Cabel Sasser of Panic shared something interesting on Twitter yesterday. He said that running the following command will highlight images that haven't been upscaled by doubling their size:

defaults write -g CGContextHighlight2xScaledImages YES

I don't have a retina MacBook Pro to test this, but this should be useful for developers, or simply for others who want to see which images are native retina resolution and which are not.

My Macworld colleague Dan Frakes tweeted recently about something he stumbled on when viewing Flash videos on YouTube. Using the J, K and L keys, he found that he was able to skip ahead and back, and pause or play these videos.

Use the following keys to:

J - skip back 10 seconds
K - pause/play
L - skip forward 10 seconds.

These only work with Flash videos; if you load HTML5 videos on YouTube, these shortcuts don't work.

It's worth noting that some websites mention that you can use arrow keys and the spacebar to perform the above actions, but these don't work on Macs.

Why don't you try it out with this video by one of my favorite artists, The Grateful Dead, performing Ripple, from a concert I attended more than 30 years ago.

Here is an Automator action I made for creating a new e-mail message with an attachment from the Finder using Sparrow. It is similar to the built-in service for Mail.

Just create a new service, specify that the "Service receives selected: Files or Folders" in "Any Application."

Then, add a "Run Applescript module". Copy and paste the code below.

This works with multiple attachments. Now you should have a contextual menu item after selecting items in the Finder. You can tweak this by opening Keyboard preference pane in System Preferences.

on run {input, parameters}
	tell application "Sparrow Lite" -- or "Sparrow"
		activate
		set theMessage to make new outgoing message
		tell theMessage
			repeat with ii in input
				make new mail attachment with properties {filename:ii as alias}
			end repeat
			compose
		end tell
	end tell
end run

[kirkmc adds: This was submitted by e-mail by Tom F. I don't have Sparrow to test it. One thought: at the beginning, should it really be for "Any Application?" This only works in the Finder, so I think it should be just the Finder in that part of the workflow.]

The autosave feature in OS X 10.7 has been a mixed bag. It's nice that it saves things for you, but it's not nice that automatically saves things that you don't want to change permanently, or that the "Save As..." option has disappeared. The good folks at stack exchange have discovered a remedy.

To disable autosave in TextEdit.app, run the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.TextEdit ApplePersistence -bool no

This disables autosave and versions, reenables the "Save As" option and hot-key (Command-Shift S), and reenables Command-D as a hot key for "Don't Save".

For TextEdit, you'll run into sandbox-related permissions errors with this with the old style Autosave, where it attempts to place a file name "filename (Autosaved).txt" in your working directory. I don't know a good fix for that (if someone does, would you mind making a comment?)

This works for other apps as well, just replace TextEdit with the name of the app, e.g.:

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Keynote ApplePersistence -bool no

defaults write com.apple.Preview ApplePersistence -bool no

It is such a relief to have that "Save As..." option back! Hopefully I'll be able to get something done in Lion now with a minimum of cursing.

[kirkmc adds: We know that Save As is coming back in Mountain Lion, but if you want to turn of autosave for a specific application, this is good to know.

I'm not sure about these sandboxing errors. After working with a TextEdit file for a bit, I got an error saying, "You don't have permission to write to the folder that the file "test" is in." To be honest, that kind of outweighs the usefulness of turning off autosave; so if someone can find a solution for that, I'd say this hint might be more useful.]

This is very specific but I offer it as it may help others.

Since upgrading to 10.7, using a VPN with manually set split routing, iChat does not connect.

I have a setup whereby I connect to work via (Cisco) VPN configuration. After connecting I modify the routing tables so that only the required traffic goes via the vpn tunnel; the default route is set to the Internet gateway.

Since upgrading to 10.7 I have found that upon connecting and modifying the routes, iChat goes offline and won't reconnect.

I happened upon a solution which is to change the IPv6 settings from Automatic to link-local only. This setting is changed in the Advanced section (TCP/IP) of the Network System Preferences for the active Primary Interface (Wi-Fi in my case, but it would be equally applicable to any).

I cannot say with complete certainty that this is the cause but (a) as soon as I changed the IPv6 setting iChat went back to online, and (b) my routing table changes are only made to IPv4 addresses, and if iChat is using IPv6 in some sort of internal 6-to-4 tunnel then this change would make sense.

I reserve the option to be wrong about the actual cause.

[kirkmc adds: I have no way of knowing whether this is correct. I've had the occasional problem with iChat not connecting (not using a VPN), and publish my solution as this hint.]

In Lion's Spotlight, type kind:web and Spotlight returns webarchive files. Type kind:webarchive, however, and Spotlight does not return any files.

This behavior happens in Lion and Snow Leopard. I have not tested previous Mac OS X versions.

[kirkmc adds: Yes, this is what happens. Oddly, webarchives aren't listed in Apple's Help entry on Spotlight keywords, and, in this hint from 2007, based on a blog post of mine, it's not present either. I've written a fair amount about Spotlight for Macworld (notably this 2008 article which features a long list of such keywords), and never mentioned webarchives.]

As someone who collects images, and uses iPhoto for personal photos, I have wanted a way of syncing both my Pictures folder and my iPhoto library. Here's how you can do this.

First, set you iOS device to sync your Pictures folder. Then run the following command in Terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo "~/Pictures/iPhoto Library"

Then re-sync.

This seems to remove an extended attribute that prevents iTunes from syncing the iPhoto Library. Keep in mind that if you have a lot of photos in your library it may take a while to sync them all.

Note: You may have to re-apply the command from time to time, when the attribute is restored by iPhoto.

[kirkmc adds: This works as described. However, this may sync much more than the photos that you see in your iPhoto library. I have a very small iPhoto library, and the number of photos that synced was about 5 times the number in my library. This is because the iPhoto library contains masters, previews and thumbnails. However, that happened the first time I synced my iPad; the second time, the number was much lower. So I'm not sure if this method tells iTunes to find every picture in the iPhoto Library bundle the first time, and subsequent syncs only find the main pictures, and not their variants.]

Assigning a shortcut to open Safari's current page in Google is simple but breaks frequently, because the menu item name includes Chrome's version number. The simple fix is to use an Apple Script like Mike Hardy's as a proxy to Google Chrome. I'm describing this in more detail in this blog post, which is also reproduced below.

Currently shipping Macs come without Adobe Flash Player preinstalled, and I’ve been running that same setup without Flash for quite a while now myself. More and more webpages work fine without Flash and only the occasional video requires it. When that is the case, I simply go to the Develop menu (enable it in Safari's Advanced preferences if you don’t have it) and select Open Page With > Google Chrome.app (20.0.1132.21). Since Google Chrome comes with Flash preinstalled, this is a simple way to switch to a Flash-enabled browser.

Now, rather than choosing Chrome from the menu it would be nice to assign a keyboard shortcut for this menu item, and this is actually quite simple: Open the keyboard preference pane in System Preferences, select ‘Application Shortcuts’ and add a shortcut for the Google Chrome.app (20.0.1132.21) menu item to Safari. However, the problem here is that the menu item contains the version number of Chrome and since Chrome updates frequently (and in the background), you’ll find yourself with a broken shortcut very soon.

The fix for this is a little Apple Script OpenURLInNewChromeWindow.app by Mike Hardy which tells Google Chrome to open the URL via an Apple Script command. If you run this script once, it will register itself as a application that can handle URLs, and will therefore also appear in the list of browsers under Open Page With. Opening a page with this script will open the current page in Chrome just like before, but the menu item will stay the same no matter which version of Chrome you have installed. You simply assign the shortcut to this "browser" instead of the ever-changing Chrome.

As an added benefit (and actually the reason Mike Hardy wrote the script in the first place) is that the page opens in a new window and not in a new tab (which can be quite annoying when using virtual screens). See Mike’s blog post for more details how to use his script in that context.

In a comment to a recent hint about using the Shift and Option keys to make finer adjustments to the volume of your Mac, user monolithic pointed out that these modifier keys also work with the brightness controls, F1 and F2. I didn't know that, and it looks like there's no hint for it on the site.

So, to change the brightness just a bit, press Shift and Option, then press either F1 to lower the brightness, or F2 to increase it. Personally, I find this more useful than the volume controls, as I often would like to change by display's brightness by a half-step.

This works in 10.7.4; if it works in other versions of Mac OS X, feel free to specify this in the comments.

A recent hint gave instructions for enabling and disabling rubber band scrolling in Mac OS X Lion, using a Terminal command. This hint contains an Applescript to do the same, without having to use Terminal.

Compile this script in Applescript Editor and run it. It will let you enable or disable rubber band scrolling.
[kirkmc adds: Well, it seems that disabling rubber band scrolling is quite popular! After a first hint, then yesterday's hint about disabling rubber band scrolling in iTunes, here's another, perhaps easier way, using AppleScript.]