Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

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.

Read more …

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

Switch between app windows in different Spaces

Here’s a really simple Spaces tip that works in both OS X 10.5 and 10.6. As best as I can tell, this isn’t documented anywhere in the help files. If you use windows from the same application in multiple Spaces (for instance, three Safari windows in three separate Spaces), switching between them can be done in a number of ways.

You can switch to the space directly (F8, Control-arrow keys, or Control-number keys), or you can use the Dock’s contextual menu for the application to select one of the open windows. In 10.6, you can click-and-hold on the application’s Dock icon and use Dock Exposé to select the window you’d like to see.

Here’s one more—super simple—method to add to your window switching tool kit: just click on the application’s Dock icon. Don’t click-and-hold, don’t Control-click, just click. If the app in question is already frontmost, each click will move to the next Space containing a window from that application. If the selected app is in the background, the first click will bring any windows in the current Space to the foreground, and then subsequent clicks will begin cycling through the open windows in each Space.

Depending on your usage preferences, you may find this method simpler than some of the others.

Create Mail accounts manually in Snow Leopard

When setting up new accounts in Mail, OS X 10.5 included a feature that would, if enabled via a checkbox, attempt to automatically set up the new account based on the preliminary information you provide. In the Snow Leopard version of Mail, however, the automatic setup checkbox option is gone, and automatic setup is now the default.

While this works well most of the time, there may be times when you’d rather set up an account by hand. Gmail accounts, for instance, will always be created as IMAP accounts when using automatic setup, and perhaps you’d prefer to use POP for your Gmail account. Also, in automatic mode, the setup wizard always tests the connections to the mail servers you enter. If you’re setting up accounts while offline, or while on a costly and/or slow connection, you might not want these tests to be run.

The solution, thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader V.K., turns out to be simple: On the first Add Account screen, which appears after you click the plus sign on the Accounts tab of Mail’s preferences, enter your name and e-mail address. Then hold down the Option key, and notice that the Create buttons changes to read Continue. Click the newly-existent Continue button, and you can set up your e-mail account manually, just as you could in OS X 10.5.

Automatically mute sound before meetings

If your only Mac is a laptop, and you take it with you to meetings, classes, or other such activities, you’re probably used to muting your machine before the event starts, then unmuting it once the event ends. While this is clearly not hard to do, it can be somewhat embarrassing if you forget to mute your Mac, only to have it loudly announce the arrival of a new e-mail, Tweet, or iChat message during the middle of a lecture.

Using a very simple set of scripts based on a submission by Mac OS X Hints reader Andrew J. Freyer, you can greatly reduce the chances of an audio outburst during your regularly-scheduled activities, as long as you’ve scheduled those activities in iCal. Here’s how to do it. First, you need to create two simple one-line AppleScripts.