Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

Add more effects to Photo Booth and iChat

As you know, Photo Booth includes a collection of image-altering effects you can use to distort your photos; just click the Effects button to see the collection of 24 effects, and to apply them to your photos. A subset of these effects (16 in all) are available in iChat, too, for use in creating some truly strange looking iChat image icons. But in case that’s not enough effects for you, here’s a way to add over 20 additional effects to both iChat and Photo Booth.

To use today’s hint, you’ll need a text editor that can handle binary plist files—Apple’s own Property List Editor (included with Xcode), or BareBones’ free TextWrangler, for instance. There’s a bit of editing to do, but it’s not hard.

To start, open two Finder windows. In the first, navigate to /System -> Library -> Compositions. In the second, navigate to your user’s Library folder. If you don’t see a Compositions folder there, create one, and then navigate into it.

Next, copy a number of the compositions from the first (System-level) window to the second (your user’s Library -> Compositions folder). Note that there are many entries in the top-level Compositions folder, but not all will work well with iChat and Photo Booth. So how do you know which ones to copy?

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Four hints about Mail and Spaces

In today’s hints blog, I’ve got a grab bag of four shorter hints, of which two work in both 10.5 and 10.6, and two are 10.6 only. Three of the hints cover Mail, while one covers a nifty Spaces trick.

The Spaces trick, which works in both 10.5 and 10.6, lets you easily switch between any of a program’s open windows, across all Spaces. For instance, assume you have Safari windows open in Spaces 1, 3, and 5 on your machine. You can see all of these windows by using the Spaces overview window (F8), or by using Control and the arrow or number keys to jump to a given space.

But if you want to quickly cycle between all of those Safari windows, regardless of which Space they’re in, try this: click Safari’s Dock icon. Each click will cycle you to another Safari window, moving between Spaces as necessary. You may not use this trick every day, but consider it just one more Space-switching shortcut to add to your toolkit.

Sticking with the “works in 10.5” theme, today’s second hint is about deleting messages in Mail without automatically previewing (and hence, marking as read) the next message in the list. One way to do this, which we’ve covered before, is to remove the preview pane (by dragging the divider bar to the bottom of the Mail window).

However, what if you like to use the preview pane, but wish you could delete a message without immediately having the next one show up there? Here’s the secret: press Option-Delete instead of Delete, and Mail won’t immediately populate the preview pane with the next message. Instead, you can manually select whichever message it is you’d like to read next.

Moving on to the two 10.6 Mail hints, both involve URLs, and the first is more of an observation than a hint. In the past, if someone sent you a Windows-style path to a file server (something like \\CoolServer\joeuser\demos, for example), you couldn’t directly do anything with it. Instead, you’d have to modify it into a Finder-friendly layout, i.e. smb://CoolServer/joeuser/demos. Mail in 10.6 has solved this problem—Windows-style file paths are clickable, and when clicked, they will automatically get converted into Finder-friendly URLs.

Finally, if you send e-mails with a lot of links (using rich text formats), you can save yourself a bit of typing time in 10.6’s Mail app. In previous releases, if you wanted a URL to be clickable in the recipient’s email application, you had to include the http:// bit in front of the site’s address. In 10.6’s version of Mail, you can save those seven keystrokes for use at a later date—they’re no longer needed. Instead, just type in the URL proper, and Mail will make sure it’s a clickable link when it sends it out.

You may be wondering, though, why Mail doesn’t show the clickable links as you’re composing your message. While it doesn’t do this by default, you can make it do just that. Open a new message composition window, then Control-click on the message body. From the contextual menu, select Substitutions -> Smart Links (assuming it’s not already checked). Once enabled, you’ll see your URLs convert to clickable links as you type them, so you can see exactly what the recipient will see.

Thanks to Sean Ahern, timcrawf, Skurfer, and the ever-popular Anonymous for today’s grab bag of OS X goodies.

Create pause-zoom-pause effects in iMovie stills

Although I typically use Final Cut Express for my video projects, I recently had a really short project to do for the family, so I thought I’d give iMovie another trial. Although I did get the project done, I found myself fighting iMovie’s interface at nearly every step (I am not a fan of the “toss all the clips in a bin and scrub as you mouseover” setup).

One thing in particular that I wanted to do was use the Ken Burns’ effect (animating still images through crop, zoom, and move actions) with a pause on the “before” and “after” images. By default, when you apply Ken Burns’ effects in iMovie, they start as soon as the still image is displayed, and then are auto-timed to end when the still image vanishes. Depending on the type of pictures you’re showing, this can be disorienting.

What I wanted to do was have the image appear fixed for a certain time period, then show the Ken Burns effect, and then hold on the final image for a bit before fading out. This is something that was relatively trivial in iMovie HD, but as I discovered, it’ss far from trivial in iMovie. (It’d be trivial if iMovie let you create a still from a Ken Burns-modified image in iMovie, but you can only create stills from movies, not other stills.)

After fighting it for a few hours, I gave up and asked the Twitterverse for assistance. Twitter user 2mutch came through with the solution, although it was complex enough that it required an e-mail exchange—140 characters just wasn’t enough room for all the details.

If you want to get this pause-move-pause effect in iMovie, here’s how to do it—the steps may seem confusing in text, so I’ve also included a little demo movie that shows exactly what you need to do.

1. Add the still you want to modify to your project, and set up the Ken Burns effects as you’d like them to be.
2. Duplicate the still twice (Edit -> Copy, then Edit -> Paste twice), so you have a total of three copies of your still.
3. In the first image in the series, which will be the “before” still, edit the Ken Burns effect so that the End effect’s size and position is identical to that of the Start effect.
4. In the last image in the series, which will be the “after” image, click the small two-headed circular arrow to flip the Start and End effects.
5. Set the End effect’s size and location to be equal to that of the Start effect.

After you do the above, you can also alter the duration of the before and/or after images to suit your movie’s timing needs. If the above instructions seem confusing, try watching this brief movie (click the red badged area of the movie to watch).

If iMovie would simply support the creation of a new still from a still that’s had the Ken Burns’ effect applied, this entire process could be greatly simplified—just apply Ken Burns, then use the first and last frames of the animation to create new stills. Even better would be total control over Ken Burns, allowing the user to specify the start time, duration, and end time for the effect. Who knows; maybe we’ll see this in iMovie ‘10? If you know of simpler ways to accomplish the same thing in iMovie, feel free to share in the comments.

Delete networked files without caution dialog

Today’s hint is simple, effective, useful, and potentially quite dangerous—even though it neither uses Terminal nor modifies anything in the system. Instead, it’s one of those timesaving shortcuts that you might, just might, regret knowing at some point in the future. Before you consider using this hint, remember that, as a relative of a spider-powered human mutant once said, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

If you use files from networked machines on your Mac, you’re probably very familiar with the system warning that appears whenever you try to delete one of those files:

This warning message is important, as it lets you know that remotely-mounted files can’t be thrown away via the system’s trash can, as can files stored on your machine. Instead, if you click Delete, the file will be deleted, and once deleted, it’s gone for good.

If you know what you’re doing, and work with a ton of networked files, this dialog can get old in a hurry—so much so that you probably don’t pay much attention to it anyway, and just click Delete out of habit. If you’ve reached this stage, you know the dialog isn’t doing much good; you’re dismissing it due to repetition, not because you’ve read it an understand the implications for the currently-selected file.

Given the dialog isn’t doing much good anyway, why not just skip it entirely? If you select a file stored on a networked machine and press Command-Option-Delete, the selected file (or files) will be deleted immediately, sans warning dialog. You won’t get a second chance, you can’t change your mind, and you won’t find the deleted file in the trash, so don’t bother looking—it’s gone.

Thanks to Mac OS X Hints contributor marksch for discovering this quite useful, if not potentially dangerous, timesaving shortcut.

See icon previews in folder Quick Look windows

I demonstrated today’s OS X hint (which works in both 10.5 and 10.6) in my latest Snow Leopard tips video, but for those who prefer their hints in the old-fashioned text format, I’m repeating it here today.

Quick Look, the “sneak peek” feature that shows you the contents of a file when you select it in the Finder and press the Space Bar, has a hidden capability for working with folders. Normally, using Quick Look on a folder is sort of boring—you see a big blue folder icon, the size and number of items in the folder, and a last modified time.

But with a simple Terminal trick, instead of the boring blue folder icon, you can see the boring blue folder icon…with cycling animated icons representing each of the files within the folder. To enable this feature, open Terminal, paste in the following command, and then press Return:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1

To make this change take effect, you need to relaunch the Finder. There are many ways to do this, but one of the easiest (and cleanest) is to hold down the Option key, then click and hold on the Finder’s Dock icon. When the contextual menu appears, select Relaunch.

Now select a folder in the Finder and press the Space Bar, and revel in the icon previews. Click the image below for a brief movie of what this looks like in action.

An enhanced Quick Look folder

If you tire of this eye candy in the future, open Terminal again, paste in this command, and press Return:

Relaunch the Finder again, and Quick Look will be back to its stock treatment of folders in Quick Look mode. Thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader freaktheclown for discovering this one.

Two more Snow Leopard Expose tips

Exposé in Snow Leopard has gained a lot of new features. We’ve already discussed using Dock Exposé to switch between app windows in different Spaces, selecting Exposé windows by name, and using Quick Look and the Command-Tab switcher in Exposé mode. Here are two more Snow Leopard features to add to your memory banks.

The first is not really a hidden feature—Apple actually demonstrates it in the Exposé Basics video on the Exposé feature page. It isn’t, however, documented anywhere in Exposé itself, nor in the Mac’s help file that I can find.

Open Exposé in its All Windows mode (F3 or F9 by default), and then press Command-1. This will sort all open windows alphabetically by window title. There’s no “unsort,” though, so to return to the default sort order, you need to close and reopen Exposé.

There’s another sort option available, too—Command-2. In the video, the narrator states that Command-2 “sorts [the open windows] by application name.” But after numerous experiments by myself and other Mac OS X Hints readers, that’s clearly not an accurate description.

What Command-2 seems to do is first group windows by application (so that all windows from Safari, for instance, are close to one another), and then sort all of the open windows by some algorithm—but that algorithm is not based on the application name. It may be based on application launch time, but that’s just a theory. Because of this odd sorting, I find that Command-2 isn’t really all that useful.

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Add notes to events and contacts created with data detectors

When you use Mail in OS X 10.5 and 10.6, you may have noticed Apple’s data detector technology at work. Data detectors scan inbound messages for addresses, phone numbers, and dates and times; if you hover over these items in an e-mail message, you’ll see a dotted outline and a triangle indicating the existence of a contextual menu. Click the triangle to reveal the menu, and one of the options will be to create a new contact in Address Book, or a new event in iCal, based on what’s in the associated bit of text.

Because this feature is fairly well known, you may be familiar with its basic usage already. What you might not know is that it’s easy to associate additional text from the e-mail with your new event or contact. Just select the other text first, and then use the data detector menu on the desired address, phone number, or date. When the new event or contact is created, the additional text you had selected will automatically be added to the Notes field in iCal and Address Book.

If you’re used to creating events (or contacts) and then going back to add your notes, you’ll appreciate the time saved by doing it all in one step.

Find recently-used apps and documents in Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard’s Recent Items menu item—located in the Apple menu—has a simple new ability that may come in handy if you use this menu regularly. By default, the Recent Items menu displays recently-used applications, documents, and servers, letting you easily access these items again. In OS X 10.5, that was all you could do with this menu.

In 10.6, though, you can use the Recent Items menu to locate recently-used applications and documents in the Finder. If you hold down the Command key, then activate the Recent Items menu, you’ll see that the description for the applications and documents change. Instead of showing simply, for instance, Safari, the menu will now display Show “Safari” in Finder. Select it, and the folder containing Safari (most likely, your Applications folder) will open in Finder.

While not terribly useful for applications, this trick can be a time-saver if you’re trying to track down a recently-used document, but you’re not positive where it might be located on your hard drive.

Two ways to download software updates in Snow Leopard

When running Software Update in OS X 10.5 and earlier, you could choose to download available Software Updates, instead of installing them. To do so, you could just select Update -> Download Only after the list of available updates appeared. In 10.6, this menu item is gone, as is Install and Keep Package, which appeared in the same menu (but didn’t seem to work in 10.5 anyway).

So what are your options if you like to download updates, instead of merely installing them—if you have multiple Macs in your home, for instance, this can be a real timesaver.

The obvious choice is a new entry in the Update menu in Software Udpate: Go to Apple Downloads Page. On the Apple Downloads page, you’ll find—in theory—every software update that Apple releases, each of which can be downloaded and saved on your Mac. Downloading a number of updates one by one can be a bit of a chore, though.

The other alternative is to use the softwareupdate program in Terminal, which still has a download option available in 10.6. In Terminal, type softwareupdate -d (then press Return) to launch the softwareupdate tool in download mode. Unlike using your browser, this command will download all available updates at once, and will do so without requiring your admin password. Let the program run, and when it’s done (the Terminal’s command prompt will return), you’ll find the downloaded updates in the top-level Library -> Updates folder. From there, you can install them, or copy them to other Macs for future installation.

See which processes are using the Internet

If you’ve ever wondered about which programs are using your Internet connection at any point in time, here’s one way to find out using Terminal. Open Terminal, in Applications -> Utilities, and run this command:

lsof -P -i -n | cut -f 1 -d " " | uniq

When you press return, you’ll see a list of processes that are using the Internet connection; at the time I wrote this, my output looked like this:

$ lsof -P -i -n | cut -f 1 -d " " | uniq
COMMAND
AppleVNCS
PTHPasteb
SystemUIS
aosnotify
iTunes
GrowlHelp
Transmit
iChatAgen
firefox-b
VPNClient
Mail

The first row, COMMAND, is just the column header. Below that are the processes that are using the Internet connection. Most of the time, they are self-explanatory, or can be figured out with relative ease. On my list, most of the entries are pretty clear, but perhaps not aosnotify. A bit of work with Google, though, determines that that process is related to MobileMe syncing.

If you just want to use this command, you know all you need to know now. If you’re curious how it works, though, then keep reading.

While the command may look complex, it’s actually three relatively simple commands strung together with the pipe (|) symbol. The first one, lsof -P -i -n, runs lsof to list open files, with options set to focus only on those connections using the Internet connection (-i), and to not try to convert port and host numbers into names (-P and -n).

The output from this command is then sent to cut, which cuts out everything except the first field (-f 1), based on using spaces to delimit fields (-d " "). Finally, that output is sent to uniq, which strips out duplicate entries from the list—without this last bit, you’d see a lot of repetition in the list, because every open app will have multiple open files.

And that’s all there is to it; thanks to commandlinefu.com for posting this useful tidbit.