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

Adobe has had some issues with security of their products lately. Because Flash and Acrobat are invoked from the user’s browser while browsing the web they are available to be exploited by malicious web pages. Because these products are widely installed, they are an attractive target for hackers. Adobe doesn’t seem to be taking these problems seriously enough, as you will see.

First of all, I urge you to make sure your copies of these products are up-to-date. Adobe has been releasing security updates to fix some exploits that are already being used by hackers. If you are using a Macintosh, there’s a good chance you don’t need or have Adobe Acrobat installed. That’s because Apple’s Preview comes with MacOS and does a fine job displaying PDF files.

If you don’t know why you need Acrobat reader instead of Preview, you should delete it from your Mac. Preview won’t handle some of the more esoteric features that can appear in PDF files, which is precisely why it is less likely to be hacked. If you do have Acrobat Reader installed on your Mac, this may be of interest to you.

One of the gee-whiz things Acrobat supports is embedded Java Script in PDF documents. Not only can it read the documents, it can execute them! That’s dangerous. That’s why security expert Steve Gibson (www.grc.com) has been recommending on the Security Now! podcast that users of Acrobat go into the preferences and turn off Java Script.

But what happens if you have Java Script turned off, and run into one of the rare PDF documents that actually uses that feature? Here’s what happened on the Windows version:

And sure enough, if you click Yes, it re-enables Java Script not just for that one document, but for all time, leaving the door wide open for the hackers.

This is very poor. Adobe is arrogantly assuming that they know better, and that you really should have that turned on from now on.

Apple’s been taking some heat recently because the iPhone and the new iPad don’t have Flash. I on the other hand, would like to congratulate Apple on this move. If you don’t know, Adobe’s Flash is a popular way to put things in motion on the web. It is behind many of the dynamic effects you see on the web.

However, Flash is an aging, proprietary, non-standard, cycle-stealing, insecure piece of bloatware whose primary function seems to be to push irritating ads at web surfers. I generally surf the web with Flash entirely blocked. The only time I miss it is on certain sites which use flash for video, such as YouTube, which is probably the best application of flash on the web. Since the iPhone already has a dedicated YouTube App, the primary thing you are missing is a bunch of very annoying ads. This doesn’t seem like a problem to me.

Apple has frequently been innovative in what it includes and does not include in its computer systems. Apple was first to introduce the 3.5″ floppy disk, and the first to leave it out when its time had passed. Apple was also the first to drop the parallel port and RS-232 serial port. These were superseded by ADB and now by USB. Apple was quick to drop built-in modems as the technology was eclipsed by Ethernet and WiFi.

In the same way, Flash’s time has come and gone. It’s going to be a little tougher with Flash, because Apple can’t do it alone. Flash has become entrenched as a de-facto standard. Apple is leading the way, but others need to follow.

A true open standard for video and animation on the web is possible. HTML 5 eliminates the need for Flash. YouTube already is allowing users to beta-test HTML 5 delivery of videos. People are seeing noticeably lower CPU load while playing HTML 5 videos compared to Flash.

-Jamie

The last MacMad meeting was interesting.  It’s amazing how far technology has come in the last few years!  A meeting location that is easy to access would probably boost attendance at the meeting.  Has anyone considered a business location such as a real estate office lobby or a bank lobby?  Does anyone have any special contacts to explore something like this?

I would be interested in participating in a special interest group dealing with internet presence.  There must be a lot of ways to get noticed on the internet or attention to a website.  These must be inside secrets!  Do we have any MacMad members in this field that would like to share?  Kathy

Hi! This is a test of MacMAD’s new blog. At this point, we’re not ready to go live, but so far, MacHighway is making it pretty easy.