There are plenty of ways to transfer photos from an iOS device to a Mac—I generally email them to myself or use Messages—but it can still be a hassle. A tip recently published on The Iconmaster could be my new solution to the problem.
First, make sure you have Photo Stream turned on in each of your iOS devices, as well as on your Mac. Next, go to your ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub folder. There, you'll see a bunch of subfolders with names like 013184d3f181aa175db7e48b08817861eff8cac25a. (If you aren't sure how to get to the Library folder inside your home folder, here are 18 ways to do so.) Perform a search for image files in this sub folder by typing kind:image in the search field and selecting Sub as the focus of the search. (If you take a lot of photos or screenshots, and only want to find one or the other, you could instead search for png for screenshots or jpg for photos.)
Now save this search as a Smart Folder by clicking on the Save button just below the search field. You can save it wherever you want: by default, it will go in the Saved Searches folder, but you can check the box that says Add to Sidebar if you want quick access from the Finder sidebar. You can also choose a different location for the Smart Folder, such as your Desktop. If you want this folder in the Dock, add it to the Dock by dragging the folder there.
First, Macworld senior editor Dan Frakes recently reported that he'd inadvertently stumbled on an undocumented keyboard shortcut for deleting messages in Mail: Control-H. Hitting that key-combo does the same thing as the Delete key, sending messages to the Trash folder.
That might seem odd at first glance, but isn't really odd at all: Control-H is the Unix keybinding for the Backspace or Delete key. As a result, you can use Control-H to delete text in apps that use the Cocoa text input framework. Its ability to delete messages in Mail is an interesting side-benefit.
In iTunes, there are two ways to categorize your videos: as either Movies or TV Shows. Movies are displayed individually, but TV shows are organized in groups, as they would be if they were episodes in the same show. One anonymous Mac OS X Hints reader takes advantage of this to organize all kinds of videos, regardless of their actual source. He uses his Movies library for very large files and puts everything else in TV Shows. So, for example, in his TV Shows library, he has groups called YouTube Videos, Home Videos, Work Stuff, and so on.
To create a group, first make sure both TV Shows and Movies are visible in the iTunes source list. If they're not, go to iTunes' General preferences and check Movies and TV Shows in the Show section.
Next, import your new video into iTunes by dragging it to the source list where these libraries display. In most cases, iTunes will categorize it as a movie. In the Movies library, select the video and press Command-I to display its Info window. On the Options tab choose TV Show from the Media Kind drop-down.
You probably know that you can configure the Dock to hide itself when you aren’t using it. (If not: Go to System Preferences -> Dock, and select Automatically Hide and Show the Dock, or Control-click on the separator in the Dock itself and select Turn Hiding On.) You may also have noticed that, if the Dock is hidden and you then move your cursor to the edge of the screen to make it reveal itself, there’s a slight delay before the Dock slides back into view. The delay may not be that long—maybe half a second—but it does irritate some users.
If you’re one of them, OS X Hints reader bahoom found that a simple Terminal command can make the Dock appear instantly. In Terminal, run the following command: defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock. That will change the setting and relaunch the Dock. When you move your cursor to the edge of your screen now, the Dock should reappear immediately.
If you ever want to restore the default delay, go back to Terminal and enter the command: defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay && killall Dock.
I use Dropbox to sync files across my Macs, but also to collaborate with others using shared folders. One day, I discovered that the disk space on my MacBook Air had dropped substantially. I started poking around, looking for swap files and other usual suspects, but eventually found one especially large folder hidden inside my Dropbox folder: .dropbox.cache.
Looking inside this folder, I found that it contained three dated folders, one each for the past three days. Inside each of those were a number of files; many, I could tell, were from my shared project folders. Because we use a versioning system on one of those projects, I could see multiple versions of many files. In all, I found 8 GB of cached files.
Sometimes you want to send a file, URL, text snippet, or image from your Mac to your iPhone (or vice versa). I generally use email for this purpose, but Mac OS X Hints reader NaOH-Lye found another method (via MacDrifter): Use Messages.
If you have the Messages beta installed on your Mac, click on the Compose button at the upper left of the Messages window. At the To prompt, start typing your own name, then select your iMessage address from the list of suggestions. Then drag (or copy and paste) your file, URL, or text snippet into the text-entry field at the bottom of the window. Whatever you’re sending will appear on the “sent” side of the message pane; it will almost immediately appear in the “received” side, too. More importantly, it will almost immediately pop up on your iOS device as well.
I recently downloaded a zip archive of freely-distributed MP3 files. But when I double-clicked it to decompress it, all I got was a .cpgz file (an archive file in the CPIO format). Double-clicking that file just created the zip file again, and thus I was stuck in an endless loop
Searching on Google, I saw that plenty of other people had come across the same problem. Some of them suggested some fixes, but none of those fixes worked for me. Some online posts suggested that I download the file again, because the first file might have become corrupted. But as it was a very large file, I really didn’t want to try that.
The solution for me was to use the free The Unarchiver, which turns out to be a Swiss army knife for decompressing many obscure types of archives. Opening the file with The Unarchiver decompressed it correctly.
