MacMAD Blog

In my search for a language-sensitive HTML editor, I have finally turned to Xcode. Xcode is Apple’s software development environment. It’s free, and usually comes with your Mac on the software install disk.

I’ve been looking for some sort of reasonable HTML editor that understood HTML, and colorized the elements. It turns out that the answer is Xcode.

Xcode does a lot more than edit HTML. It is intended to develop entire Macintosh (and iOS) applications. It is a very big and potentially scary application. However, using it to edit HTML is trivial. You don’t have to create a project or anything, just select open from the file menu, and away you go. Here’s what it looks like:

Update: Apple’s Dashcode is even more appropriate. It is intended for creating Dashboard widgets, and gives the same great editing features as Xcode in a lighter-weight application.

Enjoy,
-Jamie

Your browser uses utilities called plug-ins to handle special file types, play media and generally add functionality and fun to your web browsing experience. However these plug-ins can be a vector for your computer to be attacked by malware on the web. Your best defense is to update your software regularly, so that well-known vulnerabilities are fixed on your system before the bad guys get there. But most people don’t think about their plug-ins often, and many probably don’t remember that they have plug-ins.

The good folks at Mozilla have published a page to help check your plug-ins to see if they are out-of-date. It works for all browsers, not just Firefox. It works on Safari. However, it is still in development. They haven’t gotten all plug-in makers to cooperate in providing version data yet, so it can’t identify the latest version of all plug-ins yet, but it works okay for the major ones, and will at least remind you that you have the rest installed.

If you don’t know why you have a particular plug-in installed, maybe you should get rid of it.

Next, here’s a cool tip for Firefox users. Sorry, but this one doesn’t work on Safari, but it does work on Firefox on Mac OS and Windows. You probably know you have a “home page”, that automatically loads when you start Firefox. But, Firefox is a tabbed browser, and you can have multiple tabs open at once. How can you make Firefox start with several tabs, with a page of your choice in each tab? Say I always want to start Firefox with the Apple home page in one tab, and the MacMAD home page in another tab. In the General tab of Firefox Preferences, for the Home page, enter:

http://www.apple.com/ | http://www.macmad.org

That’s the vertical bar character between the two URLs. Now, Firefox will open these two tabs whenever it starts up. Or, you can navigate to the tabs and page you want, and then select Use Current Pages on the preferences pane, and Firefox will fill in the URLs for you.

-Jamie

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

Have you ever wondered whether the batteries in your remote control were okay?

Well, you can test any infrared remote control using your Mac’s built-in camera. Open an application, like Photo Booth, that uses that camera, and lets you monitor what the camera is seeing. Point your remote at the camera, and push a button on the remote control. You will see the emitter on the front of the remote light up if it is working. This is because most digital cameras are sensitive to infrared light. You can’t see it, but the camera sees it as white light.

This trick will work with most digital cameras, video cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. Try it with your iPhone. Most remote controls are infrared, so it should work with the majority of remote controls for TVs, stereos and similar gadgets. It definitely works with the Apple remote.

You can use your iPhone, iPod Touch or any smart phone or similar device to look at 3D photos without any funny glasses or extra hardware. What we’re talking about here is free viewing, a simple technique of seeing 3D in a left-right pair of properly-prepared images.

You can free view 3D stereoscopic images on any type of display such as a computer monitor or on paper. However, using an iPhone or similar device makes it much easier. The combination of a flat display surface, back-lit display and small size in a hand-held device makes the process unusually easy.

Many attempts to free view fail because the image is published or presented too large. Unlike 2D photos, you can’t make a stereo pair an arbitrary size and still be able to view it properly.

While viewing 3D on your phone, you can easily hold it at the angle and distance that works best for you. So, even if you have had trouble free-viewing 3D before, give it a try. It doesn’t get any easier than this. The only problem is that the images end up being rather small.

Here are some more 3D photos for your viewing pleasure in a Flickr set, and as a Picassa album. Use whichever one your device browses most easily. These images are pre-sized to 480 x 320 pixels, which is the resolution of the iPhone, iPod Touch, the HTC Eris, and probably the same or close enough for other smart phones as well.

Hope you enjoyed turning your expensive electronic toy into a View-Master for a while.

-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

Many people have problems sending email reliably from their iPhone or other mobile devices. Receiving mail is usually not a problem, but sometimes, you can’t send mail. Mail accounts at the major players, such as gmail or me.com are usually not affected, but if you have an email account from a hosting provider, or small business, you likely have seen this problem. A common symptom would be that you can send email when you are at home, connected to your home WiFi network, but can’t always send when you are on the road.

There are two problems here. First, because of the spam problem, most mail servers will no longer accept mail from just any source. For example, the RoadRunner mail servers will accept mail only if you are connected via their network. You may be a customer, but if you are connecting via, say, AT&T’s network, they will not accept your attempt to send mail.

The other problem, also due to the curse of spam, is that some ISPs are blocking port 25 which is usually used to send mail. That stops spammers from originating spam from the ISP’s network. It also prevents legitimate users from sending mail via any but the ISP’s own email servers.

The usual advice offered is to use web-based mail clients. This does work, but is less intuitive and less convenient than using dedicated mail software. Some users may also resort to sending mail from another email address that is working, even though they would prefer to use a different account. There is a better way, so keep reading.

If AT&T set up your iPhone for you, they may have configured your account to send mail via their own mail server cwmx.com. AT&T does this to help overcome this problem and prevent customer complaints. The name cwmx is from AT&T’s alter ego, Cingular Wireless, thus stands for Cingular Wireless Mail eXchange. This will work fine as long as you are sending via AT&T’s own network. However, it may or may not work when you are connected via WiFi.

The solution to both problems is fully authenticated mail servers, where the client connects via a secure protocol, and authenticates using a username and password, or other mechanism. Then, the mail server knows that you are who you say you are, and are not some random spammer. If the provider of your email account allows authenticated connections, then great, you should configure your mail software to use them, and your problems should be over. Unfortunately, authenticated mail servers are still rare, and many providers do not offer them yet. Usually they will beat around the bush, but never come right out and say they don’t support authenticated mail connections.

This problem is common enough, and annoying enough that some companies offer services just to fix it. For $2 per month, you can get an account with AUTHSMTP.com, which will allow you to use their mail servers as a relay to send mail from your own preferred email account.

However, there is still another way. If you have a (free) Google mail account (gmail), you can use Google’s mail servers to relay your email to the server of your choice. Google is really leading the way in this area. Just today (14 Jan 2010), Google made all webmail sessions automatically fully secure, in that they always use the SSL protocol to authenticate and protect your session from snooping.

Google actually sanctions this mail relay arrangement, and even provides instructions on how to do it. Here are Google’s instructions:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22370

The only drawback to this is that it may also display your gmail address to the recipient as well as the 3rd part email address you are sending from in the form of

yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com

I think most recipients will never see this, and if they do, they will get over it.

When setting this up in your mail client, it can be confusing. Remember that for your outgoing mail server, you must use the gmail server, and your gmail username and password to get you into that server, but your incoming mail server still uses the credentials of your original mail account.

Most of this discussion applies equally well to laptops and other mobile email readers. I have tried this on an iPhone though, and know it will work.

-Jamie Cox