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10.4: Activate Dashboard via a PowerBook's Fn key System 10.4
Tiger only hintWay back when, I set my PowerBook's useless (to me anyway) Fn key to trigger Exposé. Cool and all, but I found I never used Exposé -- except when I hit the Fn key by accident! Along came Dashboard, and I knew my Fn key would finally find its ... er ... function! But the Dashboard and Exposé prefs panel didn't allow me to set it for Dashboard -- it was only available in the pop-up list for Exposé. D'oh!

Well, I don't give up easily, and although it was a lot harder than I anticipated, I figured out how to set Fn for Dashboard. Read on, though this ain't for the faint of heart!
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10.4: Stop Automator actions via the menubar System 10.4
Tiger only hintThis really isn't a hint so much as it is a "hey look at that ... that's nice" kind of thing.

If you run a saved Automator "application," the status of the application will show up in the OS X menu bar. along with all of the other menu extras. You can see what the script is doing as it runs, and it also has a small stop sign icon you can use to halt the process.
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10.4: Force use of launchd for upgraded installs System 10.4
Tiger only hintIf you upgraded to 10.4, rather than doing a fresh install (or archive and install), then you're probably (see note below) still launching all your daemons (ssh, for example) via xinetd, which is deprecated. Apple provided support for xinetd in upgraded distributions so that things didn't break, but you may want the latest and greatest. All I'm suggesting here is to match what a fresh 10.4 install does.

Note: I only have one system here, where I'd installed an extra service into /etc/inetd.d, which may have prompted the usage of xinetd rather than launchd. My reading of the installer scripts, though, is that any upgraded install of 10.4 will use xinetd, rather than launchd. Fresh installs are confirmed to have a blank /etc/xinetd.d directory.

The Sharing preference pane in Sytem Preferences can use either launchd or xinetd for things like ssh, but xinetd will take preference if it's there. We'll move the files out of the way, so that launchd is used instead.
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10.4: Create a persistent postfix System 10.4
I run a local postfix on my machine, and in 10.3, I had to modify /etc/hostconfig to tell the OS to run postfix upon boot. I upgraded to Tiger today, and it would no longer start upon boot. 10.4 relies on launchd for crond, as well as a bunch of service launching. Stock, postfix is set to run every minute if there are any files in /var/spool/postfix/maildrop. But I like a livelier postfix.

The plist that is configuring postfix under launchd is called org.postfix.master.plist, located in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. You can either run the Property List Editor as root and remove the two ProgramArguments entries for -e and 60, as well as the whole QueueDirectories field, or just use su or sudo and replace the file with this plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>org.postfix.master</string>
        <key>Program</key>
        <string>/usr/libexec/postfix/master</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>master</string>
        </array>
</dict>
</plist>

After this , you can either just restart, or reload the service like so:
% sudo launchctl stop org.postfix.master
% sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
% sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
% sudo launchctl start org.postfix.master
[robg adds: Sorry for the scrolling DIV area, but it's the best way I've thought of to handle long rows of text that can't be broken in short code snippets (any other ideas?). To use the sample code, just click once in the box, select all, and copy...]
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10.4: Use the 10.3 System Preferences application System 10.4
Tiger only hintWhy would anyone care? For one, the area just below the titlebar of the window is still there for you to store your shortcuts in. If you did an archive and install, then look in your Previous System folder, and follow it from there. You should probably keep the new version around, just in case it's needed in the future.

[robg adds: I was thrilled when I found out this worked -- my big complaint about the new System Preferences panel isn't the loss of the toolbar (though that hurt), but it's the loss of speed when using keyboard navigation. I like to open various panels by just typing a couple letters of each panel's name: En for Energy Saver, for instance. In 10.3, as you typed, each possible match would highlight in turn. When the one you wanted was lit, you just hit the space bar. In 10.4, Spotlight grabs the focus of your typing, so your text goes into the search box. In these movie clips, the task was the same: open Energy Saver, return to all (via Command-L), open QuicktTime, return to all, open International, and end after returning to all one last time. As you'll see, Spotlight's helping hand dramatically slows the process: I'm roughly twice as fast using the old panel versus the new panel, all due to Spotlight trying to "help me" figure out which panel I want to use. So for as long as it will work, I'll be sticking with the old version of the application (and it seems to run just fine!). As a side bonus, it's great having the toolbar back again...]
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10.4: How to rotate OS X's display System 10.4
Tiger only hintNot sure if this is a hint or not, but I have not seen it mentioned anywhere yet. If you go into the Displays prefrence panel, you will see a new drop down caled "Rotate." This will rotate the image on your display a number of diffrent ways: 90, 180, or 270 degrees.

This is very cool. I'm not sure if this is only with a Cinema display or not; I have the new 20" aluminum display.

[robg adds: This is a very cool feature, especially with some of the larger monitors that are coming out -- a 23" LCD on its side would make a nice monitor for someone who works with large numbers of text-based documents each day (or who wants to view maybe four full-height webpage windows on one screen). You won't see this panel on every Mac -- the 12" PowerBook I own, for instance, doesn't seem to want to let me type sideways. My main machine, though, can have a rotated display, and it works quite well.

Warning: A friend of mine tried the rotation trick on his machine with an older (VGA CRT) monitor connected. Somehow, this resulted in a scan-out-of-range error. After much troubleshooting, neither of us were able to resolve it (you couldn't even boot from the install DVD, and pulling the battery didn't help). He wound up doing an archive and install in FireWire target disk mode to get it back. The big problem seems to be that there's no "Did this change work -- yes or no" dialog box. When you choose a rotation, it just happens. So if your monitor can't take the strange rotated resolution, you may be in trouble...]
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10.4: Fix Mail's reply attribution line System 10.4
Tiger only hintWhen you reply to a message, Apple Mail quotes the text of the message to which you're replying after a line like "On May 4 2005, at 5:16 PM, John Doe wrote:". For some reason, though, Mail puts a blank line after that line, separating it from the quoted text, and skips putting one before it, so it's right under the cursor and ends up run in with your typed message. It's weird and ugly! To fix this from the Terminal, type this:
sudo vi /System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Versions/\
B/Resources/English.lproj/Delayed.strings
Change the line that reads:
"REPLY_ATTRIBUTION" = "On %1$@, at %2$@, %3$@ wrote:nn";
to this:
"REPLY_ATTRIBUTION" = "nOn %1$@, at %2$@, %3$@ wrote:";
Then you'll probably have to restart to clear the system's cache and have the changes take effect.

[robg adds: I believe this is 10.4 only as I couldn't see this file on my 10.3 partition, only the 10.4 partition...]
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10.4: Replace the system's Computer icon and more System 10.4
Tiger only hintFor some reason, Tiger still insists on representing your computer with an icon showing an iMac. It's not even a new iMac, and besides, I don't have an iMac. The file you need to replace is called iMac.icns, and, along with a lot of other system icons (like those for Desktop, Trash, Finder, Get Info, etc.), it's now migrated to this directory:

System -> Library -> CoreServices -> CoreTypes.bundle -> Contents -> Resources

Now you can replace any of these with .icns files of your choosing, so long as they have the same name as the original file. Go crazy...
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10.4: Add login items from dock System 10.4
Tiger only hintTo easily add an application to the list of items that automatically opens upon login, try this...

Control- (or right-) click on the application icon in the dock, and check "Open at Login." This works with both running and non-running applications in the Dock, but does not work with applications located elsewhere, including the applications directory.

[robg adds: This is a simple hint, yes, but it's also a great timesaver that you may not be aware of. In 10.3, it took a number of clicks and drags to add a program to your list of login items. Now it's a simple control-click...]
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10.4: Use Advanced print protocol options System 10.4
Tiger only hintAs I was trying to set up printers in my recent 10.4 install, I realized that Apple moved the "super-secret" advanced print protocol options.

Under Panther, to get the Advanced menu options (like "Internet Printing Protocol using IPP") to appear, you had to option-click the Add button in the Printer Setup Utility.

Now with Tiger, option-clicking the Add button doesn't seem to do anything. Instead, you need to option-click the "More Printers..." button at the bottom of the Printer Browser window that opens when you click Add. The "Advanced" option will now be available in the top drop-down menu of the panel that slides down.
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