Mac 101: Spaces for your screen and brain
Filed under: Tips and tricks, Mac 101
Have you ever needed more room on your screen? Or have you ever needed a way to organize all the stuff you are working on with your Mac? Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, debuted a feature called Spaces: a way of creating extra screens on your Mac. Think of them as virtual workspaces, where you can easily drop application windows to reduce clutter or simply focus on one thing at a time.
To activate Spaces, go to System Preferences > Exposé and Spaces > Spaces. From there you can enable from 2-16 “spaces” (virtual screens) and you can fine-tune application behaviors. For example, I have Skitch set to appear in Every Space, which simply means it’ll appear in whatever space I happen to be working in when I open Skitch. Normally switching to an application will take you back to the space you left it in (you can turn this off in the preferences).
The really awesome thing about Spaces: it’s like Exposé on steroids. If you’re used to hitting a key and seeing all open windows, now you’ll be able to hit a key and see all windows in all the Spaces you have open — thus expanding your screen real estate considerably. Plus, you can use the two together. Hit a key to see all Spaces, then hit your Exposé key to see all the windows in every Space. You can also easily drag windows to another space either in the zoomed out view or just by pulling a window to the edge of the screen (depending on which space you wish to travel to). It’s hard to explain, so watch the video to see what I mean.
Note that there are some apps (Microsoft Word 2008 in particular) that don’t play well with Spaces, so your mileage may vary.
Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW’s Mac 101 section.
TUAWMac 101: Spaces for your screen and brain originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Turn off Airplane Mode before updating your iPhone firmware
I finally updated my iPhone to 2.2.1 today, and after a reboot I got the screen that says it needs to verify or authenticate the SIM card. Unfortunately, that failed because, while I do have a SIM card in there, I do not have AT&T service — and I had the cell radio turned off. My iPhone is never used as a phone (I don’t have T-Mobile in my area, so even unlocking it would be useless). I wound up restoring the iPhone, which took a couple of hours, but apparently there’s a better way.
Danny Goodman on the Apple Discussion boards posts this “2.2.1 Upgrade and SIM Error (and Solution)” tip. My advice? Always turn off Airplane Mode before applying a firmware update. The phone wants to access the radio hardware during the upgrade, it seems, and disabling the cell radio makes this impossible. Thus, I was locked out of my phone for several hours today. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon this tip about 5 minutes after I started the restore process.
TUAWTurn off Airplane Mode before updating your iPhone firmware originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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TUAW Tip: Removing duplicate songs from iTunes
Filed under: iTunes, TUAW Tips
Have you ever been listening your iTunes library and wondered why a song played more than one time? Duplicate songs in your library can be very annoying, and waste precious space on your hard drive. In this TUAW Tip, I’m going to show you how to get rid of duplicates using a built-in feature in iTunes.
In iTunes, click the “Music” category under the Library section from the selector on the left. You should now see all of the music items that are in your iTunes library. Now click File > Show Duplicates. Any duplicate songs that are in your library will show up, and you will be able to delete the ones that you don’t want any longer. To hide the duplicate song list, click the “Show All” button at the bottom of the window (or click File > Show All). You can use this same method for Music, Videos, and TV Shows. It will also work in any playlist.
Using the built-in iTunes feature is nice, but it can be very time consuming — especially if you have thousands of songs, videos, or TV shows. In this case, you can use an application like iDupe (which costs $8US). iDupe gives you a ton of options for deleting duplicate songs in iTunes.
Do you know another way to delete duplicate iTunes songs? Know of another application to delete duplicates? Tell us in the comments!
Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW’s Mac 101 and TUAW Tips sections!
TUAWTUAW Tip: Removing duplicate songs from iTunes originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Creating a ringtone using only iTunes
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, How-tos, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends, Freeware, iTunes, iPhone
Remember the days when getting a ringtone up on the iPhone was about as hard as, say, fixing the economy? There were all kinds of programs you had to mess around with, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, and most of the time, it just wasn’t worth the trouble. Cut ahead a year from those days of yore to right now, and look at this — all you need to get a ringtone of almost any song you want is iTunes itself.
If you want to do anything more fancy, you’ll need GarageBand (and you’ve got it anyway, so follow Steven’s guide if you’d rather do that), but as CNET shows, iTunes will let you choose the start and stop times of a song, and converting to AAC from mp3 will let you cut it down to just those times. Pull it out of iTunes, rename the extension, drag it back into iTunes (making sure to delete the version that’s already in there), and voila, custom ringtone.
Note, however, that it doesn’t work for music with DRM on it, but it does work for music you rip from a CD. One favor to ask, though: don’t really put Young Jeezy on your ringtone — those ‘tones are obnoxious. How about a little Miles Davis instead?
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Mac 101: Drag-n-Drop your way to a new Mail message
Filed under: Mac 101
Do you find yourself constantly copying/pasting text from other applications into a new Mail message? If you do, then you’ll enjoy this tip.
Instead of copying and pasting, just highlight the next you want to appear in a new Mail message. Drag and drop the text on top of the Mail icon in the Dock. A new message will be created with the text you just dropped on it in the body. Just type in a subject and address and send it off … easy as 1, 2, 3.
Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW’s Mac 101 section today!
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Mac 101: Drag-n-Drop your way to a new Mail message
Filed under: Mac 101
Do you find yourself constantly copying/pasting text from other applications into a new Mail message? If you do, then you’ll enjoy this tip.
Instead of copying and pasting, just highlight the next you want to appear in a new Mail message. Drag and drop the text on top of the Mail icon in the Dock. A new message will be created with the text you just dropped on it in the body. Just type in a subject and address and send it off … easy as 1, 2, 3.
Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW’s Mac 101 section today!
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Deleting apps from the iPhone
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPhone, App Store
Macenstein posted a strange little tip earlier this week for getting Apple’s official apps off of your iPhone (I personally never use the Stocks app, and really don’t need it taking up space around the apps I do use). But his method isn’t so much a tip as an exploit — basically, Apple has a secret 10th “page” of Application icons, and Macenstein’s method is to put so many apps onto your iPhone that the official ones get squeezed off screen.
It works, though installing 144 apps on your phone might be more trouble than it’s worth. And the change isn’t even permanent — restarting or syncing the iPhone will bring the apps back on screen (provided you make room on them — you could just leave 144 apps up if you wanted, and presumably they’d stay out of the picture).
It’s too bad that Apple has never really provided a tool to organize the iPhone’s app screen quickly — stacks have long been suggested as a way to get more icons on there, but it’d be nice to even have an iTunes-based tool to get all those icons in the right places. Until then, you can always fill up all your screens and kick any icons you don’t want off of there.
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Misspelling is faster on the iPhone
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Productivity, Tips and tricks, iPhone
I’m not sure that I quite agree with this in the wider scheme of things, but these examples are hard to argue with — apparently it’s easier and faster to just misspell words on your iPhone than to take the time to type them out in full. “We’re,” for example, is usually six hits on the iPhone’s keyboard — four for the letters, and one to shift to punctuation and another to punch in the apostrophe. But if you type “Weree,” just five hits, Apple’s little corrector will fix it for you, and you can keep on writing.
Normally, the little corrections made by the iPhone are more frustrating than anything else, but in this case, it could be a benefit — as long as you remember to misspell all the words with apostrophes while typing. Hopefully, any habits incurred while trying to save time on the iPhone won’t translate into anything else you happen to write — weree not responsible for any mistakes that might get made.
[via MacBytes]
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Misspelling is faster on the iPhone
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Productivity, Tips and tricks, iPhone
I’m not sure that I quite agree with this in the wider scheme of things, but these examples are hard to argue with — apparently it’s easier and faster to just misspell words on your iPhone than to take the time to type them out in full. “We’re,” for example, is usually six hits on the iPhone’s keyboard — four for the letters, and one to shift to punctuation and another to punch in the apostrophe. But if you type “Weree,” just five hits, Apple’s little corrector will fix it for you, and you can keep on writing.
Normally, the little corrections made by the iPhone are more frustrating than anything else, but in this case, it could be a benefit — as long as you remember to misspell all the words with apostrophes while typing. Hopefully, any habits incurred while trying to save time on the iPhone won’t translate into anything else you happen to write — weree not responsible for any mistakes that might get made.
[via MacBytes]
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