Saginaw Macintosh Users Group

Set focus and exposure for iPhone photos
~MacTips
This Tip uses the built-in Camera app on an iPhone 4S, running iOS 5.1.

When you point your iPhone at something to take a photo it may focus on the wrong thing, or make a subject against a light background too dark.

Learn how single-tap focus and exposure locks can give you better pictures. Tap once on an image to place focus and exposure in that spot. Tap and hold on an image to lock focus and exposure for that shot.

Organize System Preferences in Lion
~MacTips
System Preferences is home to all kinds of very helpful settings, but Lion brings a couple of new features to the app. You can hide Prefs you never use, call up an easy-to-use list of all prefs or display them alphabetically. Here’s how.

Click and hold on the Show All button in the Toolbar to call up a list of all Prefs.

Choose Customize… from that list to select which items to show or hide. Select Organize Alphabetically or Organize by Categories from the View menu.

Quickly print files from within the Finder
~MacWorld, Christopher Breen
Reader Warren Lane seeks a way to quickly print his documents. He writes:

“Is there some way to quickly print a single copy of a file without having to go through a Print dialog box?”

Yes, if you do it in the Finder. Just open System Preferences, choose the Print & Scan (Lion) or Print & Fax (Snow Leopard) preference, select your default printer, and drag it to the desktop. Do this and an alias of your printer appears on the desktop (termed a desktop printer).

When you want to print a quick copy, just drag a file (or more, if you like) on top of the desktop printer and, in short order, your printer gives birth to a printed copy of your document without an intervening print dialog box.

Regrettably, there’s no system-wide command for quickly printing one copy of a document from within an application. A few applications support such a thing—Microsoft Office applications, for example—but as printing is increasingly an “old-school” activity, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for other applications to implement such a feature.

Display a list of files in package while in Installer
~MacOSXHints
If you press Command+I while in the OS X Installer, a small window displays, showing the contents of the package about to be installed.

[kirkmc adds: This is great; I don’t know why we haven’t had this submitted before. I tried this with a number of installer packages. In most cases, the window shows the contents of the .pkg from the very first window. However, when checking on the Mac OS X 10.7.3 Combo Updater, clicking the disclosure triangle next to the name of the update in the file list window displayed “The file listing isn’t yet available,” but the file list then showed up a few seconds later. Note that all you can do is view the file list; you can’t copy it.]

Pause animated GIFs in Safari
~MacOSXHints.com
I’m not certain how far back this goes, but pressing the Escape key in Safari 5.1.5 pauses animated GIFs on a web page. I have an older Mac with Safari 3.2.1 and this functionality is not present there. It would be great if there were a single command to stop these GIFs completely, but this is better than nothing.

It’s possible other browsers have a similar capability, but this appears to be a Safari-specifc shortcut. Testing with iCab 4.8, a browser which uses the built-in WebKit frameworks, does not respond to the same command.

[kirkmc adds: Indeed, this does work. There are not hints on the site to that effect. In Firefox, this stops the animation entirely, unlike Safari, where it only pauses the animation. In Chrome and Opera, it has no effect.]

Unzip almost any archive file
~MacWorld
I recently downloaded a zip archive of freely-distributed MP3 files. But when I double-clicked it to decompress it, all I got was a .cpgz file (an archive file in the CPIO format). Double-clicking that file just created the zip file again, and thus I was stuck in an endless loop.

The solution for me was to use the free The Unarchiver, which turns out to be a Swiss army knife for decompressing many obscure types of archives. Opening the file with The Unarchiver decompressed it correctly.

In some cases, The Unarchiver may not work. If this is the case—or if you simply prefer using Terminal—you can try using the unzip command. Just launch Terminal, type unzip, then a space, then drag your archive into the Terminal window and press Return. That will decompress many files that are resistant to other techniques.

Speed up your Mac by removing files from the Desktop
~MacOSXHints.com
A family member owns a Mac, and he was complaining it was getting slow – especially the Desktop. He had a lot of files on the Desktop, but none of them were visible on the Desktop itself, but only in a Finder window displaying the contents of the Desktop. The Desktop only showed two icons: the main hard disk, and a Time Machine hard disk. The Desktop itself was very slow, and often displayed a beachball.

However, when I looked in the Desktop folder, there were more than 2,700 image files. When I removed the image files from the Desktop folder, everything went back to normal.

So, don’t over-clutter your Desktop, as it might slow down your Mac and even hide files.

[kirkmc adds: This isn’t new, and there have been a couple of hints about this in the past; the only ones I can find were in 2005 and again in 2008. I think it’s worth pointing it out again, though, to users who aren’t aware of the issue. If you have a lot of files on the Desktop, it will slow down your Mac; if you have Show Icon Preview checked in the View Options, it will slow it down even more. Personally, I don’t put any files on the Desktop for this reason.]

iOS 5: Cable Releases for Photography
~MacOSXHints.com
If you’re a photographer, then you know that a cable release is a tool to take a picture without touching your camera. Now, the iPhone can do this, too.

iOS 5 introduced many new features for photographers. Among these is the ability to use the Volume up button to take photos. As a result, the Volume up button on your headphones also works to take photos! It seems perfectly obvious that it should after the fact, but it’s not something most of us are likely to try. This means, every iPhone includes a free cable realease. This is huge for an iPhone photographer because the current shutter buttons aren’t very good for keeping your phone steady. Interestingly, I’ve found that it’s often much easier to get burst shots when using my headphones compared to just the volume up key.

Perhaps the best part is that this can be paired with Bluetooth devices! I’m not sure if every headset with volume controls will work (as the buttons need to map correctly to the iPhone), but if a Bluetooth headset can increase the iPhone’s volume it should work.

What I have been able to confirm so far is that a Bluetooth keyboard is perfectly capable of acting as a remote. In addition, Joseph Linaschke over at ApertureExpert.com has said that his Bluetooth headset works as well, but I’m not sure which model.

Using a wireless remote opens up even more possibilites, especially when considering that the remote will start and stop video capture, or take self portraits which don’t have your arm in the photo.

Hope someone else will make use of this for their iPhone photos.

Create new folder with selected items
~iCreate, Stephen Ashby
Now that we’ve switched over to Lion, pressing Command+Ctrl+N takes all the items you’ve selected in Finder and puts them in one folder. It’s a really useful time-saver that every Mac user should be using.

Quickly expand and shrink Save dialogs
~MacOSXHints.com
In recent versions of Mac OS X, the standard Save dialog box was replaced with a more compact sheet giving only a text field for providing a file name, a popup menu to choose a save location, and sometimes are some specific options such as text-encoding or file-type, along with the Save and Cancel buttons.

There’s a disclosure triangle to expand the Save panel into the full size one, giving access to the whole file system.

But you can toggle between the compact and full-size versions by pressing Command-= (equals).

[kirkmc adds: Nice catch. I was sure this would have been on the site, but can’t find anything. It’s worth noting that applications remember the state of the dialog box, so if you expand it once, they will always display the large dialog.

Monitor your system from the Dock 
~MacWorld
Power users likely already know about Activity Monitor. This handy troubleshooting tool (/Applications/Utilities) can tell you which apps are running on your Mac, along with how much CPU and RAM they’re gobbling up. But Activity Monitor packs a lesser-known yet equally useful feature: You can tweak its Dock icon to display live graphs charting what’s going on with your computer.

To change Activity Monitor from its default icon, first make sure the utility is running. Control-click (or right-click) on the Activity Monitor icon in the Dock and select the Dock Icon option from the menu. (Alternatively, choose View -> Dock Icon from the app’s menu bar.) There, you can choose from five graph icons: CPU Usage, CPU History, Network Usage, Disk Activity, and Memory Usage. After you select one of them, you’ll see a continuously updated chart in your Dock, graphing whichever stat you selected. If you quit and relaunch Activity Monitor, the software remembers the chart you selected most recently.

Use your laptop for a tracing backlight
~MacOSXHints.com
I needed a darkened version of a sketch I made, but I didn’t want to go scan it and darken it. I decided to make a copy the old fashioned way — trace it.

However, the lamp wasn’t bright enough, and I didn’t have access to a backlit desk. Then it hit me; my laptop has a backlight, a very bright backlight in fact.

How to use your screen as a light box:

• Turn your laptop so that the screen is horizontal.
• Prop up the body so the screen stays flat.
• Set your desktop to solid white, or open a solid white window. If you set the desktop color, hide everything else.
• Make sure the screen brightness is turned all the way up.

I used my 13.3” MacBook Pro, which was slightly small for a 8.5×11” paper. A larger screen would certainly be better.

[crarko adds: I’ve used an iPhone as a flashlight, but would not have thought of using a laptop as a light table. Clever idea.]

Resetting a forgotten administrator’s password in Lion
~MacWorld.com
Reader Lee Benjamin would like to reset his administrator’s password but it doesn’t work the way it once did. He writes:

“I have a MacBook Pro that is used by myself and a few of my family members. My wife and son both know my administrator’s password and I think that has created a serious problem. One of my family downloaded a free Solitaire program and left it on my desktop. (It seems that no one remembers doing it.) I went to delete it from my desktop, and, as expected, I was asked to enter my system password. I typed it in but was immediately informed that the entry was incorrect. No one remembers changing the password, but it is definitely not the one I originally created.”

In previous operating systems it was possible to insert the installation disc and strip the password entirely. This would allow the user to reset everything quite nicely. Since Lion came from the App store, however, there is no installation disc to insert. Is there some way out of this mess?

Indeed there is. Restart your MacBook Pro with the Option key held down and choose Recovery HD in the startup screen. From the Utilities menu in the Mac OS X Utilities screen that appears, choose Terminal. In the Terminal window that appears enter “resetpassword” (without the quotes) and press Return. A Reset Password window will pop up. Select your startup volume in the top of the window and then, from the pop-up menu below, select a user account—Lee, for example.

In the fields below that enter and confirm your new password. If you like, you can enter a password hint in the appropriate field. When everything is configured to your satisfaction, click on Save. Now choose Restart from the Apple menu and your Mac will do exactly that and will use the new password you’ve created.

Another way to recover from application freezes
~MacWorld.com
When the rainbow pinwheel spins over a specific application’s window, but changes to a pointer or cursor or finger etc. over every other applications’ windows, I figure that app has frozen. I’ll usually give it a minute or two to see if it’ll thaw on its own. If not, traditionally, I would get my Force Quit window open before I start clicking around on any other app’s windows for fear that the freeze might spread. But recently I tried something that has also worked for me a few times since, even with entire system freezes.

However, for reasons that will become obvious in the hint, I can only recommend you try this with a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air. Though you may have success with desktops by inducing a similar state; I have not tried.

Simply close the computer. Wait for it to go to sleep, as indicated by the pulsing light on the front of the case. I will usually wait a bit longer (around 5min).. I find that the more desperate i am for it to work, the longer i’m willing to wait. When I open it back up the rainbow pinwheel is gone. I’ll often find an alert window wanting me to confirm an error or stop some unresponsive script or something, but without having having to Force Quit anything. I’ve got control back, and/or I didn’t lose anything except some minutes — sometimes.

I don’t expect this trick to work for every freeze, and neither should you. But it’s worked for me enough times that it’s worth a try every time.

[crarko adds: I remember doing this sort of thing all the way back to the PowerBook 5300, and it’s always been about 50/50 with success. One thing that does happen when putting the machine to sleep is that AirPort also goes inactive, leading to the method of this hint. I might try that first before putting the machine to sleep.]

Print from page 2 onwards
~MacOSXHints.com
Sometimes you want to print avoiding some cover page. Here a simple way to do it.

When sending something to the printer the OS X Print dialog provides many useful options. One of them is selecting the range of pages to be printed. I often find myself wanting to use that to avoid printing a (few) useless coversheet(s).

However, one is seemingly forced to fill in both a starting and ending range. If you don’t know how many pages the document has that can be annoying (and you won’t be able to see it once you’ve selected the option to print a range!). One solution, which I used for a few years, is to enter a very large number, such as 999, in the box. This works.

But a simpler solution is to leave that end field blank. Actually, if you enter the starting page, hit TAB then DELETE, then ENTER you are all set and have sent your job quickly to the printer from your starting page to the end of the document.

[crarko adds: Simple enough, and obviously the starting page number needn’t be two. The actual tip here is that it’s not necessary to know the ending page number. I tried it with a print to PDF and it works as described. I’m sure this has been around a long time but perhaps it will be new and useful for someone.

Fix Lion’s erroneous autocorrections, permanently
~MacOSXHints.com
Sometimes, one person’s hint is another person’s incredibly obvious feature. In this case, I was the guy who needed a hint that—once it was pointed out to me—I felt silly for not thinking of on my own.

I was getting frustrated by Lion’s built-in, iOS-style autocorrection. I normally like the feature, which corrects misspellings as you type, but it was making life difficult for me when I searched my email for messages from Macworld senior editors Chris Breen and Scholle Sawyer McFarland. When searching for messages from Chris, I’d type “from:breen” into Gmail; for Scholle, I’d type “from:scholle” instead. Lion unhelpfully wanted to replace their names with “green” and “school,” respectively.

I griped on Twitter, and Flying Meat Software’s Gus Mueller shared the easy fix. If Lion’s autocorrecting a word that you’d prefer it simply leave alone, let it make the correction, then fix the word so that it’s spelled the way you’d prefer again. Next, Control-click (or right-click) on the word in question, and choose Learn Spelling from the contextual menu that appears. From now on, Lion won’t autocorrect that word any longer.

Now, I already knew about the Learn Spelling option, but in my mind, I used it to fix words that my Mac mistakenly gave the “red squiggly underline” treatment. But indeed, as Gus pointed out, Learn Spelling fixes rogue autocorrections, too.

If you’d prefer that Lion never autocorrect the words you type, remember you can go to System Preferences, click on the Language & Text pane, navigate to the Text tab, and uncheck Correct Spelling As You Type

iOS 5: Quickly reopen recently closed tabs in mobile Safari
~MacOSXHints.com
In the latest version of Safari for iOS, pressing and holding the add tab [+] button will show a list of recently closed tabs. Touching one of the listed pages will open it in a new tab.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described, although it seems a bit inconsistent in how it handles the list. Closing Safari with no open tabs clears the list, but if there are tabs still open the list is maintained. Actually quitting Safari (clicking the ‘X’ in the multitasking bar) clears the list whether there are tabs still open or not.]

iOS 5: iPad show mailbox gesture
~MacOSXHints.com
Maybe everybody already knows this, but I missed it in all the new features of iOS 5. The iPad mail app adds a new gesture to show and hide the message list window when in portrait orientation.

I always use my iPad’s Mail app in landscape mode because I get to see my message list in addition to the message detail. And for some reason, I find it tedious to push the mailbox button at the top left of the screen to see the message list. iOS 5 added the ability to swipe right anywhere on the message window to pop up the message list and to swipe left to hide it again. Nice! Not having to move my finger six inches has somehow made portrait mode much more bearable for me.

10.7: Dragging files from Stacks and Desktop access
~MacOSXHints.com
Just as you can now drag files from Safari’s downloads list, you can also drag them from a stack. They can be dragged to the Desktop, Trash, Finder window, folder, folders and volumes in the Sidebar and Toolbar and even another Stack.

This is also very handy for dragging images and items in the downloads menu from a fullscreen app like Safari to the Desktop. The Dock even automatically pops up if you drag the item to the bottom of the screen without having to use the double down motion normally required to access the Dock in fullscreen apps.

iPhone 4S Raise to Speak also works for text entry
~MacOSXHints.com
We know Siri has a raise to speak feature, but I discovered that raise to speak also works for text entry.

Whenever a keyboard is on the screen, you can simply raise the phone to your ear. A single tone will confirm that it’s listening (as opposed to Siri’s double tone). Whatever you say will be transcribed to text when you lower the phone.

This works in any app any time the keyboard is displayed.

10.7: Expand an application’s windows in Mission Control updates
~MacOSXHints.com
When you enter Mission Control, an application’s windows are stacked atop each other. If you’re after a particular window, but it’s not the front-most one in an application, it could be difficult to identify it.

To solve this, after you’ve entered Mission Control, move the mouse cursor over a stack of windows and scroll up. They fan out somewhat from each other, allowing you to see more of the windows’ contents. Other applications and the Desktop dim.

To exit this mode, either scroll down or click off in one of the dimmed areas.

Oddly, Apple did not choose to use the ‘pinch out’ gesture for this feature. This is unfortunate, since it’s a much more intuitive way of commanding stacked items to spread out.

10.7 Zoom in on windows in Mission Control
~MacOSXHints.com
Mission Control displays miniatures of all your open windows, grouped by application; what’s left of Exposé in Lion shows all the windows for a specific application. (Set keyboard shortcuts for these features in Keyboard or Mission Control preferences; set other triggers in the Trackpad or Mouse preference pane.)

You can’t always see the contents of a miniature window sufficiently to decide whether it’s the one you want. But select a window by simply pointing to it—you’ll see a blue frame around the current selection—and then press the spacebar to zoom it up to an easily readable size. Note that this is not the same as a Quick Look window, which shows you the contents of a file and lets you open it; this shows you a window.

Pressing the spacebar again shrinks the window down to its petite self. (Pressing Esc while the window’s enlarged switches you into its parent app and brings that window to the front.

Use the new iBooks fonts
~MacOSXHints.com
When Apple updated its iBooks e-book application to 1.5, they included some nice new fonts: Ahtelas, Charter, Iowan, and Servavek. With a little work, you can extract these from the application and use them on your Mac.

If you haven’t already, download the free iBooks app from the App Store.

Locate the application in the Finder. (Select iBooks in iTunes and choose ‘Show in Finder’ from the File menu. It will be named ‘iBooks 1.5.ipa’).

Make a copy of the file.

Change the file extension of the copy from .ipa to .zip.

Extract the resulting zip file by double-clicking on it. You will get a folder named iBooks 1.5.

In this folder open the Payload folder to find the app ‘iBooks.’

Right or control-click on the application to show the contextual menu and choose ‘Show Package Content.’

A folder will open with the font files in it. (The easiest way to locate them is to search the folder on .ttf.).

There are 16 font files in total; four for each font. Install them as you would do any font.

[crarko adds: Works as described. As always with fonts, be aware of copy-right restrictions when making use of them.]

iOS 5: Quickly reopen recently closed tabs
~MacOSXHints.com
In the latest version of Safari for iOS, pressing and holding the add tab [+] button will show a list of recently closed tabs. Touching one of the listed pages will open it in a new tab.