Mac « Phillip the Polar Bear

Here’s a tip for those who take a tidy desk to the extreme. When you’ve got multiple Finder windows open, you can apply an action to all of them at once.

Press Command-Option-W to immediately close all windows. Likewise, if you hold down the Option key while pressing the red, yellow and green buttons in the upper left hand corner of a Finder window, you apply the corresponding action to all open windows

Option + yellow minimizes all windows to the Dock
Option + green maximizes all windows
Option + red closes all windows

Keep your desktop neat and tidy by dismissing all open Finder windows in a snap.

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Add comment May 1, 2008

Smart-Open Files and Applications for a Cleaner Desktop [Mac OS X Tip]

Smart-Open Files and Applications for a Cleaner Desktop [Mac OS X Tip]: ”

If you’re keen on keeping a desktop free from the clutter of a hundred open windows, weblog AppleDoes points out a simple OS X keyboard shortcut that will simultaneously open a file or application while closing the Finder window you launched it from. How? Just hold your option key. So if you’re about to launch an application, for example, holding option and then double-clicking the app will open the app and automatically close the Finder window you opened it from. This trick also works from the keyboard—so Cmd-Opt-O will open your app or file and automatically close the Finder window. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s a handy little shortcut to keep your virtual world just a touch neater.

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(Via Lifehacker.)

Add comment April 30, 2008

Automatically Rotate through Desktop Backgrounds

Automatically Rotate through Desktop Backgrounds: ”

This is a basic tip but a feature many of you may not know about.

Inside System Preferences -> Desktop & Screensaver you can set your desktop background to automatically change at a set interval.

This interval can be as short as 5 seconds or as long as 24 hours. It can even be set for when your computer wakes up or at login.

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Check ‘Change picture’ and select the interval you’d like:

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Personally I’ve come to love my ‘Grass Blades’ background, but this is a great feature for rotating through photos of family, friends or landscapes.

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This tip was submitted by Landon Johnson. Submit a tip and get some traffic to your Web site!

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(Via MacTips – OS X Tips & Tricks.)

Add comment April 25, 2008

Crucial Introduces Memory/System Scanner For Macs

Crucial Introduces Memory/System Scanner For Macs: ”

PC users have long been able to avoid retail prices and save some money on RAM by hitting Crucial’s PC System Scanner site to analyze their current configuration and have the program give upgrade options (then go to deal sites and really save some $$). Mac users can now do the same thanks to the Crucial Mac System Scanner. After acknowledging the terms & conditions (you *do* read those, right?) the download begins. When finished, you have to mount the disk image and you’ll notice pretty quickly that the developers actually bothered to make a nice dmg background (a detail that is increasingly being left out of many packages).

I don’t recommend moving the app to your Applications or Utilities folders since it’s a one-shot deal for most folks and you can always re-download it the next time you need it.

Double-clicking the app icon runs a program which dumps an html file on your system (it put mine in file:///var/folders/NZ/NZ2aeHCxEy4bRcChWavt0++++TI/-Tmp-/sysoutput_utf8.html) and opens that up in your browser – you may want to make a note of where it stored yours and make an effort to remove it once you’re done with the tool.

It turns out that the all the utility does is put the contents of the output of system_profiler -xml (you can run that yourself from a Terminal.app session) into a hidden text area and submits it all to Crucial. As a result, the fine marketers at Crucial now know the details of your whole system, including printers, drive layout, etc. This is great marketing info for them and their partners, so you may want to think twice about using the tool if you are at all concerned about potential privacy issues.

The report is similar to what they provide from a PC scan and includes details of your current configuration and upgrade paths.

The utility is a Universal Binary so it should work fine on older systems. (I may be setting up an older PowerBook for my son in the near future, so I am in the market for an upgrade on that system unlike the result you just saw for my MB Pro, but I’ll probably be skipping the Scanner for that one).

If you don’t mind Crucial knowing all your system secrets, give the utility a try and drop a note in the comments to let us know if they identified your configuration properly. Also drop a note if you have suggestions on alternate ways you use to find the information required to upgrade your Macs memory. I may do a compilation post with the results (full credit if you leave that in the comment) if we receive enough good entries.

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(Via The Apple Blog.)

Add comment April 21, 2008

Terminal tip: easy email attachments

Terminal tip: easy email attachments: ”

Filed under: Terminal Tips

If you’re looking to automate the sending of emails with attachments quickly and easily (and aren’t too concerned with having some glamorous stationery), Terminal is once again your friend. It’s possible with Mail.app and AppleScript, but there are a few pitfalls and, for most purposes, a simple shell command will do the trick:

(echo 'This is the message body';uuencode Desktop/yourDoc.doc yourDoc.doc)|mail -s 'Test attachment' someone@adomain.com

The magical command in this one is uuencode, which is used to encode and decode binary files and can be used on just about any file type. The two arguments in the command above define the name and location of the source file and the name the file should have when it’s received. The parenthetical statement at the beginning combines the results of the echo and uuencode commands which are then piped (|) to the mail command. The mail command, having received the body text and attachment, is told to append a subject (-s ‘Subject’) and send it to the address specified. If you wanted to send a longer text file – with line breaks, perhaps – as the body, you could save the text in an external file and replace the echo statement with cat myfile.txt.

By adding a little complexity you could make a shell script that takes arguments, making the automation a little more flexible. But TUAW reader Adam was wondering how to send a photo he’d taken automatically using AppleScript (triggered by a Mail Rule). So here’s an AppleScript implementation that doesn’t require opening Terminal or dealing with Mail.app scripting:

set msgBody to 'This is the body of the message' set msgSubj to 'Message subject' set mailDest to 'someone@adomain.com' do shell script '(echo '' & msgBody & ''; uuencode /Users/you/Desktop/pictosend.jpg pictosend.jpg) | mail -s '' & msgSubj & '' ' & mailDest

Make sure you remove any line breaks from that last line. This obviously requires a predetermined image name, but that could be made a variable as well and used as part of a larger script. We hope this helps, Adam!

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