Latest Posts in Working Mac

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.

Protect your privacy on Facebook and Twitter

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from PCWorld.com.

Web surfing is no longer a solo affair. Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks have quickly become an integral part of the online culture, and with them comes a whole new array of potential security threats. In this article, I’ll identify some of the key dangers of social networking and offer a few easy steps that you can take to stay safe online.

Social networking is built on the idea of sharing information openly and fostering a sense of community. Unfortunately, an online network of individuals actively sharing their experiences and seeking connections with other like-minded people can be easy prey for hackers bent on social-engineering and phishing attacks. It’s important to be aware of the threats, and to maintain a healthy skepticism in your online interactions.

Be careful what you share

For starters, even in an open community of sharing, you should observe some boundaries. As President Obama warned students in his address to schools earlier this month, “be careful what you post on Facebook. Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.”

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Better collaboration with Word’s Track Changes

When you circulate documents among colleagues for review and comment, there’s nothing more practical and useful than the ability to track changes. Microsoft Word includes powerful tools for recording, accepting and rejecting changes, appending comments, comparing documents, and merging documents. But, if you’re like most Word users, you know little about how this set of features can help you.

Say you’ve written a report, and need to send it around to different departments for various people to fact-check the text, verify certain figures, or make changes to reflect new features in your products. You could print out the document, and have each of your colleagues scribble their corrections using pencils, pens, and highlighters, and then glue sticky notes on it with comments. You could then collate all these printed documents, and make the changes to your master file. But why bother using such a complex method? You can do the same things with Word, but keep all the comments in digital copies of your file.

Get started

To turn on change tracking, open a file in Word and click the tiny TRK button in the status bar at the bottom of Word’s window. To make changes, just start typing in the document: add text to it, or delete words you don’t like. Word marks up the document in several ways. What you see depends on the view you’re in and the options you choose in the Reviewing toolbar. (This toolbar displays at the top of your Word window when you turn on change tracking. If you can’t see it, select View -> Toolbars -> Reviewing.)

Draft view (previously Normal view in Word 2004) can be the easiest to use when you’re tracking changes. To use it, select View -> Draft. It shows both what you’ve deleted, in one color, and what you’ve added in another. However, in some cases, changes won’t display correctly; if this happens to you, try turning off change tracking then turning it on again. (You can change these colors and other options in Word’s Track Changes preferences, but I generally find it easiest to use the defaults.) In addition, Word places a thin bar in the left margin of each line that contains a change.

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Four reasons to switch to IMAP

You may know that your e-mail client uses either the Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) standard to retrieve your messages. But do you know why you should care?

When you retrieve a message using IMAP, your e-mail client makes a local copy, but a copy also remains on the server (until you delete it). Better yet, IMAP saves a lot of information about your message—for example, whether you’ve read, filed, or forwarded it. The result is your inbox looks the same whether you’re looking at it on your iPhone or your Mac. By contrast, when you use POP to retrieve a message, your local copy becomes your only copy. The message is typically deleted from the server. Even if you tell your e-mail client to leave a message on the server after downloading it, the server won’t know whether you’ve read or replied to it.

POP uses bandwidth more efficiently, which is good for people with very slow Internet connections, and it doesn’t impose inbox storage quotas. But IMAP offers a host of other advantages. Here are four big reasons I think you should switch today. (After you’re convinced, learn how to make the switch by reading The IMAP advantage.)

1. Avoid webmail outages

Not long ago, Gmail suffered an outage that affected only users who accessed their e-mail via the Web. Users who connected to their Gmail accounts using IMAP were unaffected, and could continue to retrieve their mail as usual. To be sure, such problems are extremely infrequent, but even so, the moral is that having more than one way to access any given e-mail account can be extremely useful. The vast majority of e-mail providers that offer IMAP access also let you access your mail on the Web, and many (though not all) Webmail providers also let you use IMAP.

2. Switch clients or platforms painlessly

Suppose you decide one day to switch from Microsoft’s Entourage 2008 to Apple’s Mail, or from Qualcomm’s Eudora to Mozilla’s Thunderbird. If you use POP, switching clients can be a huge aggravation. You may have to export messages from your old client, import them into the new client, or both. Either way, in the process, you risk losing messages or the metadata attached to them, because of fundamental differences in the storage systems various clients use. It’s such a hassle that if you have hundreds of thousands of messages, it may discourage you from moving to another program that could serve you better.

With IMAP, though, this sort of problem goes away magically. Switching e-mail clients is as simple as entering your credentials and a couple of settings in a new program. Then you wait while some or all of your messages download from the server. Messages need never be exported or imported at all, and your new client will show the same mailboxes, flags, and message organization as the old one. You can even switch (as I do) among several different clients at any time—for example, if you generally prefer Mail but occasionally want to use features that only Entourage has, or if you want to try out new e-mail software without committing yourself.

3. Read all your mail on multiple devices

If you want to access your e-mail using a Windows or Linux computer, an iPhone, an iPod touch, or some other portable device, simply open an IMAP client on the other system, enter your settings, and you’re off. For people who must use a variety of devices or operating systems, IMAP is a tremendous convenience in that it lets you see exactly the same data—including saved, filed, and sent messages—on every device. Macworld’s Rob Griffiths explores this aspect of IMAP in his video "Manage e-mail on multiple Macs."

4. Keep an extra copy of your messages

Although I always recommend backing up all the data on your Mac (including, of course, your e-mail), the fact that IMAP gives you both local and server-based copies of each message can help you avoid data loss. For example, if your disk crashes or your computer is stolen or damaged, you could lose all your locally stored messages, but with IMAP, the server would still safely hold master copies of all of them. Conversely, if your e-mail provider were to suffer data loss on their mail servers, your local copy of each message would serve as a backup.

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

Find and merge address book duplicates

Even if you’ve cleared out old, outdated contacts, you’ll still find that one of the most obvious sorts of address book clutter is multiple entries for the same person. This happens most often when you add records that differ slightly—for example, one for “Bob Smith” and another for “Robert Smith,” or ones listing different e-mail addresses or other contact info. Cleaning up these extra entries is easy in Address Book and doable, if a bit more complex, in Entourage.

Cleaning up duplicates in Address Book In Address Book, choose Card -> Look for Duplicates. The program searches for cards with identical first and last names, and if it finds any, it gives you only two choices—Cancel (to do nothing) or Merge (to combine the cards for each matching contact into a single entry). Click on Merge to merge the cards. Unfortunately, Address Book doesn’t tell you which entries were duplicated or let you merge selectively, so this technique will do more harm than good if you have multiple contacts that share both first and last name. Likewise, it doesn’t recognize slight variants in spelling, or nicknames, as belonging to the same person.

In such cases, merging cards manually is the better technique. To do this, select two or more names in Address Book and choose Card -> Merge Selected Cards. Address Book combines the data into a single record. If any of the fields directly conflicts with the information in another card (say, two different company names), Address Book picks one of the entries for the main card and puts the conflicting information from the other card in the Notes field.

In Apple's Address Book, select two or more cards that belong to the same person and then choose this menu command to combine the cards into one.

Cleaning up duplicates in Entourage Microsoft Entourage 2008 () lacks built-in commands for finding or merging duplicates, but you can do either with a bit of AppleScript help. One approach is to click on the Name column header to sort your contact list by name and scan it to look for consecutive entries with identical names. Then use Paul Berkowitz’s free Merge Two Contacts 1.0.1 AppleScript. After storing the script in /Users/yourusername/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items, switch to the address book in Entourage, select one of the entries of any pair of duplicates, and choose Merge Two Contacts X from the Scripts menu. In the two dialog boxes that appear next, click on OK and Merge Links, respectively, and then (at your option) No or Open when asked if you want to open the merged contact. The script combines the two records and deletes the extra one.

However, if you need to merge two contacts whose names aren’t identical, you need a slightly different approach. Download Eric Hildum’s free Merge Contacts script and install it as described previously. Select two contacts, choose Merge Contacts from the Scripts menu, and click on OK. Then, if the first and/or last names differ, follow the prompts to choose which name to use or to enter a new one. The script combines the cards, but leaves the old card for one of the contacts intact. You must select the old card and delete it manually.

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

Prune your contacts

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at my address book, noticed someone’s name, and been unable to figure out who the person was or where I’d gotten their information. Maybe someone handed me a business card at a party or trade show years ago and I stuck their info in my address book, but in any case, if I no longer recall the person, it’s unlikely that their info needs to be in my address book. Similarly, colleagues from companies I worked for a decade ago (and whom I haven’t been in touch with since) and other people who have dropped off my radar for one reason or another should probably not be in this list. You could manually scan your contact list and delete names you don’t recognize, but there are also ways to automate the process.

Mail and Address Book pruning

If you use Apple’s Address Book to manage your contacts and Apple Mail() for e-mail (either the Leopard or Snow Leopard version), you can use the two programs together to find and delete your most stale contacts. For best results, open the two programs side by side. Then, in Mail, choose Window -> Previous Recipients to display the list of everyone to whom you’ve sent e-mail. (This list is helpful only in that it facilitates automatic address completion when sending new messages. Having addresses you don’t use in here only makes addressing more awkward.) Contacts who also appear in Address Book have a small address card icon next to them. Click on the Last Used column header to sort addressees by how recently you’ve sent them mail. Starting from the oldest date, select any recipient to whom you don’t expect to send mail and click on Remove From List.

Then, for those addressees with Address Book entries (and whose contact information you don’t need for any other reason), switch to Address Book and delete the corresponding entry there by selecting the contact’s name, pressing Delete, and clicking on Delete to confirm. This procedure won’t help you find contacts to whom you’ve never sent e-mail, but it should give you a good start.

Entourage Address Book pruning

Microsoft Entourage 2008 () also keeps track of how recently you’ve used any contact’s email address, but it doesn’t present the information in a way that makes it convenient to delete old, unused contacts from its Address Book. (To display your Entourage Address Book, click the Address Book icon in the toolbar, choose View -> Go To -> Address Book, or press Command-2.) However, you can quickly delete your oldest contacts with the help of an AppleScript.

First, download Allen Watson’s free Find Delete Old Contacts script and store it in /Users/yourusername/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items. Then switch to your Entourage Address Book and choose Find and Delete Old Contacts from the scroll-shaped Script menu.

In the first dialog box that appears, type a date—contacts with whom you last corresponded (sent or received a message) before that date will be candidates for deletion—or leave the field blank to search for contacts you’ve never corresponded with, and click on OK. You’ll see a series of four more dialog boxes asking you a variety of self-explanatory questions. If you choose not to let the script delete the contacts automatically (which is probably wise), you can opt to have it list the names in a new note, which you can then use to review the contacts manually and delete them as you prefer.

(Note: The first time you run this script, you may see an alert notifying you that a script is trying to access your Address Book. To avoid seeing this alert repeatedly, select on the Don’t Show This Message Again checkbox and click on OK.)

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

Five reasons to watch Google Wave

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

Google is inviting another 100,000 people to play in the Google Wave test pool. The developing duo of Jens and Lars Rasmussen envision Wave revolutionizing online communication and collaboration. I am not sure it will be revolutionary, but at first blush it seems at least evolutionary and worth taking a closer look at.

Google Wave is part social networking, and part unified communications, and all Google. Wave combines e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, document sharing, wikis, and multimedia content to provide a seamless communications platform.

Unless you’re one of the lucky (relatively) few invited by Google, you can’t play with Wave just yet. But, I’ll give you five reasons you should be anxiously looking forward to giving Google Wave a try:

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Top iChat etiquette tips

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from PCWorld.com.

The popularity of instant messaging has grown exponentially in the past decade, but the communication platform’s immediacy presents users with endless opportunities to come off the wrong way. These tips will help you stay in the good graces of your iChat buddies.

Respect limits

Not everyone can interrupt their day for a 30-minute impromptu chat session with you. Try to be mindful of the time you are spending on an instant messaging session—especially during office hours, when excessive instant messaging (IM) dalliance can with collegues and non-colleagues alike can land a person in trouble at work.

Avoid crosstalk

It’s common for chat sessions with a single contact to split into two or more simultaneous conversations, since thoughts arrive faster than fingers can type them. Things get tricky when one side writes “I hate that” and it isn’t clear what they’re referring to—potentially offending the other participant. If a session starts getting unduly complicated, table one discussion and return to it later.

Be cautious contacting strangers

Even if an IM account is made public, send messages to it more cautiously than you would send an e-mail to an e-mail address. Like a phone call out of the blue, instant messaging operates in real time and puts the recipient on the spot. If you do IM a stranger, introduce yourself and explain the point of your contact in your first message. Don’t be offended if the recipient ignores you. If that happens, try sending an e-mail message instead.

Pay attention to status updates

If someone takes the trouble to set his or her iChat status to “away,” respect that status notification and send your message later, unless the situation is so urgent that you need the recipient to see the message the minute they return. Besides being potentially annoying, an instant message window that arrives and is left open on a recipient’s screen while he or she is away can cause embarrassment if someone else walks by and sees the message.

Feel free to have multiple IM sessions at once

It can be awkward to carry on multiple IM sessions with different people at the same time, but if you manage to keep the conversations straight—and you’re competent enough to type in the right window—it’s no more rude than playing several chess games simultaneously.