macosxhints.com application tips

10.5: Sync Sunbird calendars using iSync

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

This hint is for Tiger only -- you'll have to modify it on Leopard or Snow Leopard, because of changes to iCal's folder structure.

I've recently switched to Mozilla Sunbird because it looks a lot nicer and runs faster than iCal, although it can't directly use iSync, so I can't synchronize the calendars on my laptop with my phone. By looking around in iCal's folder, I found out that you can copy a calendar file (.ics) from Sunbird into iCal and use that to synchronize with iSync. You can then load that synchronized calendar back into Sunbird.

There's a lot of mucking about, but it's well worth it :).

Export a copy of an iCal calendar and load that into Sunbird. In this case, I'm using a calendar named Work.ics as an example, and I've exported it to my user's Documents folder.
Find out where the corresponding iCal copy of...

10.6: Work around an iWeb and Pages crash issue in 10.6.2

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

Recently, I was asked to set up a web site for a church; since I didn't want to spend days doing it, I decided to try iWeb.

Things worked well until I updated to 10.6.2. Suddenly, iWeb was crashing on startup, without fail. Fortunately, someone on the Apple forums figured out a work-around.

If you've been getting crashes with iWeb or Pages that blame the SFWordProcessing Plug In, try using Font Book to disable the font named Hoefler. Even though Font Book insists the font is valid, it appears to be triggering the crash.

Once the font is disabled, you will be able to launch iWeb (and Pages) again without crashing -- although all occurrences of the Hoefler font will be rendered incorrectly.

See this discussion (and many others) for more...

Move BBedit 9's Documents drawer to the left side

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

I've been trying to move over from Smultron to BBEdit for most of my text editing needs, as Smultron isn't officially supported any longer. One thing that I found very annoying in BBEdit 9 is that the Documents drawer appears on the right, with no apparent way to move it to the right (in older versions, I believe there was a preference to change the side).

In the "read more" portion of this hint, you can read my original solution to this problem, left in place for posterity's sake. However, commenter bhas points out a much simpler solution in the comments to this hint: just Command-click on the Drawer icon, and the drawer will flip from one side of the window to the other, and stay on that side for subsequent launches.

This also works in TextWrangler. Original solution:

After Tweeting about this annoyance, I found the solution courtesy of a Tweet from ...

Open Bento's database backup without using Bento

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

Do you want to open a Bento database backup when you're at a friend's house, and he doesn't have Bento? It's actually really simple:

Control-click on your Bento database backup file (.bentodb) and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
Navigate to the Contents » Resources folder.
Copy the file named Database to another location.
Launch a SQLite application, such as SQLite Database Browser.
Open the copy of the Database file you just created.

Enjoy your database!

10.6: Navigate Snow Leopard Stacks with gestures

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:30:03 -0800

Navigable stacks in Snow Leopard are a very nice feature, but the lack of gesture recognition is frustrating. Using the free BetterTouchTool, though, navigable stacks are a reality. BetterTouchTool is forked from the ">MultiClutch source. BetterTouchTool is essentially the same as MultiClutch, but it runs without a reliance on InputManagers. As a result, it works great in Snow Leopard, on 64- and 32-bit apps, and on Carbon apps (read: iTunes).

For Global Gestures, I have set the bindings:

Command-Up = Swipe Left
Command-Down = Swipe Right

In Finder, these navigate folder hierarchies more naturally. They allow me to move up and down folder hierarchies without relying on a history. This breaks the native behavior of forward-back navigation history, but for me, this method makes more sense.

Old Behavior...

Adjust browser width on a per-Spaces basis

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:30:02 -0800

Do you need to change the width of your Safari or Firefox window, but only on the desktop of the currently active Space? Try using this AppleScript. Placed in the excellent program Butler, you can even use a key combination to toggle the width.

Here's the script:

(* Thanks to:
 JNSoftware LLC, founded by Jonathan Nathan. See http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=23453
and
 Tip  "10.5: Find current Space number via AppleScript " of macosxhints See: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080227075244778 *)

set safariNr to get_space_binding_for_application("com.apple.safari") -- on wich space is safari?
set firefoxNr to get_space_binding_for_application("org.mozilla.firefox") -- on wich space is firefox?
set currentSpaceNr to get_my_space_number...

Embed formatted, syntax-highlighted source code in Keynote

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

If you have ever given a presentation on any aspect of programming (or webdesign), you may have felt the need to embed some source code (formatted and syntax highlighted to be easily readable) in Keynote. Your options have traditionally been limited:

You can take a screenshot of the code in a programmer's editor and embed this in Keynote, but you lose any ability to edit the code or change its appearance once inserted.
You can use a web-based syntax highlighter such as GeSHi, and embed the generated page in Keynote as a Web View, but this is similarly inflexible. Also, Web Views have been removed from Keynote '09.

A much better approach would be to have the source code text (suitably formatted and highlighted) inserted natively in your presentation. Since you can drag Rich Text Format (RTF) text to Keynote, all you need is a way to convert your code to RTF.

Here are three ways of accomplishing this whil...

Time Machine: Setup on and restore from a NAS device

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

This hint explained how to set up a network attached storage (NAS) device as a Time Machine backup. To make this process easier, I've created an AppleScript that makes the creation and setup a one-step process -- just drag and drop your mounted NAS onto the following AppleScript to ready the drive for Time Machine use.

on open names
  set volumeName to names as text
  set macAddress to (do shell script "ifconfig en0 | grep ether | tr -d '\\011' | sed s/ether// | sed 's/ //g' | sed s/://g")
  set hostName to (do shell script "hostname -fs")
  tell application "Finder"
    set theSize to round (((capacity of startup disk) / 1024 / 1024) / 1024)
  end tell
  
  do shell script "defaults write com.apple.systempreferences T...

Mark email message as replied-to in Mail

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

Apple Mail doesn't provide a built-in mechanism for marking emails as replied (or clearing said mark). I solved this weakness with a simple AppleScript that operates on whatever messages are currently selected. Simply create the following script using the Script Editor, and save it to Library » Scripts » Applications » Mail in your home directory, or in /Library » Scripts » Mail Scripts for use by all users.

This script marks the selected messages as replied to:

using terms from application "Mail"
  tell application "Mail"
    set selectedMessages to selection

    repeat with eachMessage in selectedMessages
      -- set was replied to of eachMessage to false
      set was replied to of eachMessage to true
    end repeat

  end tell
end using terms from

For marking as unreplied, I used the brain-dead solution of simply creating a second script which is identical with the exception of substituting the value false into the ...

Start a new Mail message from anywhere

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:30:03 -0800

My workflow is very email-centric and I've often wished I could start a new email in Mail by pressing a keyboard combo in any program. I use QuickSilver, and the regular way of searching for a contact's email address and then creating a new mail that way seems awkward to me compared to the email address completion Mail.app offers.

After many tries, I finally found out how to get Mail.app to open a new message window using AppleScript:

tell application "Mail"
  set t to make new outgoing message
  set visible of t to true
  activate
end tell

Save this as an AppleScript using AppleScript Editor, and then tie a keyboard shortcut to that script using your favorite keyboard shortcut creation tool. Tested with 10.6.1.

[robg adds: This also works in 10.5, and probably many releases before that. Spark is one of many program you can use to create the keyboard shortcut. In ...

10.6: Delete selected page(s) from a PDF in Preview

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:30:04 -0800

The function to delete the selected page (or pages) from a PDF file disappeared from the Edit menu of Preview in Snow Leopard. Even worse, it was replaced (using the same Command-Delete shortcut) with a command that moves the entire PDF document to the trash.

You can, however, still delete selected page(s) through an undocumented keyboard shortcut. Hold down Shift-Command-Delete with one or more pages selected, and only those pages will be deleted from the document. Page numbering, however, does not update to reflect this deletion until you (re)save the file (in 10.5, the numbering updated instantly upon deletion).

10.6: View an email message's folder path in Mail

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:30:02 -0800

Locating an email message in your Mail folder hierarchy is now a snap. As of Snow Leopard's version of Mail, if you open a message in a new window, Command-clicking (or Control-clicking) on the icon in the title bar of the message window will reveal the path to the enclosing folder for the message (just like it does in the Finder).

Select the folder from the drop-down menu, and it will open in a new Mail browser window. This allows you to easily locate the message within the Mail folder hierarchy, which can prove quite handy.

Use a Quick Look plug-in to view Entourage email in Finder

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:30:01 -0800

Viewing Microsoft Entourage email messages in the Finder with Quick Look doesn't work -- it merely displays an icon image. If you have Entourage 2008 and 10.5 or 10.6, there is a way to display the contents of the message in Quick Look. Download the file named Entourage QuickLook Plug-In.dmg from this site, and place a copy in the /Library/QuickLook folder.

This solution is especially useful for scrolling through Spotlight search results in the Finder, with Quick Look opened in full screen mode on a second monitor.

[robg adds: The plug-in should also work in your user's Library/QuickLook folder. I don't use Entourage, though, so I can't test this one.]

Change background color of Notes in Mail

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:30:15 -0800

Not a big of the yellow background in Apple's Mail.app Notes? Handy with a text editor? You can change the background with a few simple steps. First, make a backup of your Mail application in case something goes wrong.

With the backup in place, Control-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu, then navigate into the Resources folder. Using BBEdit (or another plain text editor), open the following three files: note-view.html, note-window.html, and note.css.

In the two .html files, locate the img tag that references note-background-gradient, and delete the entire line (or comment it out with the  tag pair). In the .css file, change the background:rgb values to something pleasing; I used 250, 250, 245 so it would look nice with the rest of the Mail motif.

Save the edited files and launch Mail, and enjoy your non-yellow N...

Delete email in Mail without showing next message

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:30:03 -0800

One of the "features" in Apple's Mail program that has always annoyed me is how it handles messages after doing a delete operation. If you press Delete to throw away the message you're currently looking at, Mail displays the next message (marking it read in the process). While I like the fact that Mail marks displayed messages as read, I have always found it annoying that it displays a message that I have not specifically selected (and then marks it as read).

There's a way around this. Instead of pressing Delete, press Option-Delete. With this shortcut (which doesn't show up in the Edit menu), Mail deletes the currently-displayed message and then does nothing at all, and the next message is not displayed. This is exactly what I want -- I now must explicitly tell Mail when I want a message to be displayed.

I expect I can make this the default using the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard System Preferences panel, but I have yet to play with that.

[rob...

Publish a Git repository on MobileMe

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:30:55 -0800
Git is a very popular distributed version control system. You can use it to track versions of files in your project and collaborate with other project participants in very sophisticated ways. To learn Git, I'd recommend Scott Chacon's Pro Git book (free online, or buy a printed version). You can use Git on your local computer, but if you want to access it from multiple computers with Git installed, MobileMe can be handly.

Your MobileMe disk space is available via the WebDav protocol, which Git can also use. Here are the steps to create a repository on MobileMe. First, if you use Git from MacPorts, chances are that Git on your machine uses a version of curl without SSL support. In Terminal, use the following command to check:
$ port installed curl
If that does not list +ssl in the curl options, reinstall it by typing sudo p...
Scroll to scrub through a song in iTunes Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:30:02 -0800 I would be surprised if this really is a new hint, but I can't find anything on the subject from searching Mac OS X hints. The closest hint is similar, though, as it refers to changing iTunes' volume by using a scroll wheel mouse. Whilst a song is playing in iTunes, position the mouse pointer anywhere over the display element that contains the current position of the song (i.e. the long thin gray bar between the 'time elapsed' and 'time remaining' counters). You can now use the scroll wheel of your mouse (or scroll with a track pad) to scrub backwards or forwards through the song. This technique allows for some precision playback adjustment. One 'click' on the scroll wheel of my Logitech trackball seems to adjust the playing time by less than a second. This hint also works in the miniature iTunes window. Use more photo effects than those offered in Photo Booth Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:30:04 -0800 Ever thought that Photo Booth doesn't provide enough image effects? Probably not; there are sixteen (very cool) effects built in. However, there are a couple of ways to get more effects. You could use this hint to add more effects directly to Photo Booth. If you'd rather not do that, though, try these alternatives. If you want to make a new image, first open Automator and make a blank workflow. Drag the Take Video Snapshot action from the Photos library into your workflow (strangely, Take Picture does not work). Choose your file name and location, and select Take Picture Automatically, then run the workflow. Click the effects button next to the snapshot button, and choose your effect. There are twenty-nine effects there that aren't in Photo Booth, including Blur, Pixelate, and City Lights. Alternatively, if you want to simply modify an image and don't care too muc... 10.6: Save a few keystrokes when typing URLs in Mail Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:30:02 -0800 More pointing out a new feature (though it is one that's not documented) than a hint. In Mail 4.1, you no longer need to type the http:// part of a URL to make it clickable for the recipient. In previous versions of Mail, the text would not become a link without http://. Unfortunately, Mail still does not show your URL as a link while composing the email. One way to use iTunes when it's blocked by a progress dialog Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:30:05 -0700 Have you ever had to move your iTunes library, or done any other task that popped up a lengthy progress window? If so, you know that this dialog prevents you from using iTunes, as you can't get to any of its menus or controls. This is very annoying -- especially as I'm currently consolidating my library to a network volume over a wireless connection. Although all the songs have all been moved, iTunes is checking them all. Thus, I'm looking at being locked out of iTunes for about 10 hours. The good news is that iTunes is extremely multi-threaded. So even if it's busy on some task that blocks the UI, you can use the iPhone's iTunes Remote application to control music playback (or connect from another copy, and play from there). It also responds to AppleScript events in this state, so you still use most alarm clock software as well.