Four-finger swiping on multi-touch trackpads have a few interesting behaviors not shown in the Trackpad System Preferences panel.

As documented, a four-finger down swipe executes Exposé, while a four-finger up swipe shows the desktop. Without any intermediate steps, a four-finger swipe (up or down) will bring the windows back to their prior locations. The System Preferences window makes it appear as though after swiping up, the user must swipe down to return to a normal view, and after swiping down, the user must swipe up to exit Exposé.

However, when using Exposé, it is possible to scroll through the Exposéd windows using two-finger scrolling in any direction. Then a four-finger swipe up or down can be used to select the highlighted window as the new frontmost window.

With Spaces active (i.e. more than one Space being shown), two fingers can highlight different spaces. A four-finger down swipe activates Exposé within the Spaces; a four-finger up swip...

One thing that irks me about the iCal.app / Mail.app integration on OS X is that iCal chooses (based on some unknown criteria and without user input) the sending address (and hence account) from which to email invitations and responses to invitations.

Since I have multiple calendars and multiple email accounts, it is often that I want to choose the specific account when sending an invitation or replying to an invitation. This 40KB tar file contains the iCal AppleScript changes necessary to create an account selection box prior to sending these emails. Once a sending address is selected and OK is clicked, Mail.app will proceed with sending the iCal invitation, or replying from the account corresponding to the chosen email address. Here's how to install the modified code.

First, quit iCal and create a backup. You can do that however you wish; her...

I've always had a problem trying to read the small fonts on lyrics websites for songs I know on guitar.

Now I just copy and paste all the lyrics from the page, use Quicksilver's Large Text function, and I have all my lyrics nice and large and taking up the whole screen!

When viewing photos in the grid layout of iPhoto '08 running on Leopard, simply press the spacebar to zoom the selected image to full size of image browsing part of the window. Press the Space Bar again to return to the grid view, or use the Left and Right Arrow keys to scroll through your images.

Of course, this seems intuitive if you use QuickLook in the Finder a lot or use the this hint for a similar effect in the Media Browser, but it's not documented anywhere so I hadn't tried it.

It's a huge help to use this function to quickly look more closely at a few images while still taking advantage of the normal grid view to quickly browser through the rest of the image library. No more switching to full-screen mode or zooming in and out just to examine a few images.

[robg adds: I don't think this is exclusive to iPhoto '08 or Leopard; I recall it working in older versions of iPhoto...

A while back, this tip appeared, which I really appreciated a lot -- it made it possible for me to turn my mobile phone into a "digital paper." I use this hint daily for flight tickets, shopping lists, important emails, etc. on my mobile phone.

Recently I got an iPod Touch / iPhone. Today I also got the $6 program FileMagnet for my iPod Touch. This program allows me to do wireless transfer of files to my iPod Touch (or iPhone) and view files on my iPod Touch (or iPhone) -- amazing! This was just what I needed to turn the iPod touch into my digital paper. Alas, it involves a number of steps to get a print of a complicated webpage onto the iPod. Consider my electronic flight ticket that I've just bought: First I need to print this one as a PDF from the web page where it's generated, then I need to locate the PDF, then I have to dr...

Sometimes, some PDF files do not start on page one, nor do they show up with the desired magnification. Moving to page one, setting the zoom, and resaving them does not fix the issues. When the new file is opened, the very same issues arise. Here's a fix, if you've got Acrobat Pro on your Mac:

• Open the PDF file and choose Document » Extract Pages to extract all pages individually.
• Select File » Create PDF » Merge Files into a Single PDF.
• Drag and drop the individual files, and then use File Size LARGER » Combine Files » Save.

That's it!

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one, nor have I seen this particular PDF issue on my Mac.]

Do you use your iPod for notes? Do you want to be able to manage your notes while your iPod isn't plugged in? Well, here's how you can manage your notes on your computer and have them appear on your iPod. What you'll need:

• An iPod with disk use enabled.
• A couple of AppleScripts.

Step 1: Copy the notes folder on your iPod to your home folder. So, you should have a folder at "~/Notes/". This folder should be a duplicate of the notes folder on your iPod.

Step 2: Save the following as an AppleScript: property myipodname : "My iPod" property shellscriptname : "" on adding folder items to theFolder after receiving theItems if shellscriptname is equal to "" then if myipodname contains...

I went to Europe for three weeks this summer, and wanted a way to be able to grab things from my iMac while I was away. I figured out how to alter the Auto-Accept script in iChat to enable remote screen sharing as well, so that I could start a remote session without confirmation.

Input the code below into Script Editor, and save it as Auto Accept modified.applescript in /Library » Scripts » iChat. using terms from application "iChat" on received text invitation theText from theBuddy for theChat accept theChat end received text invitation on received audio invitation theText from theBuddy for theChat accept theChat end received audio invitation on received video invitation theText from theBudd...

• Developer: ManyTricks / Product Page
• Price: €9.95 [$12.35 as of 10/28/08] Shareware

This week's Pick of the Week is actually a rerun. Back in 2005, Witch was very new, and very welcomed -- it was the first program I'd found that let me switch windows, instead of just switching between applications. Over the years, I've come to rely on Witch quite heavily. Unfortunately, the release of 10.5 caused some issues for Witch -- nothing critical, but (for instance) some annoying repetitive log entries.

Witch 2.0 (now up to 2.0.1) fixed those problems, and added one nifty new feature -- you can use (and display, if you wish) "shortcut" badge icons on your first 10 open windows. So I can switch to any window by pressing Op...

I am using Time Machine with a Western Digital MyBook World, and had the hardest time getting it to make backups (even incremental ones of only a few megabytes) with reasonable speed. Apart from having to turn off any virus scanner, Spotlight tried to index the backup drive, which made it unbearably slow. I was not able to add the backup mount to the Privacy tab in the Spotlight System Preferences panel -- neither with the preferences pane, nor with any mdutil commands.

So I had to turn it off whenever I was doing the backup with this command:launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plistAfter the backup had finished, I then reloaded the daemon. If you want to use Spotlight and scheduled backups, this is not really practical. So I found a blunt force method that works to me. First, a daemon runs a script every minute to...

I frequently watch "one thing at a time" sale pages such as Chainlove for good deals on (in my case) cycling gear. These sites sell only one thing at a time, at fairly steep discounts, until the item is gone, then they move to the next thing. This site provides software to let you know when new things come up for sale, but it's Windows-only. They also provide an RSS feed, which is slow enough that I get notifications about the latest sale just after it's over.

GeekTool/curl/perl to the rescue: The Chainlove site changes the title to the page each time they put something new up. This command uses curl to grab the chainlove.com page and send it to perl, which searches for the title tags and prints out whatever is between those tags:curl -s www.chainlove.com | perl -nle 'print for m:<title>(.*)</title>:'I then use GeekTool to run tha...

Word 2008's synchronized audio recordings in Notebook Layout format are ideal for taking notes in college lectures, but what about that physics or math lecture where you want to type in a ton of Greek letters, superscripts, and subscripts, and the toolbox just won't cut it? Go to Word, open the Scripts menu, and in the About this menu... item, choose Open Folder. In that folder, create (using ScriptEditor) the following three AppleScript files. Note that the backslash (and following characters) in their names create keyboard shortcuts for each script, which you'll see in Word's Scripts menu:

• AppleScript #1: Save this one as GreekToMe\scC.scpt after pasting into ScriptEditor: set textReturned to text returned ...
  
  

Pages has very limited features for generating Tables of Contents (ToCs). In particular, if you number your headings automatically, the numbers don't show up in the ToC. This hint shows you how to add the heading numbers to the ToC without resorting to manually editing every heading in your document.

After generating your ToC and getting text that looks like this... First Heading ............. 1 Second Level .............. 1 Another Second Level ...... 3 Big First Heading ......... 5 Second Level Again ........ 5 ...click on the lines in the ToC and add list styling to the ToC styles that match the heading styles: 1. First Heading ................. 1 1.2. Second Level ............... 1 1.3. Another Second Level ....... 3 2. Big First Heading ............. 5 2.1 Second Level Again ......... 5 Each time the headings are changed, the ToC will be updated and renumbered. The only catch is that the second and lower leve...

One of the new features in Fusion 2 is the ability to have your Windows' applications appear in OS X's Open With contextual menu. This feature is disabled by default, but there's a slight issue if you turn it on (say for testing during a review :) ), and then disable it again: the programs will still be listed in the Open With menu in OS X, even after a restart.

I've heard that this will be addressed in the first minor update to Fusion 2, but if you'd like to fix it in the interim, here's the solution. Shut down your Windows VM (not sure this is actually required, but it's probably best), and switch to the Finder. In the Finder, Control-click on your Windows VM (which is probably stored in your user's Documents » Virtual Machines folder, unless you moved it) and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. In the new window that opens, navigate into the Applications folder, and delete all the entries you find there. As I under...

I found some prior hints on the site about using boolean searches in 10.4; there are now easier ways of doing this, and a more powerful way of refining what you search for, in Leopard. In Spotlight, or just the find bar in a Finder window, you can type sun NOT set (the capitalization of NOT is important) to instantly show all matches, except those containing 'sunset.' The same can be done with OR and AND modifiers.

To extend this and do super specific searches, you can use file attributes. For example, I want to exclude movie frames from an image search, so I would type .tga NOT PixelWidth:720. There are many attributes you can use -- to find these for a specific file, use Terminal and type mdls, press the Space Bar, and then type the path to that file's location (or just drag it in from the Finder). Terminal will return a list...

I've written two AppleScripts to ease the task of moving NetNewsWire feed items into Evernote. Both scripts allow you to tag your items on the way into Evernote, and also to decide which notebook to file the feeds in.

• Single Headline or Tab: This is the quickest way to get an item into Evernote. You can find the instructions and script in this post on my blog.
• Batch Sending: For when you need to do some heavier lifting -- slower, but brings over multiple items at once. You can find the instructions and script in this post on my blog.

Feel free to post comments on the scripts here; I'll check (though I'd appreciate it if you post a copy on the source page a...

Recently, a hint posted here noted some discrepancies with the Drop Box permissions and permissions of items that are put into it. In short: sometimes a user receives a read-only copy of an item put in his/her Drop Box, and sometimes that item is read/write. Here's why.

To be able to explain what's going on, you need to know a few of the rules that Mac OS X uses for setting file permissions:

1. The Leopard systems automatically enable access control lists (ACLs) on the startup disk. Tiger systems do not.
2. Newly-created Leopard accounts are given the primary group of staff. This is also the case for Tiger Server and Leopard Server systems, but not for Tiger client. Tiger client uses what's called a "GID per UID" system, where a new group is created for each user. (Throughout these examples,...
   
   

I use a shared host which unfortunately, due to circumstances outside my control, terminates my Transmit FTP/SQL sessions after 15 minutes of idleness. Good for processor cycles, poor for my sanity, especially during intensive coding/research sessions.

After gleaning the internet for a solution and finding none which worked, I decided to whip up my own. Copy and paste the following code into Script Editor, and save it as an application with the 'stay open' option checked:repeat tell application "Transmit" tell document 1 tell current session refresh list their stuff files end tell end tell end tell delay (60)end repeatIf anyone wants to follow up this with a touch of AppleScript that cycles through every connection, that would be great. This is my first AppleScript project, so woot for me!

If your network is using an authenticating proxy for web access (you need to enter a "proxy password" to access the web), then you'll have trouble if you turn on Parental Controls, as the controls will prevent you from authenticating to the proxy.

The Parental Controls feature works by directing all web access for controlled users to an internal Apache web proxy (this proxy is dynamically started when a Parental Controls user logs in). Unfortunately, this proxy eats the HTTP 407 response authentication credentials, so you end up in a never-ending loop of the proxy demanding to know who you are, and the Parental Controls proxy refusing to let you tell.

Here's one possible solution. Open Terminal and run this command:sudo chmod a-x /usr/sbin/httpdEnter your admin password when prompted, then quit Terminal and restart your Mac. It's important to note t...

This is for MacBook and MacBook Pro users who work with a mouse connected...

I've been working with large spreadsheets with swathes of scientific data and graphs, laid out in "split" format, which splits the screen to show multiple areas of the worksheet at once. I found navigating it all very tedious after many days using a USB mouse.

But now, I've found a great solution: use the left hand to utilize two-finger-scrolling on the trackpad, and keep using the mouse with the right hand. Since my spreadsheets are split, and the two-finger scroll applies to whatever is currently 'under' the mouse, I can make a slight movement of the mouse to one pane, quickly scroll left and right with the left hand on the trackpad, quickly move back to the other pane with the mouse, and then do the same in that pane.

Two hands really are better than one; hope this helps someone else.