MacApper Tip: Enable Full Keyboard Access
Here’s a nifty tip for those new switchers and veteran Mac users alike. One of the biggest gripes with OS X is the lack of the ability to tab through dialog boxes from the keyboard. As an avid keyboard-shortcut user, I like being able to use the keyboard for as much as possible. Luckily, Apple has made it easy for us Mac users to enable this fairly simple feature.
Score! iTunes 8 Adds CD-TEXT
One of my biggest gripes with iTunes’ ability to burn CDs is the fact that it hasn’t supported CD-TEXT, something that my car offers when a CD that has the text is inserted. As a result, I have been forced to either manually go through my iTunes Music folder searching for tracks to burn from Roxio’s Toast, or simply burn full albums straight from their respective folders. But not any more.
MacApper Tip: Quickly Drill Through Folders with the Spacebar
In my opinion, one of the most handy features in OS X is the ability to drag and drop virtually anywhere. I’ve gotten so used to it, in fact, that I constantly try dragging and dropping all over the place when I’m on a Windows machine. However, one quick but useful tip to make drilling through a hierarchy of folders is to use the space bar.
Back to School Tip: Require Password to Wake from Sleep
For all the Mac-carrying students who are either already back at school or very close to heading back, here’s a nice little tip that can come in handy. For anyone worried about prying eyes or simply worried about people poking around in their machines, there’s an easy and quick way to make that less easy to do.
By heading over to the Security preference pane in the System Preferences app, there’s an option to “Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver”. When this is checked, you’ll be prompted to enter your password every time you wake from sleep or try to return to the main screen after the screen saver has been active.
Easily Spice Up Stacks with Stacks In Da Place
A while back, a set of “drawers” icons spread like wildfire across the internet. The icons, which were meant to make stacks in Leopard’s dock more attractive, looked pretty nifty, but getting them to work properly involved Terminal use and some other tinkering. However, with “Stacks in Da Place” from MacXeagle, getting your stacks looking nice and organized is even easier.
Upon opening, Stacks In Da Place automatically detects your currently set up stacks and shows you the default icon. Adding an icon (such as one of the various “Drawer” icons) is as simple as dragging and dropping. (You can find the “Drawers” here)
MacApper Tip: Clean Out Your Menubar Items
With the plethora of apps that offer you instant access to notifications and functions directly from the menubar, things can get pretty crowded pretty fast. However, it’s super easy to get rid of most of the items in your menubar, and it’s only a click and drag away.
On most Apple apps, simply command clicking will allow you to take the icon right off the menubar so that you have some more screen real estate available. You’ll see the familiar “poof” effect once it’s gone.
Keep iCal and GCal in Sync For Free
The blogs have been buzzing as of late about Google’s introduction of the CalDAV protocol into its Google Calendar service. For those of who who live on the planet Jupiter, Google Calendar is the excellent free online calendar service that resides in the cloud. One of the major trends in technology is maintaining a connection between apps in the cloud, and apps on your physical machine. With the introduction of CalDAV to Google Calendar, it’s never been easier to keep iCal and Google Calendar in sync, let alone for free.
Keep Firefox Bookmarks in Sync with Weave
Along with the birth of Firefox 3.0 came the unfortunate death of Google Browser Sync, the incredibly popular Firefox extension that allowed users to keep their bookmarks in sync across computers. While this is still possible with .mac and Safari, the space for a new cross platform solution is vast. (As a side note, I know that you can use Safari on Windows, but it still hardly has any marketshare compared to Firefox and IE). But the lack of a major browser sync tool for Firefox 3.0 may finally have a solution; it’s called Weave and it’s straight out of the Mozilla Labs.
Add More Features to iWeb Sites with iTweak
With the introduction of iWeb in the latest versions of Apple’s iLife suite of media/lifestyle applications, making and publishing your own website has never been easier. The incredibly straightforward design tools offer a true WYSIWYG web-creator tool, and a highly customizable one at that. iWeb does, however, have its limitations and lacks some capabilities that many people would like to see available. Enter iTweak, a nifty freeware app from Guimkie, that offers a handful of powerful and useful features that can help make your iWeb site that much better.
Make Your Own Menubar SSB With Fluid
We at MacApper are big fans of Fluid, the Site-Specific Browser (SSB) creator application from Todd Ditchendorf. This handy little app, which we’ve discussed before, allows you to take your favorite websites and turn them into applications in and of themselves. Basically, you get a fully functioning browser without all the clutter of toolbars and icons of your conventional browser (although you can get that stuff back if you want it). However, with the latest version of Fluid 0.9.2, a couple of new very useful features have been added. In this MacApper tutorial I’ll be explaining how you can create your very own SSB, which you can choose to put in your Menubar as a menubar item or actually on your desktop. Click on after the jump to see how to get started.
