MacMAD Blog

For our May meeting, Dennis Crowley presented secrets of the MacOS.

We peeked into some seldom-seen corners of your favorite Mac applications. Everyone learned something at this meeting.

Resolving Duplicates in iTunes
In iTunes, you often end up with duplicate, or nearly duplicate songs, that you might want to eliminate. The menu option Find Duplicates ordinarily finds any two songs with the same title. If you hold down the option key, this menu item becomes Find Exact Duplicates.

Address Book
Most people don’t know that you can print envelopes and address labels directly from the humble Address Book application. Select File:Print, and explore the extensive print dialog box that appears. It contains many powerful options, including templates for printing on the commonly available Avery labels. You can even customize your return address with an icon. This is great for sending invitations or Christmas cards.

Show Birthdays in iCal
Add birthdays to your address book contacts with Card:Add Field:Birthday.
Birthdays from address book can show in iCal, but you must enable this in the preferences. In Address Book, you can customize the fields. You can change a field for one card, or add a specialized field to the template used for all your Address Book cards.

Tips for Mail
Did you know you can select multiple mail messages and then Save Attachments?

Also, you can select two or more mailboxes such as your inbox and outbox, and then select View:Organize by Thread. This view makes it easy to follow the conversations you were a part of.

Use the rules feature of Mail to help control spam, and to put mail in the desired folders.
Dennis uses the Previous Recipients list in a rule to help determine if a message is spam. Mail keeps this list of every email address you have ever used, whether they are in your address book or not. You should take a look at it occasionally to delete unwanted entries, and to add wanted ones to your address book. The previous recipients list is also used to make pop-up suggestions as you type email addresses, so your life will be easier if you delete incorrect entries.

Dennis likes the free plug-in Letterbox, which adds the option to moves the preview pane to right side of the window in Mail.

Smart Folders are a powerful tool in Mail. Smart folders show a kind of virtual view into your mail. For example, you could make a smart folder that shows any message containing “MacMAD”. Beware that if you delete a message from a smart folder, you are deleting the original message everywhere.

iPhoto Tips
iPhoto opens faster if you turn off sharing. If you’re not using photo sharing, you should turn it off.
If you hold Option-cmd while opening iPhoto, you will see several options, including the option to rebuild your iPhoto library. Make sure you have good backups before doing this.

iPhoto has its own trash. Deleted photos still take up space on your hard drive until you empty the trash from within iPhoto.

Preferences
Dennis went over some gems from the System Preferences. His best tip was to always explore the preferences pane of a new application to find out what it will do for you. You may find features that will pleasantly surprise you.

Other Apps
Dennis recommended the use of SuperDuper! as a backup utility. It makes a complete copy of your hard drive.

Use the free utility Monolingual to save space by removing unused foreign language support from your system and applications.

Apple’s Preview application can merge PDF files! If you have several separate PDF documents, you can drag and drop them to create a single merged PDF document.

Where did these tips come from? It should be no surprise, but Apple has some excellent tutorials on using the Mac. These videos tend to be short and to the point. See:
http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/ or for switchers from Windows, see http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/ .

Also, Macworld has some excellent tips. Visit http://www.macworld.com/howto.html .

Members are eligible for a 30% discount from Take Control Ebooks . Just ask one of the club officers. We are not allowed to put the discount code on the web. These books tend to cover their topic in great detail. If you are looking for in-depth discussion of a specific topic, try these.

See you next meeting.

-Jamie

We now have a Flickr account for our MacMAD photos. Our Flickr user name is Mac_MAD.

-Jamie

We saw and discussed a video tutorial podcast from ScreenCastsOnline about iTunes 9. We were using iTunes to learn how to use iTunes. Humm.

Tutorial podcasts can be a great way to learn about your Mac. They are usually brief, and usually packed with a lot of information. There is something for everybody. I’ve been using a Mac since 1984, and still learn some useful tips from some of the basic tutorials.

Apple’s own video podcasts are a great way for beginners to learn about the Mac. All podcasts are free. Podcasts were originally audio, but many now have video.

We also took a look at iTunesU and the Free on iTunes page, both accessible from the front page of the iTunes music store.

Someone asked about importing a VHS tape into the Mac. To do that you need a hardware converter box, such as the EyeTV 250 from Elgato.

Several members are using the EyeTV software or hardware to record TV programs off the air. There is a TV tuner for the Mac from Hauppauge which is compatible with the EyeTV software.

For watching all that video on your TV, you might want to use an AppleTV, or a similar set-top box, such as the one from Western Digital mentioned at the meeting.

AT&T U-verse (TV/phone/internet service) is now rolling out in the Melbourne area. The service got some good reviews from those that have it. It’s not available everywhere, though.

-Jamie Cox

Here’s a quick list of interesting links and products from MacMAD’s October meeting:

iGlasses Provides detailed control over your iSight camera settings
MacHeist Cheap Mac Software bundles every week
TidBits Long time excellent Apple & Macintosh news
PodWorks Free program to access, play and copy songs from any iPod to any computer
PD+Rescue Allows you to rescue songs stranded on your iPod or iPhone after your computer fails or goes missing. PD+Rescue allows you to move songs back to your computer from the iPod

Eric went over the changes for MacOS Snow Leopard, and some of the new features of Automator.

We were in the Hospitality room of the Hampton Inn near I-95 and US 192. I got lost because I assumed I knew where all the hotels are in that area. The Hampton is hidden behind the Day’s Inn, and has no tall sign.

November 17, 2009 will be our main anniversary meeting, celebrating 25 years of Macintosh and MacMAD. We’re going to do a meeting on the iPhone pretty soon, October, I think.

Since the Eau Gallie Library has changed their hours, our 1st Wednesday help meeting will now start at 6:30.

There were some pretty cool links mentioned at the meeting:

zacuto.com is a shopping site for video and photo accessories.
macosxautomation.com has lots of how-tos for automating things on your Mac.
www.eye.fi offers SD camera cards that incorporate WiFi, so that your photos can be transferred to your computer or photo site wirelessly. Some can also do geotagging, although it looks to be WiFi-based geotagging, not GPS-based.

-Jamie

At the last help meeting, one of our members was having a problem with running Windows under VMware Fusion. Whenever he closed and re-opened the lid to his MacBook Pro, the guest Windows operating system would pop up a dialog saying that a device had been inserted, and offering to locate a driver for it.

What’s happening here is that the Apple iSight camera is an internal USB device, but on the same USB bus as external devices. Apparently when the Mac goes to sleep or the lid is closed, the iSight is powered down. When it reappears, the guest OS sees that as a USB device being plugged in.

The solution is easy. Since most people do not plan on actually using the iSight with Windows, just turn off access to it in the virtual machine. In Fusion, it was under a Devices/USB menu, and the option was there to enable or disable the iSight camera. Once it was disabled — no more annoying popups. Turning it off in the virtual machine has no effect on your Macintosh software, so your Mac applications can continue to use the iSight as always.

There is a similar option in Parallels as well.
-Jamie