I'd been using this hint to backup my Microsoft User Data for Entourage 2008.
I have been using Office Communicator 2011 sucessfully but, since upgrading to Lion I've had crashes and over the last few weeks have been unable to login with a message about clock settings or certificates.
Some background: my company is using an older version of Exchange (2003) with a newer version of OCS (2007) so I have both 2008 and 2011 versions of Office installed and am stuck with using Entourage until an Exchange upgrade next year.
Some searching suggested that some other Office apps do not behave when files are not in standard locations. I wondered if the method used to create an alias via the Finder to the Office 2008 Identities folder in the above Entourage hint was causing problems.
I deleted the alias and used the terminal to create a Unix symbolic link by entering the following:
Newer versions of Mail, by default, don't show your Outbox in your folder list. Even if you go offline and then compose a new email and hit Send, you will still not see an Outbox (some users note that their Outbox will show up temporarily, but will be gone after restarting Mail). Many of us are very particular about email delivery and want to know if we have messages waiting to go out.
Searching around reveals a few articles and such, but most are very old (circa 2007) and not relevant to the newer version(s) of Mail in OS X Lion. The trick to getting the Outbox to stay permanently is to add it to your Favorites bar. But before you do that, you have to be able to see it. Here's how:
Go to Mail Preferences and to Accounts.
Pick an account and under 'Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP),' click what's currently selected and choose 'Edit SMTP Server List...'
Create a bogus SMTP server by clicking the +
Description: Bogus SMTP
Server Name: smtp.bogus.blah
Save the changes if prompted.
Now compose a new test email from this account and send it.
You should see a message indicating the server is offline.
Click the Try Later button.
And now you will see an Outbox in your folder list.
Simply click it and drag it up to your Favorites bar.
It will now stay there forever including after restarting Mail or your Mac.
To clean up afterwards, first go your Outbox and delete the test email sitting in your Outbox
Go back to Mail » Preferences » Accounts
Highlight your account, and change the 'Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)' to what it was originally.
Next go back into 'Edit SMTP Server List,' highlight the bogus SMTP server and click the - to remove it.
[crarko adds: I tested this (in 10.7.2), and it works as described.]
There's a hidden setting for the Dock that will show pop-up notifications of which iTunes track is playing, a little like Growl.
First, quit iTunes if it's open, then open a Terminal window and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE;killall Dock
Then start iTunes and try playing a track. Neat, eh? The pop-up fades away after a few seconds. To add the iTunes icon to the pop-up window, type the following into a Terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image -bool TRUE;killall Dock
To deactivate the pop-up at a later date, quit iTunes again, then open a Terminal window and type the following two lines:
defaults delete com.apple.dock itunes-notifications
defaults delete com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image;killall Dock
My theory is that these pop-ups hint at either a forthcoming notification system (maybe in OS X 10.8), or it's a legacy of a notification system that Apple decided to abandon. But it's easily to imagine a similar system working with Mail, showing notifications of incoming mail. In addition to the preference keys mentioned above, I found various other keys relating to the height and length of the pop-up bubble. Whoever designed this clearly intended it to be tweakable.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. It's an interesting effect, perhaps better suited to a large screen iMac than a small laptop screen.]
In the past, saving with certain characters in the title of the document would tell you the they were not allowed.
As of 10.7.1, saving with, for example, a : in the filename will automatically convert it into a permissible -.
[crarko adds: I tried this with TextEdit in 10.7.2, and it did work as described. The hint author indicated it also works with Office 2011, so I'm assuming this will happen in all standard Save dialogs.]
The normal way of associating a picture with an e-mail is using the Address Book. While this makes sense for the humans I'm interacting with, I don't want to add an address book entry for no-reply@flattr.com. You can get around this by using an old NeXTSTEP era mechanism that still works in Lion.
Just add a tiff file with a name e-mail.tiff into the folder ~/Library/Images/People, restart Mail.app and you are done.
So for Flattr e-mails, you would have the logo at ~/Library/Images/People/no-reply@flattr.com.tiff.
There are more details contained in this blog post.
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one, but it should work with most, if not all, versions of Mail.]
You can customize 'All My Files' so a new Finder window will display whatever search you prefer.
All My Files is great for opening a Finder window and easily seeing recent documents. I found list view more useful with lots of PDFs and other docs with long and similar names. But list view will show an endless list going back as far as your oldest files. I wanted something else, in this case, only a list of files opened in the last month.
I created a new search and then made that 'All My Files.' After creating and saving the search:
[crarko adds: I admit I'm not sure how this is any better than just creating a new Smart Folder with the appropriate search criteria. But if you so want to modify All My Files instead here is a way to do it.]
If you plug in your iPad/iPhone/iPod then iPhoto or some proprietary image transfer application automatically opens even if you don't want it to, because the device is regarded as a camera.
You can change this behavior by using Apple's Image Capture utility to set defaults for each device.
This problem has been plaguing me for a while. I have a Nikon DSLR, a Canon Point and Shoot, an iPad, an iPod touch, and now an iPhone. All of them are treated as cameras when I connect them via USB.
I frequently use Nikon Transfer to move images from the Nikon DSLR, and it always opened no matter which of these devices I connected. The preferences in Nikon Transfer don't help, and the options in each of my iDevices preferences gave me nothing to manage this either.
So, when I was digging through Image Capture (it's in /Applications) to decide how to handle my new iPhone's images, I found a device list on the left, and options to change what app would open when you attached them. Once can even determine where to move/copy files on the hard drive. I set my iDevices to open no app when connected and now the only thing that opens Nikon Transfer is my DSLR.
[crarko adds: Image Capture is one of those very useful and often overlooked utilities. It's worth getting to know better.]
I have an iMac and a Droid, and it was a huge pain trying to get my Droid's pictures into iPhoto until I discovered this. All you need is an iPad and the program Bump.
Here are the steps:
Take some new pictures on the Android device.
Run Bump on the Android and on your iPad, and set the Android to share your new pictures.
Bump the devices. The iPad automatically places the new pictures into Photo Stream, which means they should also be in iPhoto almost immediately.
[crarko adds: Bump is a very useful app. It runs on iPhone as well; I didn't know there was an Android version. This is a clever use for it.]
This hint shows a way to close an application AND its windows.
In Lion Command+Option+Q lets you quit an application and close all of its windows so that when you reopen the app there won't be open windows.
[crarko adds: In Snow Leopard it there are options to close all windows (generally Command+Shift+Option+W) but it's not tied into the Quit operation. I imagine since Lion re-opens all the previous windows when the application launches the new shortcut was added to prevent that.]
This keeps the fullscreen display of Flash videos open on all spaces. Nice for watching streams/videos on a second display (TV) and then switching around.
You'll need a plist-editor like XCode (or just a text editor if you're comfortable with that) and Flash version 10.2 or later, so it remains open when the application focus changes.
Do this:
First backup and then open the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist with your editor.
Add a new line under workspaces-app-bindings
Name it org.mozilla.plugincontainer.
Change the data type to Number.
Set the value to 65544.
Save the file.
Log out and back in.
Works on 10.6. but I cannot check this on Lion, so please do and comment.
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. I admit I'm not quite exactly sure what this does, so exercise some prudence. Make sure you do the backup before making changes to the plist file. If you are adventurous and give it a go, do post results in the comments.]
