MacTricksAndTips.com

I’m continuing on the quest to explain the major aspects of the Mac operating system and to turn any noob to a pro. Although they are currently simple posts, I have to teach the basics so everyone is at the same level. Today’s post (which should have been yesterday due to technical reasons this couldn’t happen) is about Finder. I am going to explain the interface and moving onto coverflow. Tomorrows post will build upon this an introduce quicklook.

If you have some folder Applescript or Automator work flows attached to a folder you may find out that it takes quite a while for them to begin running. If you are waiting for something to happen, you may be waiting up to three minutes for the action to run. You can change this polling time with a simple Applescript to change the value. This will hopefully speed up the interval in which scripts are executed and allowed to run.

Sorry for the black hole of no posts over the last couple of days, if you have been following my Twitter feed I have been bogged down by work all week. Since the weekend is here I have a little bit of time to spare. This is going to be a quick trick which I have found more and more useful every time I use it. Its called Summarize under the services menu. As the name states it is a brilliant way of cutting down articles to get to the core text.

First off sorry for the lack of posting over the last couple of days, one thing after another piled up and I had to clear the back log. I had all of the intentions but not the time. Anyway this is going to be a quick post to get me back into the routine. The aim of this post is to highlight a couple of quick tricks to speed up copy and pasting text data and retaining the formatting. How many times have you copied something and the fonts were way out and looked stupid. Hopefully this quick trick will help you out.

This post is a semi request by MacTips, he asked in the previous post how I got the iTunes style scroll bars in the window. The answer is really simple (a lot simpler than the method I original used) and I am quite pleased with the effect. Although the install is simple to use, it does move around system files, as a result I wouldn’t recommend doing anything on a machine you really can’t live without.

If you have been reading the posts on this blog a while you may notice me mention methods in which you have to use Terminal or a long method to enable you to edit restrictive files. This is done by your operating system to stop you changing something important. But you may want to enable root so you can quickly change an array of files, for instance if you have a web server installed. Enabling root on your Mac is very simple.

I am for ever sending files to the printer, for what ever reason, I want a quick way to print those files from Finder. Usually you would have to open the file in your chosen application, what for everything to load, go to print and then pick it up. That takes to long. This post will show you two quick ways to print a file without the need to setup all of the various settings. It will throw it out of your printer as quick as possible.

This little tip will show you how you change change the number of recent places in the open/save dialog window. This is the list you see what you click on the drop down window. Its a pretty neat trick which is kinda obvious. I can’t take credit for this trick I found it on macosxhints, this is also a “heads up” for Alberto who emailed me about such a trick in October. Having looked through my emails I kinda came across this tip although I didn’t have the patient to see the results.