Send long URLs via e-mail
If you sometimes e-mail URLs to friends or colleagues, you may be vexed when recipients write back to say that a link doesn’t work. For instance, here’s a typical problematic URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BI5KV0/ref=amb_link_4263902_/002-5510588-1062447 .
E-mail clients often insert line breaks in long URLs—such as this one for the March of the Penguins DVD on Amazon.com—so only part of the address ends up as a clickable link. When your recipients click on it, they’ll get a “page not found” message. So how do you avoid this problem? Try these tricks out, and see which one works best with the e-mail clients you and your friends use.
If you use Apple’s Mail and send e-mail in Rich Text Format, an easy solution is to use Mail’s Edit: Add Hyperlink menu item. First copy the long URL from your browser’s address bar (1-C). Then open a new e-mail message and make sure that you’re using Rich Text Format (Format: Make Rich Text). Start composing your e-mail, and when you reach the spot where you want the link to be, type in a short phrase describing the URL—
March of the Penguins, for instance. Now select that phrase, choose Edit: Add Hyperlink, and then paste the URL (1-V) into the text field that appears (see “E-mail Long URLs”). When you click on OK, you’ll see that your phrase has been underlined; you’ve created a clickable link.
If you don’t want to send Rich Text Format e-mails, try putting angle brackets at either end of your URL, like this:
B000BI5KV0/ref=amb_link_4263902_/ 002-5510588-1062447>.
URLs enclosed in angle brackets should remain clickable—even if the recipient’s e-mail client inserts a line break for formatting purposes. But with the wide variety of e-mail clients available, there are no guarantees.
If neither of those methods works, visit a Web site that converts long, messy URLs into short ones—TinyURL.com is one good example. Paste your long URL into TinyURL.com’s text field, and then click on the Make TinyURL button. The site will produce a short reference URL—for example, http://tinyurl.com/27ghfn —that most e-mail clients won’t need to break.
Merge two iCal calendars
Have you ever set up two iCal calendars and then wished you’d created only one? For example, I used to have one calendar named Personal and another named Family Stuff—I eventually decided that they were redundant, but how to merge them wasn’t clear.
Luckily, you don’t have to manually move all the events from one calendar to another. Instead, turn to iCal’s Export command. In the Calendars column, select the calendar whose events you want to move to another calendar. Go to File: Export. When the dialog box appears, choose a name and a location for the exported file. (The desktop is probably a fine place to store it; you won’t have this file for very long.) Click on Export.
Now choose File: Import. In the Import dialog box, leave the Import An iCal File option selected and click on Import. Navigate to the file; then click on Import again. The Add Events dialog box will appear. The pop-up menu in its middle lets you specify the destination calendar for the imported events (see “Merge Two Calendars”). Choose the one you want, and then click on OK to add the events to it.
Quickly hide Mail’s preview pane
I almost never open an e-mail message in its own window. Instead, I usually read messages in Mail’s preview pane—the area below the message list. (Don’t see it? Double-click on the little dot at the bottom of the Mail window.) The problem is that when you use your Mac in an open office environment, there may be times when you want to quickly hide the contents of the message you’re reading. Perhaps it’s a note about an upcoming surprise party, and the subject of said party is walking toward your cubicle.
There are many ways to handle this situation. You can press 1-H to hide Mail, press 1-tab to switch to a different open application, or just press 1-Q to quit Mail altogether. But there’s also a way to stay in Mail while quickly hiding only the message: in the message list, 1-click on the message that’s currently displayed in the preview area. 1-clicking on an already selected item deselects it. In Mail, this means that the preview area will become blank.
You can also hide the entire preview pane, by double-clicking on the bar that divides it from the message list. However, the 1-click method makes it easier to return to preview mode when you’re done being secretive—just click on any message to reveal it again.
Decode Mail’s folder colors
If you use Mail and organize your messages into folders, you might notice that some folders are white and some are blue. For instance, messages imported into Mail wind up stored in a white folder named Imported. But when you create folders on your own, they’re usually blue. There is a method to the madness.
A white folder can contain only other folders, not individual messages. Blue folders, on the other hand, have no such restrictions. So why does a folder end up white or blue? White folders are just folders, while blue folders are mailbox folders. You can see this for yourself in the Finder. Navigate to your user folder / Library/Mail/Mailboxes. Inside this folder is an entry for each top-level folder you have in Mail. White folders will lack the .mbox extension, which indicates that they aren’t mailboxes. As such, these folders can’t be used to store individual messages, but they can store mailboxes.
White folders are useful because they can prevent you from misfiling a message during a drag-and-drop operation—you can’t accidentally drop the message on the top-level folder, because it won’t accept the incoming message. Alternatively, you might want to use white to call out a folder or two, since Mail won’t let you assign colors to folders.
The easiest way to create a white mailbox folder is to make two folders at once. Select Mailbox: New Mailbox. In the dialog box that appears, type two names separated by a forward slash (/). The slash indicates a path hierarchy. For example, say you want to create a new, white Vacations folder, and within that, a subfolder named 2006. Open the New Mailbox dialog box and then type
/Vacations/2006into the Name field. The leading slash tells Mail that the Vacations folder needs to be at the top level of your hierarchy (otherwise it will go within the currently selected folder). The second slash tells Mail to create the 2006 mailbox within the Vacations folder (see “A Mailbox Shortcut”). Click on OK, and the folders will appear. E-mail Long URLs: If your friends can’t click on the URLs you paste into e-mail messages, try creating clickable links in Rich Text Format messages. Merge Two Calendars: Combining two iCal calendars into one is simple, once you know the secret. Just export one calendar and then import its events into the other.
Get a handle on fonts
Whether you’re trying to disable a typeface you never use or add a new one to your system, you may be somewhat confused about how Mac OS X handles fonts. This month, I’ll explain how OS X organizes its fonts, and give you some tips for working with them.
Where the Fonts Are When you’re trying to wrangle a collection of fonts, one of the first things that can trip you up is the fact that OS X stores them in many different places.
System fonts—the ones that OS X uses in dialog boxes, menu bars, and elsewhere—live in the /System/Library/Fonts folder. In general, you don’t want to touch anything in here, or you may find, for instance, that Safari won’t correctly render the text on a Web page.
All of a Mac’s users can access fonts stored in the /Library/Fonts folder. But only administrative users (those listed as Admin in the Accounts preference pane) can add fonts to, and remove them from, this folder. Each of a Mac’s users also has his or her own Fonts folder ( your user folder /Library/Fonts). It holds fonts available only to that user.
If you’re using Classic and you want a new font to be accessible in both OS X and Classic, you should store it in Classic’s System Folder/Fonts folder. OS X can see fonts here, but Classic can’t see fonts stored anywhere else.
Solving Problems with Font Book Since OS X 10.3 (Panther), all Macs have included a basic font-management tool, Font Book (/Applications). Font Book lets you see a list of all your fonts in one window. You can preview, or get detailed information about, any font (see “Control Fonts”). Some, such as Bookman Old Style and Arial, even come with interesting descriptions of their backgrounds.
You can also use Font Book to deactivate fonts—in other words, to turn them off without removing them from your system. (To be honest, though, Font Book isn’t the best application for doing this. You need a full-featured font utility.)
Font Book is most useful for dealing with common font problems. For instance, when you install applications, sometimes they place newer versions of system fonts in your user folder’s Fonts folder. This can result in duplicate fonts, which might cause problems in some applications. To resolve this, click in the Font column, press 1-A to select all, and then choose Edit: Resolve Duplicates.
Also use Font Book to check for font corruption, which can cause application crashes and other unexpected behavior. Select all the fonts in the Fonts column again; then choose File: Validate Fonts. Font Book will indicate problematic fonts in the Font Validation window. To remove a font, select the check box next to its name and then click on Remove Checked.
Put your Mac to sleep from afar
Apple’s Mail program lets you use rules (Mail: Preferences: Rules) to manage your incoming e-mail. But you might not be aware of another aspect of Mail’s rules—the ability to run an AppleScript on a filtered message. With just a little bit of planning, for example, you can send yourself an e-mail that will put a remote Mac to sleep.
This very simple script asks you to confirm that you really want to put the computer to sleep and then does so, unless you click on Cancel. Launch Script Editor (in /Applications/AppleScript) and type this script (or download it ):
tell application "Finder" display dialog "This Computer will go to sleep in 1 minute." buttons {"Sleep", "Cancel"} default button 2 giving up after 60 sleep end tell Choose File: Save to bring up the Save dialog box. Name your script and save it somewhere you can find it later. Leave the other settings in this dialog box as they are.
Now open Mail’s Preferences (Mail: Preferences) and click on Rules in the toolbar. Click on Add Rule. In the window that appears, give your rule a name and then create a set of conditions to ensure that the rule will act on only the right e-mails. (To see how I set up my rule, see “Set the Rules.”)
Once you’ve set your conditions, set the Perform The Following Actions pop-up menu to Run AppleScript, and then click on the Choose button and navigate to your script. Click on OK, and you’re done. The next time you forget to put your Mac to sleep before leaving on a trip, just send yourself an e-mail that matches the conditions you created.
[ Senior Editor Rob Griffiths runs the MacOSXHints.com Web site. ]
A Mailbox Shortcut: Quickly create nested mailboxes in Mail by typing their names, separated by a slash, into the New Mailbox dialog box. Here, I’m creating a folder named Vacations that contains a folder named 2006. Control Fonts: Font Book lets you see what a font looks like, learn more about it, turn fonts off and on, and do some troubleshooting.