Burning Multiple Times to the Same CD
APPLEPRO:

"Generally, when you burn files to a CD once, you’re done — you can’t burn to that CD again. Unless you use this little trick: First create a new folder and give it a descriptive name (something like “burn baby burn!” Kidding). Now put the files you want to burn into that folder, then go to the Applications folder and open the Utilities folder. Double-click on Disk Utility. When it comes up, go under the File menu, under New, and choose Disk Image from Folder, and then when the Open dialog appears, find that folder with the stuff you want to burn and click the image button. A Save dialog appears in which you can leave the name as is or choose a new name (leave the other controls alone), and then click Save. In a few moments, a disk image of your folder’s contents will appear in the list on the left side of the Disk Utility dialog. Click on that icon, and then click the burn button at the top left of the Disk Utility dialog.

When you click the Burn button, a dialog will appear asking to insert a disc. Do so, and then click once the blue downward-facing triangle on the right side of this dialog to show more options. Click on the checkbox for Leave disc appendable, then click the Burn button. Your data will now be written to that CD. To add more files later, just insert that same CD and then you’ll use this same process all over again, but when you get to that final burn dialog, the button won’t say “Burn” this time, instead it will say “Append” because you’re adding these files to the same disc. By the way, don’t forget to remove the files you already burned to this disc from your “burn baby burn!” folder (and the DMG file it creates) before you make your next disc image."



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The One-Click Trick to Moving the Dock
APPLEPRO:
Okay, so you’re working in a program like Final Cut Pro or iMovie, which takes up every vertical inch of the screen, and when you go to adjust something near the bottom, the Dock keeps popping up. Oh sure, you could move the Dock to where it’s anchored on the left or right side of the screen, but that just feels weird. But what if you could move it temporarily to the left or right, and then get it back to the bottom when you close Final Cut Pro, in just one click?
Here’s how: Hold the shift key, click directly on the Dock’s divider line (on the far right side of the Dock), and drag the Dock to the left or right side of your screen. Bam! It moves over to the side. Then, once you quit Final Cut Pro, just shift-click on that divider line and slam it back to the bottom (okay, drag it back to the bottom). A draggable Dock — is that cool or what!



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Minimize all of one app's windows at once
MacWorld:

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OS X’s minimize feature shrinks down an open window and stores the page on the right-hand side of your Dock (assuming you haven’t moved the dock off the bottom of the screen). It’s a handy way to leave a window open for easy future reference, yet not have it take up space on your screen. There are a couple ways to minimize a window to the Dock—press Command-M, or just click the yellow minimize button in the top left of an open window. When you do, an oh-so-pretty animation will scale the active window down into the Dock. When you need to use it again, click the small window icon in the Dock, and it will scale up to full size.


But what if you want to minimize all of an application’s open windows? Try holding down the Option key before clicking the minimize button. This trick will probably work in most, but perhaps not all, of your applications. All Cocoa applications support the feature automatically, from what I can tell. There are lots of Cocoa applications out there, including most anything Apple has shipped lately, plus programs such as OmniWeb, Camino, Path Finder, and many more. In any of these programs, Option-clicking the minimize widget will send all of the program’s windows to the Dock. If you find you want all the windows back at full size, Option-click on any one of the minimized windows in the dock, and they’ll all expand again.


So much for Cocoa applications. What about Carbon applications, such as Microsoft Office 2004, BBEdit, and Photoshop? The answer here is you’ll probably be able to use the Option-click shortcut to minimize all open windows, but it’s not guaranteed. On my system, it seemed to work in every Carbon application I could find, including the Finder, Excel, and Photoshop. It didn’t, however, work in Word, which seems quite odd. I’m not sure if Word is the only exception to the rule, or if there are other such apps—but if there are, I don’t have them on my Mac.


There’s another disadvantage to Carbon apps in this regard—you can’t release all of the minimized windows with an Option-click on one of the docked windows. Instead, you have to click on each window to release it from its temporary home in the Dock. You’ll want to keep this in mind before you minimize those 20 open BBEdit windows via Option-click.


Just to further confuse things, however, there’s one function where Carbon applications have an advantage over their Cocoa counterparts—when closing minimized windows. With Cocoa applications, you have to release a minimized window from the dock before you can close it. With Carbon applications, however, you can close a minimized window by control-clicking on its icon on the Dock and selecting Close (or by pressing Command-W). Try that with a Cocoa application’s windows, and you’ll only see Open in the contextual menu.


Hopefully, OS X 10.5 will bring further consistency to this functionality, as it’s confusing to explain in its current state.

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Finding Where the © and ™ Symbols Live
APPLEPRO:

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Since nearly the beginning of Mac-dom, when you wanted to find out which key combination produced a font’s special characters (stuff like ©, ™, £, ¢, ‰, ƒ, etc.), you used a utility called KeyCaps. More than a decade later, KeyCaps is still a part of Mac OS, but a better way to access these special characters is through the Character Palette. You can access it two ways: (1) From within Mac OS X business apps (like Mail, TextEdit, Stickies, etc.), just go under Edit and choose Special Characters or click on the Actions pop-up menu at the bottom of the Font Panel and choose Characters; (2) add Character Palette access to your menu bar, so you can access it when you’re working in other applications (like Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign). You do this by going to the System Preferences in the Apple menu, under International, and clicking on the Input Menu tab. Turn on the checkbox for Character Palette and it will appear in the menu bar along the right side.

Either way you open it, here’s how you use it: When you open the Character Palette, choose All Characters from the View menu, then click on the By Category tab. The left column shows a list of special character categories and the right column shows the individual characters in each category. To get one of these characters into your text document, just click on the character and click the Insert button in the bottom right-hand corner of the dialog. If you find yourself using the same special characters over and over (like ©, ™, etc.), you can add these to your Favorites list, and access them from the Favorites tab in the Character Palette. To see which fonts contain certain characters (they don’t all share the same special characters), expand the Character Palette by clicking on the down-facing arrow next to Font Variation on the bottom-left side of the palette. This brings up another panel where you can choose different fonts. you can also ask that this list show only fonts that support the character you have highlighted.

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The Burn Folder Isn’t Burning Aliases
APPLEPRO:

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When you create a burn folder in Tiger (which you do by either choosing New Burn Folder from the File menu or from the Action menu [that’s the button with a gear icon on it in Finder windows]), if you look inside that folder, you won’t see your original files. Instead, you’ll see aliases to the originals (you can tell they’re aliases because they have a little curved arrow on them). But don’t let that throw you — when you do finally click the burn button (in the upper right-hand corner of the burn Folder’s window), it actually gets the original files and burns those to disk, so you don’t have to worry about having a CD full of aliases pointing to files you no longer have.

So why all the aliases in the first place? Because it points to your files (rather than copying them into the folder), which makes burning discs much faster than in previous versions of Mac OS X.

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Need the First Available Printer?

APPLE PRO:

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If you’ve got a print job on your hands and you need it as soon as possible, but all the printers on your network are often busy, you can pool these printers together so your document will automatically print to the first available printer. Just go to the Printer Setup Utility (in the Applications folder, within the Utilities folder), Command-click on all the printers you want to pool together, then go under the Printers menu and choose Pool Printers. A dialog will open where you can name your pool (the default name is “Printer Pool”), and it shows a list of printers that are in that pool.

You can click-and-drag the printers into the order that you want and then click Create, which adds a new printer in your Printer list called Printer Pool. Choose that as your printer, and then when you choose Print, Mac OS X will start looking for the first available printer.

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Searching by Color Label
APPLE PRO:

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Besides the visual benefits of having certain files tagged with a Color label, there’s a hidden benefit: You can search for files by their color. For example, let’s say you misplaced an important file for a project you were working on. You can press Command-F to bring up the Find function, and from the top-left pop-up menu, choose Color Label.

Then, click on the color for the files you labeled in that project, and it will instantly find and display all the files with that color. Searching by color—only Apple is cool enough to come up with a search like this!

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Fix Terminal typos
(MacWorld)

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If you’ve spent time in Terminal, more than likely you’ve made a typo or two—or two hundred thousand, if your typing accuracy is anything like mine! It’s one of the banes of working in Unix—after years of point-and-click, having to type sometimes long and complex commands by hand leads to inaccuracies. And, sad to say, Terminal isn’t nearly as lenient with my typos as are Word and my other text editors!


As an example, let’s say you were trying to copy OS X’s built-in webserver configuration file, httpd.conf, to your desktop to take a look at (without worrying about damaging it). This file is located in the /etc -> httpd folder, and so your copy command would look like this in Terminal (the $ is the command prompt):



$ cp /etc/httpd/httpd.conf ~/Desktop/httpd_copy.conf

But in your haste to type the command, you type htttpd instead of httpd. (Yes, I’m aware you can use the Tab key to auto-complete paths in Terminal—and I highly recommend you do so. For purposes of this hint, assume my Tab key has been broken in a tragic accident.) Terminal then helpfully tells you:



cp: /etc/htttpd/httpd.conf: No such file or directory

This is right, of course; there is no htttpd folder. One way to fix this error is by pressing the up arrow, then the back arrow to move to the proper spot in the command, and finally pressing Delete at the right spot.


But here’s a potentially easier method: use the caret character (^). Immediately after you get the error in Terminal, start the next command with the caret, type in the portion of the prior command that you want to fix, type another caret, and then type the corrected version of the command. In this example, it was the three t characters that were wrong; it should only have been two. So to fix that, you’d enter this command:



^ttt^tt

When you press Return, Terminal will re-execute the prior command, making the correction you indicated. And to let you know what happened, Terminal will also echo the corrected command that was executed:



cp /etc/httpd/httpd.conf ~/Desktop/httpd_copy.conf

You may not use this every day, but it’s a nice timesaver for those times when you do make a mistake.

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Look Inside Multiple Folders Automatically
(APPLE PRO):

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Need to see what’s inside more than one folder while in List view? Do it the fast way—Command-click on all the folders you want to expand, then press Command-Right Arrow. All the folders will expand at once.

If the file you’re looking for isn’t there, just press Command-Left Arrow (you can do that, because your folders are still highlighted) to quickly collapse them all again.

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Resizing Photos for Emailing
(APPLE PRO)

Have you ever noticed how freaked out relatives get when you email them high-res photos from your six- or eight-meg digital camera? For example, your grandmother in Minnesota may not have Photoshop CS2, and so dealing with that 26MB, 41-inch-wide photo you shot with your eight-meg camera might put a strain on her system. That’s why you might want to reduce the size of those photos you’re about to email. You don’t even have to launch Photoshop — because you can do the resizing right within Mail.

After you attach a photo to your email message (you can just drag-and-drop the image into the New Message window), take a look in the bottom-right corner of your email message window, and you’ll see a pop-up menu where you can choose the Image Size you’d like to send. As soon as you choose a size (other than Actual Size), the image is immediately scaled down right within the email message window so you can see the exact size of the photo you’re sending.




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Creating Aliases Without the Word “Alias”
APPLEPRO:

Do you find it as annoying as I do that Mac OS X adds the word “alias” every time you create an alias? (I know, previous versions of the Mac OS did that as well, and it annoyed me there too.) Well, you can bypass the “adding-the-word-alias” uglies altogether by holding the Option and Command keys and clicking-and-dragging the original file outside the Finder window it’s currently in (I usually just drag mine to the desktop).

This creates an alias without the word “alias” attached. (Note: Don’t worry, you’ll still know it’s an alias, because its icon will have a tiny arrow at the bottom left-hand corner.)




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Printing from TextEdit
MACWORLD

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Printing from TextEdit sometimes seems like a black art—often the font size of your printed document will be much smaller than the font size used in the onscreen original. You might be thinking, “I thought the Mac was supposed to be a WYSIWYG machine?” (Nevermind for now that nothing is truly WYSIWYG; that’s a topic for another day.) Well, the answer is that your Mac is trying to give you WYSIWYG, and that’s the cause of the problem. (If you just want the fix without the explanation, skip down to the Solution section or take a look at what Christopher Breen had to say on the same topic last fall; the next few paragraphs tackle why this happens in a bit more detail.)


The first thing to realize is that TextEdit is not Microsoft Word, nor any other pure word processor. Rather, TextEdit is a text editor. The distinction may seem a fine one, but I think it’s relevant here. In Word, and most other “real” word processors, regardless of how wide or narrow you make your editing window, your lines will continue to wrap at the exact same point—and that point is dictated by the printed page’s margin settings, not the width of the onscreen window.


When you write in a text editor, however, things are different. Most text editors, including TextEdit, wrap long lines at the right edge of the editing window. Make your editing window wider, and your lines will get longer; narrow the window, and the lines will get shorter. This is exactly what TextEdit does in its default mode—as you resize the window, your text will be reflowed such that the lines break near the right edge of the window.


And that’s what causes the problem. When you tell TextEdit to print, it’s faced with a quandary: should it print things as it sees them on screen, or should it rely on the chosen font size and margins to determine how things look? TextEdit is really stuck between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, you’ve set up your document with a certain font size, which you would expect to see when you print it. On the other hand, you’re looking at a window that shows line breaks following certain words, and you might expect to see those breaks in the same spots in the printed version. But what if a certain line has more words in it than will fit at the default font size, given the printed page’s margins? Should TextEdit break the line and keep your chosen font size, or should it change the font size to make the words fit on the line, as shown on the screen?


By default, TextEdit does the latter—it reduces the font size until the line breaks are where you see them on the screen, giving you (one form of) WYSIWYG output. Hence, your three-page essay on the merits of the Newton Message Pad 2000 as the ultimate PDA might only come out to be a few paragraphs long, depending on the width of the TextEdit window when you print.


Solution


So how can you avoid this? As Chris noted last fall, the answer is quite simple; before printing, choose Format -> Wrap to Page. When you do, TextEdit will reformat your document, showing the text wrapping within the page’s margins. When you print, the output will use your specified font size, not some possibly microscopic version of the font size you chose. If you like editing in a wider window, just choose Format -> Wrap to Window when you’re done printing to return to the other view. You can toggle quickly between these two modes using the Shift-Command-W shortcut.

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Forcing a Document on an App
APPLEPRO:

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Sometimes docked apps don’t want to open your document, even though they may be able to, so you have to coax (okay, force) them to give it a try. For example, let’s say you created a document in WordPerfect for Mac a few years back. if you drag that document to Microsoft Word’s icon in the Dock, chances are it won’t highlight (which would be the indication it can open that document). If that happens, just hold Command-Option, then drag the document’s icon to the Word icon in the Dock, and you can force it to try to open that document.

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