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TUAW Tip: quickly adjust viewable hours in iCal
Today's tip is a quick one about iCal, and it hails from the ever-useful archives of MacOSXHints. iCal's preferences allow you to choose how many hours you see in a day or week, but you can easily and quickly change this setting with a simple shortcut key. If you have a scrollwheel mouse or a two finger scrolling trackpad, simply hold the option key and scroll up and down in iCal to increase and decrease the amount of hours you can view.
Quicksilver's "Comma Trick"
Today I fall even more deeply in love with Quicksilver, as I have discovered yet another incredibly useful and productive trick from a 43 Folders tutorial. This easy tip, loosely called "the comma trick," allows you first to find more than one item with Quicksilver, then apply an action to all of those items. If you're wondering why or how this could be useful, consider a couple scenarios: You can find multiple bookmarks (as many as you want, as far as I can tell) and open them all in tabs (as long as your browser does the tabs thing). You could find a file, chose Quicksilver's "send immediately" action and then find multiple people from your address book to send that same file to - all without ever touching an actual email compose window. This trick's usefulness boggles my mind, and all you really have to do is hit the comma key in order to chose multiple items. Check out the 43 Folders tutorial for the full deets on how this trick works, then feel free to take a break from being amazed.
TUAW Tip: Managing Menulets
Menulets are those little menu bar widgets that reside in your menu bar to control such things as monitor resolutions, sound, Airport network selection, and iChat status. While there are ways to enable most of the menulets via System Preferences--for instance, you can enable the Display resolutions menulet from the Displays System Preference pane--there are several that are quite useful that don't have easy ways to get turned on. Two that come to mind immediately are the PPPoE menulet used for connecting/disconnecting to a PPPoE-based DSL service like Verizon, and the Eject menulet which allows you to open the tray or eject CD/DVD from your optical drive without having to use the keyboard's eject button.Launching a menulet to enable it in the menubar is easy once you know where they are located. For both Panther and Tiger, Apple's system menulets are located in: System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. Double clicking a menulet will enable it in the menu bar.You can remove a menulet from the menu bar by holding down the Command (Apple) key and dragging the selected menulet off the menu bar. It disappears with a satisfying poof. You can also rearrange the Apple menulets using this same keyboard command and dragging them in the order you desire.
Create an OPML from Safari RSS feeds
MacOSXHints has a simple trick for creating an OPML file, completely with folder structure/groups, from your RSS feeds in Safari. The tip basically involves downloading an XML stylesheet the author created, and using it in a Terminal command to generate the OPML file.I'm glad someone found a way to put this together, but with the open standards and portability of RSS and newsfeeds, I think it's kinda bad form on Apple's part to not have baked this ability into Safari already. Nevertheless, MacOSXHints has come to the rescue, yet again.
TUAW Tip: you can rotate windows, too
For today's TUAW Tip, I thought I'd build on Scott's tip yesterday (concerning the Application Switcher) with a simple tip about cycling windows, not applications. Many of us know (or will soon) that using cmd - tab will switch between applications, but plenty of users still haven't discovered the wonders of cmd - ` (the key right above tab), which allows you to switch between windows within an application. So if you, for example, have a few documents open in Word, cmd - ` will easily let you switch between just those documents, without having to bother with any other windows and apps you have open.One catch: this works in most apps such as browsers, iChat and even iPhoto, but not in a select few, such as Photoshop. In fact: if anyone knows how to cycle windows in Photoshop, please sound off in the comments.Now that you're armed with both cmd - tab and cmd - `, virtually no window is safe from your view. Combine this trick with a little Exposé action and you could obtain the ranking of "OS X window management ninja."
TUAW Tip: Copy text formatting
When I'm writing an e-mail or fiddling in TextEdit, I often copy in text from another location (Safari, another e-mail, etc.). Doing that, of course, copies the formatting along with it, screwing up the consistency of the document. (So, say I'm writing a 12-point Arial doc in TextEdit; I copy over some 10-point Verdana bold text from Safari, and all of a sudden I have a single doc with two different kinds of formatting -- and selecting the text and reapplying my previous settings is a time-consuming pain in the butt.)But Apple's aware of this hassle, and cleverly placed in a Copy Formatting feature, very similar to Word's Format Painter. Simply select the text with the formatting you want to copy and hit Command-Option-C. Now highlight the text you want re-formatted and apply the changes by keying Command-Option-V. Presto-chango, any formatting settings (face, bold, size, etc.) should now apply to all the text you selected. Neato.
Good compression settings for iPod videos
I've been tinkering with compression settings on videos, trying to find the best balance of size, quality, compression settings and compatibility for my video-capable iPod ever since the beginning of November. H.264 is very nice and cool, but it takes forever and a day to compress using QuickTime Pro's export to iPod option. Since I'm not really interested in projecting my videos in large on the wall via an HD-capable projector, there's no need to pick it over MPEG-4. Also, I want to make sure that my videos, especially ones like the video podcasts we do here at TUAW, are viewable by as many people as possible. So the best option is to wrap it in a .mov wrapper. That way, anyone with QuickTime should be able to watch the file.So, in order to do this nicely, I first installed 3ivx as the codec to use. I've been meaning to try the new Divx codec, but haven't had a chance yet. I open the file I want to convert in QuickTime Pro and choose Export to Movie and hit the Options button. This will bring up a Movie Settings panel like the one pictured with this post: Choose Settings... and pick the 3ivx D4 4.5.1 codec, set the quality to medium, the frame rate to 24 and bitrate to 400 kbits/sec. Then adjust the size. If you have a 740x480 video file, then shrink it down to 360x240. Set the sound to AAC 44.100 kHz Stereo at 160kbps. If you are hosting the file online, check the Prepare for Internet Streaming box and select Fast Start. That's it. The resulting file will be reasonably sized and playable in a browser, on your iPod or on any QuickTime compatible system.
