Latest Posts in Working Mac

Five unexpected uses for Copy and Paste

Sure, you copy (Command-C) and paste (Command-V) all the time. But did you know you can copy and paste a whole lot more than just text and graphics? When you start in the Finder, you can use the Copy command to lift all sorts of information from a selected Finder item: the item’s name; its icon; its pathname; its content; and, in effect, the entire file. What you get out of the operation depends on where you choose to paste. Here are some of my favorite tricks.

1. Quickly copy a file or folder’s name

You have a file named Docket#OCN-L-3854-09 and want to create a folder for it and related files. How do you do that without introducing a typo? Just select the file and press Command-C—you don’t even need to specifically select the name. Now create a new folder (Command-Shift-N), and while its name (“Untitled Folder”) is selected, use the Paste command.

If you need that docket number referenced in a document, select the file in the Finder, copy, and then go to your word processor and paste: there’s the name.

Bonus tip: Would you like a list of all the items in a folder? Open the folder, use Command-A to select everything in it, and then Command-C to copy them. Now switch to your word processor and paste to get a list of all the selected files.

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Extracting content from PDF files

I need to say it: PDF files are supposed to be the final format for content. You aren’t supposed to need to edit anything once it’s been turned into a PDF. In the real world, however, many people find themselves, for a variety of reasons, needing to get material out of a PDF, either for reuse someplace else or for further editing. Here’s how to get that PDF content out of an Adobe Acrobat document. Note that the instructions below are operative for Adobe Acrobat's pro version, as opposed to the free reader.

Images

Assuming the PDF security allows content extraction, getting an image out of a PDF is actually very easy.

To extract one image at a time, choose the Select tool (it looks like an I-beam coupled with a black arrow). Click once on the desired image, which will highlight to show it’s been selected, and then right-click (Control-click with single-button mice) and choose either the Copy Image or Save Image As command. The former puts the image on the clipboard ready to paste into Word, Photoshop, or another application, while the latter saves the image as a separate file on your desktop or wherever you want to store it.

If you need to get a bunch of images out of a PDF there’s a faster way. Go to File > Export > Image and choose your desired format, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, or TIFF. If you expect to print these images, export them as TIFFs. Whichever format you choose, you’ll be asked to save the files to a location on your computer. Before you click Save, note the Settings button that opens into a dialog that lets you specify the document quality and other options like color management and resolution that are relevant to your chosen file format.

It's easy to get an image from a PDF file.

Text

Exporting textual content is even easier than exporting images. Simply go to File > Export and select your desired export format—Microsoft Word, XML, HTML, plain text, or Rich Text Format, which is the vanilla format understood by Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, and nearly every other word processor of the last ten years.

When you export images from a PDF they look exactly as you see them in the PDF. That isn’t always the case with textual content. Sometimes the formatting gets lost in translation between Acrobat and, say, Microsoft Word. That’s because PDFs were designed to be the final format for documents, and that content was never meant to be extracted from them for reuse elsewhere.

On Wednesday, we'll talk about how to add, remove, and swap pages in your PDF file. Stay tuned.

Pariah S. Burke is the author of Mastering InDesign CS3 for Print Design and Production (Sybex, 2007), and other books; a freelance graphic designer; and the publisher of the Web sites GurusUnleashed.com, WorkflowFreelance.com, and CreativesAre.com. Pariah lives in Portland, Ore.

This article was updated to clarify the version of Adobe Acrobat referenced in the story.

Four ways to access files from afar

Many of us now find ourselves working from multiple locations. We sometimes trot around with a laptop, sometimes use different computers in each location and, increasingly often, try to access our files from computers we don’t own. Fortunately, you can access files you need at multiple locations, either via synchronizing selective files constantly, or by using remote access tools. Here are four ways you can access your files remotely:

1. Sync your iDisk

You can set up your Internet-based iDisk to synchronize all files—automatically or on demand—to any computer logged into the MobileMe account via the MobileMe preference pane.

MobileMe’s iDisk feature isn’t just for Internet-hosted storage, Web galleries, and public file sharing. It’s also a file synchronization tool. With iDisk sync enabled, all files on your iDisk are mirrored to a copy on your computer, and can be accessed, modified, and added to when offline. Next time you connect to the Internet, updated files are synced up.

Open System Preferences, select MobileMe, and then click on the iDisk tab. At the bottom, in the iDisk Sync area, you can choose whether or not to sync files stored in your iDisk to and from the Mac on which you’re working. Click Start to initiate the process, and choose Manually from the Update menu if you want to choose when the sync happens.

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Six ways to botch your backups

Many of us were shocked the other week that a company as prominent as Danger, Inc. could make such a rookie mistake by losing the data of T-Mobile's Sidekick customers. As a system administrator, if there is one thing you absolutely have to get right, it's backups. Here are six ways to botch them.

1. Relying only on RAID

So you've made a smart decision by making sure that your company's data is on redundant disks. Disk arrays using RAID 1,5 and 6 can continue to function if a drive fails. Great, but what if you lose multiple drives due to a power surge, defective controller, fire, flood, or user error? What if the data becomes corrupt or is accidentally deleted? RAID is great for uptime, but it isn't even close to being a complete backup.

2. Relying only on online media

Perhaps you're taking advantage of the plethora of cheap, spacious external drives to backup your system. That's actually not a horrible idea if afterward you disconnect the drive and move it to an alternate location. However, keeping that backup online and connected is a bad idea. Imagine that your system becomes compromised by a virus or a hacker; all data on all connected drives could easily be erased. What if your power supply fries and it sends out a jolt that kills both internal and external drives? Keeping your backup hard disk away from you system minimizes the risk of a single problem wiping out all your data.

3. Keeping all backups on-site

Many of the things that could cause you to need your backups are the very things that can destroy your on-site backups. Nature can be cruel, and data closets with lots of electronics are excellent candidates for a fire. Shortly after 9/11/2001, I heard an anecdote of a company that operated from one tower and kept its off-site backups in the second tower. Obviously losing its data wasn't the worst of this company's problems, but losing all your data is a quick way to lose your business.

4. Not testing your backups

When was the last time you performed a test restore of your data? If the answer is never, then how do you know your backups are good? How do you know that you're even backing up the right data?

5. Not making multiple backups of your data

It's true that most media is pretty reliable. However, disks, tapes, and optical media can all become damaged or corrupted. Performing regular backups and rotating your media are good ways of making sure that a single bad tape won't ruin your business.

6. Not backing up your system before a significant change

If you're performing an operating system update, major software upgrade, or hardware upgrade, you'd better backup your data before making the change. Performing any sort of significant update is just the sort of excuse your system needs to corrupt its databases or become unbootable. It's best to be prepared by first performing a backup even if your database is clustered. Just ask that sysadmin at Danger who's probably looking for a career change.

(Although, in hindsight, it must be painfully obvious that it's not a great idea to trust your data to a company named Danger.)

Michael Scalisi is an IT manager based in Alameda, California.

Five unexpected uses for the Control key

If you’re like me, you’ve nearly worn out your Mac’s Control key (often labeled CTRL), using it to open contextual menus. It’s true that Control-clicking on anything from a Finder icon to a window’s title is an amazingly handy way to access a pop-up menu of targeted options. But you can also add Control to common key combinations for variations on the original functions.

1. Open a folder in a new window

Set your Finder Preferences (Finder -> Preferences) to Always Open Folders In A New Window, and each double-click on a folder opens a new window, cluttering even a big screen in short order. With the option unchecked (as it is by default), a double-clicked folder shows its content in the current window (replacing whatever was displayed in the window before). This is the better default setup because it cuts down on clutter. You can always Command-double-click on a folder those times when you want to see its contents in a new window.

But what about us keyboard junkies? I select a folder by typing, and open it by pressing Command-O or Command-Down Arrow. I’d have to reach for the mouse to use the Command-double-click method. So when I want to open a folder in a new window, I add the Control key: Command-Control-O or Command-Control-Down Arrow opens a folder into a new window.

Note that the Control key effectively reverses your Preferences setting. If you use the Always Open Folders In A New Window option, a Command-double-click or Command-Control-O will display the folder’s contents in the current window instead.

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Keep track of changes in Pages

Whether you can’t afford Microsoft Word (, $180), don’t like it, or just find yourself without it on one of your Macs, Apple’s Pages (); part of the $79 iWork suite) offers some similar features. For instance, if you want to work with others on a document, Word’s track changes feature isn’t the only game in town. Pages can’t merge or compare documents. It's limited to marking changes, as well as recording notes and highlights. But this might be all you need. Better yet, you can share marked up Pages documents with Word users and vice versa, so you’re always ready to collaborate.

Get started

To activate change tracking in Pages, open a document and choose Edit -> Track Changes. You’ll see a new toolbar appear. In Pages, this is a narrow strip below the main toolbar that contains the editing controls you can use.

Start making whatever changes you want. They’ll display as they do in Word: deleted text appears as strikethrough text and added text appears in a different color. (If you’re picky about how your changes appear, make very basic adjustments by selecting Pages -> Preferences and choosing from the options under the Deleted Text, Inserted Text, or Author pop-up menus.)

Need to add an editorial comment to a document? Insert comments by choosing Insert -> Comment and typing text. Your insertion point (whether it’s a block of text or just the space between two words) becomes highlighted and a yellow line connects this highlighting to a bubble in the document’s left margin. (Although the bubble looks more like a sticky note.) This distinct coloring makes comments easy to distinguish from other changes, which appear in blue by default.

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Google Voice makes small businesses sound bigger

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Biz Feed blog at PCWorld.com.

Google Voice has been the subject of controversy for all the wrong reasons since its availability was expanded earlier this year. Even with limited availability, the service has reached almost 1.5 million users, and half of them reportedly use it daily.

The reason for its popularity isn't hard to see. Google Voice provides a plethora of call handling features at a price that can't be beat: free. For small and medium businesses, Google Voice is an opportunity to use advanced call management features typically reserved for expensive voice solutions in larger enterprises.

Large companies have IP-PBX's and dedicated voice administrators to manage it, or they have made the move to unified communications and have a voice environment built around Microsoft or Cisco or some other unified communications vendor. Small and medium businesses don't have the financial or personnel resources for those solutions though. Let's look at how smaller businesses can put Google Voice to work:

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Five unexpected uses for the Esc key

The Esc key has long been the “get me outta here” panacea for many things: canceling a dialog box, getting rid of a button-less splash screen, closing a menu that you clicked open. (Esc is, after all, short for "escape.") But those are only the obvious things. Here’s a handful of less-than-obvious but just-as-handy solutions the Esc key provides.

1. Take a shortcut back to your original application

You press Command-Tab to switch to another application, pressing Tab several times (or just holding it down) because you’re moving to a program that’s far away on the Application Switcher’s bar. You get halfway across the line of program icons and realize—whoops!—you forgot to copy the material that you wanted to bring with you. Use the awkward Command-Shift-Tab to move backwards? Use the more convenient Command-tilde (~), still pressing the key repeatedly? No! While the Command key is still down, press Esc to return to the program you were working in before the premature press of Command-Tab.

2. Erase and get out of the Spotlight menu

If you want to erase what you’ve typed in the Spotlight search field, you don’t have to tediously delete it a character at a time: press Esc to instantly wipe the field clean so you can start again. The Spotlight menu stores what you last typed in it unless you erase it so that you can make a second choice from the results list. If your search was fruitless—or mistaken—it’s a good idea to erase the contents of the field before you close the menu so you can start fresh on a new search. Press Esc twice: once to erase the field, and a second time to close it.

3. Hide your browser cursor

For a relatively tiny thing, the mouse cursor can be an annoying distraction when it happens to be in the wrong spot on your screen while you’re viewing a Web page. It’s like a fly landing on your TV screen. Whether you’re in Apple’s Safari or Mozilla Firefox, press Esc and the cursor disappears instantly, cooperatively reappearing as soon as you move the mouse.

4. Reverse your “make this tab a window” drag

I’m a tab junkie in Safari: a window just looks wrong without a half-dozen tabs (each containing a separate Web page) arrayed across its top. But when dragging a tab off the bar to create a separate window (and a new tab colony), it’s easy grab the wrong one and take it off the tab bar before you realize the mistake. You don’t have to drag a nascent window back into the bar: press Esc before you let it go, and it snaps back into its original tab position. This trick works in Firefox, too, as well as in other programs that provide tear-off tabbed windows, such as Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 and InDesign CS4.

If you change your mind when dragging a tab off the bar to make a Safari window, press Esc before you let go to send the new window back into its tab

5. Switch to InDesign’s selection tool from within a text box

This is currently my favorite Esc key trick because it triggers a feature I’ve wanted desperately for a long time and didn’t realize until recently was already available. In InDesign, a press of a single key selects a tool: V for the selection arrow, T for the text tool, and so on. This one-key access is great—except when you forget you’re in a text box and hit V or T or some other tool shortcut and you type the letter instead of get the tool. I just want switch to the selection tool with a single key, without having to deselect the text first (and not just temporarily, as with the Command key). As it turns out, I can: Esc deactivates the text box you’re in and activates the Selection tool.

Sharon Zardetto has been writing Mac books and articles since the twentieth century. Visit her MacTipster blog.

Avoiding death by e-mail

Do you love your e-mail? Come on, it's just the two of us. Do you really? How much of it do you receive? How much do you actually read?

What started out as a promising productivity tool over 20 years ago has grown wildly out of control and now bobs on the tides of abuse that are so prevalent in our world today. A once-great time-saver now threatens to choke off and suffocate the very people it was supposed to help liberate. This is especially true in the corporate environment, where e-mail is like that boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, steadily gaining on Indiana Jones as he runs through a tunnel with no escape.

The time has come for bold change. And I recently witnessed something that gives me hope. We just need the right leadership.

The case against e-mail

Postal mail was great, though slow. Speed was why I loved e-mail, but over the last decade, the trade-offs for its convenience have mounted, and I now found myself spending five to six hours every working day just reading, filing, moving, responding to, moving again, writing and sending e-mail messages.

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When to use Twitter instead of e-mail

Unlike some people, I maintain a good relationship with e-mail. I keep my inbox empty (see Empty your inbox), and junk mail no longer wastes my time, thanks to the combination of Gmail’s spam filtering and C-Command’s $30 SpamSieve 2.7 (). Because I’m almost always too busy for microblogging and random chatting, I use Twitter only occasionally and instant messaging even less. Nevertheless, I’ve discovered that in certain situations, Twitter is a better way to communicate than e-mail.

1. When avoiding junk-mail filters is a priority

Twitter doesn’t include—or need—anything like the spam filtering that’s de rigueur for e-mail, because it’s inherently an opt-in system. You follow only those people you want to read about, and you can “unfollow” people at any time if you don’t want to read any more of their tweets. You can also block people who follow you if you don’t want them to receive your tweets (although they can still view your public page on the Twitter Web site). This makes it quite easy to avoid junk tweets, however you define them. As a result, if you want to be positive that someone gets a message from you and that it won’t be inadvertently swallowed by his or her spam filter (as has happened to me several times recently, when sending completely innocuous e-mail messages to colleagues), a direct-message tweet may be just the ticket.

To send a direct message, start a tweet with a D followed by a space and the username (as in D joekissell). This is different from simply replying to a tweet by putting another person’s Twitter username, preceded immediately by an @ sign (as in @joekissell) at the beginning of a tweet. When you reply normally, everyone who follows both you and the other person will see what you wrote—and so will the person whose username you typed, whether they follow you or not. In addition, your tweet will show up in your public feed. By contrast, when you send a direct message to another user, only that person will see it (and not anyone who follows either of you). The trick is, you can send a direct message only to someone who follows you, so for two-way direct messages, you and the other person must be following each other. So, for example, if you follow me and try to send me a direct message but I don’t also follow you, the message won’t go through.

Likewise, if you know that your correspondent suffers from an overflowing e-mail inbox, a direct message can ensure that your communication stands out from the crowd. In any case, one catch is that you must be confident that the other person checks Twitter regularly. If they tweet frequently, that’s pretty much a given. But also make sure the other person knows how and where to look for direct messages, because some Twitter clients (especially on the iPhone) make them easy to miss.

2. When you need a handy universal contact page

Another situation in which Twitter shines is when you don’t want to give out your personal e-mail address. Your Twitter page is public—anyone can search for your name and also see what you write, unless you specifically protect your account. This means you can refer all those random people who run into you at conventions or who stumble on your Web page to your Twitter page as a contact method. The result will be that they can’t contact you privately unless you also agree to follow them; this can significantly decrease the incidence of unwanted messages!

3. When you want to tell friends about the newest dancing baby video

Direct messages aren’t the only way in which Twitter can substitute for e-mail. If you like to forward to your friends the URLs for interesting Web sites, funny pictures of your pets, or other such non-sensitive subject matter, you can probably distribute the same information more quickly and easily in a tweet. Although you won’t be able to control who sees the information, that fact may be an advantage in that the interesting, funny, or otherwise noteworthy content is disseminated further. You’ll also reduce the amount of mail in your inbox because each recipient won’t feel obligated to reply!

4. When your group needs a fast way to share

Twitter may also be a good alternative to mailing lists for small groups that need to share critical information with each other in real time and don’t want to risk e-mail delays or outages. For example, the staff of TidBits has a special, protected Twitter account (that is, one whose tweets are visible only to people explicitly allowed by the account owner). All the staff members follow and are followed by that account, so if one of us needs to alert the rest of the staff to something in a hurry, we can simply type a quick direct message rather than send an e-mail message.

Senior Contributor Joe Kissell is the senior editor of TidBits and author of numerous e-books about OS X.