Ask TUAW: Cookies, Mail.app vs Outlook, Party Shuffle and more

We got a lot of great questions following last week's Ask TUAW. This means, unfortunately, we won't be able to address all of them this week, but we still have managed answers for several more than usual. This week we'll be tackling questions about Mail.app, cookies in Safari, iTunes, Spotlight, and more. As always, please leave your own comments, and ask more questions for next week either in the comments to this post or using the tip form. Now let's turn to this week's questions.

Andreas asks

Back in the days when Windows was my only option, I used Winamp as my main mp3 player. And there was one feature in winamp I really used a lot, and that was the que-feature. Just press 'q' on the songs I wanted to hear next after the song that was already playnig. Now, how is this working in itunes? Does Itunes allow me to que songs?

It sounds like you should use iTunes' Party Shuffle feature. All you have to do is right-click on any track in iTunes and select either "Play Next in Party Shuffle" or "Add to Party Shuffle."

This is also another great use for Quicksilver (with the iTunes plugin). 1) Invoke QS, 2) bring up iTunes, 3) drill down to "Browse Tracks," 4) search for the track you want, 5) tab to the right and type "add" to get "Add to End of Party Shuffle." It sounds much more complicated than it is in practice; once you get used to it, it goes very quickly.

Dave asks

Is there a way to get a prompt before accepting cookies? Safari preferences lets me choose between Always, Never and Sites I Navigate to (which, by my estimation is, all of them). I have gillions of them and they're mostly for sites that I'll never go back to.

Unfortunately, Safari does not include a per site prompting system, so your best shot is periodically to clean out your cookies with one of the many cookie management tools out there like Cocoa Cookies (above) Once you clean out your cookie jar, you might also find SafariPlus useful. It is a plugin for Safari that adds another cookie management option: Only accept cookies from favorite sites. Of course you have to go through and mark which sites are your favorites. If cookies are a really big concern you might consider switching browsers. Both OmniWeb and Firefox (especially with plugins) are known for outstanding cookie management options.

El asks

I have OS 10.3.9, and was wondering if that is going to be a problem wIth the upcoming release of Leopard? Will I need to get any special software to make the transition seamless?

Well the short answer is: probably not. If your hardware is up to it (and it may be a big if given Leopard's hardware intensive new features), you should probably be able to install Leopard with no problem, without any third-party software. The developers preview has reasonably steep requirements for older Macs, and these are clearly not conservative enough. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that you will probably want to use some third party software like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable full backup of your Panther system before you install Leopard. I always recommend doing a fresh install and not an upgrade when you install a new OS.

Dylan asks

When sending from Mail.app to and Outlook user, the email has ? ? ??? question marks for every newline character and some spaces. This is because when there is an attachment, photo, HTML or rich text sigutare etc Apple's Mail.app defaults to ASCII encoding.. So special characters Outlook uses show up as ?.

To solve this you have to manually go to Message -> Text Encoding -> Unicode (UTF8) . This works.. but cannot be set to default behavior.

The closest I have found is to run the following from terminal to force the preference:

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

But even this doesn't work. if you craft a new message with a pic (eg sig) it defaults to ASCII and replying to an outlook mail does the same.

Since I don't have access to Outlook I have no way to test this, but Tim over at Hawk Wings offers this possible solution. Most of it is the same as what you wrote, but did you remember to change Mail's preferences to compose in "Rich Text" and "Use the same format as the original message" as above?

Graham asks

When I began to using spotlight, it ran quickly and found my applications and documents instantly! But now, after a couple years of use, it has become bogged down and kind of sluggish... Is there any way I can clear out, and start anew?

Great timing, we just posted on a way to get Spotlight to reindex specific apps. If you want it to reindex the entire drive, you can use a little bit of terminal trickery as outlined in this Macworld column or if you're wary of the terminal the über geeks have a tip involving adding and removing a drive from Spotlight's privacy list in the Spotlight preferences.

Jeff asks

is there any way to save those Flash movie things? I hate to download them everytime... on a dial-up takes forever

Probably the easiest way to do this is to use one of several applications we've mentioned previously including TubeSock and yFlicks.

A fellow reader, Peter, suggests another way using the keepvid.com website. If you go there it will let you specify a URL and then download it to your computer as a FLV (though keep in mind these files may be somewhat large). You'll then need to use something like SWF & FLV Player or even jack-of-all-video-trades VLC to play the files.