Archive for January, 2008
« Previous Entries10.5: Send messages to offline contacts in iChat
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
I’ve checked iChat’s built-in help, as well as Apple’s site and couldn’t find anything that has mentioned this. In Leopard, iChat has a sort of built in “answering machine” that I hadn’t noticed before. It works like this:
Find a person on your Buddy List who is currently offline. Double-click on their name to initiate a new text chat. Whatever information you send to them will be presented to them at the time of their next login. In previous OS versions, attempting to instant message someone who is offline would result in an error message. However, 10.5 allows you to “leave a message” without a problem.
I tested this using AOL Instant Messenger accounts, and going from Mac-to-Mac (using iChat as the only client on both computers). I have not tried this using other IM accounts such as Jabber, GTalk, or .Mac, and have not tried this with any other IM software on either M…
Temporarily override alignment guides in iWork
Thursday, January 31st, 2008When I’m laying out photos to be printed, I normally use Pages to set them to the size and position I want. So it’s a major annoyance that once there’s a lot of stuff on the page, the picture I’m dragging will snap to the automatic alignment guides all the time — so I’m forced to use the arrow keys for fine control.
But I’ve found a new way out. Press Command while dragging the picture, and the automatic alignment guides will be disabled.
Preview Quartz Composer (.qtz) files in Safari
Thursday, January 31st, 2008I was hunting for a very specific screensaver the other day online, and was thrilled to find a direct link to the Quartz Composer (.qtz) file in question. So I clicked on the URL in Safari, expecting it to start downloading, and was pleasantly surprised when Safari began rendering the screensaver from directly within the active Safari window. Nice one!
Additional investigation revealed that any .qtz file on your computer will render in Safari via the drag and drop method. Right-clicking on the active window in Safari brings up an option to “Save Composition,” which allows you to download the .qtz file to a location of your choice.
Some additional notes:
- I have Developer Tools installed, and haven’t tested this without Developer Tools installed.
- Not tested in 10.4.x (Tiger)
- Quartz Composer files are pretty darn small and they load and render very quickly. They are easily created with Developer Tools and can access all kinds of syste…
Preview Quartz Composer (.qtz) files in Safari
Thursday, January 31st, 2008I was hunting for a very specific screensaver the other day online, and was thrilled to find a direct link to the Quartz Composer (.qtz) file in question. So I clicked on the URL in Safari, expecting it to start downloading, and was pleasantly surprised when Safari began rendering the screensaver from directly within the active Safari window. Nice one!
Additional investigation revealed that any .qtz file on your computer will render in Safari via the drag and drop method. Right-clicking on the active window in Safari brings up an option to “Save Composition,” which allows you to download the .qtz file to a location of your choice.
Some additional notes:
- I have Developer Tools installed, and haven’t tested this without Developer Tools installed.
- Not tested in 10.4.x (Tiger)
- Quartz Composer files are pretty darn small and they load and render very quickly. They are easily created with Developer Tools and can access all kinds of syste…
Take steadier pictures and easier self-portraits on iPhone
Thursday, January 31st, 2008Some times when I take a picture on my iPhone, the force of my finger hitting the snapshot button makes the iPhone move slightly at the last second and cause blur in the picture. To make it much easier to prevent this from happening, just hold your finger down on the camera icon before you steady the iPhone. As long as you keep your finger held down, it won’t take the picture. Steady the phone, release your finger from the icon, and the picture will be taken.
This also makes it slightly possible to take a self-portrait. Hold your finger down on the snapshot button, turn the phone around and (try to) aim, then release your finger.
Fix error 0xe00002c9 when mounting disk images
Thursday, January 31st, 2008Recently I re-intalled Tiger from scratch on my old iBook G3. I let Apple’s Software Update download all the relevant updates, and after the necessary restarts, I tried to mount a disk image. To my surprise, both the Finder and the Disk utility came up with an error (0xe00002c9) and refused to mount the disk image. I tried other disk images with the same result.
After some googling and searching in the Apple support forums, I came up with the following remedy: you need to manually download and install the latest Security Update (009 as of this writing) and then restart (naturally). I can only guess that this is an issue of a corrupt download from Software Update, since this security update was already installed automatically.
[robg adds: You can find the Security Update on Apple’s Support Downloads page. This doesn’t seem to be a universal problem (or else there would have been a major uproar about it), b…
iPhone numbers are right and wrong
Thursday, January 31st, 2008The media has been awash in speculation about iPhone numbers for the past few days. Apple said 4 million iPhones had been sold as of Macworld. But AT&T only activated a bit over 2 million. The European carriers between the tree of them would be lucky to get a half a million additional. So the missing one plus million iPhones were "missing".
Some people said that they were in channel inventory. Others said that Apple had lied.
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Order iChat’s Window menu Command key shortcuts
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008I noticed this when I was helping my sister with iChat. She closed her AIM buddy list window and was unsure where the command was to open it — it’s faster just to ask me than dig around, it seems. So my first response was hit Cmd-1 (I’m training her to use the keyboard), the shortcut for Window ยป AIM Buddy List, but it didn’t work. So I discovered that on her machine it was Command-2, while on mine, it was Command-1. Through this, I discovered that it’s possible to change the value without doing anything in System Preferences.It turns out that the Accounts pane of iChat’s Preferences lets you drag your accounts around in any order. At first this seems pointless. But take your mouse on a trip to the Window menu, and you will see that all accounts have a key command, as noted above. Now rearrange the order of the accounts in the Prefs window, and voila!, the Command-# order no…
10.5: Force Spotlight to index old Mail messages
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008I’m not sure if this is a 10.4 problem as well as 10.5, but it’s something I’ve only just noticed.I installed OS X from scratch, after backing-up my data. I then imported my old mailboxes into Leopard’s Mail program using the Import feature.
So far so good. But when I used Spotlight (or even Mail’s own search box) to look for an old message I knew was there, it didn’t show up. Only a new message I’d just received showed up. In fact, my tests showed all imported messages slip under Spotlight’s radar, even after I used MainMenu to rebuild Spotlight’s index.
The solution was to use the Rebuild function under the Mailbox menu in Mail. Hey presto — everything is now indexed, and old messages can be searched for. I assume that this forced Mail to reprocess the messages, thus allowing Spotlight to, erm, spot them.
Automatically file email in Mail based on sender’s domain
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008While I’m a huge fan of Smart Folders in Mail, I’ve possibly been abusing them and not filing my mail at all. Once I had around 10,000 messages in my inbox, I decided that it was time to do something about it. Ideally, I’d have multiple sub-folders, such as Clients and Vendors, and then in these folders, I’d have Client Name A, Client Name B… and Vendor Name A, Vendor Name B, etc.
Sorting through 10,000 emails and manually moving them wasn’t my idea of fun — even on a cold, rainy afternoon. Neither was creating a slew of individual rules for something like If from contains clientname.com then move message to mailbox Client Name. This seemed like a job for AppleScript! As my script-fu isn’t as good as I would like it, I’ve resorted to having a single Sorted folder, and then within that are folders named with the relevant domain name — eg clientname.com. Here’s the script:
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10.5: Hide the Time Machine volume in the Finder
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008I don’t like to have icons cluttering my desktop. I have figured out a way to remove the Time Machine volume icon from the Finder without affecting Time Machine. I want other external drives to be visible, so the Finder’s preferences are of no help here. Apple actually provides everything needed. I will explain how to remove the volume for Finder using Developer Tools, and without having Developer Tools installed (like me). Please note that Time Machine Volume refers to the volume Time Machine is backing up to, or any volume you would like to hide.To make this work, you need to have the Unix program SetFile installed. If you have the Developer Tools installed, you have it already, and you can skip the following steps. To install SetFile, do this:
- Download a copy of Pacifist from CharlesSoft.
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Announce incoming Mail message senders
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008Instead of a simple ding sound, it’s possible to have Mail tell you a little more about incoming messages using speech synthesis. Create the following AppleScript in Script Editor:
using terms from application "Mail" on perform mail action with messages newMessages repeat with newMessage in newMessages tell application "Mail" set senderName to (extract name from sender of newMessage) say "You've just received an email from " & senderName end tell end repeat end perform mail action with messages end using terms fromSave it to something like ~/Library/Scripts/Mail Reader.scpt. In Mail, create a new rule to run the script on every incoming message.
[robg adds: You may wish to tweak the settings in the rule to limit announcements of things like mailing list messages and spam…]
Use iPhoto’s Mail button to make image thumbnails
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008I often find myself wanting to FTP a photo so I can use it in my blog. I take my photos using a 6MP digital camera and store them in iPhoto.
I don’t want the full size photo in a post, but a smaller thumbnail. This involves opening the photo in a graphics program, scaling it down, saving the scaled down version to a temporary location, and then uploading with an FTP client. Afterwards, I need to delete the temporary file. A hassle.
Here’s an easier way:
Select the photo in iPhoto and click on the Email button. This will prompt you to select what size you want to mail. Select small or medium (depending what you want). This will open a Compose window in Mail.app with the scaled down photo already in place. You can drag the scaled-down photo directly onto your FTP client and the file will be uploaded. No need to use a graphics app. No need to save intermediate files. A nice time saver! Close the compose window in Mail.app and you’re all done!
Army’s iPod translator to be available for consumers
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. — The February issue of "National Defense" magazine reports on the use of iPods by soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Iraq.
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SSD-powered MacBook Pro wait is (almost) over
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008The MacBook Pro updates are right around the corner. Some reliable sources indicate that they may be as close as two weeks away while others put the delivery date as far out as mid-March. That doesn’t mean you have to wait to have an SSD powered MacBook Pro.
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Investing in Apple within a volatile stock market
Monday, January 28th, 2008Yes Apple stock has dropped in price, and yes I think it’s a bargain right now. I think Apple is being very conservative in their earnings forecast for 2008. I think investing in apple is still a good bet based on an analysis of their stock price and earnings projections.
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10.5: Another way to archive Time Machine backups
Monday, January 28th, 2008I recently updated my updated my MacBook with new hardware. I used Disk Utility to “restore” my old drive onto the new drive. This worked great, except that Time Machine uses the MAC address to uniquely track Time Machine backups. Perhaps there is a way to convince TM to use my existing TM backup, but I couldn’t find an easy way (if you know, please comment). However, I wanted to preserve my older backups.This hint provides one method, but I wanted to archive only 60GB of TM data on a 500GB external, and did not want to use the whole 500GB or repartition (which a restore would have required). Most methods of copying TM backups will fail due to TM’s hard links. However, in Disk Utility it does work to select the TM drive and choose ‘New Image From disknnn.’ I saved this as a read-only image on my 500GB…
Five Favorites from Macworld SF 08
Monday, January 28th, 2008“With more than 450 exhibitors at this year’s Macworld Expo, it’s impossible to see it all,” writes Jochen Wolters. “Which is a shame especially because of all those countless small and medium sized companies whose product announcements are often drowned out by the major news from the big players like Apple or Microsoft. Hence, let me point out five products I stumbled over at the 2008 Expo which, in my humblest of opinions, deserve a bit more attention than they have received so far.”
Jochen goes on to list his picks in the post titled, Macworld Expo 2008 Favorites.
Is Apple subsidizing the $70 Apple TV price reduction by taking a cut of movie rentals?
Sunday, January 27th, 2008At Macworld, Steve Jobs announced that, along with all of the new features of Apple TV, Apple was reducing the price of the device significantly. The world rejoiced. The problem is that only the US and Canada got price reductions. In the UK, Apple TVs saw no price drop - they still cost the equivalent of $400.
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Frankly Speaking: Prisoners of Legacy
Sunday, January 27th, 2008Is it right that impoverished third-world children have more innovative technology than corporate users?
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