mac os x hints
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Obituary: Mac OS X Hints might be "pining for the fjords"
Over the years, one of the top websites other than TUAW for getting hints about Mac OS X was Macworld's Mac OS X Hints. Now a post by former Macworld blogger Rob Griffiths is paying last respects to the site 14 years after it first went live. The site is still online, but as Griffiths notes, it hasn't been updated in over 45 days. Whether the silence from Mac OS X Hints is part of Macworld's recent downsizing or just a momentary lapse in new hints thanks to a "perfect" OS X Yosemite, that type of silence from a blog usually doesn't spell good news. Griffiths created a chart showing just how few hints have been published this year compared to earlier years when things were really moving along: The site used to be one of my favorites when I was doing consulting in the mid to late 00's, as it was the place to find tips and hints that you just couldn't find anywhere else. It could be that the shakeups at IDG have caused the Macworld team to forget about Mac OS X Hints, or perhaps it is gone for good and they're just keeping the corpse warm as a courtesy for folks who still want help with OS X. Whatever the cause, it's sad to see such a great site leave the blogosphere. Note: if you're wondering what "pining for the fjords" means, I suggest watching the classic Monty Python "Dead Parrot" sketch.
Happy 10th birthday to Mac OS X Hints
Because we veteran Mac sites have to stick together, we're sending congratulations out to the good folks over at Mac OS X Hints, who yesterday turned the ripe old age (in blogging years, anyway) of ten years old. The site, created by Rob Griffiths and now run by Macworld, continues to be a terrific source of hints, new and old, about cool things to do with our favorite operating system. OS X Hints is just one of the many storied pillars of this wild and crazy Mac community, and we're glad to have them around. It seems like just three years ago we wished them well on their seventh birthday. Here's hoping we can do the same and congratulate them on all of their great work 10 years from now (when we're all playing with the iPad X and the Mac micro).
hacksugar: Hiding Apple's built-in applications
TUAW reader Joe Thompson pointed us to this hint over at Mac OS X Hints that helps you hide the standard applications that ship with the iPhone, without jailbreaking. This allows you to use those spots for your preferred 3rd party alternatives without sacrificing valuable home screen real estate or messing with a lot of ugly application rearrangement in iTunes. Thompson writes, "I've removed Stocks, Weather, and Notes, as I have better 3rd party apps for all three." You'll need a Windows-based system to sync your iPhone and at least a trial copy of iBackupBot. The technique involves enabling parental restrictions and editing your springboard property list (the file that controls how your iPhone home screen behaves) to flag the application and update the icon layouts. The iBackupBot program allows you to replace that property list file on your iPhone after modifying it on Windows. The Mac OS X Hints write-up has complete directions. At this time, we haven't yet found an OS X solution to do the same for an un-jailbroken phone, although we are consulting with some of our favorite sources to see if they can come to the rescue for non-Windows users.
Rob Griffiths leaves Mac OS X Hints
I have to admit that I don't always use them, but I do always enjoy reading the hints over at Mac OS X Hints -- there probably isn't a more eclectic or helpful mix of random hints about how to use your Mac or iPhone available on the Internet. So I was saddened to read today that editor Rob Griffiths (who always adds in his confirmations and other testing on the various hints posted) is leaving the editor's position. He's moving on to join Peter Maurer at Many Tricks, where he'll handle the business aspects of the company. He mentions that they're working on "some good stuff in the pipeline, especially for the upcoming iPad." As for Mac OS X Hints, the site is owned by Macworld, so it will continue to run under the oversight of a new editor, who will have the benefit of Griffiths around for training as long as necessary. But it will be a little bit of a disappointment to not see the little "robg" notes on the hints in the future. Good luck to Rob on his next venture, and here's hoping his successor keeps the site up as an endless fount of interesting tips and tidbits about all of these Apple products we use.
Terminal Tip: Disabling Leopard's Dock spring windows
I seriously hate the way that Leopard's spring-loaded download pane works. So this morning, I asked our team if there were a way to get around it. "Of course," said Brett, and he pointed me to this Mac OS X Hints page, warning me that it was a kludge. Kludge it may be, but it was a kludge that worked just fine. I didn't quite follow the directions in that post, though, and I thought I'd share my approach because it worked a lot more easily for me. First, I opened Terminal and changed directories to ~/Library/Preferences. I made a backup copy of com.apple.dock.plist (probably completely unnecessary, in retrospect) and converted the original version to XML from binary: plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.dock.plist. Next, I opened the preferences property list in TextEdit and did a global search/replace on directory-tile, changing all instances to directory. I saved and then did a killall Dock. When my dock returned, it returned with the normal, happy, uncomplicated folders you see here. When clicked, they open normal, happy, uncomplicated file browsers. Yay. Thanks, Brett, and thanks Mac OS X Hints.Also thanks to TUAW readers Brandon, who points out that you can Command-click the folder and Rich who suggests adding folder aliases rather than the folder itself.
Starting bittorrent downloads remotely from the iPhone
I like Mac OS X Hints a lot, although I will admit that most of the hints they post just aren't for me-- either they're for things that I just don't have a need to do, or they're for things I already figured out a solution for on my own. But lately, I've been trying to figure out if there was a way to start up bittorrent downloads from my iPhone (we've already been able to control clients remotely, but getting the torrent file was the hard part). And so I was ecstatic to see this tip from Whosawhatsis-- with just a little tweaking, you can install a bookmarklet on the iPhone and a script on a PHP server that will send a URL from the iPhone to the server, and then download that URL directly into a folder that a bittorrent client (Transmission is used in the example) will monitor to download the torrent.Pretty slick. Whosa runs this on a separate server, but while I'd have to read up on exactly how to do it (or maybe our commenters could jump in with suggestions), I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard to enable a Mac to run a PHP script when asked remotely. Get that running, make the necessary modifications in Who's script, and bingo, you should be able to click the bookmark and then the link on your iPhone, and have the torrent file show up in your Mac, ready for a bittorrent client to grab it immediately.
Add music to auto-synced iPods from any Mac (photos and videos, too)
At last, the chains that bind an auto-synced iPod have been broken; or at least, this is the first time I've heard of such a simple hint for adding music (and possibly photos and video) to an iPod already bound to another computer's library. Mac OS X Hints has a surprisingly simple tip for accomplishing this: all you need to do is select and expand the iPod icon in the left Sources menu, then simply drag from the Finder whatever new music you want to add onto the main list of music, *not* the iPod in the list. This can be useful especially for those who have separate libraries on two machines (example: one for work and another for home), since the only other simple alternative is to set the iPod for manually managing your music, which then doesn't allow you to sync some metadata like ratings and comments or tags. Oh what a twisted music management web Apple weaves. A commenter at Mac OS X Hints says they can add photos and videos using this method as well, but I unfortunately don't have a second machine to try this out on right now. Anyone in the audience care to give it a go?
Selectively hide the dock and menubar in some apps
Yet another slick tip I found while parsing my Mac OS X Hints feed is a fairly simple hack for setting the dock and menubar to auto-hide based on which app is in the foreground. This can come in very handy if you usually like to see these elements, but often work in screen-hungry apps that can't auto-hide them on their own. I'm even interested in trying this on Photoshop, which can hide the dock and menubar, but only when in full screen mode (which I don't often like to use). The tip essentially involves using something like the Property List Editor (a free app included in Apple's Developer Tools) or Pref Setter to copy and paste two short lines of code into an application's info.plist file. The hint contains everything you need to hack away, including a hint from The Rob himself which I'd like to echo: definitely make a backup of the app, or at least the info.plist file, before you copy and paste your way into a problem. That said, enjoy having the best of both worlds.
Export Stickies text via Applescript
As you may know, Apple's Stickies isn't directly scriptable via Applescript (technically, you can send a system event). Still, one enterprising soul has discovered a work around, and posted it to Mac OS X Hints. His script creates a new text file, one for each Sticky. Once you've got your text file, you can do whatever you wish with it.The script's author notes that his script only works on text for the time being; images will not be exported.As reader Eric notes, this script is for the Stickies application, not the Dashboard widget. Ignore the fact that I used an image of the widget for this post (it just looked so nice).
