. By default, the program will name the screensaver RecentPhotos.screensaver. If you want to create more than one screensaver, you'll need to rename the original file, as the application will automatically overwrite the file.

Make a Second User

When troubleshooting Mac OS X 10.2, it's a good idea to keep a spare user handy. That way, if your Mac begins to consistently misbehave you can log out and log back in with that second user account. If the Mac comports itself in a more agreeable fashion in the guise of that second user, you have a pretty good idea that something about your primary user account is mucked up.

Downgrade to iMovie 2

Q. I find than iMovie 3 runs more slowly than iMovie 2 and I'd like to revert to the previous version of the program. I have my Jaguar installation discs but I can't figure out a way to reinstall just iMovie 2.

A. Go to http://www.charlessoft.com and download a copy of Pacifist. This US $20 application allows you to extract individual files from packages. Launch it, drag the AdditionalApplications.pkg file from the second Jaguar disc into the Pacifist window, click the triangle next to the Package Contents entry, select iMovie, click the Extract To button, and choose a place to extract the file.

If you want to keep a copy of iMovie 3, extract iMovie to somewhere other than the Applications folder. If you want to later place iMovie 2 and iMovie 3 in the same folder, rename the older version "iMovie 2."

Free iMovie 3 tutorial

The tutorial's eight lessons introduce you to all aspects of iMovie, explaining how to edit scenes, pull digital photos in from iPhoto, add video and audio effects (iMovie 3 has an impressive collection of new video and audio effects), work with the enhanced titling available in iMovie 3, and much more. With iMovie 3 open, choose iMovie Help from the Help menu and click Tutorial.

Saving space by removing extraneous iMovie files

If you've installed iMovie 3 and you're running low on hard drive space, you'll be glad to know that you can quickly free up around 60 MB of space. To do so, navigate to /Library/Documentation/iMovie/. You'll notice that the folder contains a number of tutorials (in 14 different languages). All told, you'll find 112 PDF files in the folder. That's a lot of excess storage that you could use for other things!

If you're running short on space, or you just hate to see 60 MB being used for little more than help files, you can just delete them. Keep in mind, that these files are used when you choose the iMovie Help menu. If you can forgo reviewing these tutorials over and over, you'll be fine.

Excel and Hyperlinks

Q. Excel insists on converting URLs and email addresses into hyperlinks. Is there a way to turn this "feature" off?

A. Not via a preference or setting, no. Although Office 2002 for Windows includes the option to switch off the automatic creation of hyperlinks in its AutoCorrect settings, that feature doesn't appear in Office v.X.

Fortunately, there are a couple of ways of ridding your documents of these hyperlinks anyway. The slow, painful method is to Control-click (or right-click if you've done the sensible thing and purchased a multi-button mouse) the offending hyperlink. From the contextual menu select Hyperlink and, in the resulting Edit Hyperlink window, click the Remove Link button. What makes this method so agonizing is that you have to perform this procedure on each individual link within your document.

A far faster way to go about it is to create a macro that kills all hyperlinks within a document. Note that this method only works if you already have a document open.

To write this macro, press Option-F11 to produce the Visual Basic Editor, choose Module from the Insert menu, and in the resulting Module window type:

Sub KillLinks() Cells.Hyperlinks.Delete End Sub

and close the module window.

Return to your document and when you're ready to strip all hyperlinks from it, select Macro from the Tools menu and then Macros from the submenu. In the Macro window that appears, select the KillLinks macro and press Run. All your hyperlinks will revert to plain text.

If you intend to banish links routinely, click the Options button in the Macro window and assign a keyboard shortcut to the macro so you can easily invoke it without having to call up the Macro window.