Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

List of OS X dictation commands System 10.8
Mountain Lion's dictation feature may not be as good as a dedicated speech recognition program (read: Nuance's Dragon Dictate), but it's good for those who only want to dictate from time to time. Apple has published a tech note about the dictation feature, listing all the commands that are possible. This shows you which types of punctuation you can use, but also how to make capital letters, go to new lines and new paragraphs, how to get numerals typed and more.
  Post a comment  •  Comments (2)  
  • Currently 3.13 / 5
  You rated: 2 / 5 (8 votes cast)
 
[6,111 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Menu item to change display modes in Mountain Lion System 10.8
If you are missing the menu bar item that lets you change the display modes in Mountain Lion, there's an app for that.

Display Menu is free from the Mac App Store, and it seems to work. I really don't understand why Apple removed the menu bar item in the first place...
  Post a comment  •  Comments (6)  
  • Currently 3.78 / 5
  You rated: 4 / 5 (9 votes cast)
 
[6,053 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Create Outlook-like reminders for Mail System 10.8
I wanted Mail to remind me to follow up on a given e-mail, as Outlook does. I realized that Reminders and Mail can do just that.

If you want to set a reminder to follow up on an e-mail, just open Reminders, and without even switching back to Mail, drag the e-mail you want to be reminded about to Reminders. It will create a new task with a link to your specific e-mail. You may add an alert, and you will never forget to follow up on an email again.

[kirkmc adds: This isn't very different from this hint, but it puts it in a different context. I hadn't used Outlook in ages, but its Follow Up menu item (in a contextual menu when you right-click on an e-mail) is very practical.

I'm still amazed that there is no direct link between Mail, Reminders and Calendar. This hint seems a good way to connect them, though it requires several steps. In Outlook, you have a number of default follow up times, whereas here you need to set the date and/or time of the reminder manually. Note to automator experts: I tried to create a workflow that would do this, but it wouldn't let me set a time. Feel free to try and build something useful.]
  Post a comment  •  Comments (6)  
  • Currently 4.00 / 5
  You rated: 5 / 5 (5 votes cast)
 
[5,771 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Calm that bouncing dock icon System 10.8
Are you tired of apps bouncing Dock icons for attention? I've noticed that, with Aperture and Word 2011 in 10.8, if an icon bounces in the Dock for attention, and you want it to stop but don't want to switch to the program, you can just hover your mouse over the app icon in the dock. The bouncing stops.

[kirkmc adds: It was hard for me to get an app to bounce a Dock icon to test this, but I was able to do so with Word, and it works as described. I have to say that I don't see many bouncing Dock icons any more, perhaps because of Notification Center.]
  Post a comment  •  Comments (1)  
  • Currently 3.50 / 5
  You rated: 4 / 5 (4 votes cast)
 
[2,904 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Display Notification Center Alerts from command line and AppleScripts System 10.8
Using the Automator action from this recent hint, it is easy to post notifications from AppleScripts or the command line.

To set this up, simply do the following:
  1. Download and install the action.
  2. Create a new workflow in Automator containing only the Display Notification Center Alert action.
  3. In the variables section at the bottom of the workflow construction area in Automator's window, create three variables named title, subtitle, and message.
  4. Give message a default value like "Notification sent." You can leave the default values other two blank.
  5. Drag each variable to its corresponding field in the Display Notification Center Alert action.
  6. Save the workflow as Display Notification.wflow. A good place to save it is in ~/Library/Workflows (create the folder if necessary).

Now you can display a notification from the command line using the following command:
automator -D title='Title text' -D subtitle='Subtitle text' -D message='Message text' ~/Library/Workflows/'Display Notification.wflow'

To display notifications from AppleScripts, paste the following handler into your script, and call it using the form notify("Notification title", "Notification subtitle", "Notification message")

on notify(title, subtitle, message)
	if title as text is not "" then set title to " -D title=" & quoted form of (title as text)
	if subtitle as text is not "" then set subtitle to " -D subtitle=" & quoted form of (subtitle as text)
	if message as text is not "" then set message to " -D message=" & quoted form of (message as text)
	
	do shell script "automator" & title & subtitle & message & " ~/Library/Workflows/Display Notification.wflow"
end notify
  Post a comment  •  Comments (7)  
  • Currently 2.95 / 5
  You rated: 4 / 5 (22 votes cast)
 
[7,446 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Display Notification Center Alerts with Automator System 10.8
It would be great if you could be alerted in Notification Center when your Automator workflow is done. Here is an Automator action I created for displaying notification center alerts. It can be set to display a title, subtitle, and message. See the website linked above for screenshots.
  Post a comment  •  Comments (6)  
  • Currently 3.20 / 5
  You rated: 3 / 5 (20 votes cast)
 
[6,121 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Dismiss banner notifications with a swipe on OS X System 10.8
If you are using Mountain Lion, you've probably seen the banner style notifications and wondered how to get them away quickly. Yet there is no close button.

The solution is simple: If you use a trackpad, use two fingers to swipe them away to the right; on the Magic Mouse, it's one finger swipe to the right. Of course, hover over it with the cursor and then swipe.

[kirkmc adds: Well, I wasn't sure whether to post this. The banners go away on their own after five seconds, so you'd need to be mighty impatient to want to go to the trouble of manually removing them. But there may be cases where you do want to do this. I'll let you discuss this in the comments below.]
  Post a comment  •  Comments (10)  
  • Currently 3.15 / 5
  You rated: 2 / 5 (20 votes cast)
 
[5,027 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Edit Share menu System 10.8
Mountain Lion's new Share menu is handy, but not smart enough not to propose you services you haven’t signed for in the “Mail, Contacts & Calendar” Preferences pane. Here’s a way to remove from it the items you don’t use.

Copy the file /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ShareKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/SHKServicesOrder.plist to a folder where you have write permissions. Duplicate it and keep a copy of the original in case you want to revert to the standard Share menu, as we’ll have to overwrite the system version.

Open the file with any text editor and erase the lines corresponding to services you don’t use. I’ve erased Twitter, Facebook, and all the video services. Save the file and copy it back to the folder mentioned above. When asked if you want to overwrite the file, click on Yes and enter an admin password. You may have to log out and back in for the changes to take effect.

[kirkmc adds: Note that this change may not survive a system update. I agree that this should be user-configurable, and basing it on accounts defined in the Mail, Contacts & Calendar preference pane - whose more appropriate name would be Accounts - would make sense. It would also be great if there were a way to add accounts that aren't hard-coded into the system. Could this be a challenge to hinters to try and figure out how to do that?]
  Post a comment  •  Comments (0)  
  • Currently 3.65 / 5
  You rated: 2 / 5 (20 votes cast)
 
[3,235 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Toggle Web Sharing with an AppleScript System 10.8

As mentioned in this hint, Mountain Lion removed the setting in the Sharing preference pane to turn Web Sharing on and off, even though Apache Web Server is still installed by default. That hint also mentions a third-party preference pane that you can install to toggle Web Sharing in Mountain Lion.

Here's another solution in the form of an AppleScript. If you copy the script to a .scpt file in ~/Library/Scripts, you can conveniently toggle Web Sharing by selecting the script in the Scripts menu.

Here's the AppleScript:

display dialog "Enter your password:" with title "AppleScript" ¬
	default answer "" with hidden answer
set pw to text returned of result

set resultMsg to do shell script "
	listResult=`launchctl list | grep org.apache.httpd`; 
	if [[ $listResult ]]; then 
		apachectl stop; 
		echo 'Apache Web Server stopped.'; 
	else 
		apachectl start; 
		echo 'Apache Web Server started.'; 
	fi" password pw with administrator privileges

tell application "Finder"
	set notifier to POSIX file "/Applications/Terminal-Notifier.app"
	if exists notifier then
		do shell script POSIX path of notifier ¬
			& "/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -message '" ¬
			& resultMsg & "'"
	else
		display alert resultMsg
	end if
end tell

The script uses the free Terminal-Notifier app by Eloy Durán, if installed, to notify you that Apache Web Server has been started or stopped. If you have the app installed somewhere other than /Applications, be sure to edit the app's path in the script.

Note that the state of Web Sharing is persistent across reboots, whether you use this method to control it or the aforementioned preference pane.

  Post a comment  •  Comments (1)  
  • Currently 3.05 / 5
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  (19 votes cast)
 
[2,579 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version
Send Growl notifications to Notification Center System 10.8
If you use Growl, you might find it a bit overkill to have some notifications come through Growl and others to Notification Center. Mountain Growl pipes notifications from Growl to Notification Center, but there is one caveat: all these notifications will have the Growl icon, and not the icon of the application that sent the notification.

This is just a stop-gap, as Growl 2, to be released soon, will support Notification Center directly, but in the meantime, you might find this a useful solution to group all notifications in one place.
  Post a comment  •  Comments (8)  
  • Currently 3.33 / 5
  You rated: 5 / 5 (18 votes cast)
 
[3,009 views] Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version