When  you connect the external monitor to an Apple Macbook, the external monitor will display as secondary monitor.

In order to make the external monitor the primary one, go to System Preferences -> Displays.

Select Arrangement. You will see two rectangles – each representing a monitor (internal & external).

You will also notice there is a small white bar at the top of the smaller rectangle. Drag the bar to the bigger rectangle (indicating that you want to make the external ...]]>

When  you connect the external monitor to an Apple Macbook, the external monitor will display as secondary monitor.

In order to make the external monitor the primary one, go to System Preferences -> Displays.

Select Arrangement. You will see two rectangles – each representing a monitor (internal & external).

You will also notice there is a small white bar at the top of the smaller rectangle. Drag the bar to the bigger rectangle (indicating that you want to make the external monitor the primary one).

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In Mobile Safari for the iOS devices, such as your iPhone or iPad, you can enter a new url without tapping the x that clears the url field.

For Example:

If you already have say apple.com open on you iphone and you want to go to newmacuser.com. All you have to do is tap the url bar and start typing. Mobile Safari is smart enough to know that you want a new url and clears the old one for you.

For you Letterbox – Mail.app plugin lovers out there here is a quick fix to get you back it working in 10.6.5 Snow Leopard. First off you will need the new “SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs”.

Then you will need a program to edit info.plist files. If you have developer tools installed you will use Property List Editor if not you will need a program that will edit an .xml file like my favorite Texwrangler.

PRIOR TO THE FOLLOWING PLEASE CLOSE MAIL.APP

Next you have to find ...]]>

For you Letterbox – Mail.app plugin lovers out there here is a quick fix to get you back it working in 10.6.5 Snow Leopard. First off you will need the new “SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs”.

1. 857A142A-AB81-4D99-BECC-D1B55A86D94E
2. BDD81F4D-6881-4A8D-94A7-E67410089EEB

Then you will need a program to edit info.plist files. If you have developer tools installed you will use Property List Editor if not you will need a program that will edit an .xml file like my favorite Texwrangler.

PRIOR TO THE FOLLOWING PLEASE CLOSE MAIL.APP

Next you have to find and edit the info.plist for letterbox. Yours may be a little bit different but by default the file we need  is in You User Folder -> Library -> Mail-> Bundles. If you have opened mail and got the disabled warning message your folder will have “(Disabled)” added to it. For now Leave this alone. Open the folder and you will see a list of the mail plugins you have .

Right click on the Letterbox.mailbundle and select “Show Package Contents” a new Finder window will open and you will see a contents folder, open this and you will see the info.plist file we need to edit. Open it in Textwrangler.app and scrool to the bottom of the file. There you will see the area we need to edit.

Look for (or use the find command) the line <key>SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs</key>.

Once you find this you need to add the 2 strings from above to it. or just copy the next 2 lines and paste it in the file just under the other <string> tags as you see in my screen grab from above, make sure it is before the tag.

<string>857A142A-AB81-4D99-BECC-D1B55A86D94E</string>
<string>BDD81F4D-6881-4A8D-94A7-E67410089EEB</string>

Now we need to deal with the “(Disabled)” part of the folder. This is easy just go to the finder and open back to the Mail folder from above and edit the folder name and delete the “(Disabled)” part. If you have other mail plugins you can edit the info.plist file the same way,If you choose not to edit them they will disable again on the next launch of Mail.app. If you have this all done then when you open mail you will be back in business with mail.app and the letterbox plugin.

**** UPDATE***** (11/12/2010 @ 11:07 am est)
I have had 3 people contact me with issues after they edit the info.plist file. I have asked them all to send me a copy of the info.plist file on their machine and all have had either old versions or a very different items in the file. I have asked all of them to re-download the plugin from the original source. (Letterbox Plugin @ Harnly.net)Then prior to opening Mail.app do the edit as above. So Far that has worked for anyone who has had an issue.

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I am a firm believer in using Safari on my mac. When I had my windows computer I used Firefox and there is one thing I really miss.   The feature is hard to describe in text but here is my best attempt. In Firefox when you are on a webpage and you are looking for a word or sentence  you just start typing and the “”Find” bar comes up and you can see the results as you type in more info. ...]]>

I am a firm believer in using Safari on my mac. When I had my windows computer I used Firefox and there is one thing I really miss.   The feature is hard to describe in text but here is my best attempt. In Firefox when you are on a webpage and you are looking for a word or sentence  you just start typing and the “”Find” bar comes up and you can see the results as you type in more info. By default in Safari you have to type the keyboard shortcut “Command+F” or go to the “Edit” menu and scroll down to the find item and then you get the Find bar at the top of the screen. It seems by the time I do all that I could have found the item myself.

The fix for this is a safari plug-in, Glims. Now Gilms does much more than the Type-ahead support we are talking about here. In fact the list is so long that I am just going to link to the page and let Mac Hang Out give you the run down. To enable what I call the “Find as you type” feature  you need to download and install Glims from Machangout.com(Download Link). After you run the installer I suggest you restart Safari then go to the Preferences menu under the Safari menu. Select the Glims item at the end of the row. You may have to expand the Preferences window to the the Glims menus. The setting we are looking for is on the General tab under the area “Browser Window.” Now turn on the “Auto select browser search banner(type-ahead support).” Now when you want to search a page for something just start typing your term.

*Disclaimer – if the page you are on has fill in areas selected this will not work. You will just start typing in the forms.

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For our summer vacation my parents bought a new camera and we wanted to test it against 2 other cameras. So we headed to the beach with the 3 cameras and took the same shoots. Long story short I came back to the beach house and uploaded all the shots to iPhoto. I then wanted to see all the information about each shot so I knew which camera too the best shoots. I kept hitting “Command+I” but all I got ...]]>

For our summer vacation my parents bought a new camera and we wanted to test it against 2 other cameras. So we headed to the beach with the 3 cameras and took the same shoots. Long story short I came back to the beach house and uploaded all the shots to iPhoto. I then wanted to see all the information about each shot so I knew which camera too the best shoots. I kept hitting “Command+I” but all I got was a gray window with a map. No camera data. Then I found out to get the detailed information,or  Extended Photo Info, you have to use the option key modifier. So to get to the detailed information of a photo in iPhoto just use the keyboard shortcut “Option+Command+I”. You can also get the detailed information or, as apple calls it the “Extended Photo Info”, you can go to the Photos menu in iPhoto and it is the first item in the drop down.

By the way the Cannon PowerShot SX200 IS is a really nice camera. My sony DSC-H9 now looks so out of date. When the iphone 4 gets here tomorrow we are planning on taking the same comparison to see how it holds up to the cannon SX200 IS.

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In Mail OS X 10.6 one of the changes is how an email address is copied to the clip board. By default in 10.6 when you copy and paste an e-mail address you get the output in “Name ” . Before the release of 10.6 you could just copy an email address in Mail and when you pasted it you would just get “name@example.com.”

If use use Mail.app like I do and use the copy feature to move e-mail addresses around, ...]]>

In Mail OS X 10.6 one of the changes is how an email address is copied to the clip board. By default in 10.6 when you copy and paste an e-mail address you get the output in “Name ” . Before the release of 10.6 you could just copy an email address in Mail and when you pasted it you would just get “name@example.com.”

If use use Mail.app like I do and use the copy feature to move e-mail addresses around, and are frustrated by this new format then I have a fix for you.
The developers of 10.6 build in a terminal fix to get the paste back to the way it was before. The fix is a real simple one. All you need to do is open the Terminal and paste the code from below. ** Make sure you close Mail.app before you do this.

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

Restart Mail, and Copy Address will once again do just what it says, which is the preferred behavior for my use of Mail. If you try this and decided you prefer the default version, quit Mail and run this command in Terminal:

defaults delete com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard

Open Mail.app again and you should have the paste function of 10.5 back. If for some reason you want to undo this then you can use the code below to undo the hack.

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If you have made the move to Snow Leopard then you are using the new QuickTime X. There are a few keyboard shortcut that can help you while using the new application.

Use The J,K, & L keys to skim the video

Use the Right Arrow to move one frame forward at a time. Use the Left Arrow to move one frame backward at a time.

Use Option-Right Arrow to Jump to end of movie. Use Option-Left Arrow to Jump to beginning of movie.

And don’t ...]]>

If you have made the move to Snow Leopard then you are using the new QuickTime X. There are a few keyboard shortcut that can help you while using the new application.

Use The J,K, & L keys to skim the video

Use the Right Arrow to move one frame forward at a time.
Use the Left Arrow to move one frame backward at a time.

Use Option-Right Arrow to Jump to end of movie.
Use Option-Left Arrow to Jump to beginning of movie.

And don’t forget you can always use the space bar to play & pause the file.

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If you are a user who is trying to use the keyboard as much as you can and keep my hands off the mouse then you may want to learn the keyboard short cut to send a Maill.app message. After yo have typed you message and it is rea to go simply press the Command+shift+D keys and off the message will go.

If you have any other Mail.app short cuts that may help new users please share them in the comments ...]]>

If you are a user who is trying to use the keyboard as much as you can and keep my hands off the mouse then you may want to learn the keyboard short cut to send a Maill.app message. After yo have typed you message and it is rea to go simply press the Command+shift+D keys and off the message will go.

If you have any other Mail.app short cuts that may help new users please share them in the comments below!

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Okay so thats a bit of a lie. With these 2 methods the program will open, print the item, and then close the file.  

The first way is to select Print in the Finder s File menu.  This only works if you have the file selected in the Finder window. For example I have a Numbers document named Bills in my documents folder. If I wanted to print that, with this meted, I would open a Finder window navigate to the file and select ...]]>

Okay so thats a bit of a lie. With these 2 methods the program will open, print the item, and then close the file.  

The first way is to select Print in the Finder s File menu.  This only works if you have the file selected in the Finder window. For example I have a Numbers document named Bills in my documents folder. If I wanted to print that, with this meted, I would open a Finder window navigate to the file and select it. Go to the Finder File menu and select Print. This will open numbers, print the document, and close the file. It does not close the application though. This method is really solid as long as you only print to one printer because you can only print to the default printer. If you have multiple printers in your environment then you need to try the second method. 

Open System Preferences and open the Print & fax dialog. Start dragging the printer icons to the desktop.  You can keep the icons on the desktop or if you choice move them to the Dock. When you are ready to print a document then just drag the file from a Finder window to the printer icon you want to have print the document.

If you are going to use the first method then I would suggest adding a keyboard shortcut to make this even faster. To do this open up your System Preferences and navigate to the Keyboard & Mouse dialog. Select the Keyboard Shortcuts and click the “+” button. this will open a new window. Fill out out with the same setting in the picture. Application = Finder, Menu Title = Print and then click on the Keyboard Short care area and type what you want to use. I used command+p. Click Add and you are in business. Now all you need to do is select the file in the Finder and press command+p and the default printer will print out your document.

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Over at Macworld.com, Rob Griffiths, has put together a nice tutorial on how to set up some shortcuts to get to your shared screens on other Macs on the network.

From the article “You can create a shortcut to any screen sharing with any machine on your network by using your Web browser, and a special URL. The URL takes the form of vnc://address.of.machine, and address.of.machine can be either a raw IP address (i.e. 192.168.1.203) or that Mac’s Bonjour name, which is typically ...]]>

Over at Macworld.com, Rob Griffiths, has put together a nice tutorial on how to set up some shortcuts to get to your shared screens on other Macs on the network.

From the article
“You can create a shortcut to any screen sharing with any machine on your network by using your Web browser, and a special URL. The URL takes the form of vnc://address.of.machine, and address.of.machine can be either a raw IP address (i.e. 192.168.1.203) or that Mac’s Bonjour name, which is typically whatever you named the machine, followed by .local. I prefer to use the IP address, though, because that typically won’t change, whereas you may rename your Macs on occasion.

Once you’ve typed the above address into the URL bar in your browser, do not press Return. Instead, select the text you’ve just typed, click-and-hold the mouse over the selection, wait a second or so, then drag it to your desktop and drop it. This will create a “.vncloc” file on your desktop. Double-click that, and Screen Sharing will launch, and connect to the specified machine. Repeat this procedure to create fast-access shortcuts for each of your machines. (I tested this in both Safari and Firefox, but I’m not sure if it works with other browsers.)”

To read the full article click here

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