ianf ⌘

This little white dog never understood why it was the one who had to go to the groomer. (submitted by Carl) - ianf ⌘

Jennifer takes a look at the Blackletter typeface which has appeared in everything from the Gutenberg bible to Snoop Dogg's album covers. - ianf ⌘

The function to delete the selected page (or pages) from a PDF file disappeared from the Edit menu of Preview in Snow Leopard. Even worse, it was replaced (using the same Command-Delete shortcut) with a command that moves the entire PDF document to the trash. You can, however, still delete selected page(s) through an undocumented keyboard shortcut. Hold down Shift-Command-Delete with one or more pages selected, and only those pages will be deleted from the document. Page numbering, however, does not update to reflect this deletion until you (re)save the file (in 10.5, the numbering updated instantly upon deletion). - ianf ⌘

If you have a laptop that supports multitouch gestures, you probably are aware of the fact that a three-finger swipe in Preview will go to the next or previous page in a PDF. But you may be annoyed at how Preview insists on animating each page switch with a small scrolling action. This can make it very slow to scroll through a document -- almost as slow as regular two-finger scrolling. Fortunately, there is a solution: use a three-finger swipe in the sidebar. When you swipe in the sidebar, the pages will change instantly, without any animation. This works no matter what mode the sidebar is in (table of contents or thumbnails). And if you are in contact sheet mode, three-finger swiping will navigate you through the contact sheet. I can only test this in 10.6, and I didn't discover it until I was running 10.6, so I don't know if it works in 10.5 or not. [robg adds: My MBP is also 10.6-only now, so I can't test in 10.5 either. If you can, please post... - ianf ⌘

Viewing Microsoft Entourage email messages in the Finder with Quick Look doesn't work -- it merely displays an icon image. If you have Entourage 2008 and 10.5 or 10.6, there is a way to display the contents of the message in Quick Look. Download the file named Entourage QuickLook Plug-In.dmg from this site, and place a copy in the /Library/QuickLook folder. This solution is especially useful for scrolling through Spotlight search results in the Finder, with Quick Look opened in full screen mode on a second monitor. [robg adds: The plug-in should also work in your user's Library/QuickLook folder. I don't use Entourage, though, so I can't test this one.] - ianf ⌘

Locating an email message in your Mail folder hierarchy is now a snap. As of Snow Leopard's version of Mail, if you open a message in a new window, Command-clicking (or Control-clicking) on the icon in the title bar of the message window will reveal the path to the enclosing folder for the message (just like it does in the Finder). Select the folder from the drop-down menu, and it will open in a new Mail browser window. This allows you to easily locate the message within the Mail folder hierarchy, which can prove quite handy. - ianf ⌘

Dick Towel: The latest episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (s05e08) is awesome. They promote Paddys Pub merch including the Dick Towel … actually available for purchchase. - ianf ⌘

Yves Saint Laurent Collection Homme Printemps/Eté 2010 - Film. - ianf ⌘

To use the old-style contextual menus when you click-and-hold on an application's icon in the Dock (i.e. how it worked in 10.5 and earlier), type the following two commands in Terminal (don't type the $): defaults write com.apple.dock show-expose-menus -bool no; killall Dock All credit for this hint goes to Jeff Johnson of Lap Cat Software, who blogged about the solution. This hint is a significant update to this one, which pointed out you can use Control-click to get the old-style contextual menus. [robg adds: To undo this behavior, you can either change no to yes in the above command, or delete the key entirely with ... - ianf ⌘

Not a big of the yellow background in Apple's Mail.app Notes? Handy with a text editor? You can change the background with a few simple steps. First, make a backup of your Mail application in case something goes wrong. With the backup in place, Control-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu, then navigate into the Resources folder. Using BBEdit (or another plain text editor), open the following three files: note-view.html, note-window.html, and note.css. In the two .html files, locate the img tag that references note-background-gradient, and delete the entire line (or comment it out with the <!-- --> tag pair). In the .css file, change the background:rgb values to something pleasing; I used 250, 250, 245 so it would look nice with the rest of the Mail motif. Save the edited files and launch Mail, and enjoy your non-yellow N... - ianf ⌘

As someone responsible for supporting Macs, I carry around an external drive (LaCie Rugged with USB2, FW400, and FW800 connectors) that holds all my tools, as well as different versions of OS X, reaching from 10.3 (PowerPC) to 10.5. Recently, I had the time to finally add a 10.6 partition to the drive, and noticed that Snow Leopard won't install on a non-GUID drive -- the Installer simply won't let you continue. I can't afford to loose the ability to boot PowerPC systems like 10.3 or 10.4 or even the universal 10.5, so repartitioning as GUID was not an option here. Knowing that Intel versions of OS X will boot just fine (though officially unsupported) on APM-formatted drives, I solved this in a somewhat inelegant but effective way: I installed 10.6 on another drive with the GUID partition scheme, and simply cloned it back to an empty partition on my ... - ianf ⌘

Well, what else is she supposed to lean on? (submitted by Kimberly) - ianf ⌘

And they’re really excited to tell someone about it. (submitted by Jennifer) - ianf ⌘

The Adobe Shortcut App for Creative Suite is a handy, free desktop app for designers and developers. Jennifer gives an overview. - ianf ⌘

After upgrading from 10.5.8 to 10.6.1 on my MacBook Pro, I was unable to connect to wireless networks unless I had already connected to them running under 10.5.8. Snow Leopard would "see" the new networks, but could not connect to them. The Genius Bar at the Apple Store helped me solve the problem. We opened Library » Preferences » SystemConfiguration, and trashed the entire contents of that folder. We also deleted all locations in System Preferences » Network, and recreated the location Automatic. Finally, we rebooted. So far, I have been able to connect to all wireless networks that I want to using OS X 10.6.1. - ianf ⌘

The latest version of the iPhone OS allows you to have 11 pages of 16 icons, plus the four permanent icons at the bottom of the screen, for a total of 180 apps. You can actually have more than 180, though only 180 icons will be visible. To get to the invisible apps, just do a search (press Home from the home screen), and type part of the non-visible app's name. I don't know how many of these invisible apps you can have, as I have not tried more than three so far. [robg adds: As far as I know, the limit is simply based on the available space on your device. Long before that point, though, you may run into a limit with your ability to remember the names of all the invisible apps.] - ianf ⌘

Within the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences pane, pressing Command-Option-D (Show/Hide Dock shortcut) will add two new buttons to the panel: TEST and DEBUG WINDOW. Press Command-Option-D again to remove the buttons. TEST doesn't seem to do anything, but DEBUG WINDOW displays a window that gives you debug information about the current desktop picture. [robg adds: I'm not sure why this info might be useful; it's very low-level stuff, such as the value for configManager.operationQueue.operations. I'd guess that a bit of development code got left in the final release, and I expect it will be disappearing in a future point update.] - ianf ⌘

One of the "features" in Apple's Mail program that has always annoyed me is how it handles messages after doing a delete operation. If you press Delete to throw away the message you're currently looking at, Mail displays the next message (marking it read in the process). While I like the fact that Mail marks displayed messages as read, I have always found it annoying that it displays a message that I have not specifically selected (and then marks it as read). There's a way around this. Instead of pressing Delete, press Option-Delete. With this shortcut (which doesn't show up in the Edit menu), Mail deletes the currently-displayed message and then does nothing at all, and the next message is not displayed. This is exactly what I want -- I now must explicitly tell Mail when I want a message to be displayed. I expect I can make this the default using the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard System Preferences panel, but I have yet to play with that. [rob... - ianf ⌘

Sometimes, “it’s only because they love us” just doesn’t cut it. (submitted by Marci) - ianf ⌘

In the final part of her series on Elements of Design, Jennifer looks at one of the most fundamental elements - Type. - ianf ⌘

"Made from stainless steel, American walnut and foam the Fulton Lounge chair made in the same factory that produces the Eames Lounge, the Nelson Bench and Noguchi Table and Cherner Chairs. Fulton Lounge, by  Scott Wilson, for Minimal" - ianf ⌘ from Bookmarklet

I would be surprised if this really is a new hint, but I can't find anything on the subject from searching Mac OS X hints. The closest hint is similar, though, as it refers to changing iTunes' volume by using a scroll wheel mouse. Whilst a song is playing in iTunes, position the mouse pointer anywhere over the display element that contains the current position of the song (i.e. the long thin gray bar between the 'time elapsed' and 'time remaining' counters). You can now use the scroll wheel of your mouse (or scroll with a track pad) to scrub backwards or forwards through the song. This technique allows for some precision playback adjustment. One 'click' on the scroll wheel of my Logitech trackball seems to adjust the playing time by less than a second. This hint also works in the miniature iTunes window. - ianf ⌘

After restoring from a Time Machine backup, I ran into this error when Time Machine then tried to create a new backup: The backup is too large for the backup volume. xxGB is required but only yyGB is available. This occurs because Time Machine sees your restored computer as a completely new set of data and is trying to do a full back up. To solve this issue, open the backup drive that Time Machine backs up to, and locate the following file: computername_0022334455.sparsebundle Where computername is your computer's name, and 0022334455 is your computer's MAC address. Delete this file and have Time Machine do a new full backup of your system, and this error will disappear. [robg adds: I've never had to do a full restore from Time Machine, so I haven't seen this error -- if someone else can confirm the problem and the fix, please post in the comments.] - ianf ⌘

Java on MacOS X 10.6 has some problems with certain timezones. This problem only affects Java programs, but will cause any Java programs to use incorrect dates. For example, any cities/towns/villages in southern Ontario (locations using "America/Toronto") will find their Java apps reporting an offset of five minutes behind GMT. The solution is to explicitly specify an alternative location that doesn't have problems. For those in southern Ontario, Montreal works fine. To see if you have this problem, perform the following steps: Copy the following text to a file called tz.java in your home directory: class tz { public static void main(String[] args) { java.util.TimeZone tz = java.util.TimeZone.getDefault(); System.out.println("Timezone offset from UTC reported as " + (tz.getRawOffset() / 1000 / 60) + " minutes"); if(tz.getRawOffset() % (15 * 60 * 1000) != 0) { System.out.println("Warning: not a multiple of quarter-hours"); ... - ianf ⌘

When I'm working anywhere in 10.6 other than in the Finder, I might suddenly need to go to some path. It kind of bothers me that I have to Command-Tab to the Finder, and then do the Shift-Command-G keystroke. Also, I might want to open some Macintosh-style path (:) instead of POSIX-style (/) path. Now, in 10.6, I can jump to a path using a Service. Here is a basic intro: Open Automator and choose Service from the Templates chooser. Make sure the Service receives "no input" in the pop-up menu at the top. Drag the Run AppleScript Action (in the Utilities Library), into the work area on the right, and enter this AppleScript in the Run AppleScript box: --Go to... - ianf ⌘

Git is a very popular distributed version control system. You can use it to track versions of files in your project and collaborate with other project participants in very sophisticated ways. To learn Git, I'd recommend Scott Chacon's Pro Git book (free online, or buy a printed version). You can use Git on your local computer, but if you want to access it from multiple computers with Git installed, MobileMe can be handly. Your MobileMe disk space is available via the WebDav protocol, which Git can also use. Here are the steps to create a repository on MobileMe. First, if you use Git from MacPorts, chances are that Git on your machine uses a version of curl without SSL support. In Terminal, use the following command to check: $ port installed curl If that does not list +ssl in the curl options, reinstall it by typing sudo p... - ianf ⌘

The UK Royal Mail is producing a second set of design related stamps in early January. Jennifer takes a look at the "Classic British Album Covers" set. - ianf ⌘

lifeaquatic: Iceman is beautiful. I like him better as a marine than as a vampire. And his dad is famous! Good Will Hunting famous! And a shitload of other movies too. - ianf ⌘

This bunch shows that a routine check-up can also be a great opportunity for some quality family time. (submitted by Sarah) - ianf ⌘