All Apple keyboards now come with volume keys, so you can easily increase, decrease and mute the volume. But did you know there is more functionality to these keys.

Holding down the Option key while pressing one of the volume change keys will bring up the Sound System Preference pane. Here you can change the alert sound, alert volume, and when different sound effects are played. You can also change the sound input and output, incase you have an external microphone or speakers.

Holding down the Shift key when pressing the volume keys will disable the sound that is normally played when you change the volume. You can disable this permanently from within the Sound Preference Pane by un-checking the box "Play feedback when volume is changed". Now, when you hold shift it does the opposite, temporarily enabling the volume change sound.

Unfortunately, this one is Leopard only. If you hold down both Option and Shift while pressing the volume keys, you can change the volume more accurately. The entire volume spectrum is divided into 65 instead of the usual 17 (by my count). This means you can adjust the volume by just a tiny amount if it is not quite right.

To disable the startup sound that plays when you turn on your mac, simply hold down the mute button while pressing the power button. Keep it held down for a while, until after the sound would have normally played.

I've noticed a lot of recent articles around the web about taking screenshots on a Mac. There's just the odd tip here and there, so I thought I'd do a complete guide. If you are familiar with taking screenshots, you might want to scroll down to the bottom, where there are some more advanced tips.

Keyboard Shortcuts
The quickest way to take a screenshot is to use a keyboard shortcut. Annoyingly, these aren't particularly intuitive. There are two main ones:

Command-Shift-3 - Take a screenshot of the entire screen.
Command-Shift-4 - Allows you to click and drag around the area you want a shot of.

Each of these will save a file to the desktop named Picture 1.png, or a higher number if that file already exists.

Now there are a few extra things you can do. If you press Space after pressing Command-Shift-4, you will notice that the cursor changes to a picture of a camera. You can now just click on a window, icon, widget or almost any other interface element to take a screenshot of it. You can also add Control into the keyboard shortcut to put the image in the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop. For example, pressing Command-Control-Shift-3 would allow you to then paste the image into another document.

The Grab Application
If you can never remember keyboard shortcuts, the Grab application is for you. It is located in Applications/Utilities and it has many more options for screenshots than the keyboard shortcuts do. The two main advantages (in my opinion) are timed screenshots and being able to change the pointer type.

You can create a timed screenshot by going to the Capture menu, or by pressing Command-Shift-Z. Using this, you can achieve screenshots that are supposedly “impossible”. One example is the login window.

To change the pointer type, go to the Preferences. See the image below for the different options.

Disable Shadow
If you use the Command-Shift-4 Space method to take a screenshot of an entire window, you will find that the shadow is in the screenshot. This was added in Leopard because without the shadow, windows don't actually have a border if they have no scrollbars. However, if you prefer no shadows, you can disable them with a Terminal command. Simply open up Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities), paste in the following line and hit return.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Afterwards you will need to log out and in again for changes to take effect. To enable shadows again, simply repeat the command but with false at the end. The two images below show a before and after shot.


Change Image Format
The default image format for screenshots is png, which gives a nice, high quality picture. However you can change this if you want. As before, use the following Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

Simply replace png with your file format of choice. The available options are jpg, tiff and pdf. Changing to jpg gives a lower quality but smaller file. Some people prefer this for quick snaps, but others dislike the slightly blurry results it gives. As before, log out and in again for changes to take effect.

Advanced Screenshot Applications
If widgets are your thing, Screenshot Plus will probably be the method of choice for you. It's free, and allows you to do everything that you can achieve with keyboard shortcuts. It also allows you to view a preview image, before saving it to the desktop or importing it into Preview.

If you really want to go all out on your screenshots, you might want to consider buying an application like Snapz Pro. It allows you to do all of the things above, as well as record movies of your screen.

Finally, if you want to get screenshots of long webpages that don't fit on the screen, Paparazzi! is your solution. It gives allows you to set the size of the image, set a delay, choose the file name and choose the file format. Of course, if you want a PDF of the web page, that functionality is already built into Mac OS X.

UPDATE: Many people in the comments have pointed out that I forgot Skitch. After playing around with a it a bit this morning, I have to say I agree, it’s probably the best screenshot application available at the moment. For those interested, there’s a great 3 minute introduction video available.

Also, the MacTipper Blog pointed out one more thing I forgot. Using another Terminal command, you can change the default save location to somewhere other than the Desktop. The command is as follows:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Full/Path/To/Folder

For full instructions, check out the MacTipper Blog.

Last August I wrote a detailed article about the different ways to reset a user's password, however the instructions I gave for changing the password in single user mode don't always seem to work, especially in Leopard. Here is a new way to do it that should be more reliable.

Remember, only use this if you have lost the Mac OS X install DVD. Also, don't do this if you have FileVault enabled in your account, and note that this will not change your keychain password.

First, we need to restart in Single User mode. To do this hold down Command-S while the computer is starting up. A command line prompt should appear on the screen instead of the login window or your normal desktop.

At the prompt, type mount -uw / then return. Next, type
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist
then return. You will need to type these exactly the same, so write them down beforehand.

The next step requires you to know the short username of the account. If you don't know this, type ls /Users followed by return, and look for it in the list that appears.

Next, type dscl . -delete /Users/username AuthenticationAuthority followed by return. Make sure you replace username with the short username of the account.

The final command to type is passwd username followed by return. As before, replace username with the short username of the account.

The rest is self-explanatory. Type the new password, followed by return. When prompted, retype the password.

Finally, type reboot and hit return! Your password should be reset.

You should be familiar with Open and Save dialogs - they are the windows that appear whenever you go to open or save a file. In Leopard, these dialog boxes now have new view options for browsing your files. In addition to the list and column views that were in Tiger, you can now use icon view, just like in a normal Finder window. Moreover, if you hold down the icon view button, you get a menu with options to change the icon size and the label position.


In column view, there is a new contextual menu for changing the column widths. Simply right-click (or hold Control and click) on the handle at the bottom of each column, and the menu will appear. You can choose from Right Size this Column, Right Size All Columns Individually and Right Size All Columns Equally. Strangely, this menu is unique to Open and Save dialogs, and doesn't appear if you right-click the column handle in a normal Finder window. In that case, you have to use the old method.


Another new feature that's only in the Open dialog is a new MEDIA section in the sidebar. This allows you to open media from iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture and iMovie without having to find where it is actually saved on your hard drive. I'm not sure, but I suspect iLife '08 might be needed for this to work. Also, note that the media section doesn't appear in every application, and appears differently for some applications. For example, Safari and Preview only have a Photos section, while Quicktime and TextEdit have Photos, Movies and Music.

There are also a couple of new keyboard shortcuts for Open and Save dialogs. Command-I will open up the Get Info window on the selected item, and Command-R will show the item in the Finder. However for some reason, these don't seem to work all the time in Save dialogs.

Mike writes:

How can I set my MacBook to insert today's date, short version or long version, into whatever I'm keyboarding in??? QuicKeys is too expensive for Mac OS X and this Mac should do that!

The best way to do this is using an application called WordService. You can download it for free from the Devon Technologies site.

To install it, create a new folder in your Library folder called "Services" and drag the the WordService.service file into it. Log out then back in again to enable the service.

WordService is now accessible form the Services menu. This is under the Application menu in the top left, next to the Apple menu. You will probably have a lot of things in this menu, even if you have never installed any services before. This is because many applications will add things in that they think are useful. The new entries that WordService has addded are Insert, Format and Convert. Each of these has a submenu with multiple options. The full features are outlined at the bottom of this page.

To insert the current date or time, you want to look at the options in the Insert submenu. There are different options for inserting the short date, long date, time and combinations of these. Each one has a keyboard shortcut to speed things up.


Inserting the date and time is just one thing WordService is capable of. One of the more fun features is the Rotate13 option in the Convert menu. This allows you to "encode" the selected text with a simple substitution cypher. You can also speed up many repetitive tasks like removing double spaces and setting all caps or lowercase.

WordService works in all Cocoa applications (TextEdit, Mail, Safari etc.) and many Carbon Applications. As a result, you can use it almost everywhere. One notable place where it doesn't work is in Microsoft Word. Luckily, all of the Microsoft Office applications have their own way to insert the date and time. You'll find it under the Insert menu.

For all of these tips you will need know the password to an administrator account. You can check whether an account is an administrator in the Accounts section of System Preferences.

1. Add a message to the login window
You can add a string of text above the list of users in the login window. To do this, start by opening up Terminal. This is located in the Utilities folder, inside the Applications folder. Once it has loaded, paste in the following line and press return:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText "Hello There"

Replace "Hello There" with your text. To remove the text, type the following line:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText ""

2. Hide accounts
If you find yourself with an overly long list of users in the login window or you just want to get rid of that annoying scroll bar down the side, you can stop accounts appearing in the login window.

Start by go to the Accounts pane in System Preferences, and find the "short name" of each user you want to hide. Once you have these, open up Terminal and enter the following:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add shortname1 shortname2 shortname3

Replace shortname1 2 and 3 with the short names of the user accounts you wish to hide. You can hide as many as you like, just separate each with a space.

To make a hidden name appear again, type the command with no names in it, therefore resetting the list of hidden users.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add

Notice that doing this adds an extra option to your login window - "Other..." When you select this, you will be presented with text boxes to enter a username and password.

If you aren't running OS X 10.4, this doesn't work. Another option is to replace the list of users with username and password text boxes. Go to the Accounts pane in System Preferences and click on Login Options. There you will find an option to display the login window as name and password fields. This isn't as pretty, but saves time if you have lots of users, and is also more secure.

3. Change the Apple logo
You can replace the large Apple logo that appears at the top of the login window with any tiff image that is 90x90 pixels. In the Finder, choose Go to Folder from the Go menu or press Command-Shift-G. In the dialog box that appears, type the following line:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgent.app/Contents/Resources/

A folder called Resources should appear. Here you will find an image called applelogo.tif. You will need to create a copy of this file, just in case you ever want to revert back to it. The easiest way to do this is to hold the Option key and drag it to a safe place (like your Documents folder). Now, rename you new image "applelogo.tif" and drag it to the Resources folder to replace the old file. You will be asked to type in an administrator password.

To change back to the Apple Logo, just drag the copy that you made back to the Resources folder.

4. Get useful system stats
The name of you Mac is displayed in the login window below the words "Mac OS X". Since Mac OS X 10.4.3, you can click on the name of your Mac to show different statistics about your machine. Each time you click, it will cycle through different bits of information that are particularly useful when troubleshooting problems.

The order of the statistics are as follows:

One click: Your OS X version number (e.g. Version 10.4.9)
Two clicks: Your OS X build number (e.g. Build 7M271)
Three clicks: Your mac's serial number (e.g. WN1511LHKNW)
Four clicks: Your mac's IP address (e.g. 196.254.0.1)
Five clicks: The status of any networked account
Six clicks: The date and time (e.g. Saturday, January 20 2007 4:02:31 AM GMT)
Seven clicks: Back to where you started, the name of your computer.

So you click a few times and set the information line to your favourite thing, but next time you log in, it has changed back to the name of your mac. To change the bit of information that appears first, you need to do a bit of tinkering in the Terminal (Applications/Utilities). Open Terminal and type the following command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo HostName

Depending on which piece of information you want displayed, replace HostName with one of the following:

SystemVersion
SystemBuild
SerialNumber
IPAddress
DSStatus
Time

After doing this, hit return, and the next time you view your login window the information you chose will be displayed. To change it back to normal, simply repeat the command with HostName at the end.

5. Change the background image
There are ways to change the background image by replacing the Aqua Blue image, but that is slightly crude. A better way to do it is using the Terminal. Type the following command and press return:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture /Users/Shared/mynewbackground.jpg

The last part, /Users/Shared/mynewbackground.jpg is the location of the image you want to use. You don't have to type it out. Just paste the command as far as DesktopPicture and put a space after it. Then find your image in the Finder, and drag it onto the Terminal window. The address to your image should just appear. As far as I can tell, you have to place the image in a place that all users have access to (the shared folder is a good place).

To change back to the normal Aqua Blue image, type the following command and press return:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture /Library/Desktop\ Pictures/Aqua\ Blue.jpg

Over the past few weeks, lots of people have been contacting Mac OS X Tips asking how to reset a forgotten Mac OS X user account password. Depending on the circumstances, this task could take 5 minutes or could even be completely impossible. Here is a run through of the different ways you can reset an account password depending on the type of account, whether FileVault is enabled and whether you have the Mac OS X Install Disc.

If you still know the Administrator Password
If you still know the password to an administrator account, it is very simple to reset any standard or managed user's password. While logged in as the administrator, open up System Preferences and click on the Accounts section. All the accounts on the computer should be listed down the left hand side. Under each account name it should say Admin, Standard or Managed. If the lock at the bottom of the window appears locked, click on it to allow changes to the preferences.

The next step is to select the user whose password you want to change and click on the Reset Password button. Enter the new password and click Reset Password. If you have created multiple Administrator accounts, you can use this method to reset their passwords too, as long as you know the password for the original administrator account.


Resetting an Administrator Password
Obviously, if you don't have access to an administrator account, you can't carry out any of the above steps. If you have forgotten the Administrator password or you can't log into your Mac at all, you will need to use the Mac OS X Install Disc.

Enter the Mac OS X Install Disc that is the closest version to that running on the Mac. For example, if you are running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, you should enter the Tiger install disk, not any earlier ones. Restart the computer, and hold the C key as it starts up. This might take longer than usual, and you can release the C key as soon as the Apple logo appears on the screen. When the window appears, choose your language and click the right arrow.

The next step depends on what version of Mac OS X you are using. For Tiger (10.4), choose Reset Password from the Utilities menu. For earlier versions, choose Reset Password from the Installer menu.

Choose your Hard Drive from the top and then choose the Account from the drop down menu. Be careful not to select System Administrator, as this is actually the root user, not the administrator account on your Mac. Now enter the new password, click Save, quit the Installer and restart the computer.

Note that there are a few issues with this method. Firstly, it does not reset your keychain password. You will have to do this separately. Secondly, do not attempt this if you have FileVault enabled. To reset an FileVault protected account, you need the master password.

Resetting a FIleVault Protected User's Password
If you have enabled FileVault to encrypt your Account, you need to know the master password that you set when you enabled it. This is the password that the administrator should know that allows you to reset any password on the computer. If you have forgotten the master password, unfortunately your data is lost forever.

If you know the master password, start by attempting to log into your account. When you get the password wrong three times, you will be able to click "Forgot Password". Now you will have to enter the master password and then a new login password for your account.

If you have lost the Mac OS X install Disc
If you have lost the install disc, don't try and use one from an earlier version as this might permanently block you out of your account. You really have two options: Firstly, you could buy a new copy of Mac OS X (try eBay). Secondly, there is a way of resetting an administrator password without the disc if you are running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Note: Do NOT do this with a FileVault protected account, or your data will be lost forever.

First, note the short name of the account. This is the same as the name of its home folder, but not necessarily the name that appears in the login window. Restart your computer, and while it is starting up, hold Command-S. This will start up your Mac in Single User Mode. Once it has started up, you will need to enter three lines of code. Enter sh /etc/rc and press return. Then enter passwd yourusername and hit return. Now you will have to enter a new password twice. What you type won't appear on screen, but it is working. Once you have done this, type reboot and hit return.

This is the same as the Install Disc method in that it doesn't reset your Keychain password. You will have to do this separately.

Recently I came across a couple of scripts on Mac OS X Hints that automate emptying the Trash so you don't have to remember to do it regularly. One of them deletes items that were trashed over seven days ago and the other empties the oldest items once the trash reaches a certain size.

The one that empties items that have been in the trash for too long is a bit complicated and involves using the Terminal. The second one, however, is fairly simple and accessible to anyone who wants their trash to empty automatically.

It involves an AppleScript that you attach to the trash as a Folder Action. This script checks the size of the trash every time you add a file to it. If the size goes over a limit, it will deleted the item that has been in the trash the longest.

There are various versions of the script on the Mac OS X Hints page as many users added suggestions in the comments. If you are interested, take some time to read through the page to see how the script works. Adding all the suggestions and improvements, I made a copy of the script you can copy and paste from here.

Select all the text and paste it into Script Editor (in Applications/AppleScript). Now you need to decide what size limit your trash will have. This is specified in megabytes on the 4th line of the script. It is currently set to 2048 (2GB). If you would like a different size, change this number. 512 for example, would mean that older items would be deleted to keep the total size under 512 MB.

Once you are done choose Save As from the File menu and go to the Library in your User folder. In here go to Scripts, then Folder Action Scripts. You will probably have to create these folders unless you have added folder actions in the past. Save the script here.

Now open up Folder Actions Setup (in Applications/AppleScript). If you click the plus button, you will be presented with a normal "Open" dialog. However there is the problem that the Trash is a hidden folder. It's actually located in your user folder with Documents, Music, Movies etc. To get to it, press Command-Shift-G. In the box that appears, type "~/.Trash" (without the quotes) and click Go then Open.

In the list that appears, choose the script that you just saved. Now you can start trashing things without ever having to worry about emptying the Trash again!

Be warned that this script permanently deletes files from your computer, without you specifically telling it to do so. If you change your mind and want to retrieve a file you put in the trash, you may find that it is already gone.

For an easier alternative, you can download Compost, an application for automatic trash management. You can download it for free to try out (limited to 15 files), and it only costs $12.50 to use fully.

One of the problems that seems to cause the most distress amongst Mac users who contact me is when user folders go missing.

In general, there seems to be two reasons why a user account and their home folder can disappear. The first is simply that you have (accidentally) deleted the user. Any administrator account has the ability to do this from the System Preferences.

The second way occurs when upgrading or installing Mac OS X from the install disks. If you inadvertently chose an "Archive and Install" installation, all users are deleted unless you choose to preserve them.

Luckily, in both of the above cases, Mac OS X keeps a copy of the user folder in case you want to get it back.

Recovering Deleted User Folders
In the Accounts section of System Preferences you can delete a user by selecting them and clicking the minus button. You are presented with two options - to keep a copy of the user folder (the normal way) or to delete immediately. Unfortunately, if you chose to delete an account immediately, it is almost impossible to retrieve it.

However, it is more likely that you kept a copy (the option with the big blue "OK" button). This copy is kept in the Users folder under "Deleted Users". You must be logged into an administrator account to have access to this folder. Look in here for the name of the deleted user you want to recover, and double click it. This will mount a disk image on the desktop that essentially the deleted user folder. Hold option and drag this disk image from the desktop to the Users folder in your Hard Drive. Now you have restored the user folder, but you still need to create an account for it. Skip down to "Recreating the Account" to do this.

Users lost during an Archive and Install
When you perform an archive and install without preserving users, your user folders are archived away along with the rest of the existing system files for your Mac. A new folder called "Previous Systems" is created in Macintosh HD that contains all the users from before the archive and install. If you have done an archive and install multiple times, you will have a number of previous systems. Choose the one that contains all the users you wish to restore. In here is a users folder containing each of the deleted user folders. Drag the ones you wish to restore to the users folder in Macintosh HD. Now you have restored the user folders, but you still need to create accounts to be associated with them.

Recreating the Account

Go the Accounts section of System Preferences and click on the plus button to create a new account. You may need to enter an administrator password to do this. The "short name" of the new user must be the same as the name of the folder you just dragged to the users folder. When you click OK, a dialog will appear asking if you want to associate this account with the folder that is already in the users folder. Click OK to do this.

If you just want to retrieve certain files from the deleted user, you don't need to go through the hassle of creating a new user. From any administrator account you can open up the deleted user's disk image or Previous Systems folder and copy specific files from it.

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.

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.

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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I've never written much about Spotlight on this site, as I never anticipated that many tips and tricks would be available for it. However, Spotlight currently offers loads of tweaks and shortcuts for improving and speeding up your searching. Here are my favourites.

By default, you can access Spotlight by using the keyboard shortcut Command-Space. You can also bring up the Spotlight window by pressing Command-Option-Space. Both of these shortcuts are customisable from the Spotlight pane in the System Preferences. If the chosen combination clashes with another one on your computer a warning symbol will appear next to it. To fix this, click on the warning triangle to go to the Keyboard and Mouse pane that allows you to view all keyboard shortcuts and see which ones are the same.

In all Cocoa apps (Safari, Mail, TextEdit etc.) you can quickly search for selected text in Spotlight. The first way of doing this is to Right-click (Control-click) on a word to bring up the context menu. The first option in the list is "Search in Spotlight". If you want to search multiple words, you will need to select them before bringing up the menu. You can also achieve the same effect by selecting the text and pressing Command-Shift-F (or by going to the Services menu and choosing Spotlight).

There are two ways of putting your contacts in the spotlight. The simplest method is to just type the person's name into Spotlight. The alternative option is to do it via 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.

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.

To immediately choose the "Top Hit" press Command-Return. This shortcut makes Spotlight a bit better as an application launcher. If you press Command-Return on any other item it will bring up the enclosing folder in the Finder (i.e. Show in Finder). The same thing happens if you Command-click any item.

Spotlight indexes far more than you might expect. In iPhoto, keywords and photo titles are indexed, and in iChat your chat transcripts are as well. In terms of third party applications, Delicious Library indexes your movies and books, Microsoft Office indexes the author, title and description of your documents and Newsfire indexes the titles and contents of feed items.

On the Apple Spotlight downloads page there are loads of plugins to enhance your Spotlight searches. Some add Spotlight functionality to unsupported applications, while others allow access to internet search engines from Spotlight.

You can perform Spotlight searches from the Terminal. the mdfind command will perform a spotlight search with many flexible options. However you don't have to use the Terminal to access these advanced options. Mac Geekery has an article describing how to execute raw Spotlight queries from the Finder http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/how_to_execute_raw_spotlight_queries_in_the_finder

In the Spotlight window there is an info icon next to each search result. Clicking this will give you loads of useful information about that result. It's like choosing "Get info..." on a file in the Finder, only you can do it on iCal events, fonts, music, emails and contacts.

There are loads of keyboard shortcuts for manipulating the Spotlight menu. Most of these correspond to the normal behaviour in other Mac OS X menus. Use the Up and Down keys scroll up and down the menu. Command-Down will move to the first item in the next category, Command-Up Arrow will move to the first item in the previous category. Control-Up or the Page up key will move you to the first item in the menu, and Control-Down or Page down will take you to the last item in the menu. Command-Left and Command-Right will skip to the start or end of the search field, while Tab will select all text in the search field and Escape will clear it. If you press Escape with the search field empty, the Spotlight menu will close.

You can narrow you searches by specifying a kind. For example, to search for "Hello" but only in your music files, you would type "Hello kind:music". This can be done for almost any type of file - applications, movies, images, contacts and mail.

Using the same method as above, you can choose for Spotlight to only display files opened in a certain date range. For example, you would use "date:yesterday" to specify only files opened yesterday. Choosing a future date will display upcoming iCal events and to do items.

From the Spotlight pane in System Preferences you can enable, disable and rearrange categories. In the Privacy tab you can disable searching of specific locations.

To improve your Spotlight searches you can assign Spotlight Comments to files in the Get Info window. Access this by selecting your file in the Finder and pressing Command-I. Now you can set comments such as "urgent" or "temp" to make that file appear when those keywords are searched in Spotlight.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Many Mac OS X applications allow rectangular selections. That is, selecting multiple lines of text, without having to select up to the end of each line. This can be useful if you have created a text formatted table, and want to select an entire column, or if you want to modify the same thing on every line in a document.

To do this type of selection, hold down the Option (alt) Key while the cursor is over a block of text in a cocoa application. Notice that the mouse arrow changes to a cross.

With the Option Key still held, click and drag to make a selection without the text up to the end of the line being automatically selected when you drag down over multiple lines.

If you want to do something particularly neat, once you have made a selection hold down the Command Key as well as the Option Key, which will allow you to make another selection somewhere else in the document, whilst keeping the first block of text still selected.

This works just about everywhere you are able to edit text, including Microsoft Word (although the cursor doesn't change to a cross) and text boxes in Safari. As you would expect, it works in TextEdit, Mail, and all the other usual Cocoa Apps.

Currently there is no standard, easy way to move your contacts from Outlook to Address Book that comes with every mac. People new to Mac OS X, especially switchers from PCs or people upgrading from OS 9 often ask the question, and there is no proper answer. Mac OS X Hints has a number of tricks to get around this difficulty.

There are 7 methods mentioned:
1. If you have access to a PC, use a windows program called OutPort
2. Do it via Netscape Communicator
3. Use a program called ABFiller, which is very simple a straightforward
4. Converting to vCards if you have Outlook 2003
5. A more complex trick, using terminal to customise things
6. Importing CSV files to Address Book
7. Importing via Thunderbird

Altogether, these tips should allow you to import contacts into address book in just about every situation.

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