Whether we want it to happen or not, our systems all get a little sluggish from time to time.  Sometimes it’s a full hard drive slowing things down.  Other times we just simply need more memory for the modern apps than our Mac came installed with.  But for all those other times when things just need a quick tweak and tidy?  We’ve put together a quick list of five easy steps that should help get your Mac running like it’s factory fresh.

1. Do a widget inventory. Widgets are easy to forget about.  On a rainy afternoon you may add half-a-dozen just to check them out and then completely forget that they exist by the next morning.  But some of those widgets will keep running even when you’re not using your dashboard.  It’s always best to keep your widgets, like the rest of your digital life, stripped down to only what you’re actually using.

2. Declutter your desktop. Windows users enjoy the luxury of having a small army of icons cluttering up their desktop without any ill effects.  Us Mac users aren’t so lucky.  Each icon on your desktop is treated by OSX as its own window.  Same goes for the items on your dock.  And while having a handful of icons on your desktop probably won’t make a noticeable impact on overall performance, a full desktop will.  Time to get those organized and off the desktop!  (just a sidenote, this one shouldn’t help Leopard users.  It looks like OSX 10.5 finally tackled this problem.)

3. Keep an eye on the Activity Monitor. While this may sound like common sense, you’d be surprised at how many little programs are eating up big chunks of your memory.  The massive slowdown that prompted my most recent clean up was the result of a tiny little background application I used for PS3 media streaming eating up more than half of my systems available resources.  While I don’t have a fix for the program, disabling did provide an easy fix for my system.  Had I not checked the Activity Monitor I would have been losing my mind over this one.

4. Turn off unused features. Remember that time last Spring you turned on Bluetooth to get that picture off your mobile phone?  Or that roommate that wanted to jack your signal via internet sharing? Did you remember to turn them off?  Take a hunt through your System Preferences and make sure everything you don’t actually use is disabled (but if you’re not sure, and we can’t stress this enough, don’t disable it.  We’d hate to see you switch off something you needed and not be too sure on how to get it back).

5. Delete unused preference panes. Every now and then we download programs that install preference panes, and then forget all about them.  The real problem?  Lot’s of these will load in the background at startup.  Luckily it should be as easy as a right click to remove.  If it’s not you can always manually delete them by going to / Library / PreferencePanes.

A lot of this is probably common sense, but it never hurts to see it spelled out.  What tips and tricks have you found help you get the best performance out of your Mac?

In order to use Summarize, you need to be on a native OS X program such as Preview, TextEdit, Safari, Mail, etc. If you are in one of these programs, getting your summary takes just a second and it is fully customizable. If you are not in one of these programs, simply copy and paste your text over into TextEdit and you will be able to use it hassle free. To get started, simply select the text that you want summarized, navigate up to the menu-bar, and drop down the menu by selecting the name of the current application that you are on. In this sub-menu you will find the “services” section. From there, you can select Summarize. The summary box will look something like this:

As you can see, you will be able to edit how long you want the summary to be and if you want it in sentences or paragraphs. The accuracy of the summaries has actually been quite impressive in my past experience with this great feature.

Most of the features that we will be discussing can be found in System Preferences > Trackpad. Unfortunately, out of the box, the new MacBooks come with a lot of the multi-touch features turned off. So unless you know to go to this preference pane right away, you might be a bit frustrated with the new trackpad. This would especially stand true for a new Mac user who is used to two buttons and the old style trackpad. However, when you fully enable all of the cool features on the new glass trackpad, you will never want to go back to the older version. In my case, I never want to use a mouse again (except for when gaming).

So, let’s navigate to the Trackpad Preference Pane and get to the screen pictured below:

Now you have the ability to turn your trackpad into something much more useful. First off, highlighting each feature selection will show a short video of each feature in action. The one-finger options are fairly self-explanatory. ’Tap to Click’ will allow you to simply tap on the track pad to click instead of having to push the button down. I use this feature a lot more than fully clicking the button down. ’Dragging’ and ‘Drag Lock’ allow you to tap once and then drag anything around your desktop.

My personal favorite option is ‘Secondary Tap’. This has been around on OS X for awhile, but some people I talk to do not know about it. This allows you to mimic a right mouse click by simply tapping two fingers on your trackpad at the same time.

The most powerful options come with the three- and four-finger options. Swiping three fingers left or right allows you to go forward or backward in any given application. This works wonderfully in your browser, as it can be used for previous page navigation. As for four-fingered options, you can swipe four fingers up to show your desktop, four fingers down to enter “show all windows” expose mode, or swipe left and right in order to switch applications. Some hidden gems include: allowing you to pinch in and out with two fingers while in an application in order to zoom in and out and being able to rotate images using two fingers.

While most Mac power users will already know about these features, many new Mac users can use nearly all of these new features to their advantage in making their MacBook experience more enjoyable.

What this feature does not do, however, is fix the wonkiness of Mail.app’s Similar Messages feature. It is supposed to find messages in the same thread as others, but it really just searches by title. If you have two messages titled “Hello,” or “Re: Hello,” then they will be considered part of the same thread. Still, this can be a great and very helpful feature.

Evernote is a multi-platform note application sent to us from the productivity gods. The benefit of Evernote is that one can access and upload notes from a Mac, a PC, a  Windows Mobile or iPhone, and anything with a web browser. Evernote can even recognize handwritten or printe text from photos and scanned notes, making them searchable. This functionality will aid me significantly in my two week quest to bring my document clutter to more machines.

It should be “noted” that at present, Evernote only handles the following imported file types: GIF, JPG, PNG, WAV, MP3, PDF. This doesn’t allow Evernote to handle all documents, but there is hope. Evernote Support’s public notebook suggests more file type support for arbitrary file attachments for Premium accounts by the end of this year. Thus, I will be adding a premium account to my Christmas wishlist for this year.

My web browser piles the majority of files into my document drop box. Step one is to channel the majority of this pile into Evernote.

For starters, add the Evernote webclipper to your browser bookmark bar or install the firefox extension and use it frequently.

Next, if you use Firefox, open up your preferences window and click on the Applications tab. Search for supported file types and select the “Use Evernote” option.

Finally, instead of using the nifty Save to PDF option in your print window, why not use the Save PDF to Evernote option and save a step?

These three tips are just the beginning of using Evernote to your synchronization advantage. I’d love to read some comments on unleashing the potential of this note storage monster.

Evernote provides a free maximum montly upload of 40mb with no storage limit as well as free clients for desktop, web browser, and smartphones.  You can upgrade to a 500mb maximum monthly upload for either $5 per month or $45 for the year.

Head over to the Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane, and on the bottom of the Keyboard Shortcuts pane, you should see the option for “Full Keyboard Access.” Simply click on the option for “All Controls” and you should now be able to start tabbing through dialog boxes and windows. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard combination of Ctrl+F7 to enable this feature. When you see a little blue ring around any dialog options, you can tab through them to select a different option. You can use Shift+Tab to go backwards, and the Space bar to replicate the mouse click. This simple option makes it nice and quick to deal with one moderately annoying default “feature” of Mac OS X.

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.

For an even quicker way, you can head over to the Expose & Spaces preference pane and enable a hot corner for the screen saver. I currently have one set up for the upper right hand corner, as I don’t really ever click on the Spotlight icon and instead just use a keyboard shortcut for whenever I need to quick search for something.

An additional layer of security can be easily added. You can choose to disable the Automatic Login feature of OS X that allows you to bypass the main login window and go directly to the selected user’s desktop. While this feature is especially handy when you’re at home and don’t have to worry about anyone messing around on your machine (hopefully), it can be a major vulnerability when you’re away at school. I know that I didn’t want my roommates to be able to get into my computer, and this was a simple little way to ensure that my stuff was secure.

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)

After a few seconds, your Dock should restart and your stack should now be enclosed by a new icon. This creates a much cleaner look, and adds a cool visual effect to the whole idea of stacks.

Should you decide that you don’t like your stack icon, removing it is as simple as clicking on the stack from the left panel and choosing “Delete Icon”.

This app is really very simple, but it does its job well. Stacks In Da Place is a free download from MacXeagle.

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.

However, in some of the other non-Apple apps, it’s not as simple, but hardly a hassle. By visiting the preferences (command+comma) pane of most applications, there’s a little check mark box to show notifications in the menubar. Simply uncheck this box, and voila, the information up on the top of the screen should be gone.

I hope that this tip makes it a little easier to keep things clean on your Mac and stay organized in the process.

For the people that don’t feel like shelling out for Apple’s push-enabled MobileMe service, Google offers a highly competitive set of services that rival Apple’s. For the low price of $0.00, you can have all of your iCal appointments synced up to the cloud. Additionally, any changes you make to Google Calendar online will be pushed down to your iCal calendar on your Mac. While it doesn’t offer the same instantaneous changes as MobileMe claims to offer, the 15 minute interval default sync time should be more than enough for some.

Integrating Google Calendar with iCal is as simple as adding an account to your iCal preferences. After you open the preferences in iCal, click on the Accounts tab. Hit the “+” button to get the “Add an Account” dialog box. For the username option, put in your full Gmail address (including the @gmail.com), followed by your password. Additionally, you have to put in the address for the Account URL. This address can be found here: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/[YOUR USERNAME]/user (just replace the [YOUR USERNAME] with your own Gmail address). Again, this should include the “@gmail.com” at the end of it.

After following those simple steps, you should be up and running. You can sync manually by clicking Command+R and you can also change the sync interval. With the iPhone Google interface, and Google Sync app for BlackBerry, you can truly have your calendars in sync everywhere. I have a strong feeling that Apple will allow native syncing to the iPhone with a future update. That would make it even easier to make sure that you never have a reason for missing an appointment again.

The basics of Grab are very simple, and it can be operated by knowing two keyboard shortcuts: Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4. For one who needs a quick ’shot to send a friend, use Command+Shift+3. Command+Shift+3 takes an instant picture of the whole user’s visible screen and places the PNG image on the Desktop for easy sharing. These pictures can be uploaded to a web server, emailed, or even sent through iChat. Command+Shift+4 gives the user a little bit more flexibility with his or her screenshot. It changes the mouse into a cross hair giving the ability to select what makes it into the final picture. Just move the mouse to the starting position, click the mouse, and drag to the ending location. If you change your mind about taking the screenshot, just press the escape key. The escape key will cancel the screenshot any time between the pressing of the shortcut and the actual taking of the screenshot. As an added bonus, press Command+Shift+3/4 in order for your screen capture to be copied directly to the clipboard and not your desktop.

Many times, one just needs a screen grab of one window on their screen. It would be a bit excessive to take a picture of the whole screen, and using plain Command+Shift+4 would create a distracting border around the window. After pressing Command+Option+Shift+4, press Space for “Window Capture Mode.” Your mouse will become a camera that allows you to select the window you want. As an added bonus, you can use the camera to take a picture of dock icons, the menubar, and even desktop icons.

For those who wish to take screen capturing to the next level, you may use these “secret” modifier keys. These modifiers can only be used while one has pressed Command+Shift+4 and begun selecting the area he wishes to capture. If you have the perfect size selection for your snapshot, press and hold the Space bar to keep the selection size but move it to different areas of the screen. Holding down the Shift key in place of the Space bar will lock either the vertical or horizontal component of your already-selected snapshot area. This can be handy in scenarios where one has the correct height of his soon-to-be snapshot chosen, but not the width. Additionally, the Option key can be held after one has pressed Command+Shift+4 to cause the selection area to resize from the center of the area. Lastly, holding down Shift/Option+Space causes Shift’s or Option’s effect to occur while adding in the Space’s function of moving the selection box around the screen.

Mastering these controls can allow any user to take flawless screenshots to share with the world. Please share with me in the comments how you use these functions on your Mac.

Time Machine is part of the Finder (thinking a little outside the box), as it is basically an extension of the Finder’s functionality, so why not make it a little bit more part of the Finder – Drag the Time Machine icon, from the Applications folder onto the top pane of the Finder window, et voilà! – you can remove it from your dock, and still have a quick way back to the past

One way to run workflows straightaway is to open them with Automator Runner. Right click (ctrl-click) on the workflow to access the Open With menu.

If you find that you’re always using this feature for a certain workflow, you may opt to always open the workflow with Automator Runner. You can enable this by using the same moves listed above, but choose “Other…” instead. Select Automator Runner in System/Library/Core Services and be sure to tic the “Always Open With” box.

Workflows may be incorporated into Finder use by saving the workflow as a Finder plug-in. To do this, choose “Save As Plug-in” from the file menu. Be sure to select “Finder” from the drop down menu. You’ll be able to access the workflow from right clicking (ctrl-click) objects in the finder. This works well if you want to convert image files or move files to the Applications folder with a couple of clicks.

You can also save the workflow as an application. This means that you can execute workflows from the dock, as login items, or from the finder without having to open Automator. I use this to connect to my MBP at home when I startup my Mac Pro at work.

Finally, you could use Quicksilver to execute workflows. Be sure to install the Automator Module as this will allow automatic execution of workflows from the Quicksilver pane. Using Quicksilver means that you can also use keystrokes (aka triggers) to execute workflows.

Automator takes the redundancy out of work on your Mac, and running a workflow doesn’t have to be redundant either. How many times can I say the word redundant before it becomes redundant?

Two years ago, Adam Betts re-designed a few elements of Google Earth’s interface. I just recently came across his blog post, and I thought I would share it with all of you.

The instructions to modify these interface elements are quite simple. First, you need to get the files from Adam’s site and unzip them. Second, find Google Earth in your Applications folder. Right-click on it, and select “Show Package Contents.” This will bring you into the core of files that make up Google Earth.

Once inside, open up the folder you downloaded from Adam’s site. This folder has two more folders inside of it, with pretty straightforward instructions. The contents of one folder needs to go inside of “Resources” and the contacts of the other folder needs to go inside “MacOS>res.” When you drag the contents of each folder into the location specified, you will get an alert asking whether to replace the files that are already there or not. Select the “Apply to All” box and click replace.

Upon opening Google Earth after you have added the new files, you will be greeted with a bit of a re-vamped interface. It isn’t anything major, as Adam said it wasn’t worth his effort to re-do the entire interface if he wasn’t getting paid. Maybe Google will finally take that as a cue to hire him and make the interface more Mac-like.

If you have been waiting for Google to tweak the Google Earth interface for a while now, this is about as good as it gets for now. This little tweak is free, and the files are available on Adam Betts’ blog.

In just a couple easy steps you’ll have all sorts of fun new fonts to play around with, and you’ll have no more excuses to use Comic Sans or Papyrus.

Step 1:
You first have to find the fonts online to download. Dafont and Fonts 500 are two great resources for free fonts. Almost all the fonts you’ll find are in the TrueType (TTF) format, which Apple created in the ’80s and is used widely on both Macs and PCs to this day.

Step 2:
It’s a good thing I’m not paid by the word, because Apple has made this far too easy. Double click on the .ttf file and Font Book will pop open and ask you to install it. One more click and you’re done! The font will now appear in the fonts window in every program you use. On a PC you would need to restart programs like Photoshop to see the new fonts, but not in OS X, they should be instantly available.

Be Aware: Although these fonts are free to download and use for personal projects, the creators may have some restrictions on their commercial use. I put all the fonts I download a separate folder in Font Book so I’ll remember to check before I use in a way that is potentially against its terms of use.

I’ve spent a lot of time collecting fonts, and I’ve posted some of my favorites here, here, and here if you’re interested.

I have four email accounts that I use the most, which means I have four different mailboxes that I check often. When using mail.app, the left sidebar of your mail.app application can become a mess with all of its folders. I decided to figure out a way to make my four mailboxes, one.

As some of you may already know, you can create one account in mail.app and in the email address field on the “Account Information” tab, you can enter a comma delimited list of all your email addresses. However, you may not know that if your .mac account is the primary account you use, the comma delimited option will not work.

But there is a solution that you can use with your .mac email account in mail.app:

First, you will need to forward your email accounts to your .mac email address. Now, if you use Google Apps or Gmail, under the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab, you can put in your .mac email address and then you should choose to archive your account’s copy of the message. You will want to do this in case you need to search for an old message that is no longer available in your mail client.

Second, create your .mac email account in mail.app. You will then want to create different signatures for your different identities. Now in order to create different identities, you will need to add your outgoing servers for each email account. Make sure to give a description of each account, and I will explain why a little later. Please take note that the different outgoing servers serve as your different identities.

Third, on the “Account Information” tab for your .mac email account, you will need to choose your .mac outgoing server. Unless your do so, your signatures will not be saved to the .mac account you created. When composing or replying to a message, a list of available outgoing servers (identities) will populate on the left just below the subject field. This is why you need to give a description for each of your outgoing servers (i.e. Personal, Work).

If not, it will give you a list like smtp.googlemail.com. That might work if you only have one, but if you are like me and have three (Google App and/or Gmail accounts), you will need to give them a description in order to know from what email address your message will be sent.

By using this method (or the other method if .mac is not your primary account), mail.app will be much cleaner and uncluttered. Also, it will help with your work flow. Lastly, you should create two folders: a hold folder and an action folder. Your hold folder should contain the messages you need to reference to at a later date. The action folder should contain the messages that need immediate attention. You can create an archive folder to archive your old messages, but this is not needed if you use Google Apps or Gmail.

The only painstaking task is that when you are composing a new email message or replying to an email message, you will need to choose the identity from the drop down list as well as the signature from the drop down list. Perhaps there is an applescript or rule that can be written to make this automated for you? If I come up with something, I will definitely make it known. Now, go and have fun with mail.app.

So while we wait impatiently, why not brush up on the basics by playing the original StarCraft in the mean time?

Unfortunately there’s a big obstacle: the game was initially released for Mac OS 9. While this isn’t a big deal for older PowerPC-based Macs that can run archaic software using the Classic emulator, the newer Intel systems are left out in the cold. So how can we relive the glory days of low-resolution, last century gaming?

Luckily Blizzard has got us covered. Buried away on the developer’s support site is a link to the Mac OS X Native Installer. Using this application and your dusty, old StarCraft disc, you can get a Carbon version of the game running on any Mac. Intel systems will use Rosetta emulation, but you won’t notice much slowdown since the game isn’t very processor intensive. This trick, however, won’t work for the StarEdit campaign editor, so budding creators should turn to the more advanced editor found in WarCraft III — or you could just wait out StarCraft II’s release.

StarCraft lets you choose from three armies, each with unique fighting abilities. The Terran is the basic human group, complete with traditional marines, tanks, aircrafts and nuclear missiles. The Protoss is a powerful race whose buildings and many of its units require battery power to operate at full capacity. Finally the Zergs spit green acid and normally travel in massive groups due to their ability to produce units quickly.

I was pleasantly surprised to find I could still jump on Battle.net almost 10 years since I first played and find people to compete against online. Granted the majority of them only spoke Korean and devoured my Terran army in a few minutes, but it’s still a fun way to relive years past.

Blizzard also offers an OS X installer for Diablo II. If you have trouble running it on an Intel Mac even after using the native installer, hold the Option key when launching the app, and set the video options to “software.” Now you should be good to go to Hell and battle Satan. Just make sure to watch out for high-level bullies who try to smack down newbies.

Recent releases of StarCraft and Diablo II include the native installers on the disc, so if you bought your copy recently, hopefully you can look forward to going online and seeing new players, who dug their old copies out of the closet.

The integration between iChat and Address Book is something that never ceases to amaze me. Users are able to drag and drop Address Book listings into a category in their buddy list and screenames contained therein are populated. AIM has been able to transmit text messages since 2003, but iChat and Adium are able to handle these plus signs and numbers with grace and organizational ease. Here’s how you can organize your contacts in Address Book so that you can reach them by IM when online and SMS when they sign off.

Start with a contact that has a mobile number in your address book:

Hit the edit button and add another screename for your contact using their mobile number. You’ll need to remove the hyphens from the number and add a +1 to the front of the number like this:

Click the edit button to seal the deal, and in true Apple style you can just drag and drop the address card into your buddy list and iChat takes care of the rest.

If your buddy is online, iChat will send your IMs through their active screename and when their offline (as shown above) your IM will go directly to their mobile. If they respond, you’ll see it pop up in the chat window. Say your contact is online and you want to text them anyway; click the drop down menu at the top of your chat window to select their mobile number and text away.

In the not so distant past, iChat would log mobile numbers numerically in the buddy list by default. I can’t remember the lyrics to “The Bear Went over the Mountain” let alone whose phone number is which. Compiling multiple screen names under a single contact is brilliance, and taking away my reasons for leaving my notebook and searching for my mobile, aka physical activity, is as refreshing as two swiss cake rolls and a pint of Guinness.

If you can feel where I’m going with this click the jump.

If you haven’t heard of the game Guitar Hero, please step out from under the rock you have been living under, and give it a try. It is an incredible game. You know it’s a great game when you can watch people play and be just as entertained as playing the game yourself. My in-laws have neighbors who are all good at the game. They sit around and pass the plastic guitar around and make musical magic. My eyes widened as I was subjected to star power, whammy bars, boos and standing ovations. This was definitely something that I could be obsessed with.

“But wait,” I thought, “I play guitar for real…” Still thinking, “Why not spend the time learning how to really shred like… Weezer?” The thing is, these guitar solos are just way to face-melting to learn in real time. I need some way to slow it down to a manageable tempo. After some considerable searching, I found a way to do this with GarageBand and some demo software.

GarageBand will import selections from your iTunes library as a “don’t mess with me” media file. You can’t change tempo or pitch on imported media files without a special little spell that you can cook up with your keyboard.

This is what the main window looks like when you’ve imported a track:

Notice the track preview is a orangey-yellowish color. Media tracks need to be changed to instrument tracks to respond to tempo or pitch changes made in the master track or editor window. Here’s where the keyboard shortcut comes in. Hit “ctrl-option-G” and then click on the orangey-yellowish track preview.

It now should look like this:

Be sure to double click on the preview (now blueish purple) to open the editor and tic the box marked “Follow Tempo and Pitch” like this:

There are several ways to slow the tempo down, but if you show the master track and adjust the tempo, you can speed through the song and slow through the guitar solos. Save the file and you can come back when your fingers stop bleeding.

Another way to do this is through Annotation Transcriber by zeitAnker. This program is designed specifically for adding subtitles to films, but it can slow down audio to 30% tempo without a change in pitch. Annotation Transciber even sounds a bit better than GarageBand in the quality department at slower speeds. The downloadable version of AT is a demo that fully functions for shorter media (it worked for me on media over ten minutes) and you can purchase a fully functioning program for €29.

GarageBand has the ability to loop even the smallest selections for repetetive learning, and Annotation Transcriber can handle foot pedal operation so your hands can be ready to free small countries under communist control and save the ozone layer all through your Mexican made Stratocaster.

iTunes has playlists(iTunes link) available from each game for your downloading convenience. You’ll be able to learn the songs sweet enough to make the Guitar Hero Soundtrack. Instead of five button mastery, you’ll be able to plug your guitar into your Volkswagen just like Slash and grind your axe, burn your frets, and battle for your soul like he does every day of his life.

If you look closely there are really tons of features in this cat that got lost in the crowd. I’m talking about the little enhancements that aren’t flashy or revolutionary, but are useful, fine-tuned, or actually improve or enhance the user experience.

Right after the jump is a list of ten that you might not have come across yet.

1. iChat Recording. After getting your buddy’s permission, video and audio chats can be recorded and saved.
2. iChat Invisibility. This was the only thing keeping me using Adium. Go online and talk only to the people you want to. No more getting bombarded with chats from people you’d rather not waste your time with.
3. Preview PDF Manipulation. Now you can add or remove pages from a PDF document by simple drag and drop. Especially useful for merging several documents together.
4. QuickLook Multiple Files. Select a few files and hit the spacebar. Especially useful for videos and pictures. You can go through them like a slideshow, or click on the Light Table view to see them laid out in a grid.
5. Mosaic and Collage Screen Savers. Leopard has some great new screen savers. Core Animation has allowed them to do some crazy things with your photos. Mosaic shows you one photo, and then zooms slowly outwards from a grid of other photos that make a second photo, which in turn is part of a third one, and so on. If you don’t understand it take a look at this.
6. Drag and Drop Tabs in Safari. Not only can you rearrange tabs, but you can also drag them in and out of the window itself. Drag one away to make a new window, or into another window to add it.
7. Space Bumping. Drag a window all the way to the edge of a screen to “bump” it into the adjacent space.
8. Spotlight Calculator. Type anything from simple arithmetic to logarithms and it’ll give you the answer right below. It even knew that sin(pi)=0 and ln(log(1)) = -infinity. Also type a word in Spotlight and it’ll define it for you.
9. Autosave in TextEdit. Pick an interval to automatically save your work as you go. I can’t say I’ve ever wished I had this option as I don’t think TextEdit has ever crashed on me, but it’s certainly nice to have.
10. Scrolling in an unselected window. Position your cursor over any window, selected or not, and you can scroll through with your mouse’s wheel. This may sound trivial, but try it once and you’ll be using it constantly. I used it myself to type this article, scrolling through Apple’s page while typing in a separate window.

What Leopard gems have you found? What is the biggest change Leopard has made in the way you use your Mac?

For the average Mac user, it may be, but for those of us who are demanding or hate clutter, the ability to create multiple workstations is invaluable.

Those of you who use Spaces probably know that you can click on the Spaces icon in your dock to invoke your spaces (see Picture 1). In this view, you can move your open apps, files, or folders from one space or workstation to the next. However, since I am a big supporter of mac’s philosophy of productivity, I would rather use shortcuts in order to achieve the same goal but much quicker than having to go to my dock and invoke Spaces.

One way to achieve this is by positioning your cursor where you can manipulate the window of the open app, file, or folder you want to move (preferably at the top of the window). Then what you should do is hold down your clicker and use your trackpad or mouse to drag that app’s window all the way to the left, top, right, or bottom of your desktop in order to move it to the desired space or workstation.

Now, even though this is quicker than clicking on the Spaces icon in your dock, this is not quick enough for me. So then, there is a second and even quicker way to achieve this as well. Again, position your cursor at the top of the window or app you would like moved. Then, hold down your clicker and invoke the key command for moving to a different space or workstation (mine is Command + arrow keys) and drop it in the space or workstation so desired.

This is definitely the quickest way to move any window to another space or workstation.

So if you remember I told you about how my mother’s desktop was a wreck: files everywhere, with the desktop full with icons. I could hardly find her hard drive on the desktop. Chaos!

Eventually, I gave her a cluttered-desktop makeover, making her digital life cleaner, and easier to manage. No longer was her desktop a mishmash of various files. It is now a lean-mean, file organizing machine! Now that you have your five folders for all your incoming data types, let’s organize them so you can access them quickly. For a quick review, the 5 folder types are:

• Inbox (24 hour file life, need to be moved or acted upon)
• Read, Watch, Listen (non-actionable, files that require attention)
• Pending (actionable, files that require attention)
• Current Projects (actionable, files that require attention and are grouped together)
• Archive (2 week file life, for modification or transfer later)

So for these five folders I need to access them quickly to process through them. I have found 2 ways to do this effectively:

Place them on the desktop.

Create your five folders on the desktop for quick access. Make sure to create titles for your files like this:

• 0. Inbox
• 1. Read, Watch, Listen
• 2. Pending
• 3. Current Projects
• 4. Archive

The reason I use numbers, I’ve found, is that it keeps the folders in order (when organized by name). It’s also easy to access with applications like Quicksilver (by just typing the number of the folder you want).

Pros: Easy to access and process through groups of files.
Cons: Adds clutter to the desktop.

Make Stacks, and place them in the dock.

This is the system I am currently using and experimenting with. Create your five folders (using the number system above), and place them in your home folder (~/users/[user name]). Then, drag your folders to the dock in order from left to right. You can use the Optica Optima file icons to help create visual different between the folders.

Pros: Reduces desktop clutter, and quick to access on smaller screens when the dock is hidden. Forces you to maintain smaller file counts in the folders.
Cons: Lots of clicks required to start dealing with groups of files.

Now that I have my folders in a place where I can access them, I can now start processing through my files.

1. Place all rogue files in the Inbox.

Take every file you have without a storage place, and put in the the inbox. This will allow you to see every single file that needs to be dealt with. Make sure you set your internet downloads to the Inbox as well.

2. Start processing through your files.

• Files that need action go into the “Pending” folder.
• Files that need attention, but don’t require action go into the “Read, Watch, Listen” folder.
• Groups of files pertaining to a single project should go into a sub-folder in the “Current Projects” folder.
• Files that don’t go into any of these three folders go into the “Archive” folder.

3. Keep processing through files until there is nothing left in the inbox.

4. Go through your remaining folders periodically, to take action on files which need attention.

Remember that the files shouldn’t live in any of these folders for longer than 2 weeks. Any longer than that, and they should go into the archive.

5. Go through your archive every two weeks, to determine what can go into your User Directory Folders, and what should stay in your Archive.

The difference between the Archive folder and the User Directory Folders (Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures) is that the Archive should be considered warm storage (short term), and the User Directory folders cold storage (long term). Any files that do not require action, and will be stored for a longer time should be stored in the User Directory folders.

Hopefully, with these tips, you’ll be able to keep your desktop and hard drive clutter free!

This article adapted from experience using this article at lifeclever, and looking at desktops at the GTD flickr group. Drawer icons from Optica Optima.

Meet my mother: a few years ago, she was one of the few people in the entertainment industry who worked without email; a relic of an industry which used to rely solely on telephones. My mother’s lack of email was due to many things, including a fear of computers. So, on Mother’s Day, 2005, I forced her to conquer her fear. I gave her a computer, hoping to drag her (kicking and screaming) into the information age. She willfully agreed.

Present day: I travel a lot, and for a short while each time, I spend time with my mother. She greets me with a warm hug, a home cooked meal, and a bevy of computer questions. She wants me to help her fix her computer. Regularly. I willfully agree.

As I open her MacBook, and place my finger on the soft white power button, I hear the familiar chime of an Apple product coming back to life. The chime echoes my mother’s plea for help, and quickly guides me to the desktop. A horror is brought to my eyes: the desktop has become an endless black hole for random downloads, documents, and images.

Meanwhile, amidst this cluttered nightmare, I cannot find the hard drive. There seems to be a pile (not a Stack) of files where the hard drive would be. I start moving files left, down, another one left, a fourth one down, and so on. This process continues for more than 20 files. I turn to my mother as Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now: “the horror, the horror”.

It’s time for a cluttered file system makeover! Here’s how I work, and hopefully you, as well as my mother, will find some solace in the system I have learned, adapted, and put into place.

Start with an inbox. It’s that simple. Make sure everything that you download goes into this inbox. Additionally, any files that are not organized must go into this inbox as well. This is the place where you will process and delegate files to different places. If you can complete a task from the inbox, great! If not, delegate it to a different folder. The time length of files that exist here are 24 hours.

At first, I thought, all I needed was an inbox. The problem with that was the inbox began turning into an archive: files would never leave the inbox! So, make sure you constantly are clearing out your inbox, and for those files you want to keep longer, put them into an archive.

Create an archive. The archive will be for files that you don’t want to organize now, but will eventually be organized and currently do not need attention. Most of my completed design projects go into the archive in case clients need them after completion. The time length of files that exist here is 2 weeks.

Now that we have a system for items that are a day old, and 2 weeks old, what about the items that exist between those times? You need folders for items you are going to process.

Create the core process folders: “Read, Watch, Listen”, “Pending”, and “Current Projects”. Each folder has it’s own function and use:

Read, Watch, Listen: This folder is for all of the items that don’t need modification, but need my attention. This includes items to read, videos and images to watch, and audio to listen to. Items that I want to keep for longer than 2 weeks, for reference or entertainment, go into my hard drive for long term storage.

Pending: These items need attention and modification, but require something in the future. This includes items to send, files to upload, and documents that require modification from another person. As I write this article, all the images I capture, and eventually upload for this article are going into my “Pending” folder. Before they are ready to be uploaded, they will be stored in a folder called…

Current Projects: In this folder, I keep all my documents that I am going to modify, or am currently modifying. This includes all source material for each project. This article, as it goes through various drafts, is sitting in my “Current Projects” folder, along with all the accompanying images. All projects with groups of files go here. Pending is for single files which require action. Current Projects is for groups of files which require action.

With those folders, you have now created a dynamic filtering system for all your new documents. But you can go even further.

Stay tuned for the next part, where I will discuss how to filter, quickly access, and process through your data.

This article adapted from experience using this article at lifeclever, and looking at desktops at the GTD flickr group. Inbox icon from Optica Optima.

Open up Automator and choose a Custom project. Drag the following over to the right window:

• Under Library | Internet, drag over Get Specified URLs. Click the small pointer to open it up (if necessary), remove the default link to Apple and add entries for the sites you wish to open.
• Then drag over “Display Webpages” – nothing to configure there.
• Optionally, from Library | Utilities drag over “Show Growl Notification”, open it up and fill it in to give you a Growl notification when the sites have been loaded.

Go to the File menu, click Save as Plug-In, and save it as an iCal plug in. Whatever you type in the text box here will appear on your iCal calendar pages, and is also the name of the app file. In iCal set up the time you want this to fire and of course be sure to set it as a repeating event, if that’s what you want.

And if you don’t like the fact that it leaves Automator open in your menu bar, look at this post on macosxhints for instructions on how to fix that.

The nice thing about it is that if your default browser is Firefox then the links open in Firefox, not Safari.

Wanna bring back the rounded corners? 2D-ify that dock? Kill that transparent menu? Whatever it is, you can likely find it here. Do let us know if we missed some.

The Dock

Hate it? Love it? Make you dizzy?

2D-ify It!
DockDoctor Dashboard Widget

Probably the biggest complaint about Leopard is the new dock. Personally, I think it’s just dandy. But, if simplicity is your thing, you can easily change the default glossy dock look and change it into a sleek darker shade of the original OS X dock. You know, the one that appears by default when the dock is on the left- or right-hand side of the screen. And, if you like, you can change it right back. Quick and simple.

Color It!
with DockColor

Do you like the shiny dock, but does it just not go well with your wallpaper? No more! Easily change the color of the dock from the color palette and get the dock just right to match your wallpaper. This may require some creativity. I mean, colors are just colors, but I suggest the use of subtlety. Perhaps a slightly pink dock to go with the space-time Leopard wallpaper, or a dark navy with the original OS X one.

Theme it!
with Dockulicious

Don’t like the shiny, glossy look of the dock, no matter what color? Change it! Choose from dozens of themes made by users on the website and easily give your dock a whole new look by simply dragging the downloaded .zip file to the Dockulicious icon. And, if you want to change your dock back to it’s original look, it’s easy to revert to the original.

Triangulize it!
with a quick customization

Get rid of those glowing blue indicators at the bottom of your dock, and replace them with the classic Mac OS X triangle. Fairly simple tutorial.

Hide it!
with MacPilot

Make hidden application icons translucent with this neat feature of the shareware product MacPilot. Feat not, however. You have 15 days to make the changes until you have to start paying. This can also be achieved through a simple terminal command.

Stacks

Do they increase or decrease clutter?

Overlay it!
with “Drawer” icons

One of the biggest complaints about stacks in Leopard is how the icons are displayed on the dock. They’re just, well, stacked. And if the folder changes constantly, the front-most icon will also constantly change. These drawer icons fix that. Just drag one of these beautiful icons to the stack you want, and poof it’s there. It sits in the folder as an image with a last modified date of 2010, so you’re folders and files look like they’re in a shiny little translucent drawer.

Recent-ize it!
in the terminal

Make a stack with only your recent items, with some quick terminal commands. Great for if you’re working on a project where you constantly have to access the same files, or accessing recent downloads without finding it in the clutter of the download stack. Or, you can even have it show your favorite items instead.

App-ify it!
with a quick tip

Make a stack with a collection of apps in it for easy access. Quick and easy tip, no coding required. This is a very useful way to keep your dock tidy, but still provide easy access to groups of similar applications. Perhaps put all school-related apps in an app stack, or all web browsers that you use every-so-often.

Hierarchical-ize it!
with Quay

Remember the old way to view a folder from the dock? Right clicking would bring up a menu with all of the items inside that folder, and allow you to browse all of the subfolders in it with a hierarchical structure. Now you can do it again with Quay. If you make more than one hierarchical folder, you have to pay $10 for Quay. Watch the video tutorial for more info.

Menu Bar

Don’t you hate when this gets cluttered?

Round it!
with Displaperture

OK, they’re only rounded corners, but still! In previous version of OS X, the menu bar had rounded corners, a couple of dark pixels on the corners of the screen that gave it a nice effect, kind of a way to blend in with the thin dark border around the screen. And Leopard took them away. It’s a small thing, but surprisingly important for many people. Now you can bring them back with Displaperture, even choose how round you want for the corners to be.

Opaque-ify it!
with OpaqueMenuBar

Hate the new transparent menu bar in Leopard? OpaqueMenuBar changes your wallpaper so that the menu bar appears to be non-transparent. Not the most conventional way to do this, but it gets it done quickly and easily – as long as you don’t use another app to rotate your desktop wallpapers. Also, it’s to contrasted for my eyes after looking at it for a while. But that’s just me.

That wraps up our list of Leopard customizations. Do you have any more? Post them in the comments and we’ll check them out, and add them to the list.

The good news is that, in at least one case, the missing functionality can be re-found with a simple, little trick.

On my old Mac’s keyboard, Exposé was controlled by the F9, F10 and F11 keys. F9 gave me all windows, F10 gave me the current application’s windows and F11 hid all windows. These were, of course, customizable assignments, bit this was the default behavior – and I committed it to muscle memory. On the new keyboard, only the old F9 functionality exists and it is mapped to a different key, F3. This creates two problems: first, I was consistently hitting the wrong key to show all windows and, second, I could no longer access the F10 or F11 versions of Exposé.

Enter the magical modifier keys, Command and Control. In Mac OS X these keys do wonders, often adding secret additional functionality to mouse clicks, keyboard shortcuts and menu commands. In this case, they modify the new keyboard’s single existing Exposé key, allowing it to do three times the work of a single button. It works as follows:

• F3: show all windows (used to be F9)
• Ctrl-F3: shows current application’s windows (used to be F10)
• ⌘-F3: hides all windows (used to be F11)

Sure, this requires retraining my muscle memory, but such is the price of progress. On the flip side, the new keyboard gives us dedicated iTunes control keys which we did not have before. And, if you really miss the single-press access to the other Exposé options, you can alway use the Keyboard Shortcuts section of the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane to map those functions to the unassigned function keys at the upper-right side of the new keyboard.

Now, a team in Japan has released what appears to be the first external plug-ins for QuickLook, and they really add some awesome functionality to this already useful new tool. So in this article I will take you through the installation of a nifty Quicklook enhancement, that I really found helpful.

User XDD from .Mac has uploaded the Folder.qlgenerator QuickLook plug-in to his .Mac homepage as well as Zip.qlgenerator. To install, simply download this folder and uncompress it. With the folder uncompressed, you should see a couple of files inside, including a Readme, and the actual Folder.qlgenerator file.

Head over to your root ~/Library (the one when you click on your HDD, not the one in your home folder) and then find the folder entitled QuickLook. Now, simply drop the Folder.qlgenerator and Zip.qlgenerator into that folder.

Try and QuickLook a folder and you should see a new screen that shows the contents of that folder and not just the one large icon that QuickLook displays by default. If it doesn’t happen right away, either give it a minute, or try opening a Terminal window (located in /Applications/Utilities) and typing killall Finder. This relaunches the Finder application, and should restart QuickLook properly.

Once you have it working, you should see that there’s a significant amount of new info that is now available to be viewed through the standard QuickLook window.

And another shot.

I found Zip.qlgenerator is incredibly useful to see what is actually contained in a Zip file without having to uncompress it. You can just invoke QuickLook with a .zip file selected and it will show you a list of the files that are within it.

Keep in mind that this is still BETA software, so there are definitely some bugs, but personally this seems to be working fine. One thing that I’d definitely like to see implemented is better scrolling to see all of the folders (or other contents) of a folder, as well as the ability to click on something in the folder being QuickLooked and have the option to launch the app. Also, it would be really cool if QuickLook on external drives could be enabled somehow?

So yeah this is a bit of a hack and it’s really done at your own risk, but if you have any problems, it shouldn’t be a big deal to just trash the Folder.qlgenerator file and go back to the way it was.

Let’s hope that this is just the beginning for home brew QuickLook plug-ins and that there are many more to come!

This handy feature doesn’t come without its downfalls though, as I found out this morning. I was sitting in a coffee shop that will remain nameless, to protect it’s image. Because this has nothing at all to do with the coffee shop, it just happens to be this establishment that had been chosen as a hacker’s hotspot trap.

I turned on my laptop and instantly was asked to choose between two different networks. “attwifi” was first on the list, which has always been the one and only network that comes up as accessible at this particular location. Never before has any other accessible network shown up. Others may be on the list, such as other protected networks for the store, or other stores next door, but today, for the first time there were two openly accessible hotspots to choose from.

A second open network was oddly named, “Free Public Wifi”. So I connected just to see if it really was a newly created open network. I thought it may possibly be giving access to people who cannot come in and connect to the AT&T hotspot, because you either must have phone, internet, or paid access to their network. Perhaps this was to cater to those who have none of those services, or object to paying for Internet access twice. I am here often enough that I should consider shutting my Internet service off at home. When I connected to the wireless network however, I wasn’t seeing the default airport signal strength icon in the menu bar. I was seeing this:

That ladies and gentlemen is the icon that is displayed when you are connecting to the Internet through another computer setup to share its internet connection. Opening up Safari did gain me access to the Internet, but it was quite slow. Upon looking at network traffic, I noticed another computer, or website was trying to create an incoming connection with me. After hopping over to whatismyip.com I quickly learned that this attempted connection’s IP address was now only one number off from mine. Coincidence?…I don’t believe so.

I cannot say whether this was normal behavior, as I was essentially using that computer’s broadband connection to gain access to the Internet. It seems to me though, that this could potentially be the open Wifi hotspots we have been hearing about, that hackers are creating in order to intercept your incoming and outgoing Internet and Mail requests. Upon talking to the manager of the establishment, he showed quite an elevated level of concern, and also informed me that they had not added another open Wifi network, and that this matter would be looked into immediately.

He had also heard about this threat in recent tech news, and proceeded to place a sign by the register warning customers not to connect to it. I thought that I would offer this as a word of warning to any of you who have noticed these openly free public wifi hotspots. What kind of security precautions do you take on Wifi hotspots?

One application that illustrates this quirky display issue is Parallels, especially when in its incredibly handy “Coherence” mode. But having the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen mixed with a 3D dock doesn’t make for an exactly pleasurable experience.

Coherence is a major feature of Parallels Desktop for Mac that allows you to ditch the actual OS window and allow for fairly seamless integration between the guest operating system and Mac OS X. One of the things that it does when entering coherence mode is basically removing the background image and your windows desktop, leaving only the taskbar visible (which can be manually turned off as well).

Most people have their taskbars set to the bottom of the screen because that’s where they feel most comfortable. However, when in coherence mode, this setup doesn’t work as nicely as it did in the days of Tiger because of the controversial 3D “shelf” dock. Luckily, making XP or Vista (or probably other Windows OS’s too) work with coherence in a more clean fashion isn’t that difficult to do. All that’s involved is “unlocking” the taskbar, and then dragging it to the top (or side) of your screen.

Taskbar on the Bottom

Taskbar on the Bottom + Magnification = Weirdness

Right (or control) click on the taskbar in your Windows guest OS and make sure that the option to “Lock the Taskbar” is unchecked.

After the taskbar is unlocked (if it wasn’t already), just click down in an empty space along it and drag it to one of the sides, and while still holding down, onto the top of your screen. It should relocate, and to move it back, you just do the same process in reverse.

With the taskbar on top, there’s no more annoyances with it interfering with the dock or anything else on your system. It’s conveniently located at the top of your screen right underneath the menubar and all of your dock settings are the same.

Like everyone else, I’m always looking for ways to make my dock more productive. Thankfully, this tip, via macosxhints.com, teaches you how to make a recent items folder for the dock.

You can add a Recent Applications, Recent Documents, Recent Servers, Favorite Volumes, or Favorite Items stack to the dock. After the trick is applied, a “Recent 10 Things” stack will appear (but only expand into tile mode).

The steps are really simple:

1. Open the Terminal in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
2. Type this command into the window:
   defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
3. Type killall Dock to restart the Dock.
4. Look down to your Dock, and you should see a new folder on the right. Click and hold, or control click to get a contextual menu which will present you with the 5 types of things to display.

If you don’t like the new Dock addition, there is also a Remove From Dock command in the contextual menu. Voila!