For dialogs where options are "Save" (the default), "Cancel", and "Don't Save", 'return' or 'enter' and 'escape' are the keyboard shortcuts for the first two, but what about the last one?
I couldn't find this shortcut in the Finder Help, but after some experimentation, I discovered that control-D works for "Don't Save". I don't know if it's standard, but it worked for all apps where I tried it.
[Editor's note: It may well be standard, but I'm certain I never knew about it.]
Like many of you, I wanted to move my virtual memory to a separate partition. I didn't, however, want to have it show up on my desktop. I thought maybe the convention of putting a period at the beginning of the Volume name would hide it. Sure enough, it works like a charm. To rename the volume though, I did have to boot into OS 9 as well as use a mv command in /Volumes.
Although this probably works as described (I have not tested it myself), you may find it easier and a bit safer to simply toggle the visible bit of the volume in question. You can do this with one Terminal command if you have the Developer Tools installed:
% sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/volume_to_hide
The next time your Finder is updated, the volume will vanish. If you want it back, just reissue the same command with a lowercase 'v' instead. No rebooting into OS 9 and no physical renaming required. There may well be some GUI tools which do this as well (XRay?).
I'm not sure if there are any downsides to invisible volumes...
You might ask "What's microdock?" It's my personal name for what you get when you're trying to drag a large selection of something (images, for example) and drop it onto a folder in the dock (say a new destination folder) ... and miss the target. When this happens, the 1,254 images you were trying to place in "My Pictures" are instead added to your dock ... and you get the microdock (a 10K image file, but it's 1600 pixels wide).
So how do you recover, as the only obvious way to get the stuff out of the dock is one item at a time? There's a quick two-step solution. First, delete com.apple.dock.plist from your ~/Library/Preferences folder. Second, use ProcessViewer (or the Terminal) to quit the dock. When it restarts, you'll find a new dock with the default OS X icon set installed.
If you had a highly customized set of things in your dock that you'd rather not have lost, you're out of luck at this point (short of hand-editing the dock.plist file). In the future, though, create a backup of the dock.plist file while the dock is "good", and then just replace the "bad" dock.plist file with your good backup and restart the dock -- you'll have your pre-incident dock back complete with customization.
The publication of this hint is in no way an admittance that I may have actually done something like this, of course ;-).
I found a trick in Mac OS X to speed up window minimize and expand operations, and speed up general dock usage. For most users, the dock is almost always filled up. When the dock reaches the edge of the screen and another item is added, the dock's contents shrink to allocate room for the item. However, this scale operation can be quite taxing at times, even on a G4.
I found that if I make my dock 6 to 7 "ticks" smaller than the maximum, it is usually enough extra room to accommodate more dock items without having to scale the current items. The speed improvement is really noticeable, and makes using even a sometimes processor-intensive "genie effect" to shrink and expand dock items much more bearable.
[Editor's note: I don't use the dock in this manner (I'm hopelessly addicted to "hide" as opposed to "minimize"), but it does make sense -- the scaling operation can take some time, especially if you have a large number of items in your dock.]
Despite the title, this isn't a tip about software piracy. I run MS Word on my Tibook and on my desktop G4. One great advantage of OSX is that, once launched, you just leave your apps running until you need them. With virtual memory and lots of RAM, there is little reason not to.
However, if I leave the same serial number install of MS Word running on both machines then Microsoft believes that I am a pirate and insists on deactivating one of the running programs. They do this by an illegal and unauthorized use of the bandwidth on my network.
Read the rest of the article for an AppleScript that disables this check...
[Editor's note: I debated a while before deciding to publish this hint, but the presence of the network serial number check does make it harder to use Office if you have two machines -- even if you never break the terms of the license agreement regarding simultaneous use. I do not condone nor support software piracy, but I do believe that I should be able to use the software as I wish within the terms of the agreement. In addition, this hack has been published on many of the other Mac sites, so this isn't new information...]
OK, maybe this one was too obvious, but not for me. I understand that this feature is a carry-over from previous versions of Mac OS, but Unix and Windows users switching over (like myself) might need a little push to the obvious.
You may want to change the icon for a file. For example, I have a Terminal file saved, and even though OS X launches that file using Terminal, it gives it an ordinary "white blank paper" icon. Not the end of the world, but just a tad boring. Anyway, changing it is ridiculously simple:
Highlight the file, brings up the Finder menu bar. Select "File : Show Info" (or command-I). The upper left hand corner of the Info box shows the icon, which you can select. This was where I had previously faltered, by double-clicking it, right-clicking it (until I remembered I couldn't right-click anymore), and everything else before giving up. But it turns out that you can copy and paste the selected icon.
So the rest is elementary. Find the application whose icon you want to use (in this case Terminal), and select it. Note that the "File Info" dialog box is global, so every time you select a new widget it will replace the information in the box. Anyway, copy it, select your destination file, make sure the icon is selected, paste -- you're done.
[Editor's note: Yes, this is a very elementary tip. But for those new to the platform, sometimes the simplest of things may not be the most obvious of things. So I've chosen to publish this 'introductory' tip in the interest of possibly helping those new to the platform.
You can also paste just about any graphic image you desire in the box, not just the icon from the originating application. In general, if you can get the image on the clipboard, you should be able to paste it into the icon box.]
Check out this annoying behavior when navigating finder windows in list view:
Scroll to the bottom of a finder window with a long list of items, such as the preferences folder.
Jump straight to another folder that uses list view, but with a short list of items, such your home folder.
You're presented with a blank finder window and a long scroll to get back to the top of the window. Annoying!
Quick fix: Press fn-home (or just home on a full keyboard) to jump straight to the top. It's not wizardry, but it has saved me many annoying scrolls. Check out the fn-pg up, fn-pg dn and fn-end key combos while you're at it.
At last! Palm have released version 4.0 of Palm Desktop - which has allowed me to sync my Palm m515 five times so far without crashing, timing out or corrupting my Palm Desktop file. Prior to this update only one sync out of five would be even vaguely successful.
Definitely worth the download for any OS X / Palm users out there...
[Editor's note: I don't normally post standard software announcements, and this one is slightly "old news" by now, but it's worth mentioning given the large number of Palm users out there. Palm 4.0 works very nicely, especially when compared to the beta. I connect via Keyspan USB to serial connector on two different machines. I had mixed success, at best, with the beta, but have had 100% success with the new final code. I was waiting to publish this story until I had some time to test more extensively. Now that I've run the thing a number of times on three different machines, I'm now confident that this is a good release.]
The new global "command+h" shortcut means that I regularly switch to the Finder without clicking on a Finder window. This often results in my being presented with a Finder window which is not active.
Not wanting to have to reach for the mouse, I wanted a keyboard shortcut that would make the frontmost finder window active. There does not appear to be a built-in shortcut for this purpose. However, I found the the following achieves the desired effect:
I've been working around a strange bug in the Mac OS X Finder with an AppleScript for quite some time now. Most users don't notice the bug at all, but I do. Rather than describe it, follow these steps and see it for yourself:
Make a new Finder window
Set its view style to column
Adjust the column width/s with the slider, making them wider together
Leave the window open and log out
Log back in. At this point, your window will be open, but its columns will be at OS X's default widths.
Close that window
Open a new Finder window (should default to column view now)
Now, you'll see your custom widths respected. It just seems to affect the first window you make or see that's in column view. This bothers me, honestly, and I wrote a tiny -- and really dim-witted -- AppleScript to get around the problem.
