Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

Temporarily disable laptop screen dimming

If you use a laptop on battery power, you’re probably well aware of its penchant for slightly dimming the screen after a period of inactivity. This dimming helps reduce energy consumption, thereby stretching battery life. It can also be very annoying when it happens in the middle of reading a long story on a web page, for instance. To remove the annoyance, you can permanently disable this feature, as you may already know. Just open the Energy Saver System Preferences panel, select Battery settings, click the Options tab, then uncheck ‘Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep.’

If you permanently disable this feature, though, you’ll lose its battery-saving benefits even when it makes sense—like when you walk away from your machine for a minute or two. A nicer solution would be a way to temporarily disable it when you don’t want it active. It turns out you can do just that with the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel.

Open that panel, click on the Screen Saver tab, then click on the Hot Corners button. In the new sheet that drops down, decide which screen corner you’d like to use (I use the upper right corner), then click the menu button next to that corner. On the menu that appears, select Disable Screen Saver and click OK.

From now on, when you start reading a long document—or do anything else where you’d rather not have the screen go dim—just flick the mouse into your “do not activate” corner, and the screen will no longer dim. (And, it should go without saying, the screen saver will not come on.) After you’re done reading, move the mouse out of the hot corner, and the screen dimming function will again be active.

Repairing corrupt Mail attachments

A while back, I was having a strange issue with PDF attachments in Mail, but only on my MacBook Pro. I’d open an e-mail with an attached PDF, and Mail would show the file’s name, but instead of seeing a preview of the document, I’d see a small (10x10 pixel) black square. If I tried to save the PDF to the Finder, and then open it in Preview or Reader, I’d get a message stating that the PDF was corrupt. On any other Mac in the house, though, that very same PDF attachment both previewed and opened just fine. (I use IMAP, so the e-mail is the same physical message on all the machines, as it resides on the server. This hint probably won’t help for POP accounts, in which the message is removed from the server when downloaded.)

You may see problems with other forms of attachments—a Word document that appears as a long garbled string of text, for instance. I mainly receive PDF attachments, though, and that’s where I’ve noticed the problem on my Mac.

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Start iChat without logging into accounts

If you use iChat (or Adium—this hint works for that program as well) and have multiple accounts, there may be times when you want to log in to one account, but not the rest. Most of the time, though, you log in to all your accounts—so you’ve left the “automatically log in” setting enabled on each of your accounts. As an example, you may have a work account and a personal account, and would rather not log into the work account on the weekends. You could change the setting in iChat’s preferences, but that’s hardly an ideal solution.

You could also manually log out of each account you’d rather not be logged into, but this is a bit of a pain—and it will ‘flash’ your availability to everyone on your buddy list before you log out. Instead, try this alternative. Start iChat (or Adium) while holding down the Shift key. When iChat (or Adium) launches, none of your accounts will be logged in; you can then manually log in to only those accounts you’d like to activate.

While this may not seem any simpler than starting with all accounts logged in and logging out of those you don’t want, this method saves a needless login—and insures you won’t accidentally leave an account in a logged in state.

Assign Finder labels via the keyboard

As someone who prefers using the keyboard over the mouse, the Finder’s color labels annoy me to no end—there’s simply no way to use the keyboard to assign them. You can open the Get Info window by pressing Command-I, but neither the arrow keys nor Tab key will select the label section of the Get Info window. The same holds true for the Finder’s contextual menu—you can use Tab to move through it, but the highlight will skip right over the label section.

But using a bit of AppleScript and Butler, my favorite do-it-all utility, it’s possible to implement your own keyboard-friendly method of applying color labels in the Finder. With some modifications, this hint should work with other utilities such as Quicksilver, LaunchBar, and any other program that can assign keyboard shortcuts to AppleScripts.

The basics of the hint are fairly straightforward: in Butler, we’ll create a new AppleScript item, and insert some code to assign a color to the selected file (or files) in the Finder.

I’ll walk through that process in detail, then I’ll offer up an easy way to add a full set of color label scripts to Butler’s configuration. If you’re only interested in the ready-to-use Butler add-in, skip to the end of this hint; the following is for those interested in how this works.

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Use Font Book to organize fonts

Every so often, I’ll be digging around in my archives and find a folder full of fonts—maybe I copied them off a clip art CD one day, intending to sample them and never got around to it, or maybe it’s a backup folder from an old version of OS X. Whatever the reason, it seems that these fonts are never organized into folders by family; instead, there’s usually just a jumble of fonts all loose at the top level of the folder.

To organize these fonts—in OS X 10.5, at least (and possibly 10.4, though I’m unable to test in 10.4 any more)—you can use Font Book. Sure, you could also just add all the fonts to your system, but you may not want to do that. This solution organizes all the fonts without adding them to your system. While there may be other ways to do this using Font Book (or some other program), here’s how I do it. Launch Font Book, and select File -> New Library. This will add a new Library-1 entry in the Collection section of the Font Book window. You can rename this library if you wish, but it’s only going to be there for a while, so it may not be worth the effort.

Next, in the Finder, open the folder containing your unorganized fonts folder. Drag and drop the unorganized fonts folder onto the new Library-1 folder in Font Book, and Font Book will start cataloging the fonts—you’ll see them show up one by one in the Fonts section of Font Book.

When Font Book has finished importing all the fonts, click on Library-1 in the Collection area (just to make sure it’s active), then select File -> Export Collection. In the dialog that appears, select a name (the default will be Library-1) and location for the exported fonts, then click Save. Font Book will then export the fonts, a process that (unless you’ve got thousands of fonts) won’t take very long.

When Font Book finishes the export, switch to the Finder and find the folder that Font Book just exported. Open it, and marvel at the nicely-organized fonts within—every font will be in its own folder, organized by font name. While this won’t help me actually review all these old fonts I have lying around, at least now they’re lying around in a nicely-organized manner.

Skip certain Keynote slides via keyboard shortcut

If you do much work in Keynote, you’re probably aware of most of the useful shortcut keys you can use during a presentation—things like pressing the Space Bar to move forward to the next build on your slide, H to hide the presentation and switch to the last application used, and Home or End to jump to the first or last slide. There are actually a ton of these shortcuts, and you can see the full list by pressing the “/” key (that’s the slash key) while in presentation mode.

Two of the more useful shortcuts are the “[” and “]” keys (open and close brackets), which jump to the previous or next slide, respectively. Most of the time, that is, they’ll jump from one slide to the next. But on seemingly randomly selected slides, it seems they sometimes won’t work as expected. It turns out that if your slide has timed builds—where one action happens automatically after some time interval—these previous and next slide shortcuts may not work. I’ve found that they seem to work OK on some timed build slides, but not others.

The solution turns out to be easy, but (as best as I can tell) completely undocumented: just hold down the Option key prior to pressing either the “[” or “]” keys, and Keynote should skip the timed builds and jump directly to the previous or next slide. Your mileage may vary, but this trick has worked for me in the past.

Group minimized windows in Witch

One of my favorite third-party add-ons is ManyTricks’ Witch, a program that lets you switch between active windows—much like Command-Tab switches between open applications, with Witch installed, I can select any open window by pressing Option-Tab. This is a great timesaver, as I typically don’t want to just switch to an application, but a given window within that application. (We’ve covered Witch here a couple of times in the past—as a promising prospect back in 2005, and then a brief write-up in a Best of Mac Gems article.)

In the latest version of Witch, a new feature lets you specify a window border for minimized windows—I set mine to yellow, which makes them stand out from the other windows in Witch’s interface. This lets me see at a glance—much like I can with the Dock—exactly which windows have been minimized.

By default, minimized windows will be shown interspersed with normal windows, as seen in the screenshot at left (click the image for a larger version). While this works reasonably well, when I’ve minimized a window, it’s usually because I don’t want to actually do anything with it right now. Much like the Dock does, I’d like to keep the minimized windows segregated from my “normal” windows. In Witch 2.0.2, you can do just that with a Terminal command.

First you need to quit Witch, so open its System Preferences panel, and uncheck the Enable Witch checkbox. Then quit System Preferences, open Terminal, copy and paste this command, then press Return:

defaults write ~/Library/Application\ Support/Witch/Settings "Separate Minimized Windows" -bool true

Note that it must be entered as shown; you cannot use quotes around the path instead of the backslash, or it will not work. Now open the Witch System Preferences panel again and enable Witch. There’s one last thing to do before you can see your minimized windows grouped together. On the Behavior tab, set the Sort Windows By pop-up to Window Activity Order. This is the only sort order in which you’ll see the minimized windows grouped together.

Once you’ve made that change, activate Witch via Option-Tab, and check out your now grouped together minimzed windows, as seen in the image at left (click the image for a larger version). With Witch set up in this manner, I find it makes a perfect replacement for both the Dock and the Command-Tab application switcher.

If you ever want to undo this setting, quit Witch as described above, then copy and paste the same command into Terminal, but replace true with false. Relaunch Witch, and your minimized windows will again be interspersed with the others.

Modify iCal events in 10.5 via drag-and-drop

As much as I dislike the event info window in OS X 10.5’s version of iCal—I dislike it enough that it made my list of Leopard annoyances—anything I can do to make working with that window simpler is a win in my book. In that vein, today’s hint will allow you to do make some basic modifications to an event without opening the event’s editing window. Instead, you can use drag-and-drop.

First double-click the event you’d like to modify. But instead of clicking Edit, try using drag and drop. You can drag and drop a file from the Finder, and it will be added as an attachment to the event. Drag and drop a person (or more than one person, or even a group) from Address Book, and they’ll be added as attendees. Drag in a URL, and it’s added as a (clickable) URL. Drag and drop some text, and it’s added as a note.

If your event has existing attendees, the newly-dragged people will be added to the list. If the event has a clickable URL, it will be replaced by the dropped URL. If you’ve got an existing note, however, your dropped text will “spring back” and not be accepted by the window in iCal.

Until (hopefully!) Apple fixes the mess it made of iCal’s event input in OS X 10.6, little tips like this can make things a bit simpler—still far from ideal, but a bit more bearable.

Set iChat buddy list shortcut order

In the OS X 10.5 version of iChat, you can easily move betwen buddy lists windows for various accounts—such as your iChat account, your Bonjour account, and maybe a Google Talk account—by using the Windows menu. There you’ll find Command-key shortcuts for each active account; Command-1 activates the first account’s buddy list, Command-2 the second, and so on. But if you’ve checked out iChat’s menus, you knew this already.

What you may not have known is that you can control the order in which the accounts appear in this list. So if you use Google Talk most often, you can make its shortcut Command-1, and relegate Apple’s iChat buddy list to Command-2 or Command-3. To change the order of the items in this menu, open iChat’s preferences (Command-, [that’s Command-comma]) then click on Accounts. In the list of accounts on the left, just click-and-drag to reorder the accounts however you wish. When you have things ordered as you wish, just close the preferences window, and you’re done.

Check the Windows menu now, and you’ll find the account you moved to the top of the list is also shown first in the buddy list section of the menu, and has been given the Command-1 shortcut.

Serve local web pages via name not IP number

Today’s hint is about OS X 10.5’s built-in Web server, and how you can make it easy to access sites you’re running off that server. In case you weren’t aware, the built-in OS X web server is the industry-standard Apache web server that powers literally thousands of web sites around the world. As of OS X 10.5.5, it’s Apache version 2.2.9.

So what can you do with OS X’s built-in Web server? Almost anything, though the one thing you probably can’t do is use it to serve web pages to the outside world, at least not easily. Many ISPs don’t allow web servers to run on a standard home account, and even if they do, your firewall and/or router may make it difficult for users to reach your site. If you get around those problems, you’ll still need to arrange for a domain name to point to your home machine—and again, your ISP may make that difficult. You can solve some of these issues by using a service such as DynDNS, which lets you assign a domain name to an ever-changing home IP address. You’ll still have issues if your ISP won’t allow you to host sites, however.

So if you can’t serve sites to the outside world, why then might you want to run a web server anyway? Perhaps, like me, your job requires you to maintain a web site, and you’d like to keep a copy of it locally for testing. Or perhaps you’d like to try out some of the popular blogging web applications (WordPress, Movable Type) or some of the hundreds of content management systems available (Geeklog, for instance, which powers macosxhints.com) on your own Mac before you decide to launch a site with a web hosting company. (As an aside, this is exactly how macosxhints.com got started—I installed Geeklog locally and ran it on my own Mac for a couple of months before I launched the site to the public. In many ways, the built-in OS X web server is the one piece of technology most responsible for my launching macosxhints.)

Whatever the reason, OS X makes it super easy to run a web server on your very own Mac. You can enable the built-in web server by clicking the Web Sharing button in the Sharing System Preferences panel. Once enabled, you’ll see a couple of links in the area to the right of all the sharing options; one lists your computer’s web site URL, and the other lists the URL for your personal site. For most users, these addresses will appear as a series of (IP address) numbers—in my case, they’re listed as http://192.168.1.44 and http://192.168.1.44/~robg, respectively. If I open Safari or any other web browser and enter those URLs, I’ll see the standard pages as shown in the image at right—that’s the computer page at the top, and my personal page at the bottom.

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