Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

Search for iTunes music by star rating

You probably know that you can use smart playlists in iTunes to filter your music. Say you want to find all your 5-star Grateful Dead songs; just create a Smart Playlist where Artist Is Grateful Dead, and Rating Is *****. You’ll get a list of all those songs.

But sometimes you may simply want to find a song in your library using rating information, and don’t want to make a playlist. All you need to do is type the name of a song, artist or album in the Search box, then type the number of stars (using asterisks or Shift-8) you want to use as a baseline. (iTunes runs a “greater than or equal to” search for the number of stars you put in the search field.)

View inline PDFs in Firefox 3

If you're using Firefox 3 to browse the Web, you may have noticed that it's missing one essential feature (for many) that you can find in Safari: you can't view PDFs in a browser window. When you click a link for a PDF file, Firefox 3 downloads the file, forcing you to then open it in Preview or Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Well, there’s now a Firefox extension named firefox-mac-pdf, available for Firefox 3 that utilizes the built-in PDF support in OS X to display PDFs in the browser.

This extension doesn't have the nifty fading bezel that the Safari PDF viewer does, but it supports all the same keyboard shortcuts and you get the standard Mac OS X PDF contextual menu when you control-click on a displayed PDF.

Use an AppleScript to force a desktop picture change

You may use the Mac OS X feature in the Desktop preferences to have your desktop images set to change every N minutes in random order. Sometimes the desktop will display an image that displayed earlier in the day, and you may want to skip over that image easily. The following AppleScript will cause the desktop image to change, in whatever order you have set, each time it is run. (The script assumes that you have set the picture to change every 30 minutes).

property theSwitch : 0
if theSwitch = 0 then
  tell application "System Events"
    tell current desktop
      set change interval to 1801.0
    end tell
  end tell
  set theSwitch to 1
else
  tell application "System Events"
    tell current desktop
      set change interval to 1800.0
    end tell
  end tell
  set theSwitch to 0
end if

To maintain your current change interval, modify the change interval lines to reflect your interval, measured in seconds. Thus, for a 30-minute setting, you use 1801 and 1800 seconds. One hour would be 3601 and 3600, etc. For this script to work, you must have both Change Picture and Random Order enabled on the Desktop tab of the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel.

You can save the script as an application and leave it somewhere accessible so you can run it with a double-click.

Launch System Preferences with a keyboard shortcut

You may need to open System Preferences from time to time to adjust network settings, change user account options, or some other task. If you don’t keep System Preferences in your Dock, you can set a keyboard shortcut to make it launch.

To create the shortcut, open the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, then click the plus (+) sign. In the dialog that appears, leave Applications set to All Applications, set the Menu Title to System Preferences… (that’s an ellipsis—use the Option-; key combo—and not three sequential periods), and enter your desired shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcut box.

Since the standard keyboard shortcut for preferences in any application is Command-, (Command-comma), you might want to use Command-Option- (Command-Option-dash) or something similar. After you set the keyboard shortcut, you’ll need to log out and log in again, or restart your Mac, for it to be available.

Use a Mail rule to help identify relevant messages

If you’re looking for ways to get more control over your Mail inbox, consider taking advantage of a built-in feature in Mail’s rules to help you identify those messages that need your immediate attention. As you’re probably aware, you can use Mail’s Rules to set up rules that filter your e-mail, based on conditions you specify. By using one of the Apple-provided conditions, you can set up a rule to help you (visually and/or audibly) identify e-mails from people you are actively corresponding with.

Building a sample rule will demonstrate how this works. Open Mail’s Preferences, and click on Rules. The click on Add Rule, and enter a description along the lines of Recent correspondents or just Recent. Leave the first pop-up menu set to Any. Click the second pop-up, labeled From, and select Sender is in my Previous Recipients from the menu.

This item—and its “not in” variation—are the key to this rule. The previous recipients list is just that—people you have e-mailed recently. (Mail keeps this list of previous recipients automatically, adding e-mails to the list each time you send a message.) As you’ve sent these people an e-mail, it’s likely you’re involved in a conversation with them, so these messages are probably more important to you than most other messages. Using this rule, you’ll be able to quickly spot these conversations.

Force subscribed calendars to sync to MobileMe

As Apple has conceded, the launch of the MobileMe online service was not without its issues. Even now, with most of the early glitches resolved, there are still some holes in the MobileMe functionality. One such hole has to do with OS X 10.5, iCal, subscribed calendars (such as these provided by Apple), and MobileMe synching. (Chris Breen covered other MobileMe synching issues in a recent Mac911 blog.)

Basically, depending on which machine holds the subscribed calendars, how you’re synching those calendars, and to which devices they are being synched, you may find that your subscribed calendars fully sync, might sync only the calendar summary info but no events, or might not sync at all. Apple explains the various combination of possibilities in this tech support article. The article explains the rationale for not synching the subscribed calendars’ events to MobileMe in 10.5:

When syncing subscribed calendars to MobileMe, the calendar information and settings for the calendar is synced, but all of the downloaded events are not. This is done to help streamline the syncing process with MobileMe, as it prevents syncing redundant information to other computers with an Internet connection.

While that’s all well and good, it does nothing to help solve the problem: more than likely, you’d prefer to have your subscribed calendars on MobileMe (and hence, on your iPhone or iPod touch as well). While the tech support article offers some hope that syncing to iPhones and iPod touches may be forthcoming, here’s a workaround that will let you see your subscribed calendars today on MobileMe, as well as on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Send clickable links in Mail's Subject field

Today’s hint would probably fall into the “did you know?” category—if we had such a category. Consider it a tidbit, a morsel of knowledge to file away for possible use in the future…or not. In any event, today’s hint concerns Mail and its ability to make embedded URLs into clickable links.

You’re probably well aware that embedding an http://www…. address in the body of your e-mail will create a clickable link in the message as seen by its recipients. This definitely works with Mail as the receiving client, and I would assume with other e-mail clients as well. The link will look much like it does on any website, in color with an underline indicating its clickable state.

What you may not have known is that you can send clickable links as the subject of e-mail messages as well—at least if the recipient is using Mail in OS X 10.5 to read your message. Again, this may work in other e-mail clients, but I only have Mail set up here to test with.

Control QuickTime Player playback via the keyboard

If you use Final Cut (Pro or Express), you’re probably familiar with the J-K-L keyboard trifecta. These three keys control video playback—press J to play the video in reverse, press K to stop playback, and press L to play the video forward as usual—and they’re amazingly useful if you prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard instead of the mouse.

What I didn’t know until just recently is that these same controls also work in QuickTime Player (for QuickTime version 7.3 and newer, at least), which is used by a great many more people than is Final Cut. So the next time you’re watching a video, try using the J-K-L keys to control the video playback.

What makes these keys even more powerful is that the J and L keys respond to multiple presses. On the first press, the video plays at normal speed. Press the key again, though, and the playback speed increases. Each press of the key will increase the playback speed, up to a point. When you press K, your video playback will instantly come to a screeching halt. When you stop the playback, QuickTime Player also resets the acceleration curve, so the next press of J or L will start playback at the movie’s normal speed.

Create multiple individual zip files

Have you ever needed to zip a number of files into separate zip archives? Perhaps you’ve got a number of files in one directory, and they need to be e-mailed to a number of different people. If you use OS X’s built-in Compress contextual menu item (or Create Archive in OS X 10.4), the end result will be one archive containing all the files—which is clearly not what you want.

You could compress each file one at a time, of course, but that’s tedious. Instead, put Automator to use with a simple one-command workflow. Open Automator, in Applications, and create a new custom (blank) worfklow. Select the Utilities entry in the left-most column, the drag the Run Shell Script action into the blank work area on the right.

Set the Pass Input pop-up to “as arguments,” and then replace the existing cat code with this text:

Move the distortion effects position in Photo Booth

Here’s a simple tip for those of you who like to use Photo Booth's distortion effects (those on the second page of the four pages of effects) on your photos. When you choose one of these effects, say Twirl, you’ll see a slider appear over your photo, which lets you change the size of the effect. But did you know you can also move the origin of the effect?

This capability isn’t covered in Photo Booth’s Help, nor is it in the menus, but it’s amazingly simple—just click and drag the mouse on the effects window, and you’ll move the origin of the effect to the mouse’s current location. When you’ve got the effect set to your desired size and position, click the red camera button to snap your distorted image.

I told you it was a simple tip—still, when I asked a number of friends about this, only a couple were aware that you could move the origin of the distortion in this manner. I know this works in OS X 10.5, and I would assume in 10.4 as well. However, I don’t have a machine running 10.4 that also included Photo Booth, so I can’t test that assumption.