Filed under: iLife, Features, How-tos, Tips and tricks, iTunes, Ask TUAW
Ask TUAW: Cookies, Mail.app vs Outlook, Party Shuffle and more
We got a lot of great questions following last week's Ask TUAW. This means, unfortunately, we won't be able to address all of them this week, but we still have managed answers for several more than usual. This week we'll be tackling questions about Mail.app, cookies in Safari, iTunes, Spotlight, and more. As always, please leave your own comments, and ask more questions for next week either in the comments to this post or using the tip form. Now let's turn to this week's questions.Andreas asks
Back in the days when Windows was my only option, I used Winamp as my main mp3 player. And there was one feature in winamp I really used a lot, and that was the que-feature. Just press 'q' on the songs I wanted to hear next after the song that was already playnig. Now, how is this working in itunes? Does Itunes allow me to que songs?
It sounds like you should use iTunes' Party Shuffle feature. All you have to do is right-click on any track in iTunes and select either "Play Next in Party Shuffle" or "Add to Party Shuffle."
This is also another great use for Quicksilver (with the iTunes plugin). 1) Invoke QS, 2) bring up iTunes, 3) drill down to "Browse Tracks," 4) search for the track you want, 5) tab to the right and type "add" to get "Add to End of Party Shuffle." It sounds much more complicated than it is in practice; once you get used to it, it goes very quickly.
Dave asks
Is there a way to get a prompt before accepting cookies? Safari preferences lets me choose between Always, Never and Sites I Navigate to (which, by my estimation is, all of them). I have gillions of them and they're mostly for sites that I'll never go back to.
Unfortunately, Safari does not include a per site prompting system, so your best shot is periodically to clean out your cookies with one of the many cookie management tools out there like Cocoa Cookies (above) Once you clean out your cookie jar, you might also find SafariPlus useful. It is a plugin for Safari that adds another cookie management option: Only accept cookies from favorite sites. Of course you have to go through and mark which sites are your favorites. If cookies are a really big concern you might consider switching browsers. Both OmniWeb and Firefox (especially with plugins) are known for outstanding cookie management options.
El asks
I have OS 10.3.9, and was wondering if that is going to be a problem wIth the upcoming release of Leopard? Will I need to get any special software to make the transition seamless?
Well the short answer is: probably not. If your hardware is up to it (and it may be a big if given Leopard's hardware intensive new features), you should probably be able to install Leopard with no problem, without any third-party software. The developers preview has reasonably steep requirements for older Macs, and these are clearly not conservative enough. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that you will probably want to use some third party software like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable full backup of your Panther system before you install Leopard. I always recommend doing a fresh install and not an upgrade when you install a new OS.
Dylan asks
When sending from Mail.app to and Outlook user, the email has ? ? ??? question marks for every newline character and some spaces. This is because when there is an attachment, photo, HTML or rich text sigutare etc Apple's Mail.app defaults to ASCII encoding.. So special characters Outlook uses show up as ?.
To solve this you have to manually go to Message -> Text Encoding -> Unicode (UTF8) . This works.. but cannot be set to default behavior.
The closest I have found is to run the following from terminal to force the preference:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"
But even this doesn't work. if you craft a new message with a pic (eg sig) it defaults to ASCII and replying to an outlook mail does the same.
Since I don't have access to Outlook I have no way to test this, but Tim over at Hawk Wings offers this possible solution. Most of it is the same as what you wrote, but did you remember to change Mail's preferences to compose in "Rich Text" and "Use the same format as the original message" as above?
Graham asks
When I began to using spotlight, it ran quickly and found my applications and documents instantly! But now, after a couple years of use, it has become bogged down and kind of sluggish... Is there any way I can clear out, and start anew?
Great timing, we just posted on a way to get Spotlight to reindex specific apps. If you want it to reindex the entire drive, you can use a little bit of terminal trickery as outlined in this Macworld column or if you're wary of the terminal the über geeks have a tip involving adding and removing a drive from Spotlight's privacy list in the Spotlight preferences.
Jeff asks
is there any way to save those Flash movie things? I hate to download them everytime... on a dial-up takes forever
Probably the easiest way to do this is to use one of several applications we've mentioned previously including TubeSock and yFlicks.
A fellow reader, Peter, suggests another way using the keepvid.com website. If you go there it will let you specify a URL and then download it to your computer as a FLV (though keep in mind these files may be somewhat large). You'll then need to use something like SWF & FLV Player or even jack-of-all-video-trades VLC to play the files.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Thomas said 9:45AM on 2-28-2007
Regardless of what you do with them and how you get them, you're still going to have to download the flash video files first.
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artiswork said 10:16AM on 2-28-2007
I'd like to know how to get spotlight to index code so that I can search for certain snippets or chunks of code in a folder. I use Textmate(http://macromates.com) for my coding and it has a decent per project search, but sometimes I find I'd like to look around with a larger scope.
I've not found plugins to do this, but could use it for php, javascript, xhtml, css and the like.
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Colin said 10:27AM on 2-28-2007
Related to the Quicksilver "Add to end of party shuffle" - is there a way to set up a trigger that will start me at "Browse tracks" so I don't have to drill down every time? I find that drilling within iTunes is extremely slow compared to drilling through folders on the HD.
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Phil said 10:31AM on 2-28-2007
Question: I rarely use Spotlight because I find the results display to be crippled. I'm often looking for a particular directory, based on knowing the name of a file in that directory. In the Spotlight results, it seems that only verb available for the found documents is Open. There doesn't seem to be a way to say "show this document in the Finder". Am I missing something?
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Retroper said 10:43AM on 2-28-2007
In order to use Party Shuffle properly to que songs, you need to put the songs to be played in Party Shuffle to 0, otherwise iTunes will fill the gap with random songs - and you have to wait 15 songs or so before your songs are played.
You can even decide to play a song next in Party Shuffle, or put it last in the que - a feature you won´t find in Winamp.
The only thing I really miss is a party mode in iTunes. When my drunk friends play the role as DJ, they always end up interrupting every song instead of using the Party Shuffle. In Windows Media Player, a double click on a song could be programmed to put the song in a que, instead of instantly playing that song.
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Harald said 10:47AM on 2-28-2007
Hi,
I think instead of using a standalone application it is possible to download flash movies from within Safari.
All you have to do is loading the page with the video you want, select "Activity" from the Windows Menu and look for the file with the .flv extension in the pop up window. It is usually the largest and is growing in size while loading. Just double-click that file and the movie will be downloaded to your specified download destination. Anyway, you will still have to convert the flash movie or get a quicktime plugin.
best regards
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Harald said 10:49AM on 2-28-2007
@Colin
Hi, yes there is indeed a trigger which is also "precompiled".
Just invoke QS, open the preferences and select "triggers". In the left column you`ll see an iTunes pane. Just klick on that and you will see a list of possible iTunes action to which you can assign a systemwide hotkey, not only for browse tracks.
Personally, I have set "browse artist" to alt+a, "browse album" to alt+s and "browse title" to alt+d. close together, simple and hierarchical.
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Justin said 12:40PM on 2-28-2007
@Phil: this was actually on this site a while back. Basically just use the command key and mouse click
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/07/27/tuaw-tip-quickly-reveal-enclosing-folders-in-spotlight/
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Justin said 12:41PM on 2-28-2007
Danny beat me to it.
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Danny said 1:31PM on 2-28-2007
@4 Phil - if hold down command (the apple key) and click then Spotlight will open the folder that contains the item you want and highlight it for you.
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Michael May said 1:48PM on 2-28-2007
You can also save FLV's in safari by opening the Activity window, then double-clicking the movie in the list given. This will download it to your desktop, and then you can convert it using something like iSquint. It's best to allow the flash video to load first, then you can see it easily in the activity window, since it's many megabytes and still loading.
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PS said 9:28PM on 2-28-2007
Phil -- run your search, and click on 'Show All' when the Spotlight results turn up. In the new window that pops up, locate your item, right click on it and choose 'Reveal in Finder'. That's the easiest way for now.
I have also found this a little annoying, but I hope things will get better with Leopard!
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Aron Trimble said 9:34PM on 2-28-2007
Dear TUAW,
Please help. I have been using my mbp and for quite some time and mail.app for quite some time longer. Lately (the last couple weeks, or so) I have not been able to send e-mail. Ever. Ok, that was an exaggeration. Here is the situation: I have 5 e-mail addresses. At work, I can send e-mail with two of them. At school, I can only send using my school e-mail address. And at home, I can't send using ANY of them. Now I can understand the trouble at work and school would be related to some sort of network settings outside my control. However, at home, *I* am the network admin. So it makes no sense why given the same settings (with some of the same e-mail providers) The only differences is are my roommates are using Entourage. Now i'll die before i'll use a non-universal, microsoft application for ALL of my mail... but this is ridiculous! Are there any other e-mail applications that seem to perform better than mail.app? I would REALLY prefer to have an application on my computer rather than using a webmail app of some kind - but at this point i'm desperate.
Help me TUAW, you're my only hope!
Aron T
Ps, did you see what did at the end there?
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Adrian said 3:11PM on 3-01-2007
Come on, people - the word you're looking for is "queue".
Phil, I'm totally with you - Spotlight's results interface is awful. I'm really surprised actually; it's as if nobody at Apple has ever actually used it. Most unusual. Holding down the command key is cryptic, and having to open "show all" is just painful.
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kr said 9:18PM on 3-01-2007
I'm having trouble adding my aol account to my mail.app list. I have heard some say that aol won't work in mail.app. Is this true? If not, what should I type in in all of the fields? (i.e. outgoing, incoming server, etc.)
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Andy Smits said 1:58AM on 3-03-2007
To answer the previous post,... about AOL mail in the mail app. Use the "AOL Service Assistant". Free at apple.com. It sets up the Mail program for you automatically.
Not sure if this would be helpful to a great number of people, but anyway...
I love iPhoto and I am a heavy user of the comments "field" in iPhoto's information panel. I'm testing out Aperture with the 30 day trial, but it looks the images I brought from iPhoto to Aperture have lost any and all comments I had attached to them. Can this be the case, or am I missing something?
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Andy Smits said 2:14AM on 3-03-2007
Nevermind. I'm a dummy. I found my iPhoto comments in Aperture. They're called "captions".
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Bob said 7:39AM on 3-03-2007
In answer to Aron: I have a lot of problems with Mail.app for work email which is an IMAP network on Exchange. It works well for a couple of POP addresses, and I'll try it if I can convert them to IMAP, as I suspect it will still work well if the volume of mail is fairly low. I also use Eudora which works very well, but doesn't have a wonderful interface.
Really, don't die, just use Entourage, it work better than any of them, has never let me down.
Bob
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