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.

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).

While moving some large files around the other day I came across a rather funny code that got me confused for quite a while. Every time I tried to copy the file it would throw up an error box saying the file can’t be copied, an “unexpected error hasoccurred , code 0″. The solution was decisively simple and very easy to overcome. Its due to the FAT32 partitioning system I was copying to. This post is going to explain how you can get around it.

This is a post based on a response from a question someone emailed me the other day. If you ever have a minor problem with an application that doesn’t seem to disappear after a while and solve itself, for example the wrong email address with a name in Mail, the solution is very simple. This post is designed to target new users to the Mac who may not have experienced this kind of behaviour. The solutions are deleting cache and preference files. This post wont solve problems caused by bad coding in applications. Just problems that have shown the correct results (i.e a named entry in a database) before and have suddenly broken themselves. This should be a solution to 99.9% of minor problems and only really needs to be done every couple of months.

After playing around with iTunes for a bit, I suddenly realised that the little green button which you use to maximise and application doesn’t work as it would intend to. Instead it changes iTunes to the mini-player. You can normally maximise iTunes by pressing Alt and then clicking on the green button, however this is one extra button and I am not prepared to press that button in my day to day activities, I am busy enough as it is. So I found a quick Terminal preference command which allows you to change this function. In hindsight it took me longer to find the command than it would have to keep pressing Alt.

Here is a quick tip to start off the weekend (I promise more tricks this weekend). This is a very simple but useful tip that I have employed over the last couple of days to quickly see the results of a Terminal command. It involves making the Terminal windows transparent. Its a bit of a hack, however I think it is quite useful.

This is a very simple little trick which you can enable in Snow Leopard. In essence it provides a thumbnail preview of the contents of any folder. This is quite useful for quickly looking inside a folder. All it involves is a simple Terminal line.