Someone (Dave) asked me how to make the text bigger on his iPhone, specifically for emails. I told him how to do it: Settings, then Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then scroll way do to the Mail section, then change the Minimum Font Size. That works, and Dave's happy, so that is that. Except that I found another way to do it.

Here's a picture of a "typical" email message, viewed on my iPhone. Definitely readable, though a little small after a long day. (If it looks a little blurry that's the screen-shot's fault, not the iPhone's. It's sharp as a tack on the iPhone.)


Here's the same email, with the iPhone turned sideways. I knew it would rotate but I didn't know it would enlarge. But, as you can see, it does. How handy, especially for those occasional times when your eyes are tired. Turn it back the other way and you're back to normal. Well, maybe YOU'RE not. But your email font size is.


Give it a try. Free, and easily worth twice as much.

No doubt you've heard about FaceTime, Apple's groovy new video-chat feature built into the iPhone 4. It's pretty cool the first time around-- in fact, it's better than that. It's incredible. Mind-blowing. Astounding. That's how it was for me. But then it wore off, becoming sort of a novelty instead of a game-changer.

Until tonight.

Tonight, one of my customers needed help with his Apple TV box. Not with his Mac, which I can see and control from over the internet-- but with his Apple TV. The customer's television was displaying a message from the Apple TV, and he wanted me to tell him how to respond. As you can imagine, it helps a LOT to know exactly what the problem is before offering a solution-- and what could be better than seeing the message on the TV for myself? Thanks to FaceTime, I could. My customer aimed his iPhone 4 at his television screen, I read the message for myself, and in a jiffy I was able to solve the problem.

I'm back to thinking that FaceTime is incredible. Mind-blowing. Astounding.

So much of what we do with files starts with a drag and a drop. You might drag an image to Mail in order to send it to someone, or to iPhoto to add it to the iPhoto Library. You might drag an image to Photoshop in order to open it for editing. All of these things are easy to do (and much more efficient than going to a program, then going to File and then Open... and then hunting around trying to find your file in the resulting "Open..." dialog box. They're even easier to do when you don't have to drag your files all the way to the Dock, taking up time and introducing the potential for accidentally "dropping" the thing you're dragging, and losing it "somewhere" on your Desktop.

Here's how you do it.

Our first picture shows a typical Finder window, with some images in it.

Realizing that it's a long way to drag one of these icons to the Dock in order to open with (let's say) Pixelmator, we look for a shortcut-- and we find one, by dragging the Pixelmator icon right up into the toolbar across the top of the Finder window! Here's what it looks like (marked with a red circle to make things clearer here). I'll tell you more about how to do it in a minute.

Now, if I want to open one of those pictures using Pixelmator, I just drag it up a couple of inches (or less) to the Pixelmator icon, wait for it to highlight, then let go.

Here's an example with a whole bunch of program icons in the toolbar. With these, I can drag a file to open it in Pixelmator, open it in Preview, send it in a Mail message, add it to Evernote, or add it to the iPhoto Library. Nice.

Of course, you have to get those icons up there into the Toolbar, but it turns out to be very easy. Just go to the Applications folder, find an app that you want to have easy access to, and drag it to the toolbar. Hold it for just a second or two and it should work. Note that EVERY Finder window will have the same complement of icons in the toolbar, which makes it easy (add program icons to ANY Finder window's toolbar at it will be available in EVERY Finder window).

If you change your mind and want to rearrange the icons hold the Command key (not Control, Command) and either move the icon or tear it off and let go outside the window. Poof. Note that you are NOT throwing away the program. You're just removing a shortcut from the toolbar. And it's perfectly OK to have the same program in the Dock and in the Finder window's toolbar. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Bonus: if all you want to do is launch a program you can click its icon in the toolbar. It's like having a second Dock, except somehow it's always closer to where your cursor is. I use this all the time and I'll bet you will too.

As we've seen before, sometimes it's not the Mac that's slow. Sometimes it's the user. Even if you're fast you can get a little faster still. Here's another hint that will save you time, day after day after day. It's all about checking boxes. Read on.

The typical Print... dialog box looks something like this:


See those checkboxes at the bottom? I've marked them with red. Let's say you want to check them. Do you carefully position the pointer inside those little square checkboxes? Well, you could, and it would work-- but that isn't something you can do in a hurry (especially if you're using a trackpad instead of a mouse). FYI, I NEVER click in the boxes. Too much trouble.

It turns out that you can click anywhere in the words beside the checkboxes (shown in purple in the picture below).

That's a much bigger target-- more than ten times as big! It's easier to hit a big target, and easier means faster. This works (or it should work) for ANY checkbox (and for radio buttons too), in any program. Give it a try and save a few seconds multiple times a day. It doesn't sound like much but it all adds up.

Bonus: if your Print... dialogs aren't nice and big like the ones shown here you need to click the little black triangle in the blue square, shown below and marked in purple. There is a shortcut for clicking that triangle, but since you only need to do it once per program (and since it's a multi-step shortcut) I'd just click the thing and be done with it.

Somewhat overlooked in last week's iPhone 4 pandemonium is the updated operating system for iPhones called "iOS 4". It's available as a free download for existing iPhone and iPod Touch users. (Sorry, it is not available yet for the iPad.) I put it onto my iPhone 3GS and it's working fine.

Here's what you'll get when you install iOS 4 onto your existing iPhone: (note: iPhone 4 owners can skip this-- the iPhone 4 comes with iOS pre-installed.)

• Multitasking: in effect, it lets you suspend an app, and come back to it later, just as you left it-- saving you the time it takes to launch it and get to where you were.
• Folders: you can group apps into folders now. Each folder can hold 12 items. I have two and a half pages of folders, grouped just the way I like them (Navigation, Utilities, Reference, Shopping, Sports, etc.)
• Improved Mail: you can see all of your Inboxes at once.
• Digital Zoom for the camera: like the one in Gorillacam, but now built-in.
• iBooks: you can now buy books from Apple's store, and read them on your iPhone or on your iPad. Note: free Winnie the Pooh book is included and the books have the same groovy page-turning animations as on the iPad.

It took about an hour for me to do the update on my iPhone 3GS and I would expect it to take about the same for you. If you have an original iPhone (aluminum back), you're out of luck-- it won't install at all, so don't try. If you have a 3GS it's a no-brainer-- go get it, it's free.

Here's a link to Apple's site where you can learn more about the iOS 4. Here's a link showing how to install it.

Everyone wants a faster Mac. It's a lot easier-- and cheaper-- to make yourself faster at using the Mac you have. Here's a great way to do it. First in a series.

Ever seen one of these? It's a Print dialog box with a couple of pop-up menus. If you want to make changes to the print settings you have to click the little up-down arrows in the blue area.

The problem with those little up-down arrows is they're LITTLE. So you have to be rather precise with the mouse, and that takes time, and it's the same with every pop-up menu, in every program, all day long. Except it's not.

Turns out that you can click ANYWHERE on the pop-up menu. Anywhere! Here's a picture showing you (in blue) where you can click-- that's a much bigger target, and much easier to hit. Knowing this, you don't have to be so precise anymore, and that'll save you time.


Here are some more examples. Which would you rather click on-- the big area in blue, or the tiny area in red? Go for the blue. Make it easy on yourself.

Here's the Appearance preference pane.

Here's a slight variation: an iCal event entry panel. Still, it works the same way. Click in the blue area.

So there you have it. With a larger target it's easier to put the mouse in the right place. Assuming you save two seconds per menu, and also assuming you deal with 37.4 pop-up menus per day (a number I just made up-- I mean, the national average), you'll save more than 5 hours in a year using this "aim for the larger target" method. That would let you spend more time ordering stuff through my Amazon link or baking cookies for sending to your favorite Mac guy.

By the way, this is my 200th post to this blog. How about that.

In the "better late than never" category, here's a calendar for your iCal with the time and date of every World Cup match.

Click here to get the calendar.

All you do is click on it. iCal will add it automatically. I would set it to refresh once per day-- not so important now, but when we get to the knockout round it will be nice to have the country names rather than "1st place Group C vs. 2nd Place Group D." You can turn it off with a simple uncheck-of-the-box later, or even delete it. So you're not stuck with this calendar for life.

Apple's Mail program gives you several ways to send digital photos via email. There's the hard way (make a new email message, then click the paperclip icon, then hunt around for your picture, then give up); the less-hard way (switch to iPhoto, find your picture, select it, and click the Mail icon), the easy way (drag a photo to the Mail icon in the Dock), and the super-easy way: use Mail's built-in Photo Browser.

Here's a picture of a new message's toolbar, with the Photo Browser button circled:


When you click that button you get a palette like this one:

Everything in iPhoto shows up in this palette. So does everything in Photo Booth. You can choose an album, like so:

You can double-click a picture to see it larger, you can search for a picture using the search box at the bottom, you can control-click on a picture to change the view to "View as List." Here's what that looks like-- could be handy someday.

I like the Icon View but it's nice to know the List view is available.

Once you've found the picture you want you simply drag it into the Mail message, exactly where you want it to be. For example:

That was easy... but there's one more thing. Look at the bottom right of the message window. There's a little menu, called "Image Size." Here's a better view.


You can click on it and change the size of the image. As you choose different options the message size (shown at the bottom left) adjusts instantly. Pretty neat stuff, really.

So... next time you're in Mail, and you want to attach a photo, click the Photo Browser button. It makes sending photos unbelievably easy.

Bonus Tip: look for a Photo Browser (sometimes called a Media Browser) in other applications too. You'll find one in Pages, Keynote, Numbers, RapidWeaver, iMovie, iDVD, Pixelmator, and probably a lot more, but (notably) not anything from Microsoft or Adobe.

If you're an iPhone user you know that accurate pointing leads to efficient use. Actually, it's the other way around: inaccurate pointing leads to inefficient use. It's not easy to be accurate when your finger's bigger than the buttons and keys and controls on the iPhone's screen, but it turns out there's a useful technique that will help you when you're off the mark. In a nutshell, it's this: if you touch the wrong key, don't let go-- just sliiiiiiiiide to the right key, and then let go. For example:

Here I'm in the middle of writing a text message. I want to write "Stop it" and I've gotten as far as the "S." When I go for the "t" I miss and land on the "r."

You can see it in the picture below.

Do I accept that "r" and then delete it and then try for the "t" again? No! Instead, when I see that "R" indicating that I hit the wrong letter I simply sliiiiiiide over one letter, wait for the "T" to show, and then I let go. Ahhhh-- that feels good.

Here's what it looks like.



This technique works other places too. Here's one example that I use all the time: in Contacts, you get that TINY A-Z list at the right.



Supposedly you're able to touch a letter in that list and jump to the that letter in your Contacts file. More times than not I don't land where I want to-- but with the sliiiiiiiide technique I just keep my finger down and sliiiiiiide to the proper letter, and then let go.

Here's what it looks like when you touch and HOLD (yes, the list turns gray):



Keep the "sliiiiiide" technique in mind for the next time you touch the wrong spot on your iPhone's screen. It makes correcting an error as easy as making one.

I have likened this method to playing checkers: your move isn't official until you let go. Maybe that will help you remember.

(Note: last week one of my customers-- Tom Nevermann, AKA "The Moving Doctor"-- asked me to help him find a good deal on USB-powered speakers for his Mac. I took him to www.dealnews.com and set up an email alert for him, and now every time a good deal on USB-powered speakers comes along, Tom gets notified by email. That experience inspired me to write this blog entry as I know DealNews can save you some money too.)

I get a lot of questions that start with "Where's the best place to buy..."? Generally speaking I refer the asker to DealNews, the best website for finding great deals on tech stuff like Macs, software, printers, and networking equipment-- and a whole lot more. Here's a picture of the DealNews site, with their categories across the top. I never use the categories-- I just leave it on "Everything"-- but the categories give you an idea of the kinds of things that DealNews tracks.

Here's that same page, scrolled down a bit so you can see the deals (the top of the site isn't where the action is):

DealNews doesn't sell anything (except for advertising space). Their business revolves around getting people to come to the site, which they do by scouring the web for great deals and presenting the deals in an easy-to-navigate webpage. They don't care which store offers the deal- it might be Sears, it might be Buy.com, it might be Dunkin' Donuts. Doesn't matter to DealNews (although, if the store gets complaints, DealNews will quit showing their deals).

The more people come to DealNews the more they can charge for their advertisements, so DealNews does what they can to make you want to come back. One way they do it is by updating constantly, and that's a good reason for YOU to sort the deals in chronological order (look for a "sort by" pop-up toward the right), and also a good reason for you to check in on the site more than once a day. Deals don't last forever and sometimes they don't even last an hour. Keep that in mind when you find something you like on the site-- my advice is "buy it right now."

You can search DealNews (see the box at the top right). That's a good start, but a lot of the time the stuff you'll find has already expired. That's a drag, but DealNews has a "Get Deals via Email" feature (right above the search box) and with email alerts you'll know about deals as quickly as they're put on the site. You do have to sign up, but it's free, and they promise not to sell your email address or use it for anything else, so I think you can go ahead with this.

Setting up a DealNews email alert is easy-- you pick a store, or a product, or a category (or some combination), and DealNews will send you an email when something that matches comes along. You can set up as many alerts as you'd like, and with Christmas coming up (only 7 months away) you can sit back and cherry-pick the very best deals and save a bunch of money on your presents. I already have three presents stashed away in my secret present place, all purchased via a DealNews email alert.

Note to Suspicious Minds: you may be thinking "I'll bet they just post the deals of the people who pay the most! That's how they make their money!" Well, that might be true, but their Editorial Guarantee says they will never do that. I think they're telling the truth. If they took payola we'd find out soon enough, and when that happened we'd all go somewhere else for deals. They know that. It's in their best interests long-term to be honest, and that's what I think they are.

Of course they do take ads-- that's how they make their money-- but the ads are clearly labeled and they're not mixed in with the rest of the deals.

I check DealNews at least once a day. Recent deals that I've taken advantage of include free ice cream at Ben and Jerry's, 10-foot USB cables for $1.97 shipped, and a 42-inch 120 Hz Philips LCD TV (not for me, for a friend-- and he saved about $300). Go check it out.

In Case You Wondered
No, we do not get anything for recommending DealNews. We do get something for recommending products on Amazon.com, so if you can't find what you want via DealNews please feel free to use the Amazon link at the top of the page here. When you go to Amazon via that link they'll know we sent you, and a tiny referral fee comes our way when you buy something. It comes out of Amazon's pocket, not out of yours, so you have nothing to lose and the great feeling of supporting this blog to gain.

I'll bet you use iPhoto a lot-- not just for storing and organizing your photos, but for editing them too. The usual method of editing starts with you choosing a photo to edit by viewing thumbnails, as shown below.

Then you double-click a thumbnail and get the editing window shown below. The picture you chose is highlighted in the thumbnails across the top of the window, and the image itself is enlarged in the center of the window, ready for you to crop or straighten or whatever. That's not a bad way to do it but it's not the best way.

Next time, try this: hold the Control key and click and hold on a thumbnail. You'll get this nifty "contextual menu" and you can choose "Edit Using Full Screen" from it.

Your picture will zoom to take up the entire screen. Move the mouse to the top of the screen and you'll see thumbnails again-- that makes it easy to choose another picture. Heres' what that looks like.

Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and you'll see these buttons-- same as in the normal "double-click-to-edit" view, but with two more buttons: Info, and Compare. "Info" is pretty obvious, but Compare is worth a little explanation.

Here's what happens when you click on "Compare"-- it shows you the picture you were editing, AND it shows you the next picture, side-by-side. You can quickly scan through your photos using the left and right arrow keys (that will load the next picture into the frame with the border) and when you find one you like, you can edit using the tools across the bottom.


You can also choose photos to compare by clicking them in the thumbnail bar across the top of the screen. And, if you want to compare more than two, hold the Command key down and click on as many more as you'd like.

Even if you never make use of Info and Compare it's always nicer to work on a larger image. Give the Control-click-Edit-Using-Full-Screen method a try. You're going to like it.

When it comes to the iPhone, I hear two complaints over and over:
1. AT&T is the pits, and
2. The battery runs down too quickly.

I'm not thrilled with AT&T either but I can't solve that problem for you. I can, however, help you make the battery last longer. Do it my way and it will last all day.

First thing you do: turn down the brightness on the screen. Turn it way down. Here's where mine is:

A bright screen will run down your battery like nothing else. So fight back by dimming things down.

Second thing you do: set the "Auto-Lock" to 1 minute. This means that your iPhone will shut off its screen automatically in one minute. Yes, it's an irritation, but it's a lot less irritating than running out of battery power.


Third thing you do: turn off WiFi when you know you won't be using it. Turn it back on when you get home or to the office or Starbucks or wherever it is that you use WiFi. (The internet stuff is MUCH faster with WiFi than with the 3G network, so remember to turn it on when it's available.)


Fourth thing you do: turn off Bluetooth unless you need it. (You need it if you have a Bluetooth headset.)


Fifth thing you do: get yourself a couple of extra chargers and get in the habit of plugging the iPhone in when you can. I have one in the car and another at my desk. If you need a link, here's one for a car charger that costs $2.84, and here's one for a USB cable that provides power from your Mac that costs only a penny. You'll get both, shipped, for less than ten bucks.

I have to admit, I thought I might not get to Option key Tip Number 10... but here it is!

I'll bet you've chosen "About This Mac" from the Apple menu-- it shows you a box something like this.

Processor, Memory, Startup Disk-- all interesting stuff to know.

The "More Info..." button launches the System Profiler application, an important trouble-shooting tool. But, if you hold the Option key, the first item in the Apple menu changes from "About This Mac" to "System Profiler," saving you a click. It doesn't sound like much but they all add up.

And that's 10.

Our Option key Tip-a-Palooza continues...

Your documents will look better if you use the right characters. For example, mañana looks better than "manana," and resumé looks better than "resume." The Mac's always been able to generate these characters (not true for PCs), so why not learn how and start using the right characters today. Check out the handy table below.

Character	Keystroke(s)
• (bullet)	Option-8
¢	Option-4
ñ	Option-n, then n
é	Option-e, then e
™	Option-2
®	Option-r
º (degree symbol)	Option-0 (that's a zero)

You may be wondering how you'll ever remember these things, but take a look at the keyboard and some of them will become fairly obvious. For example, the cent sign (¢) is on the same key as the dollar sign ($). The bullet (•) is on the same key as the asterisk (*), which some people use for bullets (until they read this blog entry).

OK now-- that's 9.

Ever try to empty the Trash and get a message like this?

Of course you have. Then you click "Empty Trash" (or hit Enter on the keyboard), and then you might get this message too:

(I say "might" because if you're on Mac OS X 10.6 AND you have some locked items in the Trash you will, and if you're using 10.5 or lower you won't.)

Most likely you will click "Remove All Items" and then-- finally-- the trash empties. Yay.

Skip all of this trouble by holding down the Option key when you choose "Empty Trash" from the Finder's "Finder" menu. Then it's a one-stepper. No messages, just a satisfying whooshy-crumpling sound.

Note: when you don't hold the Option key, the Finder's Finder menu looks like this:


Hold the Option key and it looks like this:


A little different, and as it turns out it makes a difference.

You noticed of course that without the Option key, the menu says "Empty Trash…" but with the Option key the ellipsis is gone. The menu now reads simply "Empty Trash" (no dots). Those three little dots in the menus actually mean something, namely that you are going to get a dialog box when you choose that item. Dialog boxes almost always have a "Cancel" button in them, and that gives you a chance to bail out without doing anything. This goes for every menu item with three little dots-- every menu item in every menu in every program. Watch for it and see. Three dots equals "dialog box coming up." Really.

And that's 8.

PCMag.com reviewed the iPad and produced this very nice video that tells you all about it. Yes, the narrator speaks too rapidly, but you're in control-- put your mouse over the video and pause it if you need to (I did). Or grab the time (above the little stripe showing how much you've watched) and drag it back to the left to make the guy back up (I did that too).

PCMag: Apple iPad video review from PCMag.com Reviews on Vimeo.

You may not have heard but Apple has something new called the iPad and it's coming out April 3rd (this Saturday). They've made some sales tools, I mean instructional videos, and you can watch them via this link. Warning: the videos are very well done and you may find yourself ordering an iPad after watching them.

Kids, take note: look at the hands in these iPad videos. Take care of your nails and you too could be an Apple "hand model." It beats working. Trust me.

Ever click a link in Safari, hoping to download a PDF, and instead of downloading it opens up in the browser (or worse, in Acrobat)? That's a drag. Try it fifty times and fifty times it's the same-- you don't get a copy of your own.

Unless, of course, you hold the Option key when you click.

Here's a great example (he said modestly). Suppose you're looking for tax forms on the IRS website.


You find the form you want, and now you want to get a copy and save it to your hard disk. Without the Option key, when you click the Form 1040 link you see the form, but you don't have the form. Here's what it looks like in your browser:


Nice to look at, but it's not "yours." Try it again, but this time hold the Option key when you click the link. Presto!The file is downloaded to your Downloads folder, or to your Desktop, or wherever it is your downloads go. From there it's just another PDF, something you can double-click and open.

BONUS: Actually, you can do more than double-click and open it. You can fill it in! Try clicking on the 1040 form and typing. It works. And since it's "your" copy of the 1040, you can save it for later. Nice.

BONUS 2: If you can't find the file, and you're using Safari, go to the Window menu and choose "Downloads" (if you're using Firefox you'll find Downloads in the Tools menu. It works about the same way.). Safari's Downloads window will look something like this:

Double-click the 1040's icon to open it, or click once on the magnifying glass to reveal it in the Finder. You're on your own from there.

And that's seven.

Another hard drive bit the dust this week. This one was in a three year old MacBook. Fortunately, the machine had been backed up regularly using Time Machine. When the hard drive died we replaced it with a new one, started up from a Snow Leopard DVD, connected the backup drive, and copied everything from the backup to the new drive. It took about an hour to get the old drive out, the new drive in, and to set up the transfer from the backup, and another hour to actually do the transfer (giving us the opportunity to go for pastrami sandwiches). Without the backup we would have had to send the drive out for data recovery, leading to a big bill and several days of being without the machine. With the backup, it was no big deal.

I hope you're getting the message: hard drives eventually wear out. If yours hasn't yet, consider yourself lucky, but get an external disk and back your stuff up anyway. If you have questions about how to do it click this link and read all about it. If you're still stuck send me an email.

All of a sudden, the iTunes App Store has a "wish list" feature. Didn't used to, and it made shopping for apps a little harder than it had to be because you had to write down the names of apps that you thought you might want to go back to. Now (as of a week or so ago) it's all built in. Here's how it works:

1. Start iTunes and go to the "iTunes Store" section
2. Find an app that you want to add to your Wish List"
3. Click the little triangle to the right of "Buy this App" (or on free apps, to the right of "Free App"), revealing a menu
4. Choose "Add to Wish List" as shown in the picture below.

Note: if you add a free app to your Wish List you'll get this message:

They're probably right-- it's free now, but might not be when you decide to buy it. Just download the thing now and decide later whether you want it.

To see the items in your Wish List you go to the far RIGHT side of the iTunes window, click the tiny arrow to the right of your AppleID, and then choose "Wish List." Easy. Here's what it looks like, with the Magic Finger showing you where to click.


When the Wish List comes up it will look something like the picture below. And no, these aren't really things I want. They are just here to help you get the idea. If you really want to buy me something make it something involving coffee, chocolate, and whipped cream.

Neat stuff, and I think I will be using this quite a bit to help me remember various apps that I want to compare. Thanks, Apple. Very nice of you.

The Option Key Tip-a-Palooza continues with one of the handiest tips ever, namely the Option-drag technique. Basically, it comes down to this: when you drag things around they move, right? Right. Except if you hold the Option key! If you hold the Option key when you drag stuff you'll make copies.

Here's an example, using iCal.

Suppose you have an appointment on Tuesday, like so (light week):


Let's say you have such a great time eating ice cream on Tuesday that you want to do it again on Wednesday. If you drag that appointment to Wednesday it moves to Wednesday, and it's gone from Tuesday. Looks like this when you're done.


If what you really wanted to do is eat ice cream on Tuesday AND Wednesday you can do it-- just hold the Option key down while you drag! Here's what it looks like as you do it.



And here's what it looks like when you let go. I'm hungry.


This is much, much easier than entering an event twice. Or even copying and pasting. And it works in a lot more programs than just iCal, including...

The Finder (Option-drag to duplicate a file or folder)
Microsoft Word (highlight some text, Option-drag to insert that text somewhere else)
Microsoft Excel (highlight some cells, Option-drag (grab the EDGE of the selection) to copy those cells elsewhere. Great for headings!)

That's six.

You took this photo...

and now you want to rotate it so the label is readable, right-side up.. If you're using iPhoto, the Rotate Button looks like this:

If you click that button three times the picture rotates, in 90 degree steps, to the proper position. Yay. But, if you press the Option key, the Rotate Button changes to rotate the other way, so you can turn your sausage right-side-up in a single "Option-click."

It doesn't sound like such a big deal to save two clicks, but all those clicks add up. Ask someone with carpal tunnel syndrome.

This "Option-click" technique works in iPhoto, Preview, iWeb, and probably a bunch of others. It is worth experimenting. The nice thing is, the button's picture changes to show it's going to rotate things the other way when you hold Option.

Here's the properly-rotated picture, done with a single Option-click. Tasty stuff.

And that's five.

You probably know that Apple's Address Book lets you create "Groups" of people, and you might also know that a given person can be in multiple groups. For example, you might have a Family group, a Soccer Team group, and a Christmas Card group, and your brother might be in all three of them. That's pretty neat, but unless you have an incredible memory there's no way you're going to remember which groups your brother is in. And there's no indication in the Address Book that a given person is in any group at all, let alone an indication of which one(s).

Unless of course you hold down the Option key. Of course.

In the picture below I've found a person's card, clicked on it in the "Name" column, and then held down the Option key. That produces the yellow highlighting, letting me know in an instant that Mom is in the "Mass email list" group, the "test group" group, and the "California" group. Let's face it, that's pretty cool.


And that's four.

Our Option Key Super-Tip marathon continues with Tip #3.

Here's the situation: you have a mess of Finder windows open, like so--

Now you want to close them. So you either go to the File menu and choose "Close Window" or you click the red button at the top left of the first window... and then you do it again... and again... zzz.

If you really want to close them all hold the Option key when you go to the File menu and you can do it in one shot. See below.

(on the left: the regular File menu. On the right: how it looks when you hold the Option key.)

Bonus: if you hold the Option key and click ANY Finder window's red close button you will close ALL Finder windows. Very nice.
Double Bonus: this Option key technique works isn't specific to the Finder. It also works in Safari, Mail, Microsoft Word (but only if you use the Option-click-the-red-button method-- the Option-click-File/Close method does not work), and Microsoft Excel (same restriction as for Word).

That's three.

If you hold the Option key down before you click on the battery icon (10.6 laptop users only) you will see "Condition: Normal" (I hope) or "Replace Now" or "Replace Soon" or "Service Battery." And, if you actually do choose that "Condition: " menu item you'll get a Help screen that gives you some explanation. Pretty neat.

That's two.

You really ought to get to know the Option key on your keyboard. It helps you do all sorts of neat stuff. I am going to write Option key tips until I can't think of any more, or until enough people ask me to stop. Anyhoo, here's Option Key tip #1.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.6, and you make use of Apple's fabulous "Airport" wireless networking, you can learn a lot of things by holding down the Option key and clicking on the Airport menu. Here's a picture of the Airport menu. It's up by the clock, at the top right of your screen.


(double-size... blurry, but easier to see)

Normally, when you click on the Airport menu it shows you the available networks. With the Option key, and Mac OS X 10.6, you get that, but you also get a lot more. Looky here (Blue Pointing Finger added for emphasis-- you will probably not see a Blue Pointing Finger on your menu):

All of that mumbo-jumbo would help someone (someone like me) figure out why you might be having problems with your internet. Some of the more interesting info:

1. This Mac is connected to the Airport Base Station (or other wireless access point) via 802.11n. It doesn't get better than that. 802.11g is also common, but not as good. If yours shows "n" be happy.
2. The Transmit Rate will either be 130 Mbps (for newer Apple Airports, and other wireless access points with "n") or 54 Mbps (for older Apple Airports, with 802.11g). If it's NOT 130 or 54 you probably have a problem either with your Mac's Airport card or with your Airport Base Station. I saw this just the other day-- a customer's Transmit Rate was bouncing all over the place, between 2 Mbps and 20 Mbps, lousy either way. Another Mac in the same room showed 130. Conclusion: hardware problem with Mac #1, and a trip to the shop to replace the Airport card.

Try holding down the Option key and clicking on YOUR Airport menu. Mom, this won't work for you-- your system is only 10.4. Sorry.

UPDATE: you can get some of this info on 10.5 Macs too. Worth a try.

One of the best features of Mac OS X 10.5 (and 10.6) is Time Machine. It's automatic backup software, built into the system, and it works really well. It's easy to set up, and you can forget all about it after that-- until the day you need it. You'll be very, VERY happy to remember it that day.

Hard drives aren't made to last forever. One of my customers found that out last week, when her iMac's hard drive simply stopped turning. The machine was only two years old! Replacing the hard drive was the easy part-- but, as my customer said, "What about all of my stuff?" Luckily-- or, really, good on us for thinking of this a long time ago-- we'd been backing up the iMac with Time Machine, and we were able to restore all of her stuff to the new drive. Years of email, thousands of photos of grandkids, a big address book, a full calendar-- all restored in a few hours and with minimal fuss. No one likes having her Mac break down but getting everything back feels pretty good.

If your Mac is on 10.5 or higher, and you want to start using Time Machine, you'll need to get a big external hard disk to store the backed-up data. You'll want something much larger than the drive you're backing up, because Time Machine keeps multiple backups of your stuff (multiple versions, from multiple days) and more hard disk space equates to more days of backups. Here's a link to a nice drive from Seagate, makers of the best drives around. This one's 1.5 terabytes, which is about 1500 gigabytes, available from Amazon for about $120.

Here's a picture.

So, you get the drive, you plug it in, you get a message asking whether you want to use the drive with Time Machine, you click the Yes button, and that's it. Easy. Depending on how the disk is formatted you may have to reformat it for use with Time Machine but that's not a hard thing to do. If you need a hand with that I know a guy but I think you can do it yourself.

Apple has a very nice article about Time Machine via this link. Worth a peek.

(Note: besides helping you recover from a major hardware meltdown, Time Machine is also great for when you need to get an older copy of a single file-- maybe the current one's become damaged, maybe someone threw it away, who knows. Time Machine has rescued me more than once, mostly helping me bring back trashed files that I didn't think I'd ever need again. It's quite the little safety net.)

This is Dropbox. You want it. Here's the link. They have a little video there, right on the first page. It's worth watching-- it explains the whole thing. However, if you'd rather have ME explain it for you, read on.

Suppose you have a laptop and a desktop Mac. There is bound to be some item that you would like to have with you on both machines-- maybe it's a book you're working on, maybe it's a folder of website files for your 30th high school reunion, maybe it's a checklist of things you need to do when you go on a trip. In my case, it's all of those things. Problem is, it's practically unmanageable. If I put exact copies of the documents on my two machines, and then I use a document on Machine A, I have to remember to copy it back to Machine B. And I never remember.

This is a job for a computer. And good software. Enter Dropbox.

Dropbox keeps designated folders on my Macs in sync. If I add a document to one of those folders on one of my Macs I know it will show up on the other Mac in an instant. If I make a change in one of the synced documents Dropbox makes sure that those changes make it to my other Macs. I don't have to have all of my machines on at the same time to make this work-- if one is off, Dropbox will notice when I turn the machine on later and will sync things up right away after that.

Dropbox shows up like just another folder, and you can make as many folders as you want inside of it, and name them what you want to name them, just like any other folder, with the exception being that any item in the Dropbox folder will always-- ALWAYS-- be kept in synch on all of my Macs. And, believe it or not, on my iPhone too. (Click here for the iPhone app.)

Did I mention that Dropbox is free for the first 2 gigabytes? Did I mention that it keeps backups of the things you put in it? Did I mention that you can share files with PCs too? I should have. Anyhow, now I have.

I've shown Dropbox to a lot of Mac users and every single one has said "I want that!" Now they have it. And so can you. Go get it.

Every use Google Translate? It's really handy. I know there are other options but there are things about Google Translate that are hard to beat. Have a look by clicking here. Better yet, have a look by Control-clicking here, and then choosing "Open Link in New Window." That way, you can play around with Google Translate and read all about it here, with the windows side-by-side.

The first thing that I especially like about Google Translate is that it translates what you type as you type it. Try it. I don't know how they do it, but it works very nicely for me (Safari 4.0.4, Mac OS X 10.6.2). Here's a picture of the finished sentence, translated, but know that it was translating away as I entered my lunch request. Very cool. And of course there are plenty of choices for the "Translate from" and "Translate to" languages.

The second thing that I especially like about Google Translate is it can translate an entire webpage. All you do is type the website address into the box, where I typed in my "I would like a cheeseburger" sentence. If you are looking at a website and you get the notion to translate it, you could (1) select the URL, (2) copy the URL, (3) switch to Google Translate, (4) paste the copied URL into the box, and (5) click the Translate button. Or you could do it all in one step, if you do some one-time set-up. Obviously you want to do it in one step, so read on and I'll show you how.

In Google Translate, click where it says "Tools and Resources" at the left. Or click this link. Ignore all of that complicated-looking stuff at the top and scroll down until you see something that looks like the following picture.

Choose a language that you want to translate into. Click and hold on the blue underlined text for that language. If you let go you will get a friendly reminder from Google:

Do what it says: click and hold on a blue underlined language and drag it to your browser's toolbar. While you're dragging it looks like this:



When you let go you'll get a chance to name it. I used the name suggested by Google:

When you're done it looks like this (minus the red oval). That little button will be there forever, or until you take it off.



That's it for the setting up. Now for the fun part! Go to a web page, any web page. Let it load up. Click the button you made. If you happen to go to the same web page that I did, you will change this...

into this!

I don't know about you but I think it's amazing.

Bonus: notice that Google's put some controls at the top of the translated page. That means you can EASILY switch to another language, without starting over. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think. You can even tell me in Spanish.

Take a look at the Excel document below. Notice anything? Of course you did-- each column is a series, progressing from a starting item to an ending item in some sort of regular way.



It took me 59.4 seconds to enter this data. Really. That's one cell of data per second-- very, very, very quick, and it's not because I'm such an amazing typist. Actually, I let Excel do most of the typing for me, using a feature called Auto Fill. All I did was type the first row of data. Excel did the rest. Here's how it works.

1. Type something into a cell and hit Enter (or Return).
2. Click on the cell again to select it, and let go.
3. Look for a little box at the lower right-hand corner of the selected cell. Move the mouse over that until the cursor looks like a little black "+" as shown below.

4. Click the lower right-hand corner with that black plus, hold the mouse button down, and drag down (or to the right). Excel fills the cells with the right stuff. Amazing.

The four steps above will work in a lot of cases. In fact, they work for the first four columns in our example. But, when you get to the last two columns, those steps don't work, and that's because Excel doesn't know whether we want to go up by one, or two, or five, or whatever. We have to tell it.

The trick is to enter not just the first item in the column, but also the second. So, in the example here, I typed a 1 and then below it a 2. Then I selected BOTH cells, via click-and-drag, and THEN I clicked the lower right-hand corner and dragged down. For the column at the far right, I entered 5 in the top row, 10 in the next row, selected both cells, then dragged that lower right-hand corner.

You'll know you're clicking in the right place when the cursor looks like the black "+".

Next time that you have a lot of data to enter into Excel look for the chance to use this Auto Fill method. It will save you a LOT of time.

Bonus: if you type "Jan" Excel will enter "Feb" and "Mar" etc. If you type "1st Quarter" Excel will enter "2nd Quarter" and "3rd Quarter" etc.

Bonus 2: you can select more than one cell in the top row, then grab the lower right-hand corner of the selection, and then Auto Fill all of those columns at once. Try it.

Pictured above: a Dock with the magnification feature turned on. This feature, which makes Dock icons squirm as you move your mouse over them, is absolutely adored by some people, but not by me, because a squirming target is harder to click on.

Tonight, for some reason, I thought it would be fun to experiment with the Dock (which was better in OS X 10.5 than it is in 10.6), and I found an interesting shortcut: if you hold the Control and Shift keys you will temporarily switch the Dock's magnification feature ON if it's set to be off, and OFF if it's set to be on.

Armed with this knowledge, you're now able to very gracefully and surreptitiously and temporarily turn the Dock magnification feature off when you use Macs with Dock magnification set to "on." This will be especially useful for those of you who make a living helping others with their Macs, double-especially if the Dock magnification "feature" drives you nuts. Oh wait, that's me. Never mind.

You know that feeling you get when you suddenly discover that there's a much easier way to do things? That's the feeling I got when I "discovered" Tripit.com, because Tripit makes one of my more tedious tasks go away. Which task is that? The one where I type flight information into my calendar so I have it when I need it.

Anyone who's done it knows the routine: you make your travel plans online (typity-type, clickety-click), then you get to type even more into the calendar, trying very hard to be careful, but take it from me, it's hard to be perfect.

Enter Tripit.com. Go there and sign up for a free account. Then, when you make plane reservations and subsequently get a confirmation email from an airline, you forward the email to "plans@tripit.com." Tripit reads the email, puts the information into a handy little private space for you on their site, and then-- the best part-- they put your trip information into an iCal feed, which you subscribe to ONCE, and all of the information about the flying out and flying in is automatically part of your iCal calendar, forever and ever amen.

I made a Rule in Mail to automatically forward my Southwest Airlines "Ticketless Confirmation" emails to plans@tripit.com, and by golly it works. My calendar has ALL of the information-- flight numbers, departure times, arrival times, confirmation numbers, you name it-- and of course I can subscribe to the same iCal feed on my iPhone, so my iPhone's calendar is up to date too. You can change the information if you'd like, so the trip that Tripit titles "Oakland, CA 2/11/2010" can be retitled "MacWorld Expo SF 2010." That's what I did.

Tripit has a "pro" account but the free one is great as it is. If you fly frequently this is a no-brainer. Go to tripit.com now and sign up. You will save yourself a lot of typing, over and over and over. I wouldn't do any of the stuff that asks you to upload your email address book-- that will just irritate your friends-- but that's not required anyway. Just do the minimal free stuff, and you will reap the benefits time after time.

If you can't figure out how to subscribe to your Tripit calendar let me know. I can help you.

Bonus: if you use the USA Today's free iPhone app called "AutoPilot" you can connect to your Tripit calendar information very easily. Give that a whirl too.

I wrote a couple of days ago about Photo Booth and how you can use it to record a movie and then email it. It's easy, and it's fun-- so easy, and so fun, that just about all of you recorded a movie and emailed it to me. That's the good news.

The bad news is that these files are a little on the large side. But, there's more good news: you can easily compress a movie to less than half its original size while retaining almost all of the quality. All you need is "iSquint," a free download available by clicking here.


When you start iSquint the first time you'll get a sales pitch to upgrade to another program. Just say no. You'll then get a window that looks like this:

The settings are important. When you Optimize for iPod you get a movie that fits an iPod's screen just perfectly (that is, it's 320 pixels wide by 240 pixels tall). When you Optimize for TV you get a movie that's 640 x 480. Tiny Quality gives the smallest file size, while "Go Nuts" Quality gives the largest file size. I like "Standard." I also like "H.264 Encoding." I could explain what H.264 means but Wikipedia's already done that, so click this link and read all about it. All you really need to know is that H.264 is a kind of compression, and it works great. There's nothing better.

iSquint is really easy to use. Just drag a movie file into the big box (the one under "Drag files below."). Then click "Start." Your original movie will be untouched; a compressed copy will be created and saved in the same location as the original. In my experiments, my movies compressed almost in half under "Standard" Quality and almost by a factor of 4 if I went "Tiny." Choosing "Optimize for iPod" gives another 4x compression since iPod screens are 1/4 the screen dimensions of a Photo Booth-generated movie. Note the "Add to iTunes" button-- that will put your movie into iTunes, handy if you want to eventually get it onto your iPod or iPhone.

You can email the compressed movie using the drag-it-to-the-Mail-icon method I wrote about here.

Be aware that compressing a movie results in some reduction in quality. Here, for example, are three versions of the same frame in a movie.



First is from the original movie, the second is from one compressed with "Standard" settings, and the third is from one compressed with "Tiny" settings. Look around the eyes and the hair-- the original is sharper and has more detail. (The sound is better too, though you can't tell by looking at the picture.) You will have to experiment to find settings that work for you. Keep in mind that the settings that work great for one movie may not be so great on the next one. It's a case-by-case thing. Luckily, all you have to do is move the slider and click "Start" to see another variation.

(Note: if you've recorded a movie in Photo Booth it will be easiest to drag the movie to the Desktop, and from there into iSquint. The compressed movie will be put on the Desktop when the compression process is complete.)

Looking forward to seeing your new, smaller movies.

Doing a little experimenting today-- thought it might be fun to make a video showing how to use Photo Booth.

Click where it says "Click to Play." You MIGHT have to click a little triangular button after that-- look around, it's worth it. And no, I don't know why you might have to click that button. I'll try to find out.

Ever use the "Help" menu in 10.3 or 10.4. or 10.5? If you have, you know it's the slowest thing ever. But, in 10.6 (Snow Leopard), it's fast. Really fast. So, now, it's useful. If you'd previously given up on getting help from the Help menu, and you're now on 10.6, give it another try. You'll like it.

It's time for the college football bowl games. Here's a handy iCal calendar with the entire schedule. It's updated to show you the most recent information (dates, times, TV network, and even the scores). Click the link, add it to your iCal calendar, remember to tell it to refresh (recommendation: daily), and you'll have the information at your fingertips. Or at least on your computer.

Thanks to DavidGagne.net for the calendar.

Google Maps is fantastic, better than Mapquest in my opinion. If you're not using it you are missing out on a terrific service, and of course you can't beat the price (it's free). Enter maps.google.com into your browser, type in any address, and presto, you're looking at a map of that location. You're only a click away from getting directions, and traffic, and more. It's super.

Even more super is being able to bring up the map without typing in the address. That's what you can do if you use Apple's Address Book (the brown one whose icon is shown at the top of this hint). Bring up a contact in Address Book and click next to the address. If it's a home address, click where it says "Home." If it's a work address, click on the word "Work." You can see part of the word "Work" in grey in the picture below. That's where I clicked.


Select "Map this Address" and you're taken to Google Maps, where the address you clicked on is displayed on a map. Like so:

Isn't that cool?

(By the way, if you're wondering why your menu doesn't show "Make Envelope" it's because you don't have my custom "Make Envelope" AppleScript installed on your machine. It turns out that Apple allows us to create our own menu items that do anything we want them to do, and I thought it would be handy to be able to create an envelope by clicking on an address. So I did the programming and now I have the "Make Envelope" option on all of my machines. If you have an idea for something you'd like to do with an address send me an email and we'll figure out how to do it.)

One of the things I like about iPhoto is it kicks in automatically when I connect my camera. One of the things I don't like about iPhoto is it kicks in automatically when I connect my iPhone for synching or charging (iPhoto kicks in because it thinks of the iPhone as a camera, and wants to import its pictures). You might be thinking "Go into iPhoto's preferences and tell it not to connect automatically, as shown below"--


... but if I do that, iPhoto will NEVER launch automatically, and I usually want it to-- just not when I connect my iPhone. I do want iPhoto to open when I connect my camera, but I don't want iPhoto to open when I connect my iPhone. I want it both ways-- but how can I do that?

The answer is "You use the Cameras preference pane, available via this link." And guess what: it's free.

(Note: if you're using 10.6 (Snow Leopard) you have something like Cameras built in. It's in the Image Capture program, inside the Applications folder. You don't improve things by having two programs trying to control your cameras, so if you're using 10.6, find the Image Capture program, make your adjustments there, and forget about installing Cameras. If you're using 10.4 or 10.5, Cameras is the way to go.)

When you install Cameras you get a new item in your System Preferences, in the "Other" section. At first, it's pretty empty in there, but as you connect cameras to your Mac you'll get messages like this one:

(The "No Name" camera is the camera card in my Olympus. I want iPhoto to open when I connect that camera.)

I get a similar box when I connect my iPhone the first time, but I make a different choice:

I could leave it at that, but there are some other options. If you open the Cameras preference pane in System Preferences you see your list of cameras and the instructions for each one, like so:


You can click in the "When Connected" column for more options:

So... if you want some other program to launch when you connect your camera, Cameras can take care of that too. (So can Image Capture.)

I used Cameras until I updated to 10.6, and it worked great. As of 10.6 I'm using Image Capture, and it's also working great. Thanks to these programs, the days of iPhoto launching itself when my iPhone connects for a sync are over, and while I'm not sure that I'm doing anything productive with the few minutes I'm saving each day it's nice to think that maybe I am. Give this tip a try and save some time for yourself.

Well looky here: another nifty improvement in the Date & Time preference pane, thanks to Snow Leopard! Finally, all of a sudden, and only in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, your Mac can show you the correct time for wherever you are-- automatically! Those of you who travel with a Mac laptop will appreciate this-- no more trips to the Date & Time preference panel to set the proper time zone. You do have to turn this feature on, so get in there and do it now!

I've been digging around in Snow Leopard, looking for something new, and I found something in the Date & Time preference panel. Finally, after years of waiting, we can display the day, the date, and the time in the menu bar, all at the same time! Until Snow Leopard, you got the day and the time, but not the date (not without clicking on the time). Now you get all three at once.

Here's what it looks like. No click required!


Maybe you're good at remembering the date. I'm not. I found myself heading to the menu bar to find out the date several times a day-- but not anymore! I will probably save myself hundreds of clicks per month. Not sure what I'll do with the clicks I'm going to save but it's nice to think about.

Anyhow, if you're on Snow Leopard, go to the Date & Time preference pane NOW and check the "Show Date" box as shown in the image below. A click saved is a click earned. Etc.
I know, I know: there are plenty of third-party ways to get the same effect. I think it's better that it's built-in, that's all. So check it out and save yourself some clicks.

Apple released the 10.6.2 Snow Leopard update and it fixes a whole lot of issues (click the link and start the download while you read). I had been waiting for this update before moving to Snow Leopard, and I'm glad I did. Apple had already put out the 10.6.1 update, but that didn't address the problems that early adopters of 10.6 had been reporting. For those problems, we'd have to wait for 10.6.2, and now it's here. Armed with the 10.6.2 update, I installed 10.6 on my original Intel iMac (the white one), and then the 10.6.2 update, and also the HP Printers update, and everything is great. Printing is fast again, the iMac starts up quickly, Mail's loading speed is especially improved, and overall the iMac is running better than it was in 10.5.8.

If you have an Intel Mac of any sort and you've been waiting to install 10.6, now is a good time. There is always the chance that something that you use will not be compatible with 10.6, but if you make a backup first (please) you'll be able to revert to 10.5. There's a good list of compatible/not compatible programs at Macintouch.com-- worth your time to check it out.

It is always better to download the "Combo Update" (linked above) rather than a simple Software Update. So do it that way if you can. In fact, if you already did the Software Update, download the 10.6.2 Combo update and run it.

Given the advantages of 10.6 over 10.5, and the super-low cost ($29), upgrading to Snow Leopard (10.6) is a smart move. The only question really was when to do it. With 10.6.2's fixes in hand, the time to upgrade is now.

If you don't have a Snow Leopard disc you can buy Snow Leopard from Amazon and save a few bucks. Single user is $25, five-user Family Pack is $43.99. They ship for free.

According to the Beatles, All You Need is Love. If I had been a Beatle I would have suggested All You Need is Command-L because Command-L does so many things for a Mac user.

First, this Quiz:
Question: how can you tell when someone's used a Mac for a long time?
Answer: because he calls that crazy cloverleaf/open apple key on either side of the space bar "the Command Key." You can call it anything you want, but technically it's a Sevärdhet, an ancient Viking symbol used today by Scandinavian road-sign makers to signify "point of interest." Apparently, you can be driving in Scandinavia and all of a sudden there's a big Command key on a post on the side of the road. Sounds like fun to me. Read all about it.

So, what can Command-L do for you? Well let's see...
In the Apple Address Book, Command-L toggles between the Editing view and the non-Editing view. Faster and easier than reaching for the mouse and clicking "Edit."

In Preview, Command-L rotates the document to the left.

&In Safari, and in Firefox, Command-L sends focus to the address bar (the place where you normally click to type "christianboyce.blogspot.com" or possibly some other site). It also highlights everything in the address, so all you have to do is start typing. This is going to save you a LOT of time. Next time you want to load up some new web page, do Command-L, type the address, and hit Return. Bingo.

(Note: you can save even more time by NOT typing "http://www." You can save a bit more by not typing ".com" or dot-whatever. So, when you want to go to "http://www.apple.com" you can simply do Command-L, then type "apple" and then Return. If that DOESN'T work for you it's all because of your internet service. Send me an email and I will help you fix that problem, for free if you tell me you saw it on The Boyce Blog.)

Know any other Command-L tips? Add them here by clicking the "Comments" button.

We're introducing something new today: Managed Service from Christian Boyce. In a nutshell, you get the same great service as always, but you get it sooner and it costs you less. Click this link to read all about it.

When you want to something on the web I'll bet you head for Google. It's so easy, so fast, so powerful-- and so free! I'm sure you use Google all the time, and you're probably completely satisfied. So was I, until I did a little extra poking around. Turns out we're using just a tiny bit of Google's powers. For example...

Want a weather update?. Just type "weather" into the Google search box and hit Return. You get up to the minute weather, and a couple of days of forecasts. You don't have to type in your city-- Google knows where you are. (If you want to know the weather somewhere else, type the city's name or zip code in too.)



Want to check a stock? Type the symbol into the search box and hit Return.



Wondering how many feet in a furlong? So was I, until I asked Google. Sort of nice to be able to ask my question in plain English.



I could go on and on-- there are all kinds of questions that Google can answer for you. Movie times, airplane flight information, sports scores, package tracking. And more. Luckily, Google's provided a page called "Explore Google Search," which you can access by clicking here. Have a look. I'm sure you'll learn something.

Note: I could have titled this "Google Stuff I Didn't Know (until a little while ago)."

Bonus Google Tip for Safari Users
Save the time and trouble of moving the mouse up to the Search box in Safari's Toolbar by pressing Command-Option-F. Try it a few times and you'll be hooked.

There's this thing called "The Stock Market" where people with extra money place bets on companies, and if things go right they cash out with more than they went in with. It's sort of like betting on the NFL, except it's legal in every state, and harder to handicap, and if you lose you can always wait around and hope that someday things will turn around and you'll end up winning. Anyway, Apple provides an app for Stocks on every iPhone, and this very day I "discovered" a couple of features I didn't know about.

Let's start with the basics: start up the app and you get this screen.


That's pretty simple: you can see, for example, that AAPL (Apple) went up $3.95 today, and GOOG (Google) went up $10.75 today-- a good day for both. But who had the better day, Apple or Google? Well, if you're My Mom the Math Major (MMMM), you can work the percentages out in your head, and you probably already have. For the rest of us, a simple tap on a green button (of course, they might be red-- that's when it's NOT a good day), and you see the day's gain as a percentage, like so:


It was a better day for Apple than for Google, but not by much. They basically rose with the rest of the market.

Tap a green (or red) button again, and you get this strange looking bit of info-- which turns out to be the "Market Capitalization" (or just "market cap"), the product of the share price times the number of outstanding shares. Wow, look at Apple go.


But that's not the half of it.

See that little chart across the bottom? I'm sure you've figured out that you can touch "1d" to show the day's ups and downs, "1w" to show the week's, etc. But did you know you could swipe left (or right) to get to other screens, with more info? Yup, you can. Try it and see. Here's what you get:


Swipe again, and you get a list of news article concerning the company. (In a nice touch, the three screens-- chart, info, and news-- go "all the way around" so you can keep swiping in one direction and come back around again to the beginning. Too bad this feature is missing on the iPhone's Home screens.)


Touch one of the stories and you're taken to the full story, in Safari. Here's an example:


This would have been enough for me to write about, but then I tried rotating the iPhone while in the Stocks app, producing this:


And THAT would have been enough for me, until for some reason I touched the chart, and then I touched it in two places, giving me THIS.


Amazing! Now it's easy to see the stock's performance: how much it went up, what that is as a percentage, and from when to when.

Try dragging your finger along the chart. It's fun, especially if you own Apple stock! Note: if you swipe left or right on this screen you will bring up the chart for your next stock.

Much of this is new since iPhone 3.0, but that's no excuse for only discovering it today! I guess I'll have to spend more time turning the iPhone sideways and touching and tapping everywhere as I search for hidden features I should have known by now.

(Did you learn something here? Click the Share button and tell a friend! Did you know all of this already? Send me an email and tell me.)

Part 2 of a continuing series, apparently.

Ever come across a word you don't know on a web page? Unless you're my Dad, I'm sure this has happened to you. Assuming that you're not my Dad, when you do find a word you don't know, do you stop what you're doing and reach for the dictionary? I'll bet not. Luckily for the rest of us (the ones who aren't my Dad), Safari offers a shortcut to look up the word using the Mac's dictionary. All you do is hold the Control key and click on the word. You don't even have to select the word first.

Here's what it looks like when you do:

Slide down to "Look Up in Dictionary" and presto, it's done. (The dictionary came with your Mac, by the way. It's been sitting around, probably unused until now, in your Applications folder.)

Those other options are fun too: Search in Spotlight finds the clicked word in documents on your Mac, Search with Google looks up the word (or, if you've selected more than one word, it searches for that phrase), Copy copies, and Speech says the word out loud (you have to slide over a bit more to make that happen). Here's how it looks when you slide down to Speech:


If you've programmed your mouse to have a "Secondary Click" you can use that instead of Control-clicking. Many mice are set up to use a right click, like on a PC, to display the contextual menu, so you might try it yourself. You can change the way the right click works by going to System Preferences and then Mouse. Otherwise, it's Control-click for you, a two-handed move but still a lot faster than reaching for the dictionary.

You probably spend a lot of time with Safari. Use these tips and you'll have more time for other things.

Tip #1: Send a web page link via email
You would not believe how many people ask me how to do this. My own mother asked how to do this tonight (sorry, Mom-- I should have shown you this a long time ago!). Here's how simple it is:

1. Go to the web page in question
2. Choose File/Mail Link to This Page

That's it! Your Mac will create an email with the web page's address already in it. All you do is address it and click the Send button. Since you will probably already be on the desired web page this tip boils down to a single step. Can't get simpler-- or faster-- than that.

Tip #2: Open another window
Believe it or not: you can have multiple windows open in Safari. You can have as many as you'd like, and they can all be showing different sites. This can be very efficient, saving you the time you might spend clicking the "Previous" and "Next" buttons and waiting for pages to load.

One way to make a new Safari window: choose "New Window" from the File menu (shortcut: Command-N). Another way to do it: hold the Command key down while you click a link in a web page (super handy when you're clicking links from a Google search). If you don't get a new window, it's because you got a new tab, same idea with less clutter. You can adjust this in Safari's Preferences, under "Tabs." Try checking and unchecking that top checkbox-- its effect will be listed in the dialog box.

Tip #3: Reduce the time you spend typing web addresses
The odds are that you spend too much time typing each web address into Safari. Here are a couple of ways to reduce the amount of typing that you do, saving you GOBS of time.

1. Set your home page to something you like. There's no point in having landing on Apple's website every time you launch Safari if all you're going to do is go somewhere else right away. Pick a site you go to a lot and set it as your home page (Safari/Preferences.../General/Set to Current Page).
2. Don't click at the end of the current URL and then carefully delete all the way back to "http://www." That takes too long. Instead, click on the "favicon" (the little picture just before the "http"), selecting the entire URL-- and then type right over it (no need to hit Delete).
   
   
   And, when you type, don't bother typing "http://www" and don't bother typing ".com". Safari will put those in for you. In many cases, you can simply type something like "amazon" or "dealnews" or "christianboyce", then hit Return on the keyboard, and you'll go straight to that site. (If that doesn't work, as it won't for most Verizon internet subscribers, add the ".com" (or the ".org" or whatever) before hitting Return.

(These tips are for Safari 4-- if you don't have it, go get it, for free, using this link.)

You really ought to have a dictionary on your iPhone. You can get this one-- Dictionary.com-- for free, and it's terrific, so what are you waiting for? Click this link and start the download. It's big (35 megabytes, not that it will make much of a dent in your 8 or 16 or 32 gigabyte iPhone), so do it from your computer and sync it into the iPhone. May as well start the download while you read the rest of this review.

(With a name like "Dictionary.com" you might guess that you'd need an internet connection to use this program. Good guess, but wrong. Only the Word of the Day and the audio pronunciations require an internet connection. FYI.)

You know how people are always saying that you can't get something for nothing? Next time they tell you that show them Dictionary.com on your iPhone. Look at what you get for nothing:

• 275,000 word dictionary
• 80,000 word thesaurus
• Audio pronunciation
• Word of the day
• Handy list of recently looked-up words

Seems like a lot to me.

Let's look at some pictures. Here's how the program looks when you start it up: very simple and clean. The buttons across the bottom are easy to figure out, and obviously the big box at the top is where you type the word you're looking for.


To look up a word, touch either the Dictionary or Thesaurus button, and then enter your word. A list of matching words appears as you type. Here's what it looked like as I typed the first bit of "recession":


This "live search" is a real time-saver as it means you don't have to completely type out a word. Type just enough for Dictionary.com to display it in the list (which scrolls) and then touch it. It's faster to touch a word in a list than to type it all the way out, especially for the kinds of words you're likely to be looking up in a dictionary.

Here's how it looks after I touched "recession" in the list. The speaker icon does what you think it does: it says the word out loud. Very handy, and a nice use of the technology.


Here's something nice: when you touch the Thesaurus button, it remembers the word you were looking up in the dictionary. So you don't have to type it again. A small thing, but it could have been overlooked. Way to go, Dictionary.com!


Gee, look at all of those ways to say "recession" without actually saying it. Good to know that there are so many other ways to describe our current economic situation. I like "big trouble" the most.

Touch the Recent button and you see a list of the words you've looked up recently, and how. The blue circles with white chevrons were looked up in the dictionary. The yellow circles with the white chevrons were looked up in the thesaurus. The blue circle with the white "w" means "Word of the Day" (see below). Touch any of the words and of course you will look them up again. Touch the symbols in the circles to "do that" again. Easy and obvious.


Finally, here's what happens when you touch the Word of the Day button. Actually, it's only what happens on October 21st, 2009. Your word is going to be different because you're going to be touching the button on a different day. I'm sure you get the idea.


And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Dictionary.com iPhone app. Simple, easy to use, handy, and free-- without ads, other than the entire app being an ad for the very useful www.dictionary.com website. Your download should be finished by now, so plug in that iPhone and sync.

Power Support Anti-Glare Film is the best $14.95 you can spend on your iPhone. It does a great job of cutting glare, it protects your iPhone's screen, it cuts down on fingerprints, and it feels great as you tap and drag. You ought to get some. They come two to a package so find a friend and split the cost. Here's an Amazon link to the Power Support Anti-Glare Film Set for iPhone 3G/3GS, and here's a link to the Power Support Anti-Glare Film Set for the original iPhone. Get the right one: the sizes are just slightly different.

I wrote about Power Support's anti-glare film in August of 2008, when I was using it on my original iPhone, and I loved it then. When the iPhone 3GS came out I thought I'd give the 3GS' new "oleophobic" screen a try without using the film, with bad news/good news results. The bad news was the iPhone 3GS' screen picked up fingerprints like crazy. The good news was they were easy to wipe off, on (for example) a pants leg. The other bad news was the glare on the screen was distracting, and the other other bad news was the screen wasn't protected from scratching. All that, and it didn't feel nice to drag my finger across it.

Today, after being every-so-slightly irritated with glare and smudges every time I used my 3GS, I finally applied the Power Support Anti-Glare Film. It's fabulous, better than I remembered, and I am kicking myself for not doing this sooner. No glare, smudges are a thing of the past, it feels great under my finger, and there's at least some protection against a scratched screen. Worth the $14.95, and more.

Apple released updated iPhone software, version 3.1.2, this very afternoon. The previous version was 3.1 and no I don't know what happened to 3.1.1. This update takes a lot less time than the 3.1 version and it is supposed to help the iPhone to wake up from sleep more reliably, to connect to the AT&T cellular network more reliably, and to show video without crashing more reliably. I never saw any of those problems but I guess someone did, and the new software is here to fix it.

Assuming you want the update, which is free, all you do is connect your iPhone to your computer with the USB cable, wait for iTunes to launch, click on your iPhone in the left-hand side of iTunes, and then "Check for Update." It's a big button-- you can't miss it-- and it looks like this:



Click it, follow the directions, and you're all set. You will be asked at the end whether you want to update your carrier settings, and you do.

The whole process took about half an hour for me, and my iPhone seems to work at least as well with this update as it did without, so I say go ahead and do it.

Don't you hate it when you're trying to read a story on a web page, and everything else on that page is trying to distract you? "Click here!" they say. "No, here!" "And here!" It's enough to drive you bonkers.

Here's an example, taken from tonight's USAToday.com. More than half of the page is a distraction.


It would be nice if there was a way to hide everything that wasn't the story. Turns out there's a way, and it's called "Readability." And it's free.

Here's that same USAToday.com page, after the Readability treatment:

Quite a bit nicer. And all it took was a click.

There's some one-time setting up to do, but it's only a couple of steps, and from then on it takes just a click to magically transform a messy web page into a readable form. You don't have to go through the setup for every site-- you do it once and then it just works, for any site. Setup takes only a couple of minutes, and here's how you do it.

First, go to the Readability page on the Arc90 website. Here's what it looks like.

Once there, follow the two-step instructions. You'll end up with a customized "bookmarklet" on your web browser's bookmarks bar (it will look like a regular bookmark). Now you're ready to modify a web page.

Just for fun, let's test with the same site I showed above (click the link). That brings up the cluttered, distracting page. Now click your "Readability" bookmarklet, on the bookmarks bar. Presto, change-o! The site changes to the "readable" version. Pretty darned neat.

Most of the time it works like magic. Sometimes it doesn't, and I guess that's why Arc90 calls Readability "an experiment." When it doesn't work, or when you just want to go back to the way things were before the Readability treatment, you can click a button at the top left of the converted page to reload the original page. There's no harm in trying as you're only converting your own local copy of the page, so why not give it a whirl? I use Readability all the time and once you try it I think you'll like it.

(above: international "eject" symbol, at the top right of a keyboard near you)

One of these days a CD or a DVD is going to get stuck inside your Mac. That's a total drag, but it's easy enough to get it out. Try these moves before you bring it to the Apple Store:

1. Press the Eject key and keep it down a little longer than usual. No?
2. Restart your Mac, and right after you hear the chimes hold down the mouse button. No mouse button? Hold the clicker on the trackpad. No clicker, because you have some new-fangled multi-touch trackpad? Press and hold where you would normally press for a click. Keep it pressed until the disk comes out.
3. Restart your Mac, and right after you hear the chimes hold down the Eject key until the disk comes out.

If the disk is still stuck send me an email and we'll figure out what to do next.

MMS: noun. Abbreviation for Multimedia Messaging Service, an enhancement to the SMS (Short Messaging Service). In English: with MMS, you can still "text" someone, but now you can send a picture, or a video, or a sound.

This feature was part of Apple's 3.0 upgrade a few months ago, and lots of people have been using it ever since-- except not in the United States, where AT&T couldn't get its network ready in time. AT&T is ready now, and you can start using MMS today. Unless you're using an original iPhone, in which case you can't. Sorry about that. Those are AT&T's rules.

Here's what you need to do.

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac with a cable. iTunes should start automatically. (If it doesn't, launch iTunes yourself)
2. Click on your iPhone in the left-hand pane of iTunes.
3. Look for an "Update" button. Click it.
4. You will probably see a window like this one:

Click Update Settings, turn off your iPhone, turn it back on, and you're ready to go. (The turning off and turning on is very important.)

After the restart, start the Messaging app, as if you were going to text someone. You'll see a camera icon next to where you type-- that's new. If you touch it you'll get a chance to use the camera to take a photo or video, or to choose an existing photo (or video). You get to write a note to go with it, and then you can send it. Yay.

Too bad that it doesn't always work the way you want it to. What you're expecting, I imagine, is that the person on the other end gets your message, complete with photo or video. A lot of the time that's exactly how it will work. Sometimes, though, it won't. The reason: the person on the other end doesn't have a new enough phone. How are you supposed to know what kind of phone the other person has? Beats me. Luckily it doesn't really matter because you can always use your iPhone to send pictures via email, just as you've been doing all along. But, if you know the other person has a modern phone, MMS can be sort of handy. And fun.

No matter how careful you are about putting stuff into your calendar you still have to look at it to see where you're supposed to be. I had the same problem, but not anymore, because I figured out how to have my Mac read my appointments to me out loud, every day, on a timer. It's very cool, and since it's scheduled to run every morning at 7:30 AM, I think it's going to help me out quite a bit. Especially on weekends, when I tend to forget to check the calendar.

I was hoping to do this with an Automator Workflow, and if not for an iCal bug Automator would have been the way to go. I worked pretty hard at making it work with Automator but eventually realized that the reason it didn't work was something I couldn't work around. So I turned to AppleScript.

Here's the script. The gray parts are comments, put there to help you understand what's going on. Note: the script gets you part of the way there. You still need something to trigger the script at the appropriate time. Lots of programs can do that for you. I chose Script Timer, a nice little $12 program that I just found out about. Here's the link. You can get a free 30-day trial.


set the_text to ""
set today to current date
set time of today to 0
set tomorrow to (today) + 86400 -- seconds
--
-- Here are the calendars I want to check. Yours will be different. Change the following line to match the names of your calendars.
-- If you are going to check ALL of your calendars this script could be simplified. Send me an email and I'll help you.
-- Christian Boyce, macman@christianboyce.com
set the_calendar_list to {"CB & A", "usc football 2009", "Cal Football 2009", "Texas Football 2009", "UCLA Football 2009", "Birthdays"}
--
tell application "iCal"
-- First we need to tell iCal which calendars are going to be checked. We match the names in "the_calendar_list" to the names of the actual calendars in iCal. The ones that match are added to our "the_calendars" list.
--
set the_calendars to {}
set every_calendar to every calendar
-- Now we have a list of calendars to check.
repeat with an_item in the_calendar_list
set end of the_calendars to (first calendar whose name is an_item)
end repeat
-- Now we check, on a calendar by calendar basis, for appointments on the current day.
repeat with a_calendar in the_calendars
tell a_calendar
set the_events to (every event whose start date > today and start date <</span> tomorrow)
--
-- Here we sort the list of events for the day. If we don't do this they won't be chronolical. iCal sorts them in creation order unless we run this little "sortEvents" routine.
--
set the_events to my sortEvents(the_events)
-- Now we have a sorted list. Let's create a string for the Mac to speak. Loop through the events and make that string.
set i to 1
repeat with an_event in the_events
set x to properties of an_event
set the_summary to summary of an_event
set the_start_date to start date of an_event
set the_end_date to end date of an_event
set the_start_time to time string of the_start_date
set the_end_time to time string of the_end_date
--
set the_text to the_text & return & "Appointment number" & i & "." & return & the_start_time & " to " & the_end_time & "." & return & summary of an_event & return & return
set i to i + 1
end repeat
end tell
end repeat
--
-- If there aren't any events the string "the_text" will be empty. In that case we want to say something different.
if the_text is "" then
set the_text to "Good morning." & return & "Today is " & date string of (current date) & return & return & "Unfortunately, you have no appointments today."
else
set the_text to "Good morning." & return & "Today is " & date string of (current date) & return & return & "Here are today's appointments." & return & return & the_text & return & "That was the last appointment for today."
end if
end tell
--
-- This is neat: I want to set the volume loud enough for me to hear it, and then set the volume back to where it was before I adjusted it.
set old_volume to output volume of (get volume settings)
set volume output volume 60
say the_text using "Alex"
set volume output volume (old_volume)
--
-- This is the sorting subroutine. I found it on MacScripter.net.
on findLeastItem(lst)
tell application "iCal"
set theLeast to start date of item 1 of lst
set theIndex to 1
set iterater to 1
repeat with i in lst
if start date of i ≤ theLeast then
set theLeast to start date of i
set theIndex to iterater
end if
set iterater to iterater + 1
end repeat

return theIndex
end tell
end findLeastItem

on removeItemAtIndex(lst, theIndex)
set newList to {}
set theLength to length of lst
if theLength = 1 then
set newList to {}
else if theLength = theIndex then
set newList to items 1 thru (theLength - 1) of lst
else if theIndex = 1 then
set newList to items 2 thru theLength of lst
else
set newList to items 1 thru (theIndex - 1) of lst & items (theIndex + 1) thru (theLength) of lst
end if
return newList
end removeItemAtIndex

on sortEvents(myList)
set myNewList to {}
repeat until length of myList = 0
set leastIndex to findLeastItem(myList)
set end of myNewList to item leastIndex of myList
set myList to removeItemAtIndex(myList, leastIndex)
end repeat
return myNewList
end sortEvents

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

If you need it, you need it. Buy it from Amazon and you'll pay $119.99. That's thirty bucks off the price you pay at the Apple Store, and since you don't pay tax with Amazon you save even more: $44.580125, to be exact. Yes, you'll have to wait to get it delivered, but there's no shipping charge, and who has an extra $44.580125 these days? Another ten bucks and you'll have enough to get a copy of iWork '09 too.

Use the link above to go straight to it.

Note: using the Amazon links on this page, including the search box at the left, results in Amazon crediting a referral fee to the Boyce Blog, at no cost to you. As long as you're going to buy from Amazon anyway you may as well enjoy knowing that you're helping out your local Mac man.

Your local Mac man appreciates your support.

Apple's new iTunes 9 has a couple of nice new features. One of the nicest is called "Genius Mixes." Previous versions of iTunes has Genius Playlists, which I knew about but never used because it didn't seem all that groovy, but Genius Mixes are exclusive to iTunes 9-- and they are very groovy.

Before we learn about Genius Mixes, let's review Genius Playlists so we have something to compare to.

Genius Playlists
Millions of people use iTunes. Apple figures that, on average, people know how to group songs into collections (playlists) that sound good together. Apple lets iTunes users send information about the songs and playlists on their machines to Apple's servers, and by now, a lot of people have done it. Thus, Apple has a pretty robust set of data from which to draw conclusions about which songs go together and which songs don't. Apple will generate a list of songs that go together for you, based on any single song you choose, and that's a Genius Playlist. The default is a 25-song list (pulling from songs you already own) but Genius Playlists can be up to 100 songs long.

Obviously, you're going to get different Genius Playlists when you choose different songs as starting points. Choosing the "proper" song to use as a starting point becomes a Very Important Thing.

Genius Mixes
Conceptually, a Genius Mix is a lot like a Genius Playlist, except there's no 100-song limit (in fact, there's no limit at all), and there's no need to choose a song to base the playlist on, because Apple analyzes ALL of your songs, then groups them into "mixes" that somehow work together. Play a Genius Mix and the music plays forever, something like your own custom radio station. It's a neat way to rediscover your music, and since it's free, you may as well try.

There is no telling how your music will be "mixed" but Apple made four Genius Mixes out of mine: two Country-Western, one Classical, and one R&B. The more music you have the more mixes they'll make, so don't be surprised if you end up with more than four.

Enough talk. Let's make it happen. Remember that Genius Mixes are an iTunes 9 feature: if you need iTunes 9, here's a link to where you can get it.

Start up iTunes and choose "Turn on Genius" from the Store menu. (If "Turn on Genius" isn't there, it's already turned on. Skip down to Step Two.) You'll get a window asking you (again) to turn on Genius, which you do by clicking a button, signing in to your iTunes Store account, agreeing to Apple's terms, and finally clicking "Continue."

Step Two: wait just a few moments as Apple analyzes your music, then click on one of the mixes. Here's an example (one of mine).

The Mix will begin to play as soon as you click it. You won't see a list of the songs in the Mix so don't bother looking. Just sit back, relax, and listen.

I didn't think the Genius Mix would be all that interesting but I have changed my mind. Now I find myself turning to the Genius Mix rather than any of the playlists that I created by hand. It might turn out the same way for you. Give it a whirl and see.

Hey, photographers: National Geographic wants YOU. Rather, they want your pictures. Only if they're good though. Every day they publish "The Daily Dozen" online, twelve photos submitted by regular people. Maybe even you. Some of the photos selected for the Daily Dozen will also be published in National Geographic's print edition. Here's the link to get started. Read the fine print, especially if you're interested in getting paid, because they'll not be paying at all, not ever.

You really should check it out. Here's the Daily Dozen from September 16th, 2009.



You can do it. Let me know if you do.

It’s really handy to have the schedules of your favorite teams on your Mac and iPhone. But, it’s no fun at all to have to type it all in. Luckily for us, someone else has already done it, and all you have to do is know where to click.

Let’s say you want the UCLA Bruin football schedule on your Mac and iPhone. Click this link (using your Mac-- we’ll take care of your iPhone soon enough), and you get a dialog box that looks like this:



Click "Subscribe" and you're halfway there. You'll see another box:


Change the name if you'd like (usually you'll want to shorten it), change the color if you'd like (I like to match the team color, so purple is wrong in this case), and finally change that "Auto-refresh" to "Every Day." If you do that, you'll be up to date if the game time is changed, and you'll be able to click on past games in your calendar to see the scores. Fun.

If you want to get calendars for other football teams, the URL is here:

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/teams

Go to that page, choose your team, then look for the "Scores & Schedules" link. Click that, and (finally) look for the "iCal" link in the "Add Schedule" section near the top.

Note: if you do the work on your Mac you'll actually take care of your iPhone too (that is, the calendars will just show up), assuming you sync your iPhone with your Mac. You probably do. If it's not automatic, you need to get the 3.1 iPhone update. Send me a note if you don't know how to do that.

If you ignore my advice to "do it on the Mac" and instead you start with the iPhone, you'll get the calendars on the iPhone... but they will not automatically show up on the Mac. Start with the Mac. I wouldn't tell you if it wasn't for your own good.

You learned way back in July of 2008 that pressing the spacebar in Safari will scroll the window down. You also learned that holding the shift key and pressing the spacebar in Safari will scroll the window up. I just figured out that the same moves work in Apple’s Mail program. Press the spacebar to scroll down, hold the shift key and press the spacebar to scroll up. Incredible. What a time-saver.

Bonus: if you’re reading an email and you’re scrolling along with the space bar, and then you come to the end of the message so there’s nothing left to scroll, and then you press the spacebar again, the Mail program will jump to the next message. This works perfectly when your mail is sorted with the new stuff at the BOTTOM. It works in reverse if the new stuff is at the top. Try it and see.

Thanks to Dave for the bonus hint.

I mentioned in a previous post that installed 10.6 “Snow Leopard” on my MacBook, didn’t like it, and “rolled back” to 10.5.8. Rolling back meant using Time Machine, and I’m here to sing its praises and to talk you into using it.

What’s Time Machine?
Time Machine is backup software provided as part of Mac OS X 10.5 (and 10.6). It backs up EVERYTHING on your hard disk(s). All you need is a place to put it. Typically that’s an external hard drive, this one from Amazon. (This is a very nice drive: pre-formatted for the Mac, saving you the trouble of reformatting). All you do is connect the drive. The Mac will detect the drive, ask you if you want to use it for your Time Machine backup, and you say “yes.” That’s it.

You can read Apple’s official Time Machine write-up here.

How do I use it?
For backing up, you do nothing. Everything is automatic. Your entire hard drive will be backed up when you first connect the drive, and from then on Time Machine backs up everything that’s changed in the last hour. If it hasn’t changed, Time Machine doesn’t back it up. That saves space.

Obviously this can’t go on forever, because you’d run out of space on the backup drive. So, Apple stores 24 hourly backups, a month’s worth of daily backups, and weekly backups after that. When you are close to running out of space Time Machine lets you know.

How do I get stuff back?
So, now you want to retrieve an accidentally deleted file. Or your QuickBooks file’s gone bad and you know it worked yesterday, so you want to get that one back. All you do is start up the Time Machine application (in your Mac’s Applications folder), and from there get overwhelmed, and from there call me. I can show you how to get your files back from my command post at Boyce Labs. After you’ve done it once it’s a snap. Regardless of whether you need my help or not, be assured that your stuff is there, backed up.

How do I completely restore my Mac, such as going back to 10.5 after installing 10.6?
Excellent question. First, you start from a DVD such as the 10.6 installer. Then, you look for a menu titled “Utilities.” Then, you choose “Restore System from Backup.” After that, you choose your backup disk (that’s easy-- there is probably only one). You then get to choose which edition to back up from. All of your backups are listed, along with the dates and the operating system version. That makes it easy. In my case, I chose the latest 10.5.8 backup, and was off to the races. It was a slow race (3 hours plus) but in the end, I was back on 10.5.8.

Is that all there is to it?
Ah, no. Not quite. I noticed a few little odd things on my restored 10.5.8 machine. First, after restoring, Mail acted as if it was launching for the first time, doing the same import steps that it did when I went from 10.4 to 10.5. Second, my Address Book and iCal and Bookmark synching via Mobile Me needed to be reset. That wasn’t a big deal for me but might throw a beginner off.

The Stirring Conclusion
Get an external disk. Set up Time Machine. There’s no easier way to back up and when you need it, Time Machine will save the day.

I’ll bet you’ve seen a dialog box like this before:


Or maybe like this one:


Or this one:


You probably already know the keyboard shortcut that lets you click the Save button without using the mouse: you hit Enter, or Return. That’s great, when you want it. But what about the rest of the time? What about when you really don’t care about the document, and you DON’T want to save the changes? How can you click the Don’t Save button from the keyboard?


The answer, in almost every case, is Command-D. Memorize this one (D for Don’t is the way I remember it) and you’ll reach for the mouse a little less. That will save you a little bit of time over and over and over. Try it and see.

Every Mac has a Dock, and every Dock has things in it, and just about everyone clicks on things in the Dock to launch various programs. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all... but you can do more with the Dock than just click on things. For example:

Let’s say you have something on your desktop (or in a folder) and you want to send that thing as an email attachment. The typical routine is something like this (and let’s keep track of the clicks):

1. Launch your email program (Apple Mail or Entourage, probably) or switch to it. That’s one click.
2. Make a new email message. That could be one click, or a trip to the menu bar.
3. Click the Attachment button. We’re up to three clicks.
4. Hunt around in the box that comes up and try to find the thing you want to attach. This could take a lot of clicks.
5. Optional step 5: fail to find the thing you want to attach and give up.

Even if you do find your item and attach it there’s a lot of work involved. At least four clicks, and no guarantee of success. Better to do it in ONE STEP. Check it out:

Here’s a nice picture of a duck. I want to send it as an attachment.



All I have to do is drag it to the Mail icon. Mail will create a new email message with the duck as an attachment. One step, simple as that.

Here’s the result.

One step, and I’m ready to address and send my email-with-an-attachment. Easy as pie. Try it!

That there’s a one-step drag-and-drop method should not be a complete surprise to you. The Macintosh is full of nice touches and there is almost always an easier and faster way to do things. Dragging and dropping will come into play over and over as you use your Mac, and since dragging and dropping is a one-click effort, it will always be the easiest way to do things (measuring by number of clicks).

I wrote about the Dock (“Hickory Dickory Dock”) in July of last year. It was a decent little article and the stuff I wrote then is still helpful today. Lately, though, I’ve noticed that a lot of Mac users are unaware of some of the Dock’s finer points. Here, then, is More About the Dock (part 1).

Here’s a very plain and sparsely populated Dock. Just a few items in it. No one’s Dock looks this empty, but it’s going to make our examples neater and cleaner.


Let’s review: the items in the Dock in the first picture are there because someone (either you or Apple) put them there. They are permanently there (well, permanently until you drag them out of the Dock, on purpose or by accident). Other items appear in the Dock temporarily, just to the left of the dashed line in the Dock (or, if your Dock is vertical, just above the dashed line), whenever you launch them-- only to disappear when you quit.



Here we have the same Dock as in the first picture, with the addition of iChat. iChat is there because I went to the Applications folder and double-clicked on iChat. The iChat icon will remain in the Dock until I quit iChat-- and then it will disappear, leaving the Dock looking like the first picture again. And that means I’ll have to go to the Applications folder and double-click iChat the next time (and every time) I want to use it. Sort of a drag.

Speaking of drags, of course I could drag iChat to the Dock to permanently install it there. But that would mean planning ahead. The following method lets you install something into the Dock “on the fly,” when you happen to notice that there’s something in the Dock that would be a handy item to have in the Dock all the time. And, it’s as easy as clicking and holding on the icon in question.

Here, I’ve clicked and held (that’s important) on the iChat icon. Look at the little menu that pops up. All you have to do is read. Easy. For example:

if you want to keep that item in the Dock, slide up to “Keep in Dock” (see below).


If you want the program to run automatically at login (which, for most of us, means “after a restart”) all you have to do is choose “Open at Login.” Easy as pie. See below.


Two more handy menu items are “Show in Finder” and “Quit.” Both do exactly what you’d expect. You should try them and see.

Of course this works with any program, not just iChat. I mention it for those who are reading this late at night.

Watch this space (or the space right above it) for More About the Dock (part 2), coming soon.

Safari’s a nice browser but you can make it nicer by customizing the toolbar. What you learn in this blog post will help you in other programs (Mail, the Finder, Pages, Keynote, and many more) so you’re getting a lot for your money here.

This is Safari’s toolbar, right out of the box. (This is Safari 4 but it’s similar in version 3.) Click the toolbar below for a larger version.


Pretty basic. You get “back,” “forward,” and “Add to Bookmarks.” Ho hum.

But... if you choose “Customize Toolbar...” from Safari’s View menu, you get this (click the picture for a larger version):

Wowee, choices galore! Do what they tell you: drag buttons up and into the toolbar. If you change your mind, drag them off the toolbar. Arrange them any which way you like. It’s your toolbar: do what you want to it.


Here’s what I did to mine. Check out these buttons, working from left to right (and click the picture for a larger version):


Back one page
Forward one page

Smaller text and pictures (Safari 4-- in version 3, it’s just smaller text)
Larger text and pictures (see above)

Auto-fill (fills in web page forms with the information on your card in your Address Book)

1Password (not free, but really cool. Read about it further down in the blog)

Print

Home (takes you back to the page Safari starts with)

Top Sites (drag the little picture to the left of “http”-- in this case, the Apple logo-- to the Top Sites icon to add it to Top Sites, and click on Top Sites to see what your Top Sites are.

Add to Bookmarks

Customizing the toolbar is fun, and you can’t break it. If you really mess up and want to start over just drag the standard set back up to the toolbar.

Apple’s Mail program (and Keynote, and the Finder, and Pages, etc.) work the same way. You know everything you need now to customize toolbars there too. Try it and let me know how it goes.

Having your entire address book with you, always up to date, is mighty handy. Being able to search your address book is also mighty handy as it keeps you from scrolling through hundred of iPhone screens to get to the name you want. The problem is, sometimes you find yourself way down deep in your address book, alphabetically speaking, and the search box is way up at the top. Scrolling to the top of the list a screen at a time will drive you nuts. Today’s tip won’t keep you from going bonkers but if that does end up happening it won’t be because you can’t get to the search box quickly. Read on.

Here’s where you want to be: at the search screen.



But here’s where you are: down in the P section of your contacts.



How to get from where you are to where you want to be? Well, some would tell you to touch that tiny little magnifying glass at the top right of the screen, just above the “A” in the A-Z list. Good luck doing that-- you will probably hit the “+” instead, adding a new contact when you don’t want one.

The answer, it turns out, is to touch the time. That’s right, just touch the time (at the top center of the screen). Do that and you’re instantly brought to the top of your address list. Bonus: it shows you your phone number too. The magnifying glass doesn’t do that. And sometimes you need a little help remembering your own phone number. Depends on how much sleep you got.

Here’s what it looks like.



Touch where it says “Search” and you’re on your way to filtering down the list to whatever it is you type.

Note: the search is dynamic: the more you type, the fewer names show up, and it happens letter by letter. You don’t hit “Return” or “Enter” or anything like that-- different from searching in Google, for example.

Note #2: The search looks at first name, last name, and company. It does not search notes and it does not search email addresses. That’s the way it goes.

Note #3 (added after someone pointed this out to me): you won’t see your phone number above the search box if you start in the Contacts app. I never use that app, choosing instead to click the Contacts button at the bottom center of the Phone app. If you do it that way (starting in the Phone app, and then touch contacts at the bottom center-- as shown in the picture above), you do get to see your own phone number.

You’re probably wondering what makes this the iPhone Tip of the Year. It’s nice and all, but Tip of the Year? YES-- because this “touch the time” thing works in EVERY program that scrolls vertically. Safari is one (touch the time and you’re right back at the top of the page, with the Google search box at the right as a bonus). Mail is another (touch the time and you’re at the top of the page, with a search box for searching your mail!). The iPod app works that way too (and also gives you a search box). So does iTunes. I am sure there are others, as this feature is part of the iPhone’s operating system, a built-in function just waiting for iPhone apps to call it.

If you find another app where the touch-the-time method works, let me know and I’ll post it here.

iPhone pictures often look shaky. People blame the iPhone, and get used to lousy results. That’s a drag, because the iPhone can take really good pictures. Here are some very nice pictures that were taken with an iPhone. Here’s another iPhone photo gallery.

Turns out that shaky pictures aren’t caused by the iPhone. Shaky pictures are caused by you. That’s because the iPhone takes a picture when you let go of the button, not when you touch it-- the opposite of what you’d expect. So, as you stab quickly at the shutter button, trying to take the picture at just the right moment, you’re knocking the iPhone around and you’re probably not even paying attention to what you’re doing when you take your finger off the button-- and, as you now know, that’s the moment of truth.

Since the picture’s going to be taken when you let go of the button, the trick is to already be holding the button while you wait for the perfect moment to take the picture. Press and hold the iPhone’s camera shutter button as you compose the shot, and then, gently and controlled, let go. Click! Result: a very nice, no-shake picture. Try it. It will work for you.

Note: even if you’re not gentle and not controlled, it’s hard to shake the iPhone by taking your finger OFF of the button. You probably won’t shake it no matter how hard you try. I’m telling you, as soon as you try this method you’ll take better pictures, so try it right now!

You’re probably thinking “what a waste of time-- what’s so hard about charging an iPhone? Just plug it into the wall, right? Right?”

Wrong. Well, technically “right”, except my way is even more right. And my way is “plug it into the computer.” Here’s why.

Plugging into the wall charges the iPhone. That’s all it does. Plugging into the computer will also charge the iPhone, but does more:

1. It creates a backup, automatically, of everything on the iPhone. If you lose the iPhone, or it breaks, you can connect the new one to your computer and load your old data. This leads to This Important Tip: connect your iPhone to your computer every day.
2. It allows you to synchronize contacts and calendars without using Apple’s $99 MobileMe service for through-the-air synching.
3. It allows you to bring in music and videos and iPhone apps, through iTunes and the iTunes Store.

You already have the right cable-- just pull it out of the AC adapter and plug it into the computer.

Note: if you have multiple computers you will have to decide which one to use for the charging. Pick one and keep using it. It’s possible to set things up so you can sync and backup from one computer, and charge from multiple others-- tell me you want to know how and I’ll send you a note.

Naturally it is OK with me if you get an adapter to let you charge the iPhone in the car. In fact, I think that’s a great idea. Just be sure that you buy an adapter made specifically for the iPhone. If you get one that was made for an iPod you’ll be able to connect it just fine... but it will drain, rather than charge, your iPhone.

They don’t give you much of a manual when you buy an iPhone, and that’s too bad because there are lots and lots of cool features that aren’t obvious right off the bat. The Maps app is a case in point. Here, then, are some hints for using the Maps app. Try ‘em.

Tip #1: Use the Current Location button.
See where the red arrow’s pointing? That’s the “Current Location” button. Touch it, and assuming you have either cell phone or WiFi coverage (or both), you’ll see a map with your location indicated by a blue pin and a blue circle. Knowing where you are is a huge advantage, even if you end up calling someone to get directions rather than do it all yourself. Note: the Current Location button is happy to oblige at 10:02 PM, and even later.



Tip #2: Use the Search feature.
You can see my location indicated by that blue pin and the blue circle. (A small circle indicates good accuracy. A large circle indicates bad accuracy.)

This is Google Maps, friends, so you can search for anything. I think I’ll look for a nearby place to get coffee, but you could search for ATMs, books, hamburgers, gas stations, whatever. Start by tapping where the red arrow points.



As soon as you touch the Search field a little keyboard shows up. Type what you want, then tap the big blue Search button.




Looky what I found-- some coffee places, indicated with red pins on the map. Super. The nearest one has a little label showing you what it is. You can click on the other red pins to find out what they are too. This leads us to our next tip, which is...

Tip #3: Touch the white chevron in the blue circle (highlighted here in red, though it won’t be on your iPhone). This will lead to more info.



Here’s what you get-- phone number, home page, address, and some handy buttons for getting directions. Usually, the one you want is “Directions To Here.” For now, let’s just go back by tapping the “Map” button at top left.



You may have noticed another little button at the left side of the pin’s label. That indicates “Street View,” the amazing photographic representation of the place. Touch it (circled in red here).



When you touch that button you get Street View, which in this case looks like so:



(Yes, it’s sideways. Street View is always sideways. Just rotate the iPhone.)

Tip #4: drag around on the photo in Street View to show the other side of the street. Or, when you’re viewing down a street, tap the big arrows in the street to “drive” in that direction. Street View is sort of a gimmick, but when you’re trying to find the Coffee Bean it can be handy to know it’s a white building with a tree in front.

Tip #5: touch the circle (highlighted here with the red arrow) to get out of Street View and back to the map.

Tip #6: tap anywhere other than on a pin or its label to hide all the labels. You’ll see something like this:



Tip #6: Tap the Page Curl button. I’m pointing to it with the red arrow.




Look at all those options.



Showing Traffic is handy (green is fast, yellow is not so fast, red is bad). The Map view is what you’ve been looking at the whole time. The Satellite view shows you an overhead photo of the map. The Hybrid view shows you the Satellite view, with the Map view drawn on top of it. Use the List button when you want directions in list form rather than graphically.

If you tap the Show Traffic button you get something like this. Note that they don’t show traffic on surface streets unless they happen to be state highways, and they won’t display freeway traffic everywhere (such as out in the country). It’s hard to complain though, considering it’s a free service. Thank you Google.



Looks like it’s going to be a smooth drive. 10 PM is like that.

One more tip for you.

Tip #7: double-tap with one finger to zoom in. Double-tap with TWO fingers to zoom out. Sure, you can pinch and un-pinch, but double-tapping is easier, at least for me.

Here’s the map after a couple of one-finger double-taps:



And here’s the map after a couple of two-finger double-taps. Pretty neat.



In case you wondered, the purple pin is a pin I dropped myself. That’s an option under the page-curl button. You drop a pin when you want to remember where you were.

OK, that’s it. Lots of little hints that add up to Total Maps Mastery. I could do the same thing for every standard iPhone app, and probably will, but it’s going to take a little while. Send me a note and tell me which app you want to know more about and I’ll prioritize by popular demand.

Usually, when you close a Safari window, you mean to do it. But sometimes you make a mistake and close the wrong one. That’s when you say “Come baaaaaack...” and of course it doesn’t.

Next time that happens, try this:

Go to Safari’s History menu and choose the well-named “Reopen Last Closed Window.” It looks like this:



And it works.

Right below “Reopen Last Closed Window” is “Reopen All Windows from Last Session.” That one’s great for when you quit Safari and then regret it (this is especially bad when you have lots of windows open). Start Safari up again, choose “Reopen All Windows from Last Session,” and you’re right back in business.

Try these things out before you need them. Muscle memory and all that.

(Part II of a series)

So, we made Safari bigger. Now Mom wants her email bigger too. But, as before, we can’t simply choose a lower resolution in the Displays preference panel (Apple menu/System Preferences.../Displays), because doing it that way has the side effect of making a flat-panel Mac’s screen a little blurry.

Mom uses Apple’s Mail program. Fortunately, Mail allows us to set the size of a lot of things. We can change the size of the Mailbox font. We can change the size of the Message List font. We can change the size of the Message Text (sometimes). Here’s how we do it.

1. Get Mail running.
2. Go to the Mail menu and choose Peferences...
3. Click on the Fonts & Colors button at the top.

From here, it’s pretty much click-and-experiment time. You will get the most mileage out of the first three sections (Mailbox font, Message List font, and Message font). Here’s what my Mail program looked like before I started changing things...


Here are the settings that went along with it.

I changed the settings (by clicking the various “Select...” buttons) as shown below...

...and now my Mail program looks like this:


A couple of notes: first, you’ll notice that clicking the “Select...” buttons leads you to a panel with font sizes like 12, 14, and 18. If 14 is too small, and 18 is too big, you’re stuck... or are you? No, you’re not. Type in any size you want up at the top right, as I did to get 16 point for my Message List font.


Second, no matter which size you specify for the Message font, plenty of messages will stubbornly resist the change. Try all you want and the messages stay as they were. (Messages that are pure text will enlarge as directed, but most will not.) Solving that problem takes another couple of steps, but they’re worth it.

1. Choose “Customize Toolbar...” from Mail’s View menu.
2. Find the “Smaller Bigger” buttons and drag them to the toolbar.


3. Close up the Customize Toolbar window and give your new buttons a try.

If you tend to double-click messages so they open in their own windows, you’ll have to drag the buttons to a message window too. Just get a message open, go to View/Customize Toolbar, and drag the buttons up.

Here’s what a message looks like in the regular size:

Here’s what it looks like after a couple of clicks of the “Bigger” button (top right of the message window, right where I dragged it):


Try these adjustments for yourself. They make a world of difference. As always, if you’re stuck, send me a note and I’ll help you out.

(First in a series.)

A couple of weeks ago Mom was asking me how to make things bigger on her Mac. Naturally I had her select Displays from the System Preferences (under the Apple), and in there I had her choose any size that WASN’T the one with the largest numbers. Just as naturally, Mom didn’t like the way things looked, as there’s only one “sharp” resolution on an LCD screen, and that’s the one with the largest numbers. Yes, things were bigger, but no, they weren’t better. Try again, she said.

(Isn’t it funny how a person who wants things larger because the small type is too hard to see has no problem at all discerning the slight fuzziness present at larger sizes? Remarkable.)

If blowing up the entire screen (and losing quality in the process) wasn’t going good enough I was going to have to do it the hard way. Which is to say, go program by program and set the preferences in each to make things bigger. Today we’ll learn about doing that in Safari. We’ll cover Mail, the Finder, and a bunch of other programs later.

Safari 3 lets you make a website’s text larger (or smaller) in a couple of ways. First, you can go to the View menu and choose “Make Text Bigger” (or “Make Text Smaller”).



Another way to do it is to use the keyboard shortcuts next to the menu items for Make Text Bigger and Make Text Smaller: Command-Plus and Command-Minus. You don’t have to use the Shift key to do it-- just tap the + or the- while holding the Command key.

A third way is to click the “Big A” and “Small A” buttons on the toolbar. What, your toolbar doesn’t have those buttons? Solve that problem by going to Safari’s View menu and choosing Customize Toolbar...



Drag the two “Text Size” buttons up and onto the Toolbar, wherever they’re handy for you. When you’re done, click “Done,” and from then on all you have to do is click the big A to make the text bigger, and the small A to make the text smaller.

(Note to Safari 4 users: it works almost exactly the same way for you, except you’ll increase/decrease the size of the pictures as well as the text.)

Of the methods presented so far, I like Command-Plus and Command-Minus. But here’s another method that’s even better. At least sometimes.

Go to Safari’s Preferences (under the Safari menu) and click the Appearance button.


Jot down the information already in the box (Times 16 and Courier 13)-- you might want to change back to original settings one day-- then click each “Select...” button in turn and choose a larger size using the slider on the right. Don’t go crazy with it, and remember that you won’t see a change in every website (though you will on this one). Slide things around until it’s easy to read, and from then on your websites will load in the larger font. At least some of them will.

Cool stuff, eh?

Here are some of my favorite iPhone tips. Try ‘em and let me know what you think.

1. Press the Home button and you go to the “Home” screen you were most recently on. Press the Home button again and you go to the FIRST PAGE of the Home screens.
2. Capture whatever’s on your iPhone’s screen by holding the sleep button (top right) and quickly pressing the Home button. You’ll hear a camera shutter sound, not that “a camera shutter sound” will mean anything to anyone in a few years, and the picture will be stored in your Photos. From there, email it or do anything else you do with a screenshot. (Use a screenshot of the Home screen as your wallpaper. Hilarious!)
3. If web pages don’t rotate when you turn the iPhone sideways try putting the iPhone on edge. It works better that way. Flat on the table it has no idea that you’ve turned it. You can put it on edge to rotate, then lay it down flat when it’s finished the rotation.
4. Get an anti-glare film for the iPhone. The best ones come from Power Support USA and you can get them from the Apple Store online. They cut glare significantly, and as a bonus they are nicer for your finger to slide around on (and they don’t show fingerprints). Other than that, they don’t do anything. The films are cut very precisely and you just lay it down over the iPhone’s front glass. Works like a charm, without any adhesive! Don’t ask me how they do it. First person who asks me gets a free one, sized for the iPhone 3G.
5. Save a favorite web page to your Home screen. Start by loading up the web page in the iPhone’s Safari browser. Then touch the “+” at the bottom of the screen, then touch “Add to Home Screen.” From then on, you can go to that web page by touching it right on the Home screen. Very nice.

If there’s one feature of Apple’s Address Book that is overlooked by almost everyone it’s Smart Groups. The regular kind of Group is handy, and you should read up on them (try going to the Help menu in Address Book and looking for “Groups”). In a nutshell, you add people to a Group manually, by dragging them from the “All” group. Easy enough. But not as easy (and not as cool) as Smart Groups.

A Smart Group fills itself automatically, exactly like a Smart Playlist in iTunes or a Smart Album in iPhoto. (Don’t know about those things? Send me a note and I’ll blog on it.)

Here’s an example. Suppose I wanted to be able to quickly find all of my contacts who either live or work in Texas. I could go through my entire list of contacts and drag them to a Group, but that wouldn’t be much fun (and when I added a new contact I’d have to remember to drag that person to the Texas Group). Much better is to make a Smart Group that does the work for me.

Step One is to make a new blank Smart Group. You can Option-click the “+” at the bottom left of the Address Book window, or you can go to File/New Smart Group...

Step Two is to choose a name for the Smart Group, and also to choose criteria. Many Smart Groups have just one criterion but in this case, I need to check two criteria because I don’t know how the State on a person’s address book card will be entered. Note that I chose “any” and not “all” for my matching criteria. In other cases, it would be better to match “all.”

Here’s what it looks like.



If you decide to modify your Smart Group down the road you don’t have to start over. Click once on the Smart Group that you want to modify (you could have several), then choose “Edit Smart Group...” from the Edit menu. Or just Control-click on the Smart Group and choose “Edit Smart Group...” from the pop-up menu.

The beautiful thing is that the Smart Group is always up to date. Add some people to the Address Book and the ones with Texas as their states will show up in the Texas Smart Group. This is really handy and you ought to give it a whirl.

So brilliantly simple, today’s idea is this: use your iPhone to take a picture of where your car is parked. When you return, have a look at the picture, and that’s that. It’s a huge help in those huge parking structures-- just get a photo showing “B45” or whatever the sign is next to your car, and when you come back for your car you’ll have a visual reminder.

Happy New Year.

Newer Macs come with little pictures on the function keys (top row of keys, with names like “F1”) and they are supposed to tell you what the keys do. The pictures aren’t all that clear, and on older keyboards the pictures aren’t there at all. Here are some explanations.

Newer keyboards:
F1: make the screen dimmer
F2: make the screen brighter
F3: show all windows (Exposé)
F4: show Dashboard widgets
F5: nothing
F6: nothing
F7: go back (in iTunes)
F8: play/pause (in iTunes)
F9: skip forward (in iTunes)
F10: mute/unmute all sounds
F11: make the sounds softer
F12: make the sounds louder
F13: nothing
F14: nothing
F15: nothing
F16: nothing

Older keyboards:
F1: nothing
F2: nothing
F3: nothing
F4: nothing
F5: nothing
F6: nothing
F7: nothing
F8: nothing
F9: show all windows (Exposé)
F10: show all windows for current application (Exposé)
F11: show the Desktop
F12: show Dashboard widgets
F13: nothing
F14: make the screen dimmer
F15: make the screen brighter

If the keys don’t do these things for you it’s probably because someone’s made some changes in your Keyboard preferences. Go to the Apple menu, then to System Preferences, then to Keyboard & Mouse, then to Keyboard Shortcuts. You’ll figure it out from there. Of course, if you don’t, you can always click here to send me an email.

Today’s topic: The Desktop.

We love The Desktop. We put all of our stuff there. And then we open up Safari, or Mail, or something else, and we cover everything up. When we need something from The Desktop, Step One (and Step Two, and Step 3) is “move all those windows out of the way so you can see The Desktop.” Very inefficient. No one likes it.

Today we are going to learn how to use “Exposé.” Exposé allows us to get to The Desktop with a single keystroke. It will save you a ton of time.

Exposé can be configured using the System Preferences (under the Apple menu). Click on the “Exposé and Spaces” button in 10.5 (“Dashboard & Exposé” in 10.4), then the Exposé button, and you’ll get something like this:

See where it says “Show Desktop”? You can click there and choose the keyboard shortcut that you want to use to trigger the showing of The Desktop. On my Mac, it’s Shift-F3 (the arrow means “Shift”). When I press that combination of keys, everything scoots off the screen-- temporarily, revealing my Desktop. I can double-click an icon from there or do anything else I want. Another press of Shift-F3 will bring the windows back. Pretty handy.

All you have to do is pick the key(s) you want to use as the trigger. It could be plain old F9. Or Shift-F10. Or just about anything you want. Hint: try holding down a modifier key (Command, Option, Shift, or Control) when you have that “Show Desktop” menu clicked. The menu will change to reflect what you’re holding down.

Once you’ve chosen a key to show The Desktop, close up the preferences and try the key out. Fun, yes?

Bonus Hint: Click and HOLD your “Show Desktop” key. The Desktop appears. Let go of the key and the windows come back. This saves you one keystroke if all you want to do is LOOK at your desktop. Think one little keystroke isn’t worth saving? One day, when your wrists are burning and your hands are falling off from overuse you’ll say “Dang it, he was right.” Save yourself some pain and say it now, before you get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome like everyone else.

Here’s one for all the Apple Mail users.

Ever send someone an email with an attachment? Of course you have. Most people write the message, then click the Attach button, then climb around in what some of you call “the dead-end box” (where you’re supposed to somehow track down the thing you want to attach).

Here are two methods that are a lot easier. You start in the Finder, not in Mail. In this example, I have a document I want to email, and I’ve clicked on it ONCE to select it. Here’s a picture, and you can see what I’ve selected.



Now we have two choices. One choice is to click and DRAG the document to the Mail icon in the Dock. When the Mail icon highlights, let go. Presto-- you’ll get a new document, with the attachment attached.

The other choice requires less dragging. Leave the soon-to-be attachment where it is (still highlighted) and go to the Finder menu (next to the Apple menu), slide down to “Services,” choose “Mail” and then “Send File.” It’s really just one move-- takes less effort for you to do it than for me to tell you how.

Believe it or not, I only “discovered” this second method TODAY. That Services menu has been around a few years, but it hasn’t been very useful... at least that’s what I thought. Now I think I am going to take a good look at Services and see whether I can “discover” something else cool.

The key to these methods is you start with the attachment, not with Mail. Try it once or twice and you’ll be a convert.

Did You Know-- ?

The Preview program that comes with OS X 10.5 can do some pretty spiffy things. In fact, it can do some of the things Photoshop can do, and some of the stuff that Acrobat can do, and a whole bunch of stuff that neither can do. And it’s free.

In Part I of this tip (today’s blog entry) I’ll outline some of the really handy features built into Preview. Part II will explain how to use these features. Email me and tell me which features you want explained first-- this is your chance to influence the blog.
You can use Preview to...

1. combine two or more PDF documents.
2. delete one or morepages from a PDF document.
3. rotate one or all pages in a PDF document.
4. crop one or more pages in a PDF document.
5. mark up or otherwise highlight a PDF document.
6. adjust color/brightness/shadows/etc. in a JPG document.
7. adjust size and resolution in a JPG document.
8. save documents as PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG... and Photoshop format.

Pretty neat. Try some of these things on your own. If you can’t figure out how to make them work, do what researchers at the Christian Boyce Center for Advanced Macintosh Studies do-- namely, “guess.” In Preview, your guess is likely to be right.

That’s it for now. Vote for the features you want explained. We’ll follow up within a few days.

Ever get a weird error message on your Mac and then try to tell someone (me) about it? The conversation goes like this:

You: “I got a weird error message on my Mac.”
Me: “Oh really. What did it say?”
You: “Something about an error.”
Me: “Right. Can you tell me a little more?”
You: “No, it just said there was an error. What do you suppose it was?”
Me: “Aaargh.”

Today we are going to learn how to take pictures of the screen-- of the whole screen, of parts of the screen, of particular windows. Here goes.

1. Take a picture of the ENTIRE screen by holding down Command and Shift and 3. If the sound is up on your Mac you’ll hear a camera shutter sound, useful to those of you who have heard a camera with a shutter. The picture will be saved on your desktop with a name like “Picture 1.” From there, do anything you want with it-- open it, print it, email it.
2. Take a picture of PART of the screen by holding down Command and Shift and 4. You’ll get a cross-hair cursor. Click and drag to highlight part of the screen, then let go. You’ll hear the shutter sound again, and there’ll be an icon with “Picture 1” (or 2, or 10) on the desktop, ready for you to work with.

Bonus: do Command-Shift-4, then press the spacebar. Your cursor will look like a camera! Move it until it is over the window you want to take a picture of, then click the mouse. Presto: a PERFECT picture of that window, edge-to-edge. No trimming required.

Double Bonus: do any of the above but also include the CONTROL key. When you do that, the picture is put onto the Clipboard, ready to be pasted into an email (or anywhere else). It does not save a copy on the desktop.

So... next time you get a weird error message on your screen, do this: Command-Shift-CONTROL-4, then spacebar, then get your cursor over the error message, then click. Write me an email, and paste the picture in.

It sounds complicated but after you’ve done it once or twice it becomes almost automatic. Sort of like breathing.

Assuming you’re using Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5):

One of the very handy features introduced in 10.5 is “QuickLook.” With it, you can VERY quickly pop open a document and see what’s in it, without the delay of launching a program such as Preview or Word. Here’s how you use it.

1. Click ONCE on a document icon in the Finder. Here, I’m clicking on what looks to be a picture.



2. Now, with the icon highlighted, press the spacebar. Yes, the spacebar. Don’t ask me why it’s the spacebar. The document pops open, like so:



Any resemblance to Macintosh Consultants living or dead is a miracle, since this picture is from 1991.

You can stretch things from the lower right corner. You can go full screen with the two-headed arrow. You can add this item to iPhoto via the icon at bottom right. Or you can press the spacebar again and make the thing go back to being an icon. (Or click the x in the circle, top left corner.)

You can even double-click on the preview and open it up for real, if that’s what you want to do.

This works with pictures, word processing documents, email messages, you name it. Even Excel documents. Amazing.

Command-Spacebar. That’s it. See you tomorrow.

OK, here’s a little more info. When you press Command-Spacebar, you get a little search box at the top right of your screen. Looks like this:



Type something in, and as you type, Spotlight searches your hard disk(s) for matches. Big deal? Well, yeah, because it searches INSIDE documents in addition to searching document titles. So, if you’re wondering what you gave your nephew for Christmas last year, you can search for his name and find it in a document called “Naughty and Nice 2007.” Good luck finding that document some other way.

Of course you could do this by clicking the Spotlight magnifying glass at the top right of your screen, but Command-Spacebar is faster. By far.

Bonus cool thing: do a Spotlight search, then use arrow keys to run down (or back up) to the matching item you want, and then hit Enter. The item pops right up, whether it’s a Word document, an email, or a calendar item. Now that’s handy.

Try it.

See that row of keys across the top of your keyboard? The row you never use? How about making those keys do something useful, like opening your mail program, or Safari, or (yuck) Microsoft Word? Here’s how you do it using a FREE program called “Spark.”

Step One: go to versiontracker.com and download Spark. Here’s the link.
Step Two: double-click the download from Step One, and if things go right you’ll see something called Spark on your desktop. It will look like this:



Open that, revealing this. That’s the Spark application. Drag it to your Applications folder.
Step Three: open up the Applications folder and open up Spark. You’ll see something like this (without the shortcuts yet):


Step Four: click the little gear at top left, hold it down, and slide down to “Application.” Now you get another box:

All you need to do is fill in the box. Click where it says “click to edit” and then press the “trigger” key. Click where it says “Choose...” and choose a program to open. “Calculator” is a nice one-- why not make Calculator be F5? Try it-- there’s really nothing like getting your hands a little dirty.

From that point on, your key will work-- forever, for free. Pretty neat.

If you have trouble, click the link at the bottom of the page and send me an email.

Supposing you wanted to put your Mac to sleep. Or to shut it down. Or maybe restart it. Do it the way the cool kids do: press the Eject button (top row of keys, a triangle with a line under it) while also holding pressing Control (either one of the Control keys). You get a box asking “Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?”

If that’s what you want, hit Enter on your keyboard, and voila, the computer shuts down. If you want to put it to sleep, you can click the Sleep button... or just type “s.” Want to restart instead? Type “r.”



If you change your mind about shutting down/sleeping/restarting you can click the Cancel button... or, better yet, press the “Esc” key. Pretty darned neat. Once you get the hang of it, you can do Control-Eject and then Enter lickety split, faster than anyone can choose “Shut Down” with the mouse.

I “discovered” this tip accidentally. I was trying to eject a CD, and when I pressed Eject I got the “Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?” box. I was surprised to see that box, so I cancelled and tried again-- with the same result! I kept pressing Eject and I kept getting the box asking me whether I really wanted to shut down. I was mystified. Mystified, that is, until I realized that Charlie the Cat, who I thought was sitting beside the keyboard, was really sitting on it-- more precisely, on the Control key, way off at the bottom left corner of the keyboard. When Charlie moved, the Eject key did what it used to do (Eject things). And that’s when I figured it out.

Anyhow, Charlie the Cat gets credit for this one. She’s not much of a typist so this is really a team effort.

I would imagine that you have a few icons on your desktop. Maybe more than a few. Maybe a lot. Turns out that “a lot” is bad. The problem is that the Finder (which displays the icons) is not very good at dealing with a large number of icons at once. The effect is your machine slows down, just a little, for every icon on the desktop. Incredible, but true. So, if you want your machine to be fast again, reduce the number of items on your desktop. It’s OK to put a couple of folders onto your desktop, and to toss zillions of items into those folders, because when the Finder looks at the desktop it will only “see” the folders (not what’s inside).

Apple loves the Dock. Actually, I think Steve Jobs loves the Dock. That’s one way that you can tell us apart: Steve loves the Dock. Plus, he’s a billionaire.

Love it or not, we’re stuck with the Dock. So here’s how to make the best of it. Start by opening up the Dock’s preferences (Apple menu/Dock/Dock Preferences...), and then...

1. Turn OFF magnification. That will keep the Dock’s items from squirming around when you point at them
2. Turn OFF “Automatically hide and show the Dock.” It’s easier to hit a target when you can see it. Plus, when your friendly neighborhood computer consultant comes over (ahem) he won’t have to mouse around the perimeter of your screen like a fool, trying to make the Dock appear.
3. Position the Dock on the RIGHT. You ALWAYS have room to the right, and you ALWAYS run out of room at the bottom. So use what you have an excess of. (Positioning on the LEFT seems like a good idea until a window opens up and to the left... under the Dock... leaving you unable to click the close box.)
4. Set the Size to LARGE. The Dock will adjust the icons to make them fit. Why squint if you don’t have to?

Special Note to Friends of CBoyce (“FoCB”): it’s OK with me if you do things your own way as long as you try it my way first.

You can do a Google search without going to Google first. In Safari, look for the search area at the top right of the screen.

Type in what you’re looking for, hit Enter (or Return) on the keyboard, and there you are, a page full of search results. Sure, you can go to www.google.com and do the search there, but why bother?

Bonus Tip: there’s a tiny triangle pointing down at the far left of Safari’s search area. Click it and you’ll see the last ten things you searched for. Choose something from that list and you’ll do the search again. There’s also a “Clear Recent Searches...” option, in case you want to cover your tracks.

Double-Bonus Tip: try holding the Control key down and clicking on ANY word on a web page. A little menu appears, and one of the options is “Search in Google.” Which means that you can do a Google search without typing anything! Incredible.

I would never let my Mac sleep. Let the screen go black but keep the machine up and alive. Waking up from sleep has been a problem for Apple over the years-- sometimes machines won’t wake up at all, sometimes their keyboards/mice/printers won’t work, sometimes other problems. If you are connected to another machine (file sharing, or maybe a remote database) going to sleep will drop the connection, causing inconvenience at the least and maybe even data loss.

So do it my way. Go to the Energy Saver Preference Pane (Apple menu, System Preferences, Energy Saver)

and tell it you NEVER want the computer to sleep. Do what you want with the SCREEN sleeping (this will turn the screen black-- in between, you’ll see the Screen SAVER, which is a different affair altogether), but DON’T set screen sleeping to Never. You don’t want the screen to show the same picture forever because it’s hard on the screen.

Press the space bar to scroll down in Safari. Hold Shift and press the space bar to scroll up.

This also works in Firefox.

I love football, and I especially like the “glamour” games on Monday Night, Sunday Night, and now Thursday Night. I thought it would be handy to have the NFL Prime Time schedule in my iPhone’s calendar, so I got the info from NFL.com and massaged it into an iCal calendar (which then uploads to my iPhone when I sync). You can have the calendar without doing the work: just click the link below.

webcal://ical.mac.com/christianboyce/NFL%20Primetime%202008.ics

Hit the Escape key (esc, at top left of keyboard) instead of mousing to and clicking on the “Cancel” button in any dialog box. Bonus Shortcut: Enter (or Return) almost always clicks the default button (the one with the heavier border) in a dialog box. Double-Bonus Shortcut: Command-D almost always clicks the “Don’t Save” button.

Command-click links in Safari to open them in new tabs. Here’s a link to practice with. Command-click it, and look near the top of your Safari window. You’ll see two “tabs” and you can click back and forth between them. Neater and cleaner than opening separate windows.