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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 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: 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: Highlight items in gridded stacks
The Dock's Stacks feature lets Leopard users view a folder's worth of stuff with one click. You'll either love it or hate it, use it or not. If you do use it, here's a little tip that improves it slightly (in my opinion).When you've got a bunch of files from a Stack displayed in Grid View, it can be hard to spot the particular one you're looking for, especially if many of them look identical (such a collection of text files or word processor documents). Luckily, there's a highlight you can switch on, that puts a whiter background around the file you're mousing over. It makes it slightly easier to ensure you click on the correct file.The highlight appears normally if you use the arrow keys to move around a Grid, or if you type Command and the first letter of one of the files displayed. But this trick switches it on permanently, so that it is always in action whether or not you use these keyboard shortcuts.Read on for all the commands.
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: Myspace Music on the iPhone
Think getting music from the WiFi store on your iPhone would be cool, but frustrated that they haven't implemented it yet? Justin sent along a simple little tip that makes it easy to grab all the music you want off of Myspace band pages, even without Jobs' Starbucks integration.Lots of Myspace band pages offer little Flash-based widgets that will play music for you, but without Flash, MobileSafari won't let you at them. But with a web application like file2HD, getting at those music files is easy-- plug in the Myspace URL, choose Audio, agree to the Terms of Service, and boom, you get a list of URLs, that, like any other Quicktime-playable media online, will stream directly into the iPod's music player.There is, of course, a catch. According to the Terms of Service for file2HD (or any other service like it, I'd imagine), you can only access your own pages. Myspace, obviously, wants you visiting their page to hear that music. Listening to it on your iPhone will definitely violate the ToS that you agree to. Not that anyone should care-- most bands put this music on their Myspace page to promote themselves, and so it's likely that they want you listening to the music no matter how you hear it. So as long as you can justify your way past that little conundrum, you're home free. Listen on (at least until the iTMS WiFi store lets you get music cleanly and legally from wherever you are).Thanks, Justin!
TUAW Tip: Safari's reset button
Brandon sent us a great tip that I should have known was in Safari, but that I hadn't found yet. For you paranoids out there, the Safari 3 beta offers an easy way to clean up every single thing you've ever done, including the history, passwords, cookies, and even favicons and Autofill text. Under the Edit menu, there's a "Reset Safari" option which reveals a checklist that lets you hit the reset button on your browser. Firefox users like myself will notice that this was "gently lifted" from the Clear Private Data function under FF's Tools menu.And it's not just for paranoid browsers out there-- the blogging engine here at TUAW, Blogsmith, is a great program but sometimes hiccups when the cache gets overwritten or pushed out of sync. When it does, the Reset options let me flush the cache in just a few clicks without losing any of my browser windows. If you ever run across a browser-based application that's not doing what you want, this is definitely an alternative to try before actually restarting the browser.
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.
TUAW Tip: Rockin' multiple monitors with your Mac
I just recently plunked down some of my sweet, sweet blogging money for a 24 inch Dell monitor (check out my setup) which I am loving. Setting it up with my MacBook running OS X 10.4.8 was very easy (as long as you have one of these). There are a few things that did get me, which I thought I would point out for you readers out there. Above you see the Arrangement section from the Display preference pane in System Preferences (note that each display will popup its own Display pref pane, but only the main display will have the Arrangement option). This is where you can do a few things: Arrange the displays by dragging the boxes that represent them around Move the Dock and the menu bar to whichever monitor you want to use as you main monitor (as you can see I'm using the 24 incher as my main display) Mirror the output on each display This is where you should first go when you have multiple monitors, however, the fun doesn't end there.
