Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

Gain more control over QuickTime X playback speeds

In OS X 10.5’s QuickTime Player, it was easy to control how quickly you could fast-forward or rewind a playing movie. There were, in fact, two ways to do so. Select Window -> Show A/V Controls, and you could then use the Jog Shuttle and Playback Speed features to control your movie’s playback speed.

In Snow Leopard’s QuickTime X, the A/V Control palette has gone missing (along with any number of additional user-friendly features). In its place, we have just the Fast Forward and Rewind buttons. Click once, and the speed changes to 2x; click again for 4x and then 8x. While this works, it’s not nearly as flexible as the options offered in the A/V Control palette in Leopard—or at least, so it seems.

As discovered by Mac OS X Hints contributer ipearx, you can get better control over the fast-forward and rewind speeds. The secret is to hold down the Option key before clicking either the Fast Forward or Rewind button. With the Option key held down, the first speed you’ll see will be 1.1x, and each subsequent click will increase the rate by .1x, up to a maximum of 8x.

While still not as flexible as the Leopard version—there’s no job/shuttle controller, for instance—it’s nice to have more control over playback speed. I’ve found I can watch a video at somewhere around 1.2x to 1.4x and still follow all the audio and video.

You might try using this technique to watch my recent Snow Leopard tips video, where I cover this tip and a handful of others. (I tend to repeat some of the more-useful video tips in these hints blogs, because not everyone watches the videos.)

Force Dictionary to use one window in Snow Leopard

One of the new “features” in Snow Leopard’s Dictionary is that the built-in dictionary will open a new window for each word you define from either the Spotlight menu or the Services menu (Control-click on a word and select Look Up in Dictionary from the contextual menu). In OS X 10.5, these searches all opened in one window, and you could then use the arrow buttons in the toolbar to navigate back and forth between definitions.

If you’d prefer to have Dictionary in 10.6 open everything in one window, here’s how to change its behavior. (I covered this tip in last week’s Snow Leopard tips video, but I know not everyone watches the videos, so here it is in text form.)

Note that this hint is not related to looking up definitions in the floating dictionary window—the one that appears when you press Control-Command-D over a word in a Services-aware application. It’s about the behavior of windows in the full Dictionary application.

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Make it even easier to add media to iTunes

While the new Tunes 9 feature that automatically adds media to iTunes is pretty easy to use already—just drop an iTunes-compatible media folder on the Automatically Add to iTunes folder in your iTunes folder, and you’re done. But in case you’re looking to make it even easier, here are a couple of hints that do just that.

First, if you’d rather not navigate to that folder every time you want to use it, simply make an alias to it, then put the alias wherever you want. Highlight the original folder in the Finder, then select File -> Make Alias (or press Command-L) to create the alias. Drag the alias to your user’s Documents folder (or wherever), then drag and drop it to the Dock, or the Finder’s toolbar or sidebar for easy access from nearly anywhere in the system.

Second, if you’re running Snow Leopard, here’s another alternative: Create a new Service that moves the select file or files to the Automatically Add to iTunes folder. If you wish, you can then create a keyboard shortcut for this Service, meaning you can add media to iTunes via the keyboard. Don’t worry, this is about the simplest Service you can possibly create, as it will have but one step.

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Select Expose windows by name in Snow Leopard

As one who prefers the keyboard to the mouse, I’m always interested in changes to the Mac operating system that make the keyboard usable in more places. One such change was snuck into Exposé with the Snow Leopard update.

After activating Exposé in All Windows mode (F9, or the dedicated key on your keyboard), you can now select windows by typing portions of their names (as shown below each window). Depending on the names of the open windows, you can select a window with as little as one keystroke, though it will usually take two or three to uniquely identify a window.

As you type, the system will move the blue halo to the currently-selected window. When you see that the window you want to switch to is highlighted, just press Return to exit Exposé; that window will appear in the foreground.

This simple change means I can now easily use Exposé without ever touching the mouse. (In OS X 10.5, you can select windows in Exposé’s All Windows mode using the arrow keys, but with more than a few windows open, this quickly becomes time consuming.) Thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader PhilHints for uncovering this timesaving tip.

See selection info in iTunes 9

Here’s a quick iTunes 9 tip that may make your life easier if you burn a lot of CDs, or otherwise need to know the size of a selection in iTunes. In older versions of iTunes, if you wanted to know the play time for a group of songs, you had to drag those songs into a new playlist.

In iTunes 9, that step is no longer necessary. Simply select your songs (using any combination of click, Shift-click, and Command-click), and as your selection grows, the status display at the bottom of the iTunes window will update in real time, showing the item count, total play time, and total size of your current selection.

If you’re trying to fill a CD, either based on data size or minutes of play time, this new “live” status display makes it a much simpler process.

Control the behavior of the green button in iTunes 9.0.1

The iTunes 9.0.1 update changed (again) the behavior of the green button in iTunes’ window. Prior to iTunes 9, clicking this button would change the window into a miniature player, showing just playback controls and a small info window.

In iTunes 9, the green button switched into a real “maximize” button, as in most other OS X applications; to get the mini player, you had to Option-click the green button (or use Shift-Command-M, the shortcut for View -> Show Mini Player).

In iTunes 9.0.1, things changed again, with the button’s behavior returning to the prior “switch to mini player” behavior when clicked, with an Option-click maximizing the window. Apparently the change in iTunes 9 was not well received (or else it was just a bug; the iTunes 9.0.1 release notes describe the behavior as being “fixed.”)

In any case, if you prefer the “maximize when clicked” behavior for the green button in iTunes 9.0.1, here’s how to get it back. Quit iTunes if it’s running, and enter this command in Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities):

defaults write com.apple.iTunes zoom-to-window -bool YES

Restart iTunes, and the green button will now maximize the window when clicked, just as it did in iTunes 9. To revert to the iTunes 9.0.1 behavior of showing the mini player, quit iTunes and enter this command in Terminal:

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes zoom-to-window

The next time you run iTunes, the green button will again show the mini player when clicked. Thanks to this command, this should mark the end of the debate over the green button’s functionality—regardless of how you’d like it to act, you can now make it work as you wish (perhaps this will eventually show up as an option in iTunes Preferences).

Associate files to applications using Services in Snow Leopard

As I noted Wednesday, Snow Leopard changes the way applications and documents are associated. The original article has the details, but basically, documents will no longer automatically open in the applications used to create them. For many users—myself included—this change represents a large loss in functionality.

As a user, what can you do if you prefer the “old” behavior of OS X 10.5 and earlier? I list a few alternatives in my article, including using the Open With contextual menu, and changing the file associations in the document’s Get Info window. Today’s hint details a third solution, which is the one I’m now regularly using myself.

This method is basically the same as using the Get Info window to change a given document’s associated application, but it uses Automator to turn the task into a Service—which can then be assigned a keyboard shortcut. I created one Services for those programs I work in most often (Smultron, BBEdit, and Photoshop CS3), to make it easy to reconnect newly-created files with those programs. Here’s how I did it.

Open Automator (in the Applications folder), and when the template chooser appears, select Service and click Choose. On the right side of the Automator window, you’ll see two pop-up menus, next to text that reads Service receives selected and in. Set the first pop-up menu to files or folders, and the second to Finder. You’ve just specified that your new Service will work only on selected files (or folders, but you wouldn’t use this Service on a folder) in the Finder.

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Yet another way to move app windows to Spaces

Spaces, which lets you create “virtual desktops” to separate your applications, is something I’ve learned to love on my laptop—I don’t really need it as much on my large screen at home, but it’s great for working on a number of things at once on the MacBook Pro. As you may know, there are a number of ways to move windows between Spaces in OS X.

You can enter the Spaces overview window (F8 by default) and drag windows around between Spaces there. You can also drag a window to a screen edge and the system will then switch to the next Space. Finally, you can click-and-drag on the window’s border, then press Control and one of the Spaces numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) to move to that Space, bringing the window with you. (There are probably a couple other methods I’m leaving out, too; feel free to add your favorite if I’ve left it out.)

While all of these methods work, there’s one more that I prefer, and it’s a variant of the drag-plus-Control-key method above. While I generally prefer keyboard-based solutions, reaching for the Control key and number keys requires an awkward hand movement—little finger down to Control, and then fingers reach up for the number keys. Instead of using these hard-to-reach keys, try pressing Command-Tab after you start dragging a window.

The onscreen App Switcher will appear, and you can then press Tab repeatedly to select an application that resides in another space. Release Command and Tab, and that application’s Space will come to the foreground—and bring your dragged window along for the ride. Release the mouse button, and the dragged window will be dropped in the selected Space.

The disadvantage of this method over the others is that you need to know which Spaces your various apps are in, as you won’t see it until you select it. However, I like that it’s relatively easy to press Command-Tab while dragging a window, so I find myself using this method quite often, despite that limitation.

Thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader James Carey for submitting this one.

See hidden files in Snow Leopard's Open and Save dialogs

Many of OS X’s files and folders are hidden when working with the system—most of the Unix-only folders, such as /usr, /etc, and /bin, for instance. If you want to always see these hidden files and folders, you can do just that.

Most of the time, though, I don’t want to see hidden files, as I don’t do much with them. I really only want to see them when I want to open one of them—for editing in a text editor, for instance. For those situations, Snow Leopard offers a new solution to the hidden file dilemma: the ability to see hidden files quickly, but only in Open and Save dialogs.

In any Open or Save dialog in Snow Leopard, simply press Shift-Command-Period to display hidden files and folders. This command is a toggle; hidden files will be displayed as you navigate various directories in the Open or Save dialog.

To hide the hidden files again, just press Shift-Command-Period again. The setting is temporary, though—hidden files will always be hidden when the Open or Save dialog appears onscreen. (Somewhat obviously, this also only works if you’ve clicked the triangular button to expand the dialogs to show the folder browser.)

I covered this tip in my Six Snow Leopard tips video, but felt it was useful enough to share here, too—just in case not everyone watches the video. Thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader Magno Urbano for finding this hidden Snow Leopard gem.

Keyboard navigation of Snow Leopard's Stacks

If you like using Stacks in Grid view mode in OS X, and you prefer using your keyboard to your mouse, Snow Leopard adds some new keyboard-based navigation ability to Stacks.

As you may already know, Stacks in OS X 10.5 allowed for decent keyboard navigation already. Once a stack is activated (which can be done via the keyboard if you set up a shortcut to switch to the Dock), you can then use the arrow keys to move through the Stack, or you can jump to any item in the Stack by typing the first few letters of its name.

Once an item is selected, press Return to open it. You can even open an item in the background, leaving the Stack on screen by holding down the Option key prior to activating the selected item.

Both of these tricks work in 10.6, but there’s a new capability in 10.6’s Stacks feature: you can now navigate into Folders while using Grid view in Stacks. Thankfully, this new feature works just as well with the keyboard as it does with the mouse. Just select the folder as you would a file or application (using the arrow keys or letters) and press Return (or Command-O or Command-Down Arrow) to drill down into that folder in a new Stack.

To get back to the parent folder (the one that’s actually in your Dock), just press Command-Up Arrow; I find this much easier than finding and clicking the well-hidden arrow at the upper left of the Stack grid.

You can use other modifier key tricks with folders in Grid view Stacks, too. Press Command-Return to open the selected folder in the Finder and close the Stack. Press Command-Option-Return to open the selected folder in the background and leave the Stack open.

I only have a couple of Stacks, but I like that Stacks support keyboard navigation, and find the new drill-down ability to be very useful.