If you've ever explored the possible actions offered by Mail's rules, you've probably wished that you could apply some of them to any message on command. For example, you might want to move the selected messages to one mailbox or another at the press of a hotkey, or to replicate Eudora's labels by changing the text color of messages in their mailboxes (Mail's GUI only allows changing their background color, which I dislike as much as OS X's Finder labels).

The problem is that Mail's rules are intended to run automatically on incoming or outgoing emails, so such "manual" rules cannot easily coexist with automatic rules. The good news is that it's very easy to work around that conflict using AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro.

The trick is to group the "manual" rules at the top of the list, end each of them with with 'Stop evaluating rules,' and to keep them disabled so they won't interfere with automatic rules. To run one of these rules manually, you need a Keyboard Maestro macro that will enable that particular rule via AppleScript, tell Mail to 'Apply Rules' (which will run it on the selected messages), and then to disable the rule.

Xcode now has gesture support to quickly switch between files. For instance, you can switch between the .h and .m file with a three-finger upward swipe. A three-finger side-to-side swipe puts you back or forward in the file history.

Here are two problems that have frustrated me with iTunes for the longest time:

1. My iTunes library contains a few entries that are not really music (e.g., comedy or spoken word), and I don't like them cluttering up my "Music" library.
2. I have a few streaming radio stations that I listen to often and are listed in my Music library as well. Unfortunately, each radio station has its own special genre (e.g. "Eclectic, Alternative, NPR, Public, News") that doesn't correspond with my own classification scheme. True, you can change the meta-information of a stream, but it reverts back the next time you play it. I've seen this problem described in numerous Mac forums, but without a satisfactory resolution.

My solution (and it's a bit of a hack) is to select these items (streams, comedy, etc.) in iTunes and classify them as Audiobooks (by selecting the items, choosing File » Get Info, selecting the Options tab, and changing Media Kind to Audiobook).

Now, when I browse my Music library, it is no longer cluttered with non-music or genres that only apply to a single radio stream. And when I want comedy or radio, I just open up my Audiobooks library. This works nicely for me because I don't have any audiobooks. Presumably, you can also use the other Media Kinds (Podcasts, iTunesU, or Voice Memo) instead, depending on which of those you don't use.

Mail's View » Organize by Thread option is a great way of seeing one side of an email conversation. Until recently, however, I didn't realize that I could see both sides of that discussion. By selecting multiple mailboxes in the left panel (as described in this hint), Organize by thread will interleave all messages in all selected mailboxes.

So, for instance, with both Inbox and Sent selected, I can see the organized messages from both sources. If I add Drafts to the selection, I can see what I wanted to say in the its full context. It's a great way of seeing both sides of a long-running discussion in Mail.

This hint updates this older hint to work in Safari 4 in Leopard. Disclaimer: Proceed at your own risk...Cocoa, to me, just means a hot drink made from chocolate powder!

This hint requires you have Apple's Xcode installed. Also make sure Safari is not running when you do this.

1. In the Finder, control-click on Safari and select Show Package Contents. Navigate into Contents » Resources » English.lproj. Create a backup of ToolbarItems.nib, then open the original in Interface Builder.
2. Set the main window's view mode to List (middle button in toolbar)
3. Navigate into (by clicking the 'reveal' triangles) Window » Content View, and you'll see two Split View entries. Open each of those, and you'll see a Custom View and a Web Search Field. Delete the Web Search Field from both Split View entries. (Just select them and press Delete.)
4. Save the file and quit Interface Builder.

Install keywurl to search from within the URL bar.

[robg adds: Modifying a program in this way will break code signing. If the program no longer seems to work right after this hint, the broken code signature is, most likely, the source of the problem. Also, in 10.6 the nib file is compiled, and you'll have to use a workaround, as described in this hint, to modify the nib file.]

In 10.6, Apple moved Directory Utility to the /System » Library » CoreServices folder; you can launch it directly from there, if you wish.

However, the "official" way to get to Directory Utility now is through System Preferences » Accounts » Login Options. At the bottom of the panel you'll see Network Account Server; click on the Edit button and there is a listing of directory services. The button in the bottom left-hand corner says Open Directory Utility; click on this to launch.

This workaround, using Thunderbird, allowed me to successfully remove 30,000 duplicate emails (from a collection of about 80,000 emails) in OS X's Mail.app. I spent a lot of time searching this question, and this is the only solution I found that worked.

My mail.app emails got rather out of hand; I won't bore you with how. I had most emails at least twice, and some up to five times. I tried Andreas Amann's Mail Script for this, but, even though it was working OK, it only found about 200 duplicates in three hours, and was cooking my CPU at about 95%. There was no way that this could go on, so I cancelled the process. (Thanks anyway, AA.)

I looked at importing into Entourage, because there are some scripts to eliminate duplicates from there, but for reasons I shall not bore you with here, this proved a dead end.

The solution turned out to be the amazing add-on for Mozilla's Thunderbird called Remove Duplicate Messages (ALTERNATE). I had to use version 3.0 of Thunderbird, not the current version 3.01 (so thanks to those reviewers who reported that the add-on version 0.3.3 was failing with Thunderbird 3.01). I found the older version on the Thunderbird releases page. Below is the process I used. (It took several hours, because of the number of emails. Ironically, every stage except the actual analysis of duplicates takes ages. This makes using Thunderbird permanently quite tempting.)

This is a fairly obvious hint, but it may help some of the Mac-owning magicJack users out there who are frustrated by the fact that the magicJack window pops open whenever you make or receive a call. To fix this, open AppleScript Editor and make this simple script:

tell application "Finder" to set visible of process "magicJack" to false

Save it to your /Library/Scripts folder. Next, create a cron entry (mine is set to run every five minutes) to run the script: The cron job launches the AppleScript, which then hides the magicJack window.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one. cron isn't the officially-supported OS X solution, but it still works. This ancient hint contains some basic information on how to use it.]

I recently decided I wanted to purchase the audio CD version (or electronic equivalent) of a concert DVD that I've owned for a few years. However, in looking at the options on iTunes and Amazon, I discovered that the CD version was missing five songs off the DVD, including two of my favorites. So I thought I'd just rip the Dolby 5.1 music out of the DVD and create my own "CD."

Little did I know this would be as tricky as it turned out to be. After a few false starts, including some time wasted trying to extract and convert the PCM version (I never did get that working), I finally found a solution that worked perfectly for extracting the 5.1 audio track.

This how-to was the key to my successful extraction. Becuase that how-to is thorough and includes numerous screen shots, I'm not going to try to replicate it here. In the rest of this hint, however, I'll provide an executive summary (in case the original goes away), and some recommendations for tools to split the resulting MP3 file.

In Snow Leopard, when opening Freehand files, the app crashes. The fix is to use the Freehand Clip Art Viewer, which is located in the application's own folder. If you browse the hard drive with this utility, then you will see thumbnails of your files -- simply double-click on them to open.

Adobe tech support were of no help at all, as they said Freehand has been upgraded to Illustrator CS4. Hope this helps other frustrated Freehand users.

[robg adds: As I don't have Freehand, I can't test this one, or even confirm the problem.]