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O'Reilly Book Excerpts: Mac OS X Power Hound, Panther Edition

Mac OS X Power Hound Helpful Hints, Part 2

Tip 9-19. Create a Smart iPhoto Album for General Searching

iPhoto includes the ability to add keywords to photos--assigning "Aunt Hilda" to all of your aunt's pictures, for example--so that you can find them quickly with a future keyword search (or even a smart album based on keywords). Sure, that's convenient, but what if you want to find the one photo out of your 23,250-picture collection that you named "Secret to success?" Amazingly, iPhoto 4 lacks a basic search feature, which means you're left to browse for the proverbial needle in the photostack.

Luckily, you can use smart albums to fake your own basic search tool. Select File -> New Smart Album, or just hit Command-Option-N. iPhoto displays the smart album creation sheet. As seen at left, set the first criterion to search on Any Text (using "contains"), and add a few Keyword criteria if you wish (they're not required). When you're done, click OK. Once saved, you can easily find a photo whenever you want. To conduct the search, just Control-click the saved smart album, select Edit Smart Album, and modify whichever criterion you'd like. To find the missing "Secret to Success?" photo, for instance, just enter the photo's name in the Any Text box, and click OK. (The Any Text function searches photo names, roll names, dates, comments, and keywords.) The Keyword fields you added can be used to help refine your search further. Namely, when you enter a keyword value, iPhoto narrows down the smart album to only those pictures that match the keyword.

Tip 10-11. Setting Identical Window Sizes in iCal

iCal lets you view your calendar by day, week, or month. It also remembers the window size for each mode independently, since Day probably doesn't require as much real estate as Month. Nevertheless, you may find the size change distracting when you jump from one mode to another. Yes, you could take the time to drag all three windows to the same size--just make sure you've got half an afternoon and a bottle of Advil handy before you start. A more precise way to create three identically sized windows is to edit iCal's preferences file. Here's how:

Set the Day view window to the size you'd like to use for all three views, and then quit iCal. Behind the scenes, you've just implanted certain window dimensions in iCal's preferences file.
In the Finder, open your Home -> Library -> Preferences folder. Find the file called com.apple.iCal.plist and drag it onto the icon of TextEdit. You may wish to make a copy of the file first and save it to your desktop--just in case something goes awry. In the text file filled with code that now opens before you, look for the first <dict> tag a few lines from the top. Just below that, you should see something like this:
```
<key>1-day view window rect</key>
<string>{{640, 265}, {846, 742}}</string>
```
The text between the <string> tags will probably be different on your machine, because it reflects your window size and location.
Carefully select and copy the text between the <string> and </string> tags. Press Command-C, for example.
Find the <key>7-day view window rect</key> line further down in the file. Directly below that, replace the text between the <string> tags with the stuff you just copied in the previous step. That is, select the text you want to replace, and then press Command-V to paste. You've just set the Week view window to the same size as the Day view window. If you use the other day views, change those as well.
Find the <key>monthly view window rect</key> line. Once again, replace the text between the subsequent <string> tags with the stuff you just copied in step 3. You've just set the Month view window to the same size as the Day view window.
Save the file, quit the text editor, and then reopen iCal.

You now have identically sized windows in all three views.

Tip 11-13. The Graphing Calculator and Other Hidden Modes

The Calculator has but two modes, Basic and Advanced--or so it would appear. However, with a very simple change in the Finder, you can enable not one, not two, but three new modes: a graphing calculator (as seen below), an expression sheet for entering long calculations, and a hexadecimal calculator for the programmer types among us.

Quit Calculator, if it's running, and switch to the Finder. It's always a good idea to quit a program before you modify it.
Click once on the Calculator icon in the Application folder, and choose File -> Get Info. Command-I does the same thing from the keyboard.
Click Add, and navigate to Applications -> Calculator -> Contents -> Resources in the dialog box that opens. If your dialog box is in list-view mode, you might find it easier to navigate if you switch to column-view mode first. To do so, click the button in the upper-left corner that looks like three vertical bars.
Select ExpressionSheet.calcview, Graphing-2D.calcview, and Hexadecimal.calcview in the dialog box. Click Choose. It's easiest to select these items--without selecting anything else--if you hold down Command while clicking them. Once you've clicked Choose, you should see all three new plugins listed in the Plug-ins pane of the Info window.
Close the Info window and relaunch Calculator.

You'll now see all three new modes listed in the View menu.

Tip 12-11. Internet Shortcuts

In most browsers, you can put about ten of your favorite sites (or folders of favorite sites) on your personal toolbar. But if you have enough favorite sites that you can't remember where you've filed some of them, Internet shortcuts can save you a lot of frustration. An Internet shortcut is a short name that you assign to any web site. When you type the short name into the address bar and press Enter, your browser loads the full URL for you. So instead of typing "www.nytimes.com" or mousing into your News -> World -> Current folder, you could just type "nyt" and press Enter to call up the New York Times site. Shortcuts (also known as keywords) are supported in every Mac OS X browser except for Safari, iCab, and Internet Explorer.

As a general rule, you must bookmark a page before you can add a shortcut for it. Once you've done that, the process of adding a new shortcut varies slightly from browser to browser:

Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape: Select Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks, and then select the web site for which you want a shortcut. Choose Edit -> Properties, enter your shortcut term on the Keyword line (see the image above; "csshelp" is the shortcut being defined), and then click OK to save your work.
Camino: Choose Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks (Command-B). Select the web site you want a shortcut for, and choose Edit -> Get Info (Command-I). Then just enter your shortcut in the Keyword box and close the window.
OmniWeb: Select Bookmarks -> Show Bookmarks Page (Command-B), then highlight the bookmark for which you'll be creating a shortcut. At the bottom of the window, just type the shortcut into the Keyword box, and you're done.

Note: If you don't see a Keyword box at the bottom of the window, just Control-click any bookmark and choose Show Bookmark Info.
Opera: Select Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks, highlight the bookmark for which you are creating a shortcut, and click Properties. In the dialog box that appears, enter your shortcut in the Nickname section, then click OK.

From now on, you won't have to hunt through subfolders just to find a URL--instead, you need only type your shortcut and press Enter to load your favorite page.

Note: How you remember your shortcuts is another matter entirely. One way is to use a translucent, floating Stickies note so you can see all of your shortcuts, but still see the windows underneath.

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