MacTricksAndTips.com

This is going to be a quick tip for any users who regularly use iCal. When you create a new event, either in the day, week or month viewer you will realise that the length of the event is one hour long, for most people this is fine. However if you regularly have meetings which are half an hour long, or book rooms for two ours at a time, it may be beneficial and more efficient to adjust the default meeting time. This means you don’t have to fiddle around with the length slot if you regularly use the same event length.

Normally Front Row, Apple’s multimedia interface which I haven’t used in a long time, is accessed by either pressing the keyboard short cut, using the Apple remote or clicking on the applications icon in Finder. I have found that using the short cut (Command + Escape) is a bit cumbersome, I also end up pressing it every so often while I am working. If you don’t use Front Row it can be a good idea to disable to short cut to stop being interrupted by the application starting up.

Yesterday I wrote a post on the calendar function in Terminal, its designed as a two part series, with the second part being about the date function. I found in bash scripts the two functions sort of work hand in hand. This post is going to show you some of the main features of the date function. The date function is more versatile in that you can easily pick out the piece of information you want, the week of the year, day of the year etc, the calendar function is more graphical. The date function can be used to set the date in your Mac, however I will not be going into this today as I prefer to use System Preferences (to find out more about setting the date use the man help page).

Today and tomorrows post will be a two part mini-series on the date and calendar function within Terminal on your Mac. If you are ever into scripting or working with GeekTool (I have an old post about GeekTool here) it may be very useful to learn how to work with the calendar function in various scripts or what ever you decide to use it with. The calendar function is very useful for producing graphical representations (in text) of any month of any year. Tomorrows post will feature the date function which complements the calendar function nicely. The commands talked about in post can be found (along with more commands) in a variety of books such as Mac OS X Toolbox. Any basic Unix book will feature these basic commands.

Today’s post is all about adding a welcome message to your login screen. Most of the time it displays a list of users and options to restart, shut down or log into your Mac. This string of text can be very useful if you have a fear of your Mac getting stolen or mixed up with other Mac’s. The string is short but can be used to display a useful bit of information. This post took me about 15 minutes to research and put together, and about an hour to try and grab a screen shot of the screen in action (I never found a working solution).

With a variety of formats for practically everything imaginable, we will at some point get a clash where one newer format will not work with an older app. In Microsoft’s infinite wisdom they have decided to release a docx format super seeding and as a result not making it work on the old but widely used version of word. Since I am a student, as a result broke, I can’t afford to upgrade to the latest version. I only use it for writing reports and reading files people send me. I then went out on a web hunt for an app or web website that could convert my files from docx to doc format. There is many out there, with some that need a payment of some kind, I eventually found a good app. It’s on the Windows site of all places, and can convert docx, pptx and xlsx files.

Todays app is a rather fun and quite interesting to use. It has risen up and been developed initially from finding it on reddit and various other websites including Flickr. This app is rather simple. Every time you move your mouse it will draw a black line on a white canvas within the app. This sounds a bit boring (on its own it is). However when combined with the thousands of different movements it shows a good representation of what you do day to day. Its great if you do a specific task as you can clearly see where you click on a regular basis. If you are smart enough you can probably use it to make peoples lives easier when using your app.