Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

Contextual consolidation in iTunes 9

If you have your iTunes library set to not copy media files into the iTunes Music folder when adding to your library, you’re probably familiar with the File -> Library -> Organize Library menu item. You can use this menu option to copy your added media to the iTunes Music folder, which would make it easier to (for example) move your music and media files to a new machine.

At one time, this menu option affected only music files. As of iTunes 9, however, it consolidates all types of media files—at least, it does if you’re using the new iTunes Media folder structure. There’s a little gotcha in this menu item, though: if you want to keep your large video files on another drive, but choose the Organize Library menu item to copy some newly-added music into the iTunes Music folder, iTunes will also copy all of your video files. This is probably not what you want, given you went through the trouble of setting up another drive for those files.

Thankfully, there’s a workaround. iTunes 9 includes a consolidation feature on the contextual menu. Select all of the tracks you’d like to copy into the iTunes Music folder, Control-click on one of them, and select Consolidate Tracks from the contextual menu. Used in this manner, iTunes will only consolidate the selected tracks.

With this option in the contextual menu, you can avoid the top-level consolidation option entirely, unless you want to merge everything together, of course. Thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader sig eigei for this one.

Rotate user images in many OS X apps

There are a few spots in OS X applications where you have the ability to choose a photo to use as a representation of you—Address Book and iChat are two that come to mind. In Address Book, click on your entry, click on Edit, then double-click on the picture box next to your name.

This brings up the picture selection window, where you can take a picture with a connected camera, insert an image from a file, or paste an image from the clipboard. While these features may be well known, this one may not be: you can also rotate any image, once it appears in this box.

Twist your image

To do so, just hold down the Option key and then click-and-drag with your mouse or trackpad. As you drag with the Option key held down, you’ll see the image rotate, along with an overlaid clock face of sorts (see picture at left) to help you align the rotated image.

You can’t use your multitouch trackpad’s twist gesture, though—only the Option key with click-and-drag will work. This trick, pointed out by an anonymous Mac OS X Hints contributor, should work in any program that uses this standard picture-choosing interface.

Reduce iPhoto launch times

If iPhoto is slow to launch on your machine—as in taking over a minute to load, including visits from the spinning beach ball—here’s a possible fix that also happens to be a simple one. Once the application finally launches, open its Preferences by hitting Command-, (that's Command-comma), then click on Sharing.

In Sharing, see if either the “Look for shared photos” or “Share my photos” boxes are checked. If they are, and assuming you’re not using these services, uncheck those boxes. If you are using the sharing features, you may still be able to remove the check mark from one box—if you never access other shared libraries from the current machine, remove the check mark from the “Look for shared photos” option, for example.

When I posted this tip (from an anonymous contributor) on Mac OS X Hints, I was skeptical that it would make any difference, as it didn’t in my testing. However, many users have commented that it did, in fact, greatly reduce their iPhoto launch times. So if you’ve got a slow-to-load iPhoto, and you don’t use the sharing features, check to make sure they’re disabled in the program’s preferences.

Browse command history in Terminal

Today’s hint is for those who spend a fair bit of time in Terminal. If you do, you’re probably aware that Terminal tracks your command history—that is, it keeps a record of the commands you’ve used, and you can scroll through those historical commands. Press the Up Arrow key from the command prompt, and you’ll see the most-recently used command; each additional press moves further back through history, and the Down Arrow key moves forward in the history file.

There are a couple tricks to getting even more out of this history file, though. First, you can search through it by pressing Control-R to bring up the (reverse-i-search) prompt. Once the prompt appears, enter a portion of the command name you’d like to find, ssh for instance, and then just keep pressing Control-R to see each match in the history file. When the one you want to re-use appears, press Return to execute the command.

While this is nice, it’s a bit of a pain to press Control-R. So another option, and the focus of this hint, is to give the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys another role: they’ll do what Control-R does, but only when you’ve already started typing a command.

So in normal use, if you haven’t started typing a command, the Up Arrow key will show the last-used command. But if you start typing a command, then the Up Arrow key will actually run a search of the command history, and show the last-used command that begins with the letters you’ve already typed. (This is subtly different than Control-R, which finds the string you’ve typed anywhere within a previously-used command. I think this difference, though, actually makes this hint more useful.)

One way to access the Mac's boot menu

Do you use multiple partitions on your Mac? Maybe you use Apple’s Boot Camp tool to boot your Mac into Windows occasionally, or maybe you’ve got a Mac Pro loaded with four drives partitioned into 16 different virtual drives. Whatever the reason, if you’ve got a bootable system installed on more than one drive or partition in your Mac, you’re probably familiar with the boot manager—this is the screen that shows the bootable drives on startup (or reboot).

You can make this screen appear by holding down the Option key during startup, which is the typically-prescribed method. However, if your machine seems to be ignoring the keyboard at boot time (which is a problem I’ve heard about, but not experienced myself), try this tip, courtesy of Mac OS X Hints reader GanjaManja.

If you’ve got an Apple Remote for your Mac, you can use it to activate the boot menu. Just hold down the Menu button on the remote as the Mac boots up. (If your Mac doesn’t recognize your remote, check the Security System Preferences panel to make sure it’s set to accept commands from the remote. You might also want to pair the remote with your Mac, so the Mac only responds to that particular remote.)

I tested this with my MacBook Pro, which has three bootable systems on it (the ExpressCard SSD, the internal 10.6 drive, and the Boot Camp Windows partition), and it worked as described.

Find only exact duplicates in iTunes

Here’s a very simple iTunes hint that may come in very handy for those of you who may have duplicate song issues in iTunes. As you’re probably aware, iTunes includes a tool to help find the duplicates; just select File -> Show Duplicates, and iTunes will create a list of all the songs it believes are duplicates.

The only problem with this feature is that it’s quite liberal in deciding what is, and is not, a duplicate. As a result, the list of potential duplicates can wind up being very large—especially if you have a number of different versions of the same song by the same artist.

So here’s the trick…the Option key. Hold it down, then select File, and notice that Show Duplicates has changed to Show Exact Duplicates. The resulting list will be much shorter, as it will only select exact duplicates. This functionality is covered in the iTunes Help, where it states:

Press the Option key and choose File > Show Exact Duplicates to find multiple copies of the same song (if, for example, you inadvertently imported the song twice).

However, based on feedback from those who’ve heard this hint before, it seems like this feature isn’t well known.

If you need more help removing duplicates than this method provides—for instance, clearing out hundreds of duplicates isn’t necessarily an easy task, even if you’ve identified them—then you might want to check out Dupin, which offers a number of features to help solve your duplicate woes, including automating the deletion of duplicates. Christopher Breen discussed Dupin in more detail in his article on dealing with iTunes dupes.

Thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader rab777hp for pointing out this hidden gem.

Clear just one Recent Items category

The Recent Items entry in the Apple menu tracks recently-used applications, documents, and servers. At the bottom of the menu is an entry to clear all of your recent activity. But what if you want a more fine-grained control over removing entries from these lists? For example, say you want to remove one or more individual entries. Christopher Breen explains how to do just that by editing a plist file (with the help of a free tool).

Between the two extremes of clearing all and clearing individual items, though, lies a simple method of clearing one or more categories (Applications, Documents, or Servers) without affecting the others. Simply open the Appearance System Preferences panel, and change the Number of Recent Items pop-up menu to zero for the category you wish to clear. Then set it back to whatever your preferred count is, and check the Apple menu’s Recent Items entry. The category you zeroed out will be blank, while the other two will still show your recent activity.

Note that if you’ve enabled the Recent Items Dock Stack, and you clear the category that that Stack, the Stack will vanish, but leave an invisible space behind in its wake. If you click the empty space, your Dock may restart, but this won’t do any harm (other than changing your Desktop picture, if you’ve got it set to rotate).

Thanks to Mac OS X Hints contributor Philip Rink Jr. for this easy-to-use tip.

Ease web searches with LaunchBar

I used to be a heavy Quicksilver user in the days of Tiger. But when Leopard came along and brought with it faster Spotlight searches, and the ability for Spotlight to serve as an application launcher, I left QuickSilver behind and switched to Spotlight. It wasn’t quite as fast as the former, but it did the job and I was satisfied.

After hearing a lot of praise for LaunchBar—from none other than Macworld’s own Jason Snell—I decided to download the trial and give it a run. After spending two weeks with the app, I was convinced and purchased a license.

For those not in the know, LaunchBar is an application launcher that can also do a variety of other tasks: on-the-spot calculations, online searches, opening websites, searching your computer, performing predefined actions liking controlling iTunes playback, running scripts, and so on. If ever there was such a thing as a productivity enhancer, this is it.

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New ways to navigate column view Finder windows in 10.6

One of the nice changes in OS X 10.6 is greatly enhanced keyboard navigation of column view windows in the Finder.

In 10.5, if you wanted to move up and down the hierarchy of a column view window, you had to use the Left and Right Arrow keys—right to drill down, and left to move back up. To move within a given folder in that column view window, you could either type a few letters of the target file’s name, or use the Up and Down Arrow keys to move through the list.

While this worked fine, if you wanted to move back up a hierarchy—say to check on a file in a higher-level folder—the system would close each folder you had drilled down into as you moved backwards. (The alternative is to use the horizontal scroll bar to see the off-screen columns, but this means reaching for the mouse.) This functionality made it a real pain to get back to where you started, as you’d have to again use the combination of arrow keys and/or letters to select your desired folder.

Watch smaller-resolution movies at their native size in Snow Leopard

One of the great disappointments in Snow Leopard, at least to me, is QuickTime X. While the under-the-hood technologies may be bleeding-edge and allow far better and greater things in the future, the front-end that is QuickTime Player (version 10.0) is a joke. Once you get past, if you can, the controller and title bars that float over the movie content itself, you’re still left with a player that lacks almost all the export features of QuickTime Player 7, and has many other little idiosyncrasies.

One such issue is trying to play small movies in QuickTime Player 10—the fairly common 320x240 size, say. As an example, consider these SR-71 flight movies. If you download the 30fps MPEG-1 movie (stated to be 320x240 in size) in Snow Leopard, it will open in QuickTime Player 10 at 478x359. Why? Because that’s the smallest-sized window that QuickTime Player 10 can create to accommodate its enormous floating controller bar.