If you normally leave the dock visible, it sometimes gets in the way when apps (especially Classic apps) take over the whole screen. It's a pain to mouse to the dock, switch the setting to autohide, do what you want, and switch it back to always show.
A much easier method is to hit Command-Option-D, and the dock will hide. Do what you need to do, and hit Command-Option-D again, and the dock will show itself.
Caught this one on the MacFixIt boards tonight...of course, from comment #1, I should have 'caught' it by just looking at the Apple menu! Oh well, it was a long day!
Open TextEdit, create a new document, and then drag in an application ("Clock", for example) from the Finder. You'll see a clock icon appear in your document. If you save the document, it will be in "rtfd" format, which the Finder tells me is "RTF with attachments." If you look at the size of the file, you'll see that, in fact, the entire app has been saved with the document! Now open the file you just saved. Double-click on the application icon (the clock, in this example). The application launches right from TextEdit!
I have no idea as to how this might be useful; maybe it's a standard data format (but I've never heard of embedding an application in an RTF document?). There's nothing in Apple's help about this 'feature', so this is about all I know. Anyone care to shed any more light on the subject?
If you ever want to send email through one POP account, but with different sender info, there's a trick to doing so with mail.app. An example of this would be Yahoo! services, which allow one to have several public "personalities", each of which dump email to just one yahoo.com email address. In order to respond as the proper personality, you need to pick a different "from" address, even though you have only one POP account.
In mail.app, in the Account edit screen, you can enter multiple email addresses on the 'Email Address:' line. Separate each with a comma, and then save your changes. When you compose a new email from that account, you'll see a little pop-up for selecting which address you would like to use as the sender of the email. Very slick trick, and easier than creating an entirely new account.
You can't change the physical name, though - only the email address. If you need a different physical name, you'll have to set up different accounts.
Apple's mail.app stores most of the text strings it uses for creating replies, displaying dialogs, and composing new messages in an easy-to-edit text file. If you haven't relocated your mail.app, you can find the text file here:
When I tried to edit this in the terminal, all I got was gibberish - it's a Unicode text file. Opening and saving it in the GUI works fine; you just have to use a control-click on mail.app to "Show Package Contents" in a new Finder window, and specify which application to open it with (I used TextEdit).
Amazingly enough, the text file is even commented, explaining what each line does. You'll have to do some work to change the default reply string ("On March 23, robg wrote..."), as the date format strings are all variables - I imagine they match those used by the system date command, which you can view in the man pages:
man strftime
Have fun customizing, but you should probably make a backup copy of the unmodified file first -- just in case! Any changes made take effect on the next launch of mail.app.
This tip was posted to the X4U mailing list by a member of Apple's mail team.
Panther update: As noted in the comment below, you now need to edit /System -> Library -> Framework -> Message.framework -> Resources -> English.lproj -> Message.strings. In addition, you'll have to reboot after making the change to see it take effect.
If you have a scroll wheel mouse, you can use OmniWeb to 'hover scroll' background windows. Try this experiment.
Open two OmniWeb windows that require vertical scrolling, and position them so that you can see a fair bit of the back one. Move the mouse over the back window, and use your scroll wheel without clicking in the window to activate it. It scrolls! Move the mouse over the front window, and you'll scroll that one instead -- no clicking required.
I imagine this is a feature, but I'd never noticed it before. Could prove useful at times.
There was a question in the quickies about accessing files in a Public folder from another SSH capable computer. In this piece, I'll try to answer that question and hopefully help folks understand SSH a little better.
Read the rest of this article for a great overview on what SSH actually is, and how to use it for remote connectivity in OS X.
This is apparently floating around on MacFixit, although I couldn't find it there in the forums or on the main page. The following hack will disable the anti-aliasing effect in some applications. I'm not sure which apps, as I haven't tried this myself yet (I actually like the anti-aliasing).
If you'd like to experiment, here's what you need to do.
Create a folder named '.OpenStep' in your home directory (mkdir ~/.OpenStep).
Create a file called 'environment' containing one line of text:
QDTEXT_ANTIALIASING=0;QD_MINSIZE=18
From the terminal, vi ~/.OpenStep/environment and then type the above line. Save the changes and quit. I'm guessing that QD_MINSIZE is the size below which the anti-aliasing is disabled.
Logout and login again, and you should (might?) have less anti-aliasing than you did previously.
If someone tries it, post back with your observations as to where it does and doesn't work.
The special keys (volume up, volume down, mute, and eject) work more or less as expected in OS X. The only exception to this is the eject key. It not only ejects any inserted CD, but also all your mounted disk images. With the adoption of disk images as the primary means of OS X software distribution, I probably won't be using my keyboard eject key much more!
Many have been having trouble using Outlook Express and the like while in classic mode due to a PPP issue. The fix for this is head slappingly simple.
Go to the System Preferences and select Network. Click the PPP tab, then click the Options button at the bottom of that screen. Now uncheck the option that's named "Use TCP header compression". Save your changes, reboot, and you will be able to use your Classic internet aps again!
I saw this on the Mac OS X help boards, and thought that many might be happy to see it spread about a bit.
I just got my OS X package Today (3/31/01). Inside was OS 9.1 and X. Well, three weeks ago, I downloaded the 9.1 update from the Apple Web site and it installed easily and worked great! Well, as any good Mac user, I figured that Apple had probably included some updates with the CD. So I chose the option on the 9.1 CD to "Re-install" System 9.1. The install went well and everything seemed great! Then I hit the restart button. DIASTER!!!
My computer would not start (it ran, but nothing happened?) My monitor was blank? I could not start up from a CD..nothing? I tried everything...and still a blank screen?
Read the rest to see how George (as signed below) resolved the startup problem, and it's probably a good heads-up for those of you working with upgraded machines.
