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TUAW Tip: Getting your fill with iTunes' autofill
I'm the iTunes music pharmacist for my family's iPod and iPhone music libraries. In short, what this means is that, whether it's due to "getting sick of hearing the same thing over and over when I'm running" or wanting a new song or album on their iPod, they come to me when they want their music refilled. Which is fine and dandy. I'm more than happy to do this, and have my trusty ol' 17 inch iMac loaded with everyones' music on it (except mine, which is loaded on my MacBook Pro). From the 3rd generation iPod classic to the iPhone 3G S, and from The Arcade Fire to ZZ Top, there exists an eclectic iPod and music mix in my family. How I would sync music for each person varied on a case-by-case basis, and usually took shape in syncing specific folders, playlists, smart playlists, and genres. For the iPod shuffle, however, I would typically click on the "music" within the device and choose playlist-based "autofill." This morning, my sister brought over her shiny new third generation iPod shuffle. And to my surprise, it, unlike its predecessors lacked the "autofill" feature. Or so I thought. After spending a half hour or so creating a size-limited smart playlist with random songs, I said to myself, "Self, there's gotta be an explanation for this. Surely, the folks at Apple wouldn't leave out something as important as autofill." And they didn't. They just put it in a different place for the third generation shuffle, and have now extended the feature for all iPods and iPhones. To enable autofill on your iPod or iPhone, click on "summary" tab for your device (in the "device" section of iTunes). Then place a checkmark on "manually manage music [and videos]." Now here's where I got lost and confused, and I don't want you to pull out your hair like I almost did mine just because I didn't read the Apple support forums carefully enough. Except for first and second generation iPod shuffle models, the autofill option for all iPods and iPhones is activated by expanding the device (by clicking on that little triangle to the right of it) to reveal its media folder hierarchy. Then, you'll want to click on "music," and now you'll see the autofill option in the bottom left hand corner. The whole time, I thought it'd be located on the "music" tab within the device, much like how it's on the "contents" tab on the second generation iPod shuffle. Autofill is now available for all iPods and requires iTunes 8.1. The more you know...Dun, dah, duh, ding.
TUAW Tip: Get an instant definition of any word in a pop up window
Gee, I love stuff like this, and I wish I would have known about it a long time ago. The tip comes from OSXhelp.com and it's a great one. Need a quick definition of a word in Safari or an email? Yes, you probably already knew you could right-click on a highlighted word and bring up the OS X dictionary, but how about this? Press Command+Control+D while hovering over any word, and up pops the definition almost immediately. If you continue to hold down those keys you can slide your mouse over any other word and get a definition as well. Let go of the keys, and click somewhere else and the dictionary vanishes. This little feature doesn't work everywhere. It requires you be in a Cocoa application, like Safari or Mail. It works in Pages, but not in MS Word because it was based on Carbon. Sadly, it doesn't work in Firefox. In fact, you can't right-click in Firefox and get a definition in the 'normal' Apple way. If you want even more information than the little definition, click on the word 'more' at the lower right of the pop-up, and you'll get a lot more stuff from the Apple dictionary app, including usage suggestions and the origins of the word. A couple of notes: If you are using a macro program like QuicKeys, make sure you aren't mapping the key combination you need to activate this feature, or re-map it to something else. If you click on the word 'dictionary' you can bring up the thesaurus, and if you launch the Apple dictionary application you can get into preferences and change the order of display, so you get the thesaurus as a default. You can also change your right-click behavior to open the concise panel instead of the larger definition page. Once I memorized the command key sequence I find myself using this all the time. It's quick and dirty. Let us know if you like it. Thanks to OS X Help for all the little tips they regularly come up with, and to my fellow blogger Erica Sadun for testing this feature with QuicKeys. Sharp eyed readers will note we've covered this tip before here and here but I think it bears repeating.
TUAW Tip: Veency remote controls your iPhone from your Mac
Reader Kevin C. sent us a tip the other day -- he recently got a Bose SoundDock II, which is a nice little speaker dock, as a Christmas gift, and he wants to know: with his iPhone sitting all the way across the room, is there any way he can control the iPhone from his Mac? Obviously there are lots of ways to control your Mac with your iPhone, from Apple's official Remote app to multiple VNC programs on the App Store. But in this case, we want to go the other way: control your iPhone's iPod app with a Mac. Turns out there isn't a way to do it -- unless you jailbreak your iPhone. Using Veency, a jailbreak app that Erica covered about a year or so ago, you can head into your iPhone from your Mac and do anything you want, from changing tracks in iTunes to even sending text messages. Here's an older how-to on getting it working. Unfortunately, other than that (according to our research -- commenters feel free to jump in, of course), you're out of luck -- Apple is fine with sending commands from the iPhone to the Mac, but not the other way around. Maybe Bose needs to come up with a way for you to stream music over Bluetooth to their speakers so you can keep your iPhone with you. Update: Our commenters come through as always: Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil will supposedly send audio from your Mac out to your iPhone, and while I haven't tried it myself, we're told that the Bose dock will then play that audio for you. So instead of playing sound on your iPhone, you can just send it music from the Mac and control things that way. And Jeff points out that Belkin makes a Bluetooth dongle, so you can stream music that way as well (and just carry your iPhone with you). So there's a few solutions to try.
TUAW Tip: Get your animated slideshows to MobileMe
For all the things Apple does right, there are some strange decisions in the integration of iPhoto and MobileMe. iPhoto has a wonderful way to create animated slideshows with music and professional looking transitions and you can look at them all day on your Mac, or send them to your iPhone or AppleTV. But things get ugly when you want to post them on the web for family and friends using MobileMe. It's baffling, but there is no direct way to upload an animation you've created to MobileMe, even though you can easily send stills or even iMovie videos to the web. Well, it can be done, but it's a non-intuitive work around. First, create your slide show in an iPhoto folder the usual way. Then hit the "Export" button on the lower right of the iPhoto screen. From there, you can determine the size of the QuickTime movie you want to make. If it's for the web, I'd suggest the large size. The movie will render, and then be placed in your iPhoto Slideshows folder inside the Pictures folder. From there, you have a couple of options, none of which are well documented: One way is to open your newly created movie in the latest version of QuickTime. Then from the Share menu, select "MobileMe gallery" from the options presented (you'll get the screen you can see in the thumbnail above). Another way to go is to is to import the movie into iMovie first, and then export it out to MobileMe from there. You can also drag the movie back into iPhoto (and yes, I know this is nutty) and then click the MobileMe icon to upload it there. Why can't you do this directly from iPhoto? Search me. It should be there -- maybe we'll see it in the app's next version. If you have another method to do this let us know.
SSH and the case-sensitive username in Snow Leopard
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard introduced a lot of under-the-hood changes and many are not very obvious. One such change is to the authentication requirements for logging in remotely via SSH. In 10.5 logging in remotely via SSH was a pretty standard affair. In 10.6, however, security has been beefed up a bit to require case-sensitive login credentials. While this requirement has already been imposed on passwords, Snow Leopard now requires a case-sensitive user name as well. In other words, when logging in via SSH, Snow Leopard differentiates between the username "aron" and "Aron." This threw me for a loop for quite some time and is another one of the numerous reasons I have held off upgrading my Mac mini to 10.6.
TUAW Tip: Sync your bookmarks to an iPhone or iPod touch with Xmarks
I'm an avid user of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as are probably many of you. I browse the Internet regularly on three different computers, and so it helps immensely to have all of my Firefox bookmarks and passwords synced. But the one fly in my ointment has been my iPhone's mobile Safari installation -- because I don't usually use Safari as my browser, I haven't yet figured out a way to get all of my usual bookmarks on to the iPhone. Until now: this writeup by Shawn0 (via the good folks at Lifehacker) presents a quick workaround to get your Xmarks-synced bookmarks up and running on your iPhone. Unfortunately, he uses Internet Explorer to do it, but given that we're all on Macs, I discovered that it worked just fine with Safari. Set up Xmarks on your Safari installation, sync it up with your usual bookmarks, and then set iTunes to sync your mobile browser's bookmarks with Safari. The one big drawback is that you'll have to start up Safari every once in a while to make sure your changes get all the way out to the mobile device, but that's better than not having them synced up at all. And yes, you MobileMe users are laughing at us Xmarks users right now, because Apple's service syncs all of these things automatically. But I've never known Xmarks to go down, and this solution costs the low, low price of free per year. If, like me, you haven't landed on a solid way to sync bookmarks out to the mobile browser yet, here you go.
Why is there a progress bar when my Mac is starting up?
Update: As several of our commenters pointed out, the OS is probably running the fsck utility in the background to repair directory problems, while showing the progress bar to the end user so they know there's something going on (fsck can take quite a while). Here's an older Apple support article that explains the disk repair process very well. We will update you if we find a support article with more information. Here's a story for anyone who's come across an unusual progress bar during boot and my best guess at what it really is. The moral of my story: backup frequently and try not to turn off your Mac while it is starting up. Five days ago, I was prepping my late 2008 MacBook Pro for resale when I encountered the ever-spinning gear at boot. Ridiculously enough, I hadn't kept up any of my backups in a month and I hard powered off the machine while it was booting because I forgot to select the boot drive (yes -- I'm a technician and I did something dumb -- I know). Many thoughts went through my head: I've lost the last month's worth of work, I have to waste hours trying to recover data from my drive, why did this have to happen while I was trying to back it up? It goes to show that it can happen to anyone at any time and that the only real solution is to keep a current backup (if not several) of all your information. Now for a quick word on backups. I usually keep a continuous Time Machine backup of everything and clone my internal drive every couple weeks. The cloned drive is kept in a fireproof safe here in my house. Also, as much as I love Time Machine, in my profession, I've seen several instances where Time Machine backups don't restore properly. I always suggest having a manual clone as a backup to your backup.
TUAW Tip: Smart Groups in Address Book
Let's face it, contact management is a pain. Address Book in OS X is a good tool, but one often overlooked feature is the "Smart Group" -- a way of quickly organizing your contacts together. If you're familiar with Smart Playlists in iTunes, it's the same but with contact info. To start a Smart Group, go to File > New Smart Group. A dialog will drop down in Address Book for you to start entering criteria for filtering. For example, you could create a group of everyone whose birthday you have in your contacts by choosing the item Birthday from the first drop-down menu item, then adding the menu item "is set." Note that you can't create a list of people with birthdays in June, which is a bummer. But the Smart Groups have a variety of ways to filter, some more useful than others and several are dependent on the data (dates vs. text, for example). To delete a group you'll have to make a trip to the menus, as no amount of right-clicking or key pressing will do it. Delete is in the Edit menu, under Delete Group. One more thing: the notes field in Address Book extends the power of Smart Groups just a bit. After returning from WWDC I added the business cards of people I met and added the note "wwdc" to each one. I then made a Smart Group where the Note contains 'wwdc' and now I've got an easy way to see the group of people I met at WWDC. Think of the Notes field as a loose tag field, if you like. I've also set up my Address Book to add family members based on a list of surnames, but that may only work if you have an oddball last name like mine!
TUAW Tip: Multitasking in iTunes
Have you ever been playing one of your finely-tuned playlists, blissfully grooving to the music, only to connect your iPod or iPhone and lose your place? In other words, iTunes (if you've set it to automatically sync) will move your view from whatever playlist you're in to the sync window. That's handy, of course, but if you forgot which playlist you were in, it can be a pain. I have several playlists set to random, and when I try to go back, it re-shuffles the order. There are other multi-tasking issues with iTunes that largely stem from its one-window interface. If you want to browse the store and manage a playlist, for example, you're stuck doing a lot of scrolling. But iTunes isn't really one window!If you double-click the title of a playlist, it allows you to edit the name of the playlist, right? But if you double-click the icon of a playlist (for a standard list it'll be a little blue note to the left of the title), iTunes will open an entirely new window, as seen above. You can open a bunch of these if you like and it works with TV, Movies, pretty much everything on the left side. It's much easier to drag and drop songs this way if you have a bunch of playlists. Plus, the window menu will give you quick access to whatever you opened, or you can switch through them with Exposé.Note: yes, this has been in iTunes for a long time.
TUAW Tip: Wipe down an old Mac with Target Disk Mode
A reader recently contacted us with a question regarding her decision to recycle an older iMac computer. She wanted to know how she could clear/reformat the hard drive, but didn't have the disks that came with the system. So, we thought we would take a minute to tell you how you can cleanse your hard drives before getting rid of your computer. I'm going to show you how to wipe the hard drive using Target Disk Mode, since this will work even if you don't have the install disks. Step 1: Get a FireWire CableBoth of the Macs will need to have FireWire, which means everything between the iMac DV and the current lineup (except for the MacBook Air and unibody MacBook) is eligible. You will also need a FireWire 400 cable so you can connect one end to the old Mac, and the other end to another Mac. If you don't have one of these cables, you can easily pick up one online or at a retail store. If both of the Macs support FireWire 800, you can use one of those cables as an alternative to 400; it will be faster. If one has only a 400 port and the other has only an 800 port, a converter cable (available online for less than $10) is what you need. Once you have the FireWire cable, just simply connect the two computers together. Step 2: Boot into Target Disk Mode on the old Mac Shut down the old Mac that will be receiving the hard drive cleaning, and reboot it while holding down the "T" key on your keyboard. After a few moments, you should see a FireWire symbol appear on the screen -- when you see this, you are in FireWire Disk Mode (FDM). When in FDM, your old Mac's hard drive should show up on the new Mac as a connected external FireWire drive.Step 3: Do some Disk Utility magicOpen Disk Utility.app on your new Mac (located in /Applications/Utilities), and click on your old Mac hard drive in the selection area on the left. Note that you should click on the drive, and not the partition (often called "Macintosh HD") to ensure a complete disk wipe. The disk drive will most likely have a FireWire icon to denote that it is connected as an external disk. Once you select the drive, click the Erase tab, and click Security options.In this section of Disk Utility, you will be able to select a few different erase options that will also add security to the standard disk erase. First, lets specify a name for the drive -- in the name field type what you would like the drive to show up as when it is erased, otherwise it will default to "Untitled." Continue reading to learn about security options and how to fully erase the hard drive on an old Mac.
TUAW Tip: Fixing syncing between iPhone and iPhoto '08
This is a pretty selfish tip, because this issue has happened to me personally a few different times, and despite my many searches around the 'net, I've never found a quick, simple solution. So here you go: my suffering can be your gain.Basically, iPhoto '08 and the iPhone don't always play nice -- sometimes, you'll take a bunch of pictures on your iPhone, bring them back to sync up with iPhoto '08, and whoops, iPhoto doesn't see them at all. You can see them on your iPhone, but iPhoto's "Import All" button is greyed out, and they're not showing on your screen (sometimes, I've gotten dotted lines where the pictures are -- I think this all has something to do with a corrupted cache that iPhoto keeps of what's on the iPhone). Fortunately, though it's frustrating, there's an easy fix. Open up Image Capture (you can find it in Spotlight or even Quicksilver if you swing that way) with your iPhone connected, hit the "Devices" menu item, and then "Browse Devices." You'll get a screen just like the one above, with your iPhone's name instead of mine.Uncheck the "Connected" box, and then recheck it, and boom. Image Capture, and thus iPhoto, will see all of your pictures and happily upload them. Is it voodoo? Sure -- we still don't know why iPhoto loses its place every once in a while (like I said, I'm thinking a corrupted cache somewhere along the line). But it works.
TUAW Tip: Removing duplicate songs from iTunes
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!
TUAW Tips: Replace login screen background
Are you tired of the standard background for the login window? Well, if you are running Tiger or Leopard, you can easily change this picture to anything you wish. This is handy for schools or organizations who want a static background showing off their spiffy logo. For Leopard UsersTo change the background, just replace the picture file located here: /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpgBe sure to keep the original file in case you want to change it back to the original picture. We suggest changing the original to "DefaultDesktopOriginal.jpg" or something similar.For Tiger UsersTiger users don't have it as easy. You have to replace the picture by editing a login window preference file. Open Terminal and type in the following command, replacing "path_to_picture.jpg" with the actual path to the picture you want as the background:sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture 'path_to_picture.jpg'Since this is a sudo command, you will be required to authenticate as an administrator before the command will be run. Once you enter the command and logout, you should see the changes. Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's TUAW Tips and Terminal Tips sections.
TUAW Tip: Add date to the menu bar clock
Have you ever wanted to quickly verify today's date, but didn't want to open iCal? Well, you could click on the clock in the menu to get the month/day/year. However, you can also change the layout of the clock to include the extra information such as month/day/year. To do this, open System Preferences and go to the "International" system preference pane. Once there, click on the "Formats" tab and then click the customize button in the dates section. Select "Medium" from the drop-down menu. You should see the data change in the text box below the drop-down menu. Click inside the box, select all the text (Command + A), and then copy the text (Command + C). Once you've copied the text, click cancel. Click on the customize button in the times section. Select "Medium" from the drop-down menu. Then place the cursor just before the time and paste (Command + V) the date that you just copied. You might want to add several spaces (or some sort of separator) between the date and time. Once you are finished, click OK. The changes will now show up in the menu bar. Update: To remove the custom formatting from the menu bar, go to System Preferences > International > Formats. Click the "Customize" button in the times section and select "Medium" from the drop-down menu. Delete the additional text that you add and click "OK." Now click the customize button under the "Times" section again and select "Short" from the drop-down menu. Click "OK," and your system should return to normal.More tips and tricks like these can be found at the TUAW Tips and Mac 101 sections of TUAW.
TUAW Tip: exclude your Time Machine disk from Spotlight indexing
Just the other day I noticed an odd thing: the Spotlight magnifying glass on my MacBook Pro had that little pulsating dot in it that means it is indexing something. That was odd, since I hadn't added any large files to my Mac, nor had I connected an external harddrive. Or did I?As you might be able to guess from the picture above, Spotlight was dutifully trying to index my Time Capsule's harddrive every time that drive was mounted by Time Machine (which is once an hour). This process was making my backups take a little longer than I wanted them to, so I simply excluded my Time Capsule from Spotlight's indexing.Here's how you do it: Launch System Preferences (or you can open the Spotlight preferences from the Spotlight dropdown menu). Click on the 'Privacy' tab. click the little plus icon () Choose your Time Machine disk (as you can see mine is cleverly named) That's it! Now Spotlight will ignore your Time Machine disk, your backups will run a little faster, and there will be a spring in your step.Update: As some commenters have noted, this tip does mean that you won't be able to use Spotlight to search your Time Machine backups. That's fine for me, since when I'm using Time Machine I'm restoring a file that I noticed is missing, or an entire folder. I don't need to search for something, however, if you find yourself routinely searching your Time Machine backups via Spotlight this tip isn't for you.
TUAW Tip: How to disable automatic hyperlinks in Pages '08
Do you find it annoying when you go to type in an e-mail address or hyperlink into Pages and it automatically thinks you want the text turned into a hyperlink? Well, you can easily change this setting in the preferences. Just open Page's Preferences (Pages > Preferences, or use command + , (comma) to open preferences). Once there, select the "Auto-Correction" tab and un-check the box labeled "Automatically detect email and web addresses." Now when you start typing a link or e-mail address inside of Pages it will appear as text. [via New Mac User]
TUAW Tip: The best way to add the Trash to your Finder sidebar
Update: Alas, it looks like I'm going to have to withdraw this one. Do not use this tip, particularly on PPC Macs. Although it worked fine in my initial testing on an Intel Mac, it's becoming clear that this doesn't work for everyone, nor does it persist after a restart. So while I don't think it's dangerous (if you tried this and it didn't work properly, just force-restart the Finder to return things to normal), it is not actually a good solution. See our earlier Ask TUAW post for other, more permanent ways of doing this.On an older Ask TUAW we were asked how to add the Trash to the Finder sidebar. I pointed to several different solutions to this, but just recently reader DG left a comment on that post with far and away the most elegant solution. Basically, show the Trash folder in the Finder by clicking on the Trash can in the Dock. Next hit ???-i to reveal the "Trash Info" window (right). Click on the triangle to reveal the Preview if it's not already visible and then drag the preview icon onto the Finder sidebar and drop it. This will place the Trash in the sidebar with the proper icon and you can now drag and drop files to the Trash from the Finder. Not only that, the icon will even animate to show whether the trash is empty or not (though it may take a few moments to refresh your Finder window so you can see it).Thanks, DG!
TUAW Tip: open a second Mail window to stay productive
This whole 'electronic mail' really seems to have taken off with the internets, and we need to rely on it for an increasing amount of communication with email lists, coworkers, friends and more. While many Mail.app users have at least some sort of Rules system for filing messages into folders (or tagging them with Scott Morrison's spectacular MailTags plugin), I have recently been getting cozy with a lesser-known feature that can save a lot of time with hopping between folders. Under Mail.app's File menu is a New Viewer Window option (opt-cmd-n) that opens - drum roll please - a second window in which you can browse through your messages. This is particularly useful if you have a folder (or perhaps a Smart Folder) which you keep checking throughout the day; this way, you can simply keep one viewer open to your inbox (or whatever default location that suits you), with the second viewer set on that other folder. Go up to View > Hide Mailboxes (cmd-shift-m) for either window to give you some extra room to stretch out those From or Subject headings, and you just took another step up the ladder of email zen. Finally: have no fear if you need to quit Mail or restart - Mail remembers your multi-viewer setup and will put everything right back where it belongs the next time your get your email on.
TUAW Tip: Hiding iTunes Artwork
I don't know about you but my iTunes source list gets crowded. Sometimes I just need a little more space for my list. Command-G gives me that space. Its menu equivalents (View -> Show Artwork and View -> Hide Artwork) aren't exactly hidden features menu-wise but this option isn't as widely known or as widely used as it could be. It's a simple but convenient arrow to add to your arsenal. And, speaking of arrows, did you know that you could click the top bar in the Artwork display to toggle between displaying the Album art for your currently-playing item and your currently-selected item?
TUAW Tip: open two separate iTunes windows
This isn't the most advanced tip in the book, but I found the trick darn handy last night while performing some badly needed library cleanup. In iTunes, you can open a second window for almost any item in your sources list on the left - the iTunes Store, a playlist or - interestingly - even a folder of playlists. While your library items such as Music, Movies and TV Shows are unfortunately exempt from this convenience, you can simply double-click any of these items to open them in their own window, minus a source list of their own. This is great for having easy access to playing music in one window while you work in another, perhaps cleaning up files, like I was, shopping at the store, or building a new playlist.
