Double Click Columns to Resize in Finder

Column View is a handy way to display multiple folders on your Mac simultaneously, left to right. Choose View --> As Columns (or type Command-3) when in the Mac Finder to switch to this mode. If you use Column View you've probably run across filenames which don't display completely within the default width. A long name like "Running Windows on your Mac" gets truncated to "Running Win... your Mac" When multiple files are similarly named, this can get confusing.

You can drag the column slider left or right to resize manually, but there's a quicker way: Double-Click on the bottom of the slider and the Mac will resize the column automatically to fit the longest name. Quick and easy. Closing and reopening the window resets widths back to normal.

Tap and Hold Web Links on iDevices

A tip this time for the iDevice equipped - aka iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners. The Safari mobile web browser offers much of the functionality of it's full sized counterpart, but without a keyboard many surfing options are missing. The iPhone OS (now renamed iOS) offers some assistance.

If you Tap and Hold your finger on a link in a webpage, after a short delay a menu pops up giving you options to Open, Open in New Page, Copy, or Cancel. The Copy option is a quick way to copy a page URL to paste in an email or text message. Open in New Window is for power-browsers who prefer multiple sites in different windows (albeit still viewing only one at a time on these platforms).

Tap the Switch Page Icon - two stacked squares in the Safari button bar - to switch among different pages, close pages, or open a new blank window.

Configuring Mac Shortcuts - Screen Corners and Mouse Buttons

Scenario: you're using your Mac and move the mouse near the top left corner to click on a menu. Suddenly the screen goes dim and all the windows disappear. Or, you squeeze the sides of your Apple Mighty Mouse (the one with the little scroll ball) too hard, and the Dashboard launches. What's going on?

Apple provides a number of window management and other productivity shortcuts in Mac OS X. These include Show All Windows, Show the Desktop, Launch Dashboard, Start the Screensaver, etc.. Many of these shortcuts can be configured to get triggered when the mouse cursor is moved to one of the corners of the screen (top left, bottom right, etc), or one of the mouse buttons are clicked. This can be very useful - or an ongoing annoyance if things happen when you don't expect.

To enable, disable and configure how the screen corners and mouse buttons work to trigger shortcuts and actions, use System Preferences (found under the Apple Menu). The majority of items are controlled using the Exposé (or Exposé & Spaces) Preference Pane; here you can set mouse button, screen corner and function key options. Other settings are available in the Mouse (or Mouse & Keyboard) Preference Pane, options vary depending on the Mac OS X version and particular mouse used with your Mac.

Control iTunes with Apple Remote on iPhone or iPod Touch

This round a tip on a very nice free app to control iTunes playback, provided by Apple for those with an iPhone or iPod Touch. From the iTunes Store download a copy of Remote. Once configured (paired with a library) this slick program allows your iDevice to browse your music or video libraries, see album artwork, direct the output (from iTunes) to any Airport Express or AppleTVs you have around the home, and control playback and volume.

It's a superb replacement for the minimalist Apple white plastic remote, in fact easily one of best remote controls I have ever used. Give it a shot if you have the gear - the price is right!

Ejecting a CD or DVD from a non-booting (or cantankerous) Mac

Many of us may have run into something like this time to time - your Mac has crashed, you put in a Utility CD, and when you restart it attempts unsuccessfully but repeatedly to boot from the utility disc. Or the Mac is running but it refuses to eject a disc you've inserted, even after restarting. Ever since His Steveness removed the Eject buttons from the optical drives on Mac hardware back in the G4 era, what should be a trivial situation has become more difficult.

Here are some tips for getting stuck CDs or DVDs out of your drive:

On all Macs, reboot your machine and hold down the mouse or trackpad button continuously after restart. Keep the button held down until the Mac spits out the disc. This works 90% of the time.

On (non-beige) PowerPC Macs with G3, G4 or G5 processors, you can restart and boot into Open Firmware (the Mac BIOS) to eject the CD. Restart and hold down the Command, Option, "O" and "F" keys simultaneously: CMD-OPT-O-F After a few seconds you will see a white screen with some black text, and an ok> prompt. At the prompt type "eject cd" followed by the Return key:

ok> eject cd <RETURN>

If that works, shut down the machine and reboot normally. If neither method works the drive may be damaged and/or the disc stuck in the machine. A trip to a Service Center (or a call to Oakbog) would then be in order.

Screen Zooming in Software

Macs have the handy ability to magnify your screen built right into the Operating System. This can be useful when trying to look at something tiny or enlarge a portion of the screen to be viewed from across the room. The zoomed image area tracks with cursor movement. Sometimes this feature gets turned on by accident, causing consternation (to put it mildly) among unsuspecting users!

There are several ways to enable and control Screen Zooms:
(Note: Command Key = CMD, Option Key = OPT, Control Key = CTRL)

Go to System Preferences --> Universal Access. You will see controls for several system related functions. Under Zoom, click the status to On. Once enabled CMD OPT = will zoom in one step at a time, CMD OPT - will zoom out, and CMD OPT 8 will toggle the zoom status On/Off. (The Command key is the same as the Apple key.) Try it and see what happens!

If you have a mouse attached to your computer, you can also enable and control the screen zooming feature in one step by using the mouse wheel with the Control key. Hold CTRL and Scroll Up with the wheel to Zoom In, then CTRL and Scroll Down to Zoom Out. This works anytime and is nice way to Zoom In quickly without having to go to System Preferences first.

Dealing with the Desktop Pileup

When you've been using your Mac for a while your (virtual) desktop can tend to get a bit cluttered. If there are too many items on the desktop to display at once, Mac OS X will pile icons onto the top right corner of the screen. Moving one file off this stack reveals another one, then another, and another - the stack of files can be surprisingly deep. Often this behavior gets in the way of finding the file you actually need.

To solve this problem, and for help finding things on a messy desktop in general, open a new Finder window from the File menu and navigate to the Desktop folder (inside your Home folder). Then choose List or Column mode from the View menu. These views provide a scrollable list of the items on the desktop, making it easier to find what you need. From the Finder window you can open, move or delete items just as if you were dragging items around on the desktop itself, and get rid of the stack (or mess) for good.

iPhone & iPod Touch Screenshots

An extra end-of-year tip for iPhone & iPod Touch owners. To take a snapshot of what's displayed on your screen, press and hold the Home and Power buttons (front and top, respectively) together, briefly (about a half second) until the screen flashes white. After the flash you will have a screenshot saved in the Camera Roll or Saved Photos section of your handheld. This picture can be emailed to yourself (or any recipient), and downloaded to the computer via iPhoto. Fun to play with, and sometimes very handy!

So What Are .dmg Files, Anyway?

Many Mac installers you download online come in the form of .dmg files (e.g., Installer.dmg). The .dmg extension means Disk Image, and is a way of compressing a copy of an application or it's installer in a form safe for transport and delivery over the web.

To use a .dmg file that you've downloaded, double click on the file. This will expand and mount the disk image, opening a new window with a copy of the application or installer. Note: this image which opens is loaded into the RAM of your computer and is meant to be temporary; this is an important - and often overlooked - part of the process.

If the expanded disk image window contains an installer or a .pkg file, double click that to finish the installation. If however you see an icon for the program you want to install, or a folder containing that program, it's probably accompanied by a little drawing of an arrow pointing to the Applications folder. That's a (generally unclear) instruction to copy the program or folder from the temporary RAM disk onto your actual hard disk, in what's known as the "drag install" method.

After dragging to install you should close the .dmg window and eject the temporary disk image. You can then run the program from the Applications folder on your hard drive. In my work as a Mac tech I often see people mounting the disk image repeatedly to run an application, or deleting a .dmg file and then wondering why they can't run the application any longer. Poor documentation of the drag install method is the culprit of this easily avoided problem.

Using Command-Tab to Switch Between Applications

A quick, keyboard-only way to switch between applications when you have multiple programs running is to press and hold the Command (CMD) key while tapping the Tab key. This brings up an application bar with icons for all running programs. Hit Tab repeatedly (while holding Command) to move the selection box among apps. Let go of both keys when you reach the program you want to switch to and that program's windows will pop to the front. (The Command key is sometimes known as the Apple key on older keyboards.)

This technique can be combined with other Command Keys for even more efficiency. Copy some text in one program (say email) using CMD-C, hit CMD-TAB a few times to switch to your word processor, then hit CMD-V to Paste the copied text into the new program. You can also bring up the application menu using CMD-TAB, then with the Command key held down hit the Q key repeatedly to Quit running programs in succession.

Spring 2008
 

Window Management Using Exposé

When you have multiple programs running and many windows open at once, things can get a bit cluttered. Since Mac OS X 10.3 Apple has provided some handy window management shortcuts, collectively called Exposé:

F9		Show All Windows, click on a window to bring it to the front
F10		Highlight Windows of the current (frontmost) application
F11		Move All Windows off screen to access items on the desktop

Hit each key a second time to turn off that view. On new Apple laptops and keyboards you may need to simultaneously hit Fn and F9 (or F10, F11) to access these features.

You can assign Exposé features to a mouse button or screen corner in System Preferences --> Expose & Dashboard (Expose & Spaces in Leopard) . I find it handy to set the mouse scroll wheel (button 3) to the Show All Windows function, instead of the default to launch Dashboard. You also use the Exposé Preference Pane to turn off unwanted behaviors, particularly involving mouse event triggers in screen corners.
 

January 2008
 

Weather Widget Problems

Winter 2008
 

Screen Snapshots

Sometimes it's helpful to save a picture of your Mac's screen, or a portion of the screen, for a project, as a receipt or for other reference. The Mac provides several ways to do this right from your keyboard. Type the following keys together to capture screen images (the Command - CMD - key is also known as the Apple key):

CMD-SHIFT-3		Saves a copy of the whole screen to the desktop named as Picture 1, Picture 2, etc.
CMD-SHIFT-4		Cursor changes to cross hairs, allows you to outline a square region to capture

Both these capabilities have long been part of the Mac OS. New to OS X is the ability to cleanly capture a picture of a single window without the screen background or other annoyances:

CMD-SHIFT-4 SPACEBAR

Cursor changes to cross hairs, then hit the SPACEBAR Cursor changes to a camera, move over the desired window and click the mouse to save picture

Try it and see what happens! I find this very handy to send pictures of error message windows to tech support folks when I have problems with my own Macs.
 

Target Disk Mode

Target Disk Mode is a wonderful feature in FireWire equipped Macs that lets you access the hard drive in your desktop or laptop from another Macintosh without using a network or file sharing. The computer in 'target' mode behaves as an external FireWire disk and allows access to your files and data for copying, to perform disk repairs, or as temporary extra storage space when needed.
 
To use Target Disk Mode, restart your Macintosh and hold down the T key after the chime. After a few moments you should see a blue or grey screen with a floating FireWire logo. When the logo appears connect the target computer to another running Mac via a FireWire cable. The target computer will mount on the desktop as an external FireWire drive and you will be able to access all your files. This is a convenient and fast way to copy large amounts of data between two computers, as well as accessing and repairing a system that might otherwise not be bootable.
 
Target Disk Mode also allows the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive of the target computer to be used as an external optical drive. If you have an older Mac with a malfunctioning CD/DVD drive, or perhaps only a CD-ROM drive but need to install software from a DVD-ROM, you can use a second Mac in target disk mode to help. Boot the second Mac in target mode, connect via FireWire, then insert the CD or DVD into the target machine. The disk will show up on the desktop and be usable just like an internal drive.
 

Summer 2007

Print to PDF in Mac OS X

PDF files have become an indispensable part of modern computing. This handy file format works cross-platform on Macs, Windows, and Linux systems and preserves all fonts and formatting details. Adobe's goal for their Portable Document Format has been attained, and PDF is now an open source (free) standard that will be around for a long time.

Since Mac OS X v10.2 Apple has provided Print to PDF services in the Operating System - no need to purchase a full retail copy of Adobe Acrobat as previously required. This is a great way to save web pages for later viewing, no internet access required. It's also a handy way to send formatted information from any application to other users or keep for future reference. To make a PDF, select Print... from the File menu and click the button that says "PDF" or "Save as PDF" Name the file whatever you like, and keep for later use.
 

Spring 2007

Running Windows on your Mac

Apple's new Intel Chip-Based Macs (ICBMs, in industry parlance) are sleek and powerful systems that bridge the gap between Operating Systems by allowing you to run Windows applications directly on your Macintosh at full (native) speeds. Apple's BootCamp utility allows you to install Windows XP or Vista on a partition of your hard disk, then boot your Macintosh directly into Windows. Users report that new Macs make great Windows machines (ironic, ehh?) and run most software - including high end games - very well.

Better yet, virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop and VMware allows you to run Mac and Windows applications simultaneously, side by side. While VirtualPC and other emulators have offered this capability for years on PowerPC Macs, the switch to Intel processors lets these solutions really fly with little to no performance impact. Now you can run business critical or Windows-only apps right on your Mac, in any version of Windows, and enjoy the benefits of Mac OS X for your other computing needs.
 

Winter 2007

Backup Tip for Pod People

Everyone knows they need to backup their files, but most people don't do so regularly. Keeping a spare drive around or burning CDs/DVDs is a pain. Yet these days an easy and practical solution exists with extra benefits to boot: backup to your iPod.

iPods are portable hard disks or flash drives, with a nice interface for playing music built in. Many iPods, especially full size hard disk models, have lots of unused storage space. To use this space for your own files, connect your iPod to your computer, go to the iPod Preferences in iTunes, and select Enable Disk Use. Your iPod will now show up on the Desktop (Macs) or within My Computer (PCs) and the free space will behave like a removable disk drive.

You can use this capacity to copy files & folders (like My Documents or your email folder) to a backup medium that regularly goes where you go, and allows an easy way to transfer files between two computers. You can even automate the process using a File Synchronization utility. Just think, an iPod used as a backup device may even be a deductible business expense! <grin> Just make sure that any sensitive documents use password-protected files, in case your iPod is lost or stolen.