Here a roundup of the latest tips and tricks from Mac OS X Hints:
- Integrate the MacOS sandbox into an executable Firefox application
- Safari Reader can negate the Undo Close Tab option
- Chrome three-finger gesture
- An extension to add any search engine to Safari 5
- Delete spam by IP address in Mail.app
- 10.6: An AppleScript to compress a Finder selection
- Refresh Corrupted Top Sites
- Easily paste and match style anywhere
- Flagging entries in BiBDesk
- Create Home Screen links to 3rd Party browsers without jailbreaking
- Before you lose your Mac laptop
- Reset Firefox preserving bookmarks on many machines
- 10.6: Set Help Viewer window to non-floating mode.
- Safari: Hide images in RSS feeds
- 10.6: Gather Finder Items with a new Service
- Home sharing on iOS may not display some libraries
- Show full URL's for bit.ly and goo.gl in Chrome and Firefox
- Create Placeholders for downloaded files
- Comprehensive summary of Mac Metadata
- Extra photo and video storage for iPad
- Set StarRating from CLI
- Pick mail addresses to use with groups in Address Book
- Quick access to System Preferences isn't gone
- Multiple FaceTime addresses for one e-mail address
- Control which tab gets the focus when you close a tab in Safari
- PoorMan's Lockscreen
Integrate the MacOS sandbox into an executable Firefox application
Safari Reader can negate the Undo Close Tab option
Chrome three-finger gesture
An extension to add any search engine to Safari 5
Delete spam by IP address in Mail.app
10.6: An AppleScript to compress a Finder selection
Refresh Corrupted Top Sites
Easily paste and match style anywhere
Flagging entries in BiBDesk
Create Home Screen links to 3rd Party browsers without jailbreaking
Before you lose your Mac laptop
Reset Firefox preserving bookmarks on many machines
10.6: Set Help Viewer window to non-floating mode.
Safari: Hide images in RSS feeds
10.6: Gather Finder Items with a new Service
Home sharing on iOS may not display some libraries
Show full URL's for bit.ly and goo.gl in Chrome and Firefox
Create Placeholders for downloaded files
Comprehensive summary of Mac Metadata
Extra photo and video storage for iPad
Set StarRating from CLI
Pick mail addresses to use with groups in Address Book
Quick access to System Preferences isn't gone
Multiple FaceTime addresses for one e-mail address
Control which tab gets the focus when you close a tab in Safari
PoorMan's Lockscreen
- Integrate the MacOS sandbox into an executable Firefox application
- Safari Reader can negate the Undo Close Tab option
- Chrome three-finger gesture
- An extension to add any search engine to Safari 5
- Delete spam by IP address in Mail.app
- 10.6: An AppleScript to compress a Finder selection
- Refresh Corrupted Top Sites
- Easily paste and match style anywhere
- Flagging entries in BiBDesk
- Create Home Screen links to 3rd Party browsers without jailbreaking
- Before you lose your Mac laptop
- Reset Firefox preserving bookmarks on many machines
- 10.6: Set Help Viewer window to non-floating mode.
- Safari: Hide images in RSS feeds
- 10.6: Gather Finder Items with a new Service
- Home sharing on iOS may not display some libraries
- Show full URL's for bit.ly and goo.gl in Chrome and Firefox
- Create Placeholders for downloaded files
- Comprehensive summary of Mac Metadata
- Extra photo and video storage for iPad
- Set StarRating from CLI
- Pick mail addresses to use with groups in Address Book
- Quick access to System Preferences isn't gone
- Multiple FaceTime addresses for one e-mail address
- Control which tab gets the focus when you close a tab in Safari
- PoorMan's Lockscreen
Integrate the MacOS sandbox into an executable Firefox application
Following up on the ideas of this previous hint, there is also a possibility to make an application which starts with the sandbox already activated, so there is no need to run a shell script every time you need the sandbox.Read more
Safari Reader can negate the Undo Close Tab option
Beware of a situation like this with Safari 5.Read more
Chrome three-finger gesture
I am currently using the developer version of Google's Chrome browser (v. 11). In it, 3 finger grab gesture (pull 3 finger across top-to-bottom) on your Macbook, you get a window within the current window that shows all of your open tabs.Read more
An extension to add any search engine to Safari 5
It was fairly incredible to me that Safari still does not support extending its search bar with additional search engines beyond Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or that it does not support searching from the address bar like every other modern browser. There have been SIMBL-based extensions that add these missing features, but many of us shy away from these because they seem somehow unclean.Read more
Delete spam by IP address in Mail.app
Here's an easy method to remove email based on the IP address of the sender in Mail.app.Read more
10.6: An AppleScript to compress a Finder selection
I use my faithful Butler to run Finder's usual operations, like copying, moving, and deleting files, making both my mouse and trackpad completely useless devices. As a keyboard-only user, I also wanted to add some other Finder operations, such as file compression.Read more
Refresh Corrupted Top Sites
Have you ever experienced an outage of your Internet connection? Has your router been confused? Sometimes the Top Sites wall gets pretty corrupted, the site previews are all showing errors - or they just seem to be a bit outdated. There is a very Apple-like Solution.Read more
Easily paste and match style anywhere
Frequently, I will copy something from a formatted web site, but I want what I paste to just match the formatting of where I paste it. Some browsers have an Edit » Paste and Match Style command, but I've found that it frequently doesn't work. This is a speedy workaround that is guaranteed to always work.Read more
Flagging entries in BiBDesk
This is a tip about flagging entries in a .bib file using BibDesk.Read more
Create Home Screen links to 3rd Party browsers without jailbreaking
There are many great iOS 3rd party web browsers out there which are nicer than the built in Mobile Safari. However, in Safari, you can add home screen links to pages and you cannot do that in the 3rd party browsers. This is a workaround based on my limited PHP knowledge. It requires that you have a PHP-supported web host and it will only work when you can connect to said web host.Read more
Before you lose your Mac laptop
This hint is something that may increase the chance of getting your MacBook back if you ever lose it or it is stolen.Read more
Reset Firefox preserving bookmarks on many machines
Sometimes, Firefox bounces in the Dock and will not open. Either a new Firefox version has been pushed out to the machine, or some Firefox settings have changed. If it's on a personal machine, it's pretty easy to handle. What if it happens on a corporate network with many users, and you must repair them all?Read more
10.6: Set Help Viewer window to non-floating mode.
This is an update to an old 2008 hint for Leopard. Basically the hint explained how to have an icon in the Dock for Help Viewer and how to set its windows to non-floating mode. Of course it didn't work anymore in Snow Leopard, since some of the terminology changed.Read more
Safari: Hide images in RSS feeds
I frequently don't like images showing up in my RSS feeds. To me, RSS is a quick way to read just text. So, I used a custom stylesheet to tell Safari to hide images in RSS feeds (images on web sites will still display normally).Read more
10.6: Gather Finder Items with a new Service
I am trying to wean myself from numerous utilities that add System and Finder functionality and replace them with Services wherever possible. One indispensable (for me) feature of Unsanity's FruitMenu is the 'Gather Items in New Folder' Contextual Menu Item.Read more
Home sharing on iOS may not display some libraries
After upgrading to iOS 4.3 on your iPhone and/or iPad you might find yourself in a situation where you don't see all your shared libraries even if they all have Home Sharing enabled with the same Apple ID.Read more
Show full URL's for bit.ly and goo.gl in Chrome and Firefox
Often I avoid clicking on shortened URLs because I don't know where they will take me, especially if they are from someone I don't know.Read more
Create Placeholders for downloaded files
Since I work in IT in the education sector, I'm always looking for whatever things I can find that are free that help me get things done.Read more
Comprehensive summary of Mac Metadata
I found a great article that someone, who I am not sure, is compiling on OSX/Apple metadata that is beyond comprehensive, not an Apple TechDoc and easy to read/understand. Since many of these topics come up, it seemed like a useful pointer.Read more
Extra photo and video storage for iPad
This hint requires the Apple Camera Connection Kit and some SD cards.Read more
Set StarRating from CLI
Using information found in the article listed in the Comprehensive summary of Mac Metadata hint, I was able to find a way to write metadata from the CLI, making it possible for shell scripts to modify files in a way that is visible to the Finder, and therefor in Smart Folders and other search results.Read more
Pick mail addresses to use with groups in Address Book
I use a lot of Groups in Address Book and sometimes a Group member's contact info has more than one e-mail address listed in AB. It annoyed me that sending e-mail to a Group often resulted in the 'wrong' address being used, i.e. the contact's private one instead of work.Read more
Quick access to System Preferences isn't gone
You can open several frequently used System Preferences directly in 10.5 and 10.6 with a simple keyboard shortcut.Read more
Multiple FaceTime addresses for one e-mail address
If you have multiple FaceTime devices: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, Multiple Macs, etc. The iPhone's ID is the phone number, but the rest use an e-mail address. If you don't want them all to ring when someone is trying to contact you, then they each need a different address. You could set up a separate e-mail address for each device, but that's a pain.Read more
Control which tab gets the focus when you close a tab in Safari
When you close a tab in Safari, the one that gets the focus (becomes active) is the one that was to its right (unless you are closing the last tab, in which case the one that was next to last gets the focus). If you sometimes wish the tab on the left would get the focus, you can have that with the help of a free extension called Tabkeys.Read more
PoorMan's Lockscreen
Although there are nice apps that display calendar events and to-dos on a jailbroken iPhone lockscreen, those of us who aren't jailbroken lack a feature that, in my opinion, is a huge oversight. If you're like me and not good at checking your to-dos and calendar regularly, you may find this helpful albeit not terribly elegant.Read more
