Quickly add titles to iPhoto images
When you’re working with Apple’s iPhoto 5 ($79 as part of iLife ), the left- and right-arrow keys are useful keyboard shortcuts for moving from one photo to the next. But if you’re working in the Information panel (click on the small i in the lower left corner) to set titles, dates, times, comments, and so on, you’ll find that the arrow keys no longer switch photos. Instead, they allow you to move within the text you’re modifying. This makes changing information for multiple photos difficult, since you’re forced to use the mouse to move between them.
There are, however, two not-so-obvious shortcuts that can save you some mousing time. After you’ve clicked on one of the Information panel’s text fields, just use Command-[ (left square bracket) and Command-] (right square bracket) to move to the previous and next images, respectively. Your cursor stays in the text field you were working in, so it’s easy to quickly update information for a large number of photos (see screenshot). Note that if you’re setting the field to exactly the same value for every photo in your selection, it’s faster to select Photos: Batch Change.
Add photos to iPhoto 5 via the Dock
In earlier versions of iPhoto, you could add images to the library in only two ways: by using the Import feature, or by dragging and dropping images directly into the iPhoto library. Both of these techniques required that iPhoto be running. In iPhoto 5, there’s another option: drag and drop an image, or a group of images, onto the program’s Dock icon. You can do this even if iPhoto isn’t running, and it works from most applications—drag an image out of Microsoft Word, say, and onto iPhoto 5’s Dock icon, and the image joins the library.
Unfortunately, this trick won’t work with Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox; if you want to put Web images in your iPhoto library from one of these browsers, you’ll have to save the images to your disk from the browser and then import them into iPhoto.
Fine-tune fonts in iPhoto 5 books
The Settings button in iPhoto 5’s Book toolbar lets you control a photo book’s font particulars—you can set the font size and type for the cover title and subtitle, headings, and more. But you’re not limited to just this kind of global control.
Once you’ve created your book, you can modify any text as you see fit—just press Command-T to bring up the Font panel, select some text, and change the size, color, shadow, and so on. Since iPhoto sends a book as a series of images, not text, to the print house, what you see on screen will be what you get back from the printer.
Alert others to iCal events
If you’re an iCal user, you’re probably familiar with the alarm function—you can set up alarms that alert you to upcoming events via a pop-up message or via an e-mail message sent to the address stored in your own Address Book entry. Therein lies the rub—for whatever reason, iCal will not let you send alarms to e-mail addresses other than yours. This might make sense for personal events, but if you use iCal to track your whole family’s commitments, it might be nice to use iCal’s alarm function to remind everyone. With a bit of trickery, you can.
This tip takes advantage of the fact that Address Book will let you associate more than one e-mail address with any one person. Open Address Book, select your own card, and click on the green plus sign (+) next to your e-mail address. Address Book will create a new e-mail entry for you. Type in the address of the person to whom you’d like to send a message from iCal, and then click on the label to the left of that e-mail address. Select Custom from the pop-up menu, and type the person’s name for easy identification. Repeat this process for each person you want to be able to include. When you’re done, click on the Edit button to return to normal browsing mode.
Launch iCal (or quit and relaunch it if you already had it running), and select or create an event. Click on the Alarm field, set the alarm type to E-mail, and then click on your e-mail address. In the pop-up menu, you’ll see all the new e-mail addresses. Select the one you’d like to use, and you’re done.
But what if you want to send a message to more than one person? When you add a new e-mail address to your Address Book card, don’t type an individual’s e-mail address; instead, type the name of any already existing Address Book group. For instance, if you’ve set up a group named My Family, just type that name, complete with the space, in the e-mail address field. Then click on the pop-up menu to the left of the e-mail address, select Custom, and type a descriptive name for the group. When you next launch iCal and set an e-mail alert, you’ll see your newly added group in the list of addresses. Select it, and everyone in the group will receive the alert when the time comes.
This isn’t an ideal solution, of course—if you sync Address Book with your phone or PDA, you’ll find your data record clogged with multiple e-mail addresses. A more elegant workaround is to create an AppleScript that sends an e-mail message to a bunch of users simultaneously, and then have the iCal alarm trigger that AppleScript. However, that method is much more complex. The one I’ve described will work just fine for most people.
Avoid chart snafus with Excel and iWork
Using Apple’s new $79 iWork productivity suite—the Pages word processor and Keynote presentation program—you can create gorgeous charts with data you’ve copied from Excel workbooks. Most of the time, this works just fine. Copy the data range in Excel, and then insert a new chart in Pages or Keynote using the Objects toolbar button. In the Chart Data Editor window that appears, click on the leftmost column (named Region 1 by default), and select Edit: Paste. If all goes well, the labels from your data will show up in the first column and first row, and the remaining cells will contain the data points to graph.
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But what if things don’t go well? For instance, you’ll run into problems if you’re trying to create a chart that has an axis labeled with numbers. Say you’re charting something across multiple years (1997, 1998, and so on). In that case, the paste will fail—the iWork applications will interpret the numbers as values that appear on the graph, instead of treating them as labels. A simple example demonstrates both the problem and the solution.
Consider the Excel spreadsheet in the screenshot at right. If you were to copy all of the spreadsheet’s data and paste it into the Chart Data Editor in Pages or Keynote, you’d find that the Year column would become the first column of data on your chart, and the Cost column would become the second column of data.
To prevent this, you need to fool Pages and Keynote into thinking that the entries for the x- axis are real text, not numbers. The easiest way to do this is to just add a letter to the first label—change 1997 to 1997a, for instance. Then when you copy and paste, Pages or Keynote will properly place the labels in the label portion of the Chart Data Editor, as seen in the bottom half of the screenshot. Remove the a, and you’re done. You’ll have the same problem if your row labels are numerals; the solution is the same.
[ Contributing Editor Rob Griffiths is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Panther Edition (O’Reilly, 2004), and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site. ]
When editing text fields in iPhoto 5’s Information panel, you can use a keyboard shortcut to navigate between photos—no need to reach for the mouse.Don’t settle for standard Finder font sizes
When you view a folder’s contents in the Finder, you can customize the font size by choosing View: Show View Options (Command-J). However, you’re limited to text between 10 and 16 points in size. What if you’d like a smaller or larger size? For instance, a smaller font will show many more entries when you’re in Column view (see screenshot below). A larger font might be useful if you use Icon view or have a limited number of items on your desktop. If you edit the Finder’s preferences, you can choose font sizes outside of Apple’s predefined range.
To start, navigate to / your user folder /Library/ Preferences, find com.apple.finder.plist in the long list of files, and drag and drop it onto TextEdit. Make a duplicate of this file before you start, in case you make a mistake.
The preferences file is quite large, but you’re looking for four particular things. The first thing to look for is the settings that control the desktop. Press Command-F to bring up the Find dialog box, type
DesktopViewOptionsin the search box, and click on Next.
If you don’t find any matches, close the file, click on your desktop, and then select View: Show View Options. Toggle one of the options twice and then close the window—this will write a DesktopViewOptions entry to your Finder’s preferences. Now reopen the file in TextEdit, search again, and look for this section:
Once you find these lines, you adjust the desktop’s font size by changing
12to a larger or smaller number.
The next three options (called keys ) are all in one section of the file, so switch back to TextEdit’s Find window, type
StandardViewOptionsin the Find field, and click on Next. The three keys you’re looking for are
Nlsv(List view),
clmv(Column view), and
icnv(Icon view). You’ll have to scroll to reach each one.
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Within each area, you want to find and modify the
FontSizekey, changing the values to the size you prefer. If you don’t see this key in a particular section, that means the Finder’s defaults haven’t been changed. The safest way to fix this is to close the preferences file, use the Finder’s View options to set a font size for the missing entry, and then reopen the preferences file.
When you’re done, use File: Save to save the modified file, and then quit TextEdit. To see your changes, you need to restart the Finder. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the option key and then click and hold on the Finder’s Dock icon until a contextual menu appears. Choose Relaunch to restart the Finder.
Examine your battery’s lifeline
Ever wish you could get more information about the state of your laptop’s battery? The Unix command
ioregdisplays the contents of the I/O Kit registry, which contains a ton of information about your machine. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) and type
ioreg -l | more. You’ll see data on everything from CPUs to peripherals.
Buried deep in the output is information about your battery’s overall health and current charge, but it’s not easy to find on your own. Instead, let the Unix search tool
grepdo all the hard work for you. Just use this command:
ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity
The
-w0flag tells
ioregnot to truncate the output lines, and the
-lflag is the
listcommand, which is what actually generates the output. The pipe symbol (
|) then sends the output to
grep, which searches for any line containing the word
Capacity. The output will look something like this:
| | | "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=3971,"Amperage" =18446744073709550895,"Cycle Count"=61,"Current"=2160, "Voltage"=11370,"Flags"=4,"AbsoluteMaxCapacity"=4200}) What does it all mean? The values you care about are
Cycle Count(the number of times the battery has gone through a discharge-charge cycle),
Current(the current charge in the battery),
Capacity(the highest charge the battery can hold), and
AbsoluteMaxCapacity(the battery’s original highest-charge value).
As your battery ages, the
Capacityvalue will slowly decline in relation to
AbsoluteMaxCapacity—the battery is losing its ability to take a full charge. If a battery is giving you very short usage cycles, you may need to replace it. You can find out by checking the
Capacityvalue. The
Cycle Countvalue shows what remains of your battery’s useful life. Studies indicate that PowerBook-style batteries have a useful life of between 300 and 500 cycles.
Secrets of the Application Switcher
Productivity mavens probably already know that you can press Command-tab to switch programs quickly in OS X 10.3 and later. But there’s a lot more to the Application Switcher.
When you press Command-tab, the icons for active programs appear at the center of your screen, in order of use from left to right. The program you’re currently using is in the leftmost position, the one you used before that appears to the right, and so on. This makes it very easy to toggle between two programs—for example, if you’re copying and pasting multiple items from Microsoft Excel to Word. Just press and release Command-tab. You don’t even need to wait for the window to appear; as soon as you release tab, you’ll switch to the prior program.
The standard method of moving between programs in the Application Switcher is to hold Command and just keep pressing the tab key. As you do, the selection moves left to right across the Switcher. What if you want to move right to left? The hard way is to hold down Command-shift-tab. An easier method is to press Command-tab once and then press the backtick key (`) while continuing to hold Command. That’s one less key to press, and it’s much easier on the fingers.
Depending on your predilection, you can try other means of navigating the panel. If you have a scroll wheel, activate the Application Switcher by pressing Command-tab, and then spin the wheel while holding down Command. Or just move the mouse itself, and the cursor will highlight each application icon it touches. You can also use the left- and right-arrow keys to navigate across the Switcher. The home and end keys will jump to the left and right ends of the Switcher, and you can activate a selected application by either releasing Command or pressing enter.
Finally, here are two keyboard shortcuts you can use with the Switcher. After you press Command-tab, hold down Command and press H to hide the highlighted application. Press Q, and the program will quit instead. This is a great way to quit all your apps at the end of the day—just press Command-tab once to bring up the Switcher, then keep pressing Q (no need to press tab again, as the Switcher will move through the list as each program quits).