Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

Set iChat buddy list shortcut order

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

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

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

Serve local web pages via name not IP number

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

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

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

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

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Set Mail’s sending account via keyboard shortcut

Like many of you, I have more than one e-mail account set up in Mail. I’ve got my work account at Macworld, my work account at macosxhints, and then a few assorted personal addresses that I use for various things. When composing a new e-mail, I can pick any of these sending accounts using the From drop-down menu in the new message window. You control the default sending account for new messages using the Send New Mail From drop-down menu in the Composing tab of Mail’s preferences; I have mine set to “Account of last-viewed mailbox.

Even with the preference set to use my last-viewed mailbox, though, there are times when I want to change the sending account. Until recently, that required either reaching for the mouse, or judicious use of the Tab and arrow keys to select a different sending account. Now, however, I can change my sending account using a simple keyboard combo. What magical third-party application enables this bit of trickery? None at all—it’s built right into OS X in the form of the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard and Mouse System Preferences panel. (Note that this has only been tested in OS X 10.5, and I don’t think it will work in 10.4.)

As it turns out, you can define shortcuts on that tab for each of your sending accounts. There’s nothing really tricky about it, either, other than making sure you specify the menu item exactly as it’s formatted in the drop-down menu. Assuming you used your full name when creating each account, the standard format for each entry in the menu is:

Firstname Lastname <user@host.address>

You can, obviously, see exactly how each of your e-mail addresses are formatted by simply activating the From drop-down menu in Mail. On the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, click the Plus sign, and set the Application drop-down menu to Mail. In the Menu Title field, enter the details for the sending account, exactly as they appear in Mail’s drop-down menu.

Click in the Keyboard Shortcut box, then press your desired shortcut. To avoid conflicts with existing Mail keyboard shortcuts, I recommend using the Control key, either alone or in combination with Command, Option, and/or Shift. When done, click Add. Repeat for each account for which you’d like to create a shortcut.

Switch back to Mail, press Command-N to start a new e-mail, and press one of your newly-defined keyboard shortcuts. When you press the shortcuts, you should see the From drop-down menu change to the chosen account—even though the menu’s not technically active, then sending account will still change when you press the shortcut.

As you can see in the image at right, the menu will even show you your shortcuts, in case you happen to forget them. As an added bonus hint, it turns out you can use this same technique to create keyboard shortcuts for both the SMTP Server and Signature drop-down menus as well. So if you use a lot of signatures, you can easily keep your most-used options no more than a keyboard shortcut away. Just remember to precisely match what you see in the menu (capitalization counts) in the Keyboard Shortcuts panel.

I’ve found this to be a tremendous timesaver—so much so that I’ve duplicated it on all three Macs I routinely use, and have become very used to switching the sending account with the keyboard.

Some tips on downgrading applications

Recently, after swapping a couple of machines (I sent my first-generation Intel-based Mac mini back to the Macworld offices, and we bought an iMac for the kids and general use), I realized that I had inadvertently also disabled my locally-hosted Web sites: I used to use the mini as a local Web server, and it served out copies of the Mac OS X Hints site, as well as the various family sites I maintain. I didn’t really want to keep the iMac running all the time just to have the Web server running, so I decided to move the server to my Mac Pro.

While OS X ships with a built-in Web server, it doesn’t ship with MySQL, the database engine that enables sites such as macosxhints.com to work. Installing it is relatively straightforward—there are OS X installer versions available on the MySQL site. About the only trick comes in choosing which version of MySQL to install—some content management systems only work with certain versions. In my case, I wanted MySQL 4.1 for compatibility with the macosxhints.com site. Unfortunately, I managed to download and install version 5.0 without noticing. As soon as I noticed the problem, I downloaded the 4.1 package, and attempted to install it. The installer, however, refused to proceed, telling me there was already a newer version of MySQL installed.

Since the installer didn’t want to install due to the presence of the newer version of MySQL, I thought I’d first get rid of that newer version. In the case of MySQL, all the code lives in the /usr/local/mysql directory, which is actually a symbolic link (like an alias in the Finder) to a directory with a much longer name. So in Terminal, I issued a sudo rm -r /usr/local/mysql-long-directory-name to remove all the MySQL code. Note that this command will delete all of your MySQL databases in addition to MySQL itself! In my case, I didn’t care, because I hadn’t yet migrated the databases over to the Mac Pro.

I then tried to run the installer again, but it still failed, saying a newer version was installed. After some thinking, I remembered the /Library/Receipts folder—this is where installers write out records of what they did. Perhaps, I thought, the MySQL installer is looking at the Receipts folder, seeing the MySQL 5.0 receipt, and using that as the basis for stopping the install.

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Remove duplicate iCal birthday reminders

Here’s a super-simple Thursday tip regarding iCal and the Birthdays calendar. The Birthdays calendar is a special one that pulls birthday information from Address Book and displays it as a subscribed calendar in iCal.

At times, though, it seems iCal gets confused, especially if you’re syncing via MobileMe. What I’ve found is that occasionally, and for no apparent reason at all, iCal will create two entries for every birthday. While I realize the importance of not forgetting the birthdays of my contacts, I really don’t need to see two reminders of the upcoming event for every single contact.

The temporary fix, at least until someone figures out the bug and fixes it for good, is quite simple. Open iCal’s preferences, and on the General tab, uncheck (disable) Show Birthdays Calendar, then check (enable) it again. Presto, no more double birthday entries on the calendar…at least until the next time it happens.

Shortcuts for working with iPhoto ’08 thumbnails

In iPhoto ’08’s thumbnail view, there are a couple of undocumented keyboard shortcuts that make working with thumbnails somewhat easier. If you want to resize the thumbnails, for instance, you don’t have to grab the mouse and drag the slider. Instead, you can cycle between various pre-set thumbnail sizes by pressing 0 (tiny), 3 (small), 2 (medium), and 1 (show one image only). (Previous versions of iPhoto support these same keystrokes, though they offered only three sizes—0, 1, and 2.) When you press 1, you’ll see only one thumbnail at a time, and it will expand to fill the entire viewing area in iPhoto.

While it’s nice to see large views like this, most of the time I prefer to see a number of thumbnails, and not just one. Thanks to a second undocumented shortcut, however, you can have the best of both worlds. First, set the thumbnail size to whatever you like—one of the pre-defined values shown above, or use the slider to set your preferred size.

Next, press the Down Arrow (or use your mouse) to highlight one of the images in thumbnail view, then press the Space Bar. The selected image will now zoom to fill the available image area in iPhoto, just like using the ‘1’ mode above. You can then use the Left and Right Arrows to move from image to image, letting you easily browse a given event’s pictures at a large size. When you’re done, just press the Space Bar again and you’ll then see your thumbnail view, at whatever size you set it up.

I’ve dug through iPhoto’s Getting Started manual, and its list of keyboard shortcuts, and as far as I can tell, neither of these tricks are documented.

Export text from all notes in Stickies

Despite the plethora of apps out there to help me track to-do items, I find I still use Stickies quite often—sure, I use iCal for tracking my actual to-do items, but I like Stickies for just jotting down quick ideas as they occur during the day. While Stickies has improved over the years, there’s still one fairly major problem with the program: It’s not easy to get your text out of Stickies. There’s a File -> Export Text menu item, but that will only export the text from one Sticky at a time. What if you’ve got 30 or 40 notes, and you’d like to get the text out of all of them?

While there’s no direct “export all” feature in Stickies, there is a fairly simple workaround. First, select File -> Print All Notes. In the Print dialog, click the PDF pop-up menu, then select Save as PDF. In the new window that appears, name your file and pick a save location (and optionally provide values for Title, Author, etc.), then click Save.

This will create a PDF file containing all your notes. You could leave it like this, if you want, but there’s one more step if you want the actual text from the Stickies. Using Preview or Reader, open the PDF file you just created. Now select all (Command-A), copy it to the clipboard (Command-C), switch to a blank TextEdit (or your editor of choice) document, and paste (Command-V). Save the resulting file, and you’ve got a text version of all your Stickies.

While a real export feature would be nice, as workarounds go, this one’s not too much trouble.

Disable Mail’s data detectors in OS X 10.5

Data detectors are one of the new features in the OS X 10.5 version of Mail. Data detectors watch for addresses, dates, and times in e-mail messages, and when found, highlight those regions of text when the mouse enters them, displaying a button to show a contextual menu. Activate the contextual menu, and you can create new iCal events or Address Book contacts based on the highlighted information.

While I find the data detectors very useful, some people don’t find them useful at all. If, for instance, you don’t use iCal to manage your schedule or Address Book to manage your contacts, you don’t have much need for data detectors in Mail. Or perhaps you just find the highlighting annoying and never use the feature, even if you use iCal and Address Book. Regardless the reason, it turns you you can disable Mail’s data detectors. Quit Mail and open Terminal, then run this command:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES

When you launch Mail the next time, you’ll find that iCal and Address Book data bits are no longer detected. If you ever want to re-enable this feature, quit Mail, and repeat the above Terminal command, but change YES to NO, then start Mail again.

Avoid icon dragging delays in 10.5

If you’re an OS X 10.5 user and you prefer to look at your Finder windows in icon view mode set to its maximum—128-by-128 pixels—size, here’s a little timesaver when drag-selecting icons from such windows. It seems there’s a bug of sorts in the 10.5 Finder that makes such operations quite slow, especially if the window contains a large number of icons. If you try drag-selecting a bunch of 128-by-128 pixel icons in such a window, you’ll notice some visual freezes and jumps as you drag the mouse around. These lags can be distracting and annoying, as they make it tougher to drag-select just the group of icons you want to select.

To prevent this problem, open the View Options window (Command-J) and drag the icon size slider down to the first tick mark from the right—112-by-112 pixels. At this size setting, I don’t see any of the lag issues that I see when using the 128-by-128 pixel size. You might have success with slightly larger sizes, but I find the first tick mark is an easy mark to hit when dragging the slider.

After you’re done with your drag-select operation, move the View Options slider back up to your preferred 128-by-128 pixel setting. If you leave the View Options window open while doing your drag-select operation, you can do this icon-size-changing routine with a minimum of fuss. Press Command-J, move the icon size slider, perform your drag-select operation, move the icon size slider back, then press Command-J again. While it’s not ideal, I find it much nicer drag-selecting the smaller icons without the visual delays associated with the full-sized versions.

Updated at 8:09am to change Get Info to View Options.

Toggle smoothing during screen zoom

If you use the Universal Access screen zoom feature—Command-Option-equals and minus, or Control plus your mouse’s scroll wheel—you’ve probably noticed that OS X attempts to “smooth” the zoomed-in image by applying various color shades to fill in areas of sharp color change. Depending on what you’re looking at, and how much you’re zooming in, the end result can either be very nice or very ugly. I find text at mid-zoom levels looks fine when smoothed, but when really zoomed in, the end result can be quite ugly, as seen in the image below.

There is, thankfully, a way to disable the smoothing when zooming. At any time while zooming, you can press Command-Option-backslash to toggle smoothing off or back on.

This shortcut is documented in both the Options section of the Seeing tab of the Universal Access System Preferences panel, and in the Universal Access section of the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel. Despite the fact that this shortcut is listed in two separate spots, I didn’t know it was possible to turn off smoothing until someone pointed it out to me.

Because this shortcut is a pre-defined keyboard shortcut, it’s easily changed to another keystroke if you wish—just double-click on the listed shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, then type the shortcut you’d prefer to use. I actually find the default keystrokes logical and easy to use—if you’re using the keyboard to zoom, you already have Command and Option pressed, and the backslash key is quite close to the equal and minus keys that control the zoom level.

I realize this isn’t the world’s deepest-buried hint, but if I’ve overlooked this feature, perhaps others have as well.