Drag and drop print jobs between printers
If you have more than one printer, you’ve probably sent a file to the wrong printer more than once. That’s not a problem when you send a short, simple text document to the photo printer—you’re just out a bit of black ink. But if you send your 300MB, full-page, full-color bleed advertisement to the laser printer, you may find the machine locked up for quite a while. But all is not lost—with the right setup and some quick finger work, you can still set things right.
First, to set up the ability to correct mis-routed print jobs quickly, put aliases to both your printers in the Dock. This will give you one-click access to your printers, no matter which app you happen to be using. The easiest way to do this is to open Printer Setup Utility (/Applications/Utilities), and then drag each printer’s entry in the list to a folder on your hard drive. From there, drag the aliases you’ve created for each printer from the Finder to your Dock (see “Docked Printers”).
Now for damage control: as soon as you realize that you’ve sent a print job to the wrong printer, click on both printers’ Dock icons. This will open a window for each printer. Click on the window for the printer that received the job, and click on the Stop Jobs button in the toolbar—do this as quickly as you can to prevent the job from starting to print.
Once you’ve stopped the job, all you need to do is drag and drop the print-job entry from the wrong printer to the right one. The job will begin processing on the other printer as soon as you drop it. If you don’t want it to begin right away, click on the other printer’s Stop Jobs button before dragging the job across.
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| Docked Printers By placing your printers’ icons in the Dock, you’ll be prepared if you ever send a print job to the wrong printer. |
Cycle random Mail signatures
E-mail signatures provide a handy way to sign your messages with a pithy quote or with your name and address. One of the nicer new features in Tiger’s Mail is the ability to have multiple signatures for each e-mail account. Go to Mail: Preferences and click on the Signatures tab to enter your text. Then click on the plus sign (+) to add more signatures.
Here you’ll also find a Choose Signature pop-up menu, which lets you specify how you select one of your signatures for use. You can pick just one, or you can have them rotate sequentially or randomly. I like to use a three-line signature; the first two lines are always the same, and the last line contains a witty saying. I use the random option, for a different signature in each new message I compose.
But what do you do when, for whatever reason, the chosen signature just isn’t right? There’s no obvious way to pick another random signature when you’re composing a message in Mail. You could use the Signature pop-up menu in the composition window to pick one, but that’s not the easiest solution if you have 100 or more signatures in your collection. Here’s a much simpler way:
Instead, pick a new random signature from your collection by clicking on the Account pop-up menu and reselecting the same sending account. When you do, you’ll get a new randomly chosen signature. This trick works even if you’ve already started typing your message.
Build smarter iPhoto albums
iPhoto’s smart albums are great when you want to use certain criteria to find a subset of your photos—say, all images created in the past week. But what if you want to do something more complex, such as find pictures of your cousins Bill and Will? Here’s an undocumented trick.
If you’re using iPhoto 5, you can build smart albums that use a number of wild-card characters. Wild cards act as generic substitutes for other characters. iPhoto supports three: the asterisk (*), which stands for any number of characters, including none; the question mark (?), which stands for any one character; and square brackets ([ and ]), which you can use to select from a list of characters. Be aware that to use wild-card searches, you need to have given your photos descriptive names, applied keywords (select Photos: Get Info and click on the Keywords tab), or typed comments in the Information text field (click on the i button at the bottom left of iPhoto’s window).
First create a new iPhoto smart album (File: New Smart Album) with the criteria Any Text and Starts With. Then consider the following possible contents for the actual search string:
j?nMatch all photos that contain a string starting with j and ending with n, with one character between those letters. This would find Jen or Jon but not Julian (since there are only three characters in our search string).
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| The Brothers T You can run some advanced searches using wild cards and brackets in iPhoto’s Smart Album dialog box. This one, for instance, will find all images that contain a reference to either Tim or Tom. |
b*eMatch any photos that contain a string starting with b and ending with e. So you’d see matches for base, bike, and brittle, and even be. You would not, however, see matches for brighten, since that has a character after the e.
b??tFinds boat and belt but not burnt (since that’s got three characters in the middle, and we’ve only allowed for two).
T[io]mFinds only images whose text includes Tim or Tom (see “The Brothers T”).
c*r*You’ll get lots of matches here, as it’s basically saying, “find any text that starts with a c, then has any number of characters (including zero), then has an r, and then has any number of additional characters (including zero).” So car, cars, characterization, and chart are all examples of words that would match.
If you want to match an actual asterisk or question mark, enclose the special character in square brackets, like this: Kellie[?]. This search would match only images marked with the text Kellie? —which you might use if you haven’t quite identified some of the people in your images.
Control Exposé via voice
Why type when you can talk? Here’s how to tap into Mac OS X’s voice-recognition abilities and map Exposé’s All Windows mode to a voice command. (The All Windows command shrinks every window you have open so you can see them at once.) If you like the way this works, try the same technique for any other Exposé or Dashboard commands. You’ll need access to a microphone, either built-in or external (the iSight has one, for instance).
First, temporarily disable the Exposé and Dashboard shortcut keys you want to map to voice commands. Open the Dashboard & Exposé preference pane (simply named Exposé in OS X 10.3). In the Keyboard And Mouse Shortcuts section, select the appropriate pop-up menus (All Win-dows, Application Windows, and so on) and choose the last item, a dash (-). This removes each key-board shortcut.
Next, go to the Speech preference pane and click on the Speech Recognition tab. Set Speakable Items to On by clicking on the appropriate radio button. The round Speech Feedback window will appear on your screen. This serves as your speech- recognition guide, and gives you quick access to a couple of interface options. Click on the small triangle at the bottom of the window to open either the Speech Commands window—which provides a dynamic list of available speech commands—or the Speech preference pane.
To activate speech recognition, press and hold the escape key. Face your microphone and clearly say, “Define a keyboard command.” If your Mac understands you, you’ll hear a short “whiiit” noise, and the Define Keyboard Command window will appear.
Usually you access Exposé’s All Windows mode by pressing F9. However, you’ve deactivated the shortcut so you can do your work here. Press F9 now, and F9 appears in the dialog box’s Send These Keystrokes field. Click on OK. Now the rest of the dialog box is visible. Type the phrase you’d like to use to activate Exposé’s All Windows mode. For instance, type
all windows. In the Use Command In section, make sure to choose the Any Application option; then click on Save. Now reactivate the All Windows Exposé keyboard shortcut. Go back to the Desktop & Exposé preference pane, click on the pop-up menu next to All Windows, and choose F9 from the list of available options. That’s it—start talking!
Outline clicked Safari links
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for the Mac may be officially dead (see macworld.com/1050), but some of us still think wistfully of its finer features. One I really liked was the simple visual feedback it gave when you clicked on a link—a colored box would briefly surround the link. This box was visible only for a second or so, but it was a nice way to make sure you’d actually clicked on your intended target (see “I Clicked Where?”).
Today, of course, Safari is the dominant browser on the Mac, but we can add this feature ourselves, thanks to Safari’s Custom CSS feature. (CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] is a way of controlling how text and images appear on a Web page.)
First, quit Safari and launch your favorite text-only editor—TextEdit, say. Create a new document, and insert this one line:
:link:active, :visited:active { outline: #C30000 solid 2px; } When you’re done, save the file somewhere where you can find it, but not where you’ll have to stare at it all day. Name it whatever you like, but make sure it ends with the extension .css. My file, for instance, is called tweaks.css, and I keep it in a Miscellaneous folder in my user folder’s Documents folder. Note that if you’re using TextEdit to edit the file and you try to name it with a .css ending, TextEdit will display a dialog box warning that you’re not using the normal extension, .txt. It’s very important that you click on the Use .CSS button—otherwise, you won’t be able to proceed with the next step.
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| I Clicked Where? If you liked the red out-line Microsoft Internet Explorer used to put around clicked links on Web pages, you can summon it from the dead in Safari. |
Next, launch Safari, open its preference pane (Safari: Preferences), and click on Advanced. Click on the Style Sheet pop-up menu, select Other, and navigate to the file you just created. You’ve just told Safari to use your custom CSS file anytime it encounters a hyperlink on a Web page.
That’s all there is to it. Launch Safari, load a Web page, and then click and hold on any link, and you should see a nice two-pixel-wide red outline around the link—proof that Safari is loading your custom CSS file and applying it to every page. Click here for more tricks you can do with this custom CSS file.
Uncovering Mac OS X users
If you’re the only person who uses your Mac, you may have been puzzled by the fact that you had to set up a user account. You may fly solo, but OS X was designed to accommodate many people per computer and to prevent users from damaging the system. This month, I’ll discuss OS X’s user accounts and how they differ.
OS X gives each user a protected space in which to store his or her data (inside the Users folder), along with the ability to see and use things in systemwide locations, such as the Applications folder. But not all users have the same abilities. Create new users via the Accounts preference pane.
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| Safe to Surf Extend some hospitality and protect your files by creating a special user account just for visitors. Using Tiger’s Parental Controls, I’ve set up a managed account that’s restricted to running Safari. |
Administrator Accounts The first user that you create in OS X receives an administrator, or admin, account. The administrator is essentially in charge of the Mac, but there are some things not even admins can do without special permission—casually deleting files owned by other users, for instance. (Admins can do those things, however, if they supply their password when prompted.) They can also install systemwide applications and system extensions—though they’ll have to supply their password during some installations if those installers modify directories that the system owns. They can also create and delete other users and install system upgrades.
Standard Accounts Any account you create after the first will be a standard account. (You can easily upgrade a standard account to an admin account. Select the Allow User To Administer This Computer option in the Accounts preference pane.) These users can customize their system preferences (for example, desktop pictures and screen savers), install applications inside their user folders, and use the systemwide programs in the Applications folder. They cannot, however, modify items outside their user space—they can’t install systemwide applications, can’t run software updates, and can’t browse many of the folders outside their user folder.
Standard accounts are the safest to use on a day-to-day basis. Everyone in your family or computer lab can keep track of his or her files without bugging anyone else, and since standard account users can’t install programs or modify system files, they can’t harm the system.
Managed Accounts A managed account is a standard account that you’ve restricted further by using Parental Controls. This doesn’t mean that you can use managed accounts only for children. On my machine, I have a Visitors account that I’ve restricted to using just a few programs. I did this through the Finder & System Parental Controls (see “Safe to Surf”). If a guest comes over and needs to use the machine, I just use Fast User Switching to log into the Visitors account, and I know my data is safe.
By setting up different users on your machine, you can give every user his or her own workspace without worrying about possible damage to your files or the system itself.
[ Senior 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.]