Ask TUAW: Drag and drop images, Front Row skipping, Leopard SMS and more

Brian asks

Is there any way to lower the output volume thru the dock connector on an iPhone? At work, I use my iPhone with the Griffin Amplifi speaker. Unfortunately, even at the lowest setting on the Amplifi... the volume is too loud for the work environment. Is there a way to lower the volume output from the iPhone (or iPod) thru the bottom connector (not headphone). Volume control on the ipod/iphone is disabled while docked.

Unfortunately, no. The Dock output is at line level and thus not adjustable. I know that it's not terribly slick, but the Amplifi accepts a 1/8" audio input so you could use the headphone output with the patch cable.

Jason asks

Back in the day of OS 8 it was very easy to drag an image from anywhere to anywhere else. But now when I try to drag an image from Safari to Omnigraffle, or Photoshop or something, all I get is the URL. Therefore I have to drag it from the web to my desktop, and THEN drag it to Omnigraffle, and then throw it out off the desktop. Is this an option I can switch?

This article at Mac Geekery explains a bit of what is going on. It seems that this behavior is determined by the receiving application so I don't think there's a simple switch to fix this. However, there is a solution; instead of dragging and dropping from Safari to Omnigraffle, etc. instead right-click on the image in Safari, choose "Copy Image" and then paste that into Omnigraffle.

Topslakr asks

In leopard when you skip forward while watching something in front row it seems to skip by some percentage of overall length. Is there any way to change the length of the skip? I'd much rather have 30 seconds or even 15 seconds.

There does not seem to be a way to do this. There's a thread in Apple Discussions complaining about this and there seems to be a minor work around. Apparently if you pause first the FF/REW buttons skip at 10 second intervals. Not exactly what you want, but better than nothing perhaps.

Bob asks

Can I use my iPod (3G) to transfer files between my MacBook Pro at home and my Windows XP computer at work?

Yes, but the iPod will have to be formatted FAT32 instead of HFS+ because OS X can read and write FAT32 but WinXP cannot read or write HFS+ without extra software. If you'd rather install software on the WinXP computer rather than reformat the iPod, you could try MacDrive ($50) or MacDisk ($42), though I haven't used either. You'll also need to enable disk use in the preferences (in iTunes).

Mikael asks

I miss the ability to text someone (via SMS) directly from the Address Book since I've upgraded to Leopard. Can I get back the functionality from tiger somehow?

There does not seem to be any way to get this back natively in the Address Book application. However, some third-party add-ons will give you something similar, though at a cost. Mira Software's BluePhoneElite 2 ($25) and FoneLink ($50) from Nova Media will give you something like what you're looking for. If you'd be willing to use a Dashboard widget instead you might like to check out the emitSMS widget. You can also send SMS directly from iChat for free, with a .Mac or AIM chat account, using AOL's long-standing SMS bridge. In iChat under Tiger, send a new chat to the target # in "+19175551212" format; under Leopard, there's a handy "Send SMS" menu item.

I want an automatic way to have the contents of my USB flash drive synced with a folder on my mac every time I plug it in, so that the folder is a mirror of the USB drive.

The best way to do this is probably with a differential backup in ChronoSync ($30). If you really want don't want to spend the money you could use Do Something When to launch a simple AppleScript or Automator action that would simply copy over the complete contents of flash drive to the folder on the Mac.