Now Hear This
The iPod's volume-limit controls let you lower the player's maximum loudness level to help protect your (or your child's) ears. On the Nano, set your sonic limits by choosing to Settings→Playback→Volume Limit. On the Classic, choose Settings→Volume Limit. On the Touch, choose Settings→Music→Volume Limit.
Art Collecting By Hand
To make the Cover Flow feature in iTunes look great, use the Advanced→Get Album Artwork command to have the program round up missing album covers for songs in your music library. If you get an alert box with the number of things iTunes couldn't find, click the triangle or plus icon in the box to see what's missing. Click the Save button to dump the notes into a text file that you can use as a shopping list. Now you know what art you need to snag off of the Web from Amazon.com or other cover-rich sites.
The iPod as Pocket Watch
Have your iPod Classic or Nano tell you the time on the main screen--without having to fumble down to the built-in clock. Just choose Settings→Date & Time and select the Time in Title option to always have a clock displayed in the top bar on the iPod screen.
Return to the Beginning
The iPod Shuffle has no screen to tell you what song you're on, but you can get back to the first track in the playlist by quickly pressing the Play/Pause button three times.
Playlist Shortcuts
Right-click (or control-click) any track in the iTunes library and choose Add to Playlist to instantly place that song on an existing playlist. And if you want to see just how many playlists include a particular song already, right-click (or control-click) the track and choose Show in Playlist.
A Touching Story
Turn your iPod Touch into a pocket ebook reader with Lexcycle's free Stanza program, available in the iTunes App Store. Once the app is on your Touch, you can download all kinds of free books and classic works from Stanza's online catalog. The program also lets you adjust the font size and spacing of the onscreen text to make it all easy on the eyes.
A Nano Battery Booster
Want to squeeze out all the music you can between battery charges on that new Nano? Choose Settings→Playback→Energy Saver→On. With Engery Saver on, the Nano's battery-hogging screen gets quickly turned off when you aren't actively clicking buttons or scrolling around menus.
Sort iTunes Music Your Way
Press Control-J (Command-J on a Mac) in iTunes to open up the View Options box--which gives you all sorts of useful columns you can add to iTunes. Some of these include Equalizer settings, Last Played, and Date Added. Click the top of any column in the iTunes window to sort your collection based on that factor. Sorting by Play Count, for example, lets you see which tunes are in heavy rotation and which songs you've been neglecting.
Clip and Save Time
Tired of having to go to Safari first to get to your bookmarked Web faves? The iPod Touch lets you add one-tap shortcut icons called Web Clips right to the Home screen. When you have a site you want to add, tap the + button and then on the "Add to Home Screen" button. When you tap that new icon on the Home screen, Safari opens automatically and takes you right to the part of the page that was on display when you saved it.
My Main Menu
You're not stuck with Apple's default items out on your iPod's main menu screen. If you want a shortcut to your calendar, games, or other favorite destinations, add
Geniuses don't just hang out at the Apple Store. With iTunes 8, you get your very own music-mixing expert. Once activated, the new Genius Playlists feature whips up instant song lists in your iTunes library that, well, play nice together. You select a song and the Genius pulls together other tunes that it thinks groove well together.
To use it, click the "Turn On Genius" button on the right side of the iTunes window, or choose Store→Turn On Genius. Be prepared to type in your iTunes account name and password, though, because Apple needs to "gather information" about your iTunes library before making Genius work for you. Once Apple's finished analyzing your collection, click a song title in your library and then click the Genius button down at the bottom of the iTunes window. In a flash, iTunes rounds up at least 25 songs it thinks would sound great with the one you clicked. You can change the number of songs in the playlist and save it for posterity by clicking the buttons at the top of the window. These new playlists now sit alongside all your other lists on the left side of iTunes.
Buy, Buy, Baby!
Having to log into the iTunes Store and get your music collection analyzed makes perfect sense when you see what else the Genius can do. In the Genius Sidebar on the right side of the window, you also get cheerful recommendations of other songs and albums for sale in the iTunes Store that Apple thinks would sound just great on your playlists. If you have an Internet connection, this list changes each time your current song does. Each track has a convenient "Buy" button next to it; if you're prone to impulse shopping but don't want to max out your credit card, close the Genius Sidebar by clicking the small square icon underneath it at the bottom of the iTunes window.
On the Grid
The new Grid view in iTunes 8 turns the main window into a catalog of album covers that you can look at and sort by Album, Artist, Genre, and Composer. Whereas Cover Flow lets you "flip" from one album to the next, Grid view gives you a nice birds-eye view of a much larger assortment of your music. (Activate this view by clicking the box-of-6-squares icon, to the left of the Search box.) Click a cover in a particular view and then click the Play Album (or Artists, Genre, or Composer) icon that appears on the cover. Your music starts up, pronto. And if you find those album covers too large or too small, make them just right by moving the slider at the top of the Grid panel to resize 'em.
Revisit the Visualizer
If you feel like you've seen all the hippie, trippy patterns in the Visualizer already after years of playing iTunes at your desk, check again. The Visualizer option under the View menu now offers an "iTunes Visualizer" submenu with new patterns -- many of which make you feel like you're flying through space while simultaneously burning up the floor at a disco. And if you miss the old laser light show, there's now "Visualizer Classic."
Shake, Rattle, and Rock
Instead of scrolling through menus to mix up your songs with the Shuffle option, just give the new iPod Nano a quick shake to shuffle up your tracks. It's a great way to randomize your music when you don't have time to even look at the iPod's menu. Just keep a tight grip before you shake things up.
Bring Your Game --And Your Movies, Music, and Photos, Too
Thanks to the iTunes App Store and the latest iPod software, the iPod Touch is now a pocket 3-D arcade. The touchscreen and built-in accelerometer let you tap and tilt your way through games so intensely that you may forget that the Touch plays music and movies, too. And you don't need to have headphones plugged in to hear the sound effects -- the new iPod Touch has its own speaker and external volume controls built right in.
Now if I wanted to retouch, we have a new retouch tool, so wait, it's all the way down here. There it is right there. It's actually gotten better from the old days. So sometimes when you retouch, maybe you just want to work on a certain area so I'm gonna hit the 1 key that brings me into 100% and let's say I just wanted to retouch right here, maybe we'll even go to 200%. There we go.
So I could go all the way down here, find the retouch, now in the old days we didn't have a way to really determine how big of an area we were retouching. We just got a crosshairs and then iPhoto says I'll take care of it and you go, "I know but what are you doing?" Don't worry; I know what I'm doing. Well you know actually a lot of times it really didn't know what it was doing so now with the new retouch tool, oh we have something where we can actually decide how big of an area we're gonna retouch just by moving this little slider thingy-bob here. So let's just say that we only wanna retouch the area that's affected, like right here. So I just put it right over that and then all I have to do is just click. And look at that, it's all gone. It's very nice. And then when you're done, you can just click right here, and that closes the tool.
Now I can hit 0 and go back out. There is a keystroke command for retouch too. Anyone wanna guess what it is? What? No! What made you think the R would be retouch? It's T. Of course, you knew that right? Its T is the retouch tool for reTouch. It's like that, that's all you have to say, reTouch so I'm gonna retouch this photo and if you wanna get rid of it, then you just click the X key right there.
No, the R is for Redeye. That's why, that's why. So if there hadn't been two R's I think we woulda been fine. We had it we woulda been fine. Speaking of redeye, so I'm gonna go ahead and apply this edit so I'm gonna hit the return key and brings me back. Let's go to redeye. This is - oh I love this redeye shot here. This is really gruesome. Oh! I know, poor guy.
I mean I did it - I did this on a person whose actually, he's actually a GQ model but you know I purposely wanted redeye so we did everything, we did all the bad techniques so I'd have a good redeye. So now look right here. I 'm not in edit mode right? I don't have my edit - that's cause I just double clicked and I didn't hold down the option key. So what I need to do is hold down the option key and double click; now I have my edit tools down here. So if I hit the R key, I get the redeye removal right here.
Again, you have two ways. You have the automatic way, which iPhoto has always had and all I have to do is just put it right here on their eye, click, iPhoto finds the area that needs to be retouched and does it and it does a really good job. In iPhoto '08 you get an upgrade. You get manual mode where you actually get to set the size of the slider so this allows you to make redeye correction mistakes because I never quite get it right. I mean we're gonna really make a mistake now but if you get it wrong on the diameter, oh wait, it still fixes it.
Okay so what this really means is it doesn't make any difference for the most part. I would just leave it in automatic and I wouldn't worry about making sure that it's the right size. iPhoto's really good at finding those changes. Now if I decided I didn't want to apply the redeye, I could get out of edit mode just by hitting escape, we come back here, I'm gonna double click just to show it and our edits are not applied. So remember, return applies your edits; escape does not.
Okay, so there's - that's some fun stuff. Now what if you wanna see a before and after of your work? Well let's show you this one here, this is a fun one. We're gonna - I'm gonna go to full screen mode. The enhance button is pretty good. I like it and it's particularly good on images like this that are low contrast and don't have - you know it was kinda overcast, your subjects don't have a lot of contrast. That is a perfect candidate for the enhance button. It's right down here. It's a one-click thing. Watch what happens when I click it. Brightens it right up, brings up the contrast, does a very nice job.
Now if I wanna see the before and after, does anyone know what the before and after key is? It used to be command, they wanna keep us on our toes, they changed it; it's the shift key now. so you hold down the shift key and you can see the before and after. Not too bad. You go - you know what? That's a better edit but I decided I don't want it because I have two more of these demos to do so I'm gonna hit escape and we'll get out of there.
So the - this down here - and then one more, I wanna show you the black and white. The black and white is so much fun. It's actually one of the things I'm gonna be talking about today. We'll take our bright here and I'll do shift, command, option command, I'm sorry, option command F; well go here to full screen mode. I'm gonna hit the E key right? For effects, and this effects palate is pretty, pretty nice. So I can hit black and white right here, automatically converts my image to nice black and white.
Now if I hit the A key for the adjust palate, then I can even make some finer adjustments beyond that and play - this is like an up the contrast if I wanted, give it a little bit more punch. I could darken or lighten the exposure. You have highlights and shadows to play with here. And one of the things that I noticed, is that even the temperature slider, this is a secret. Well I mean it's not a secret any more but it was a secret, that when you convert the black and white, bring up the adjust palate, my favorite adjustment; the one that seems to work the best is the temperature slider. It's very subtle and it holds the tones better than a lot of the other adjustments right there.
So all you have to do is hit the E key to go to effects, click on your black and white, then bring up the A, hit the A key to bring up adjust, make your temperature slider and you've got a nice black and white photo and if you have a good photo printer, these things print up very nice, very nice. So then I just, now all I have to do is hit the A key again, hit the E key again, I don't have to move the mouse over to try to hit the little X, I don't have to do any of that sort of stuff. I'm not gonna apply these edits right now so I'll hit the escape key and we come right -
Now once we have stuff in there, sometimes we want to edit them, we want to play with them a little bit. So let's just take, we'll take my iPhone. By the way this is out through an airplane window; I'm gonna hold down the option key and I'm gonna double click on this, this shot here and so I have my thumbnails up here and I'm in edit mode now and the reason why I know I'm in edit mode is because I have my editing tools down here.
Now the first thing that you should remember is that you can zoom in and zoom out very easily in iPhoto so you can get a better look at stuff. So let's say I wanted to see - well, you know do I have a lot of image noise on the shot or whatever. It says easy as 1, 2, 0; 1, 2, 0. I just put the mouse wherever I want a 100% view; push the No. 1; I get a 100%. Push the No. 2, I can go to 200% and if I wanna go back to fit in window, that's where the 0 comes in. Okay so zooming is as easy as 1, 2, 0, really rolls off the tongue doesn't it? 1, 0, 2, 0, you can just go in and out; it's very easy. And that way you can get a good look at your image and wherever you put the mouse, say we put the pointer up here, that's the are it'll go to. So it follows where your pointer is. Let me go back to 0.
Now if I wanna go to full screen mode, you can try to remember where the full screen mode icon is. Where is it? Oh, now I don't see it, I don't see it, you know what? I'm tired of trying to guess, just do option, command F. Option, command, F - that will get you in the full screen mode. Now when you're in full screen mode, your thumbnails may or may not be up here and you can hide them if you want. And then down here are all of your editing tools. But when I'm in full screen mode, what I really wanna do is enjoy my picture. I don't wanna have to come down here and sorta fool around.
And we have some very nice editing tools. We have you know the adjust palate, which you click on and you can do all sorts of fun things, play with the exposure, contrast, you can bump up the contrast, you can have all sorts of fun and if you don't like what you've done you can just hit the reset button. So we do this and now I gotta go all the way back down here; all the way over to here. I'm gonna hit the effects button. This is fun.
This one I like especially, you can convert to black and white or sepia or you can boost the color. We'll go over here to boost, let's - oh let's punch up that. Now if you hit it again it'll boost it some more and you go again and again and - oh wait - that's too much. So you can go backwards by hitting the little arrow key. All right? And then if you go - you know what? I'm just going wacky here; go back to original.
So you have effects, really fun now I'm gonna go all the way back down here, go all the way over here. You got retouch which I'll show you in a minute, redeye, enhance - so you have all these tools, they're very nice but they're not really conducive so those of you who have pen and paper, you might wanna write this down although they're easy to remember. I'm right here, I'm in edit mode, hit the A key. You get adjust, hit the A key again, adjust goes bye-bye.
I wanna change it to black and white, that's in effects, hit the E key. Hit the E key again, good-bye. I wanna crop, hit the C key. Oh cropping is fun, cropping has really changed in iPhoto. Now in - back in the olden days when we were all like a year younger, cropping a lot of times meant that you were actually throwing away information. That's a lot of pressure right? You know because if you made a crop then you better like it. Well now, we're just gonna move the cropper thing around and I'll just grab a corner here. Let's just say I want this little portion of this sunset. I'll bring it down a little bit like this. I get it the way I want and I hit apply and now I have a nice crop, just like before.
And then let's say that I'm actually done okay? So I'll hit apply, I'll actually apply this edit. I'm gonna make this edit, this is an edit. By doing that of course, I hit the return key. Return key applies the edit. The escape key lets me get outta dodge without doing any harm but this time I actually wanna apply it, so I hit the return key, I've applied that edit, there we go, right there. All right but now let's say that you know what? I'm having second thoughts, I don't know if I want to crop that or not after all.
You always have the option of going back to the beginning right? You can always revert to original. But maybe you've done other things and you don't wanna get rid of that, all you wanna do, right is change your mind about the crop. So I'm gonna hold down the option key and double click. All you have to do is hit the crop key again, the C and look what happens.
The rest of your picture is still there and this is even after you've applied the edit, it's still there. It remembers that it's going - you know what? I know you. I know the way you are. You like to change your mind. I know that you're gonna do that so I'm gonna remember where everything is. You can come back, you can change your mind, you can apply it again, and there you go.
So that way if you do wanna change your mind on a crop you don't have to revert to original and throw away all of your other stuff. All you have to do is hit the crop key again and it will remember for you. So that -
So the first thing, I wanna go into the preference pane for a second. I want to show you a couple things. Again, we're in iPhoto '08. Now the number one thing you should do, how many of you work are in a network environment ever like at work or in a public network? Any network folks here? Not too many. What are the rest of you hanging out in the living room? Yeah, mostly? All right. All right, well that's okay. For, okay, so this tip is for three of you, so that's what I like to do. I like tips that apply to a lot of people.
The first thing you should do and the rest of you should do this anyway 'cause you may someday get out of the house and end up in public. Go to Sharing, right. It's okay to look for shared photos but don't have this box sometimes is checked by default. Don't share your photos with the world automatically. If this box is checked, and you're on a network, what'll happen is your photos will show up in other people's iPhoto pane right here. Now that may be okay. That may not be okay. Sometimes it's sort of shocking when you have people you know show up here, and you go, "Should I look at those photos?" They haven't asked me to look at 'em. So make sure that you turn that box off.
Okay, that's my num' - this is all part of one tip. We're still in one tip right now, so these tips have A, B, and C levels, okay, so that's one thing. Now there's some new things happening over in the general pane here, and one of 'em is double-click behavior. Double-click behavior in iPhoto '08 is very important and very fun. Right now what I recommend is that for double-click behavior you have magnifies photo, and I'll show you why. Most of the time when we're looking at photos, right, when we're in our thumbnails here, we wanna see them. We just wanna double-click and get a bigger picture. Now in previous versions of iPhoto, you would double-click and a lot o' times you end up in edit mode, all right. You don't really wanna edit most of the time. Hopefully, you don't even need to edit most of the time. You just want a bigger look at the shot, so in iPhoto '08, they gave you that option, so now when you double-click, right. When you double-click, you can just look at the photo, and you just have your regular rotate and email and all that kinda stuff, and you click again and it goes away. But you go what sometimes I do wanna edit, so do I have to like click on the photo and then go down here to the pencil in order to edit? You don't.
One of the most important keys in iPhoto - the key you should burn this into your memory - is the option key. The option key the engineers who made iPhoto love the option key, so now I'm just gonna hold down the option key. I'm gonna double-click. Now I'm in edit mode. That option key is very important. Now it comes to play in a lot of other areas too. Now what happens if you're in edit mode and then you don't wanna save your changes? Does anyone know what you do? Escape. You escape from edit mode. If you hit the escape key, and that's whether you're in full screen or any other edit mode, hit escape; you can get out of there and none of your changes are saved which is pretty important. It's pretty important stuff.
Now rotating photos is another place when you're in preferences, you get to choose which way you're gonna rotate your photos. When you hit the rotate key, right? And of course, you always know you think about we all know which way we're gonna hold the camera all the time, right? Do you always hold it the same way? Sometimes? No. You know what's really fun? You know a lot of things break up marriages, right, money and differences in religion and stuff like that. One thing that'll break up a marriage very quickly is if you're sharing one camera on a vacation because invariably, right, she holds it this way which she does rather close, and then hands it to him and then he holds it this way, right. And then you get your photos back and they're all catty-wampus, right, or sometimes he might hold it this way sometimes and then he changes his mind and is gonna hold it that way just to keep it fun. All right, that's not good, but iPhoto can help preserve your relationships and I'll show you how.
You do make, you have to make some sort of decision here but it really doesn't make any difference which way photos initially rotate. Like right now here we have a photo right here and we have the rotate button. Now it's set to rotate the wrong way. If I click on it and hit rotate, it's gonna put her on her head. I don't necessarily wanna do that, but we'll do it anyway. Okay, now do I need to go back to preferences in order to get her going the right way? What key would I probably use to go the other direction? Option key, absolutely! Hold down the option key and we can straighten things out, so this is how it saves your marriage. You don't care which way the photos are because you just go through with the rotate key and then if it's turned the wrong way, you hold down the option key and it goes the other way. You don't have to keep going back to preferences to change your preference there.
So this is two instances where the option key is really helpful. One is to go from double-click just to view, and then the other is, of course, to go double-click to edit, so the option key toggles that and then rotating in different directions.
Author Jim Elferdink talks about what's new in Office 2008 for Macintosh. If you're still using Office 2004, you'll find some great reasons to upgrade. Jim also fills you in on some cool features that Office for Windows can't match, and why you may not need to invest in iWork!
What are the best new features that will make folks want to upgrade to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view. If you use Word to create formatted documents like letters and brochures, you'll find it so much easier to do now in the new Publishing Layout view than in the old Page Layout view. Publishing Layout view is actually quite similar to Pages; both are very usable. It's a huge boon for Word people--if you haven't bought Pages, now you won't have to!
MyDay. I really enjoy Entourage's MyDay feature. Assuming you're not working on a laptop that doesn't have screen space to spare, I recommend keeping MyDay open in the corner of your screen. That's what I do! It helps me keep track of my appointments and schedule. If you've got appointments every 20 minutes or just a lot going on in your day, it's great to have it all at a glance. It also helps you remember to go pick up the kids. (And you can feel superior to your Windows friends. There's nothing resembling MyDay in Office for Windows.)
Project Center. Entourage's Project Center has been streamlined and beautified for 2008, but it's still very underutilized. It takes a little extra effort to learn, but once you've got it up and running, if you're doing any kind of a project that involves Office documents or even files from other programs, it's a great timesaver. It lets you keep shortcuts to all these documents, plus email related to the project, in one window. The Project Center makes it easy to categorize email, contacts, notes, and documents. Things don't get lost, and you don't have to worry about Mac OS X labels and other ways to categorize things. (Office for Windows also has nothing like the Project Center.)
Formula Builder. In Excel, one of the greatest new features is the formula builder. If you use Excel for formulas much at all, especially more complicated ones, it's really a timesaver. It helps you get those things created and working much faster than you could do before.
Elements Gallery. The Elements Gallery concept is really great because it carries over from one program to the other, gives the programs a consistent feel. If you're using a lot of templates or AutoShapes, you'll find it a quick way to get at all that stuff. You could do all these things before, but it was a lot harder to find what you were looking for.
So, are there any disadvantages to upgrading to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view can be frustratingly slow on G4 Macs, especially when you're trying to move layout elements around onscreen. I would only use it on an Intel Mac. The same caveat holds true for PowerPoint; it's hard to move things around. But the rest of the suite works great on faster G4 machines.
Office 2008 uses the same new, XML-based file format as Office 2007 for Windows. It's great not to have to worry when someone with Office 2007 on a PC sends you something. Office 2008 can open those documents right up. But now when you send documents to Mac folks who haven't upgraded, they won't be able to open them! Once you upgrade to Office 2008, you've got to be aware that not everyone else has, and (unless you have a real need to use the XML format) set your Save options (in Preferences) to the older format so there won't be problems with your attachments.
Then there's the macro problem. Any macros you wrote in earlier versions of Office use the Visual Basic programming language (VBA), and they won't work in Office 2008! If you've written a lot of macros for yourself, you'll have to stick with Office 2004 until you have time to rewrite them in AppleScript.
What do you like best about Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual?
I'm happy with the way this book turned out. I think it covers everything you need to use this really powerful suite of programs for all your work. One chapter I'm particularly fond of, and which I think is missing from every other PowerPoint book I've looked at, is Chapter 15--Planning Great Presentations. It helps you prepare for your presentation and shows you how to use PowerPoint for its true purpose. PowerPoint isn't doing the presentation--you are. You're the star of the show! Unfortunately, too many people think it's the other way around.
Lesa Snider King, production editor on several of David Pogue's Missing Manuals, is desperately seeking a sane solution to her current address book situation.
At Macworld, Lorene Romero, president of the North Coast Mac Users Group, says she would love to be able to cut and paste on an iPhone, as well as to be able to do more with attachments.
Problem:
You're prepared to be stuck at the $&$^%#%@ airport for nine &#&$%%#^ hours when you remember you have a Netflix account and you can use your broadband wireless card to watch some movies to kill the time. However, you are on a Mac and you are told the following:
"Your system is not compatible with watching instantly
"Your computer's operating system is not compatible with watching instantly.
"Try again from a computer running Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista."
The Answer:
Steve Jobs and Slingbox (The technology that Netflix is powered by) need to work out a solution to enable the growing marketshare of users who are switching to Macs to be able to get full value from services like Netflix's Watch it Now and the live streaming feature on DirecTV's SuperFan NFL package. Perhaps there could be a conversion through Flip for Mac that could accommodate this?
In Mac OS X 10.5, Apple did something secret and artistic: It quadrupled the potential size of its icons. Instead of the measly 128 pixels square (which is all that most people ever see, maximum), you can blow them up to a colossal 512 pixels square. They're less like icons than art you can hang on your wall. To see the effect, you have to use Terminal.
Type this command, exactly as you see it here, but all on one line:
defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict IconSize -integer 256; killall Finder
It's quite a shocking sight--and, in fact, rather too big to be useful. It also works only on desktop icons--not icons in folders.
To turn the effect off, press c-J to open the View Options dialog box. Adjust the icon-size slider; the least touch of that slider turns the giganto-icon effect off again.
Doesn't running Windows on my Mac mean that I'll be exposed to the nightmare world of viruses and spyware, just like the rest of the Windows world?
As a matter of fact, yes.
If you install Windows on your Mac, you should also install Windows antivirus and antispyware software to protect that half of the computer. The world is crawling with commercial programs that do the job; ironically, one of the easiest and least expensive is Microsoft's OneCare Live ($50 a year for up to three computers). There are also lots of free programs, like Microsoft Defender for spyware, and either AVG Antivirus (www.free.grisoft.com) or Avast Antivirus (www.avast.com) for viruses.
The good news is even if your Windows installation gets infected, the Mac side of your computer is unaffected. Just as Mac OS X can't run Windows-only software like, say, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, so it can't run Windows virus software.
Some people, therefore, run Windows naked--without virus protection (especially when using Windows-in-a-window programs like Parallels and VMWare Fusion). If a virus does strike, no big deal; they drag the infected copy of Windows to the Trash and just install a fresh one!
The first little pop-up menu in the Spotlight window lists those handy search starting points: Kind, Last opened date, Name, and so on.
But it's actually less fully stocked than it was in Mac OS Xes of days gone by. Apple streamlined the options a bit.
For example, you used to be able to search by label. You could therefore easily round up all files pertaining to a certain project for backing up, deleting, or burning to a CD en masse. That's off the menu as you first see it. Gone, too, is the Size criterion, which could be helpful when you're trying to make space on your overstuffed hard drive by ferreting out the huge, multigigabyte files and folders.
Fortunately, you can restore these options to the criterion pop-up menu easily enough.
The trick is to use the Other option as described on these pages. In the dialog box shown in Figure 3-4, search for label or size. When you find that criterion, turn on the "In menu" checkbox and click OK.
Presto: You've got your menu back.
Figure 3-4: Here's the master list of search criteria (below). Turn on the "In menu" checkboxes of the ones you'll want to re-use often, as described in the box on the previous page.
Once you've added some of these search criteria to the menu, you'll get an appropriate set of "find what?" controls ("Greater than"/"Less than" pop-up menus, for example).
With this new Missing Manual, you can count on learning how to use all of Leopard's new features including the Time Machine, Boot Camp, and File Stacks. And here, as a bonus, David gives you six of his favorite Leopard tips:
1. Spotlight has been given two quiet enhancements that turn it into a different beast altogether. First, it's a tiny pocket calculator, always at the ready. Click in the Search box, type or paste 38*48.2-7+55, and marvel at the first result in the Spotlight menu: 1879.6. There's your answer--and you didn't even have to fire up the Calculator.
And it's not just a four-function calculator, either. It works with square roots: type sqrt(25), and you'll get the answer 5. It also works with powers; type pow(6,6)--that is, 6 to the power of 6--and you'll get 46656. You can even type pi to represent--you know, pi.
2. Spotlight is also now a full-blown English dictionary. Or, more specifically, it's wired directly into Mac OS X's own dictionary, which sits in your Applications folder. So if you type, for example, "schadenfreude" into the Spotlight box, you'll see, to your amazement, the beginning of the actual definition right there in the menu. Click it to open Dictionary and read the full-blown entry. (In this example, that would be: "noun: pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.")
3. The Mosaic screensaver is a real stunner, and Apple doesn't even talk about it. It starts with one photo from your collection; your "camera" pulls back farther and farther, revealing that that photo is just one in a grid--a huge grid--that's composed of all your photos. As you pull even farther back, each photo becomes so small that it becomes only one dot of another photo--from the same collection! And then that one starts shrinking, and the cycle repeats, on and on into infinity. How could Apple not have mentioned Mosaic in its Leopard advertising?
4. You're floundering in some program. You're SURE there's a Page Numbering command in those menus somewhere. But there are 11 menus and 143 submenus hiding in those menus, and you haven't got time for the pain. That's when you should think of using the Help menu. When you type "page number" (or whatever) into its Search box, the results menu lists, at the top, the names of any menu commands in that program that contain the words you typed. Better still, it actually opens that menu for you, and displays a big, blue, animated, floating arrow pointing to the command you wanted. You'd have to have your eyes closed to miss it. Slide your cursor over, click the menu command, and get on with your life.
5. That menu-search feature is especially helpful in Web browsers like Safari and Firefox, because it even finds entries in your Bookmarks and History menus! In Safari, for example, you can pluck a recently visited site out of the hundreds in the daily History submenus, like the "Wednesday, January 9" submenu. You've just saved yourself a lot of poking around menus, trying to find the name of a site you know you've seen recently.)
Ultratip: If you think about it, this feature also means that you have complete keyboard power over every menu in every program in the world. Hit Command-Shift-? to open the Help search box, type a bit of the command's name, and then use the arrow keys to walk down the results. Hit Enter to trigger the command you want.
By Peter Meyers on July 18, 2007 6:51 AM
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Dudes, don't get me wrong: I love my iPhone. But this thing's definitely got a few signs of version-one-point-oh-itis. Exhibit A: Every time I (and apparently lots of others) try to use the phone's iPod program while browsing the Web, the iPod crashes. On the iPhone crashing simply means that the music stops. You've got to then finger click your way back to iPod to re-start the music...until it happens again about a minute later. Kinda takes the fun out of showing off your new gadget to all the (ok, both) Zune owners you know.
One poster to the Apple discussion forums advised powering the phone on and off (hold down the Sleep/Wake switch on the top of the phone for three seconds). I tried this to no avail. The prevailing opinion out there in Fix It Land seems to be that this bug will only (hopefully?) be fixed upon the release of Apple's first iPhone software update. Let's hope that comes soon.
I'll be the first to admit: my experience with first generation Apple products is they tend to be buggy.
By J.D. Biersdorfer on June 4, 2007 5:47 AM
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Gadget geeks, rev up your credit cards! The new iPhone ads on Apple's Web site announce that the phone will be available June 29th, just a few short weeks away. Expect a data explosion at the end of the month on blogs and tech sites as the early adopters snap up the device and dissect the good, the bad, and the why-did-this-&^%$#@-thing-do-that?
