Filed under: How-tos

By default, movies and TV shows in the iPod portion of the iPhone and iPod touch play in landscape view. The biggest change with respect to video orientation came about with iPhone OS 2.0, which provided the option for landscape-right viewing (that is, with the volume and silent/vibrate buttons facing up). While most videos could, and should, be viewed in landscape, there are times that call for a portrait perspective -- for example, when placing your iPhone into a dock, which is what I do when working out.

Getting your iPhone to play a movie or TV show in portrait mode requires a simple change in the video's tag, from TV Show or Movie to Podcast. Simply right-click on the file and select "get info "(or you could use the Command-I shortcut). Then, in the "Media Kind" section within the "Options" tab of the video, select Podcast. Now, the videos will show up in both the Podcasts and Videos section of the iPod portion on your iPhone.

Obviously, this isn't something you'd want to do with every movie or TV show in your library. So, to revert the file back to its old self, you'd want to follow the same process and change the video back to a TV show or movie.

One gem in Mac OS X that sometimes gets glanced over is the Services menu. Lots of readers may not know yet that Snow Leopard brought with it the ability to create your own customized service in Automator -- in other words, you can get additional selections on a contextual menu when right-clicking within a certain context, say a file within a Finder window. To create a customized service, all you have to do is launch Automator and select "Services" from the "Choose a template for your workflow" window, and then insert your own service from there.

Here are five customized services for you to install on your own Mac.

A friend's MacBook had slowed down to a snail's pace. Despite looking everywhere for the issue, streamlining everything I could, and yelling at it, it failed to accelerate to usable speed. So I recommended we start from scratch and build it back up with only the things she was using, free of all the other downloads and aborted installs of various software she never used or cared about. It also housed a prior system, and a PC migration from a few years back. All told, the computer was a bloated, duplicated whale of files and applications for what was essentially a light-load writer's computer.

So I backed up the essential parts of her system using Time Machine: documents (including her novel and decades of prior writing, published and unpublished), ten years of family photographs, a 41GB iTunes library, among other things, and then....backed it up again elsewhere, outside of Time Machine.

And again.

And just for good measure, once more time, to yet another drive. I wasn't going to be the (ex-)friend who lost her novel.

What I wanted to do was do the ol' "erase and install" that prior system software discs allowed you to do. But clicking around Snow Leopard left no obvious method for this. But instead of booting Snow Leopard while inside of Mac OS X, if you just directly reboot the computer off the disc itself (holding down the "c" button after the system chime, letting go when you see the Apple logo) you get a few more options. Once you've gone into the installer program, you'll see "Utilities" at the top, and if you select Disc Utility, you can see your hard drive. If you click on "erase" (like I did, with one hand over my eyes) you can wipe the drive clean with various security options, and then you can do a fresh install of Snow Leopard on your computer on a pristine hard drive.

Once you've done that, you can either transfer your files back in directly, or use the installer program's built-in migration utility to restore any or all files from Time Machine.

And now? The world awaits the Next Great American Novel, untragically unlost by yours truly.

I've previously demonstrated how to use LaTeXiT to create and display complex math formulas and other symbols, and thank you readers for the additional recommendations!

While providing a means to display almost every imaginable existing symbol or character, a LaTeX-based solution may prove too complex and unnecessary for some. For the less "mathletic," Mac OS X's built-in character viewer is one of the easier ways to display characters of all sorts.

To enable the character viewer, open Mac OS X's System Preferences and select the "Language & Text" icon. Once there, click on the "Input Sources" tab and place a checkmark next to the "Keyboard & Character Viewer" box and "Show input menu in menu bar" box. The Keyboard & Character Viewer is now accessible on your menu bar.

Now, displaying special characters on your document, email, or whatever it is you're working on is just a drag and drop away.

Imagine if, as Steve Jobs moves through each slide of his Keynote presentation, he also has the telepathic powers to automatically tweet information related to the slide.

But even the almighty Steve Jobs can't do that.

Fortunately for him, there's Keynote Tweet. An open source AppleScript app, Keynote Tweet will automatically tweet the text from your presenter notes (accessible by clicking on "view" and selecting "show presenter notes").

Keynote Tweet was exposed to me while reading a piece by IDEO Labs' Gentry Underwood, who highlights the idea of large presentations increasingly occurring within the context of a backchannel in which audience members are responding to what's being presented.

Getting Keynote Tweet up and running is fairly straightforward. Simply download the app, and then add the following entry into the Keychain Access app:

• Keychain Item Name: http://twitter.com
• Account Name: Your email address
• Password: Your Twitter password

Now, with the Keynote Tweet app running, any text between the [twitter] and [/twitter] tags will automatically tweet when that slide is displayed (while in slideshow mode).

For example, "Jay Leno lacks the charm, wit and red headedness of Conan O' Brien" will be tweeted the moment I reach the slide showing the percentage of people that hate Jay Leno.

Keynote Tweet is available as a free download here.

[via IDEO Labs]

I'm the iTunes music pharmacist for my family's iPod and iPhone music libraries. In short, what this means is that, whether it's due to "getting sick of hearing the same thing over and over when I'm running" or wanting a new song or album on their iPod, they come to me when they want their music refilled. Which is fine and dandy. I'm more than happy to do this, and have my trusty ol' 17 inch iMac loaded with everyones' music on it (except mine, which is loaded on my MacBook Pro).

From the 3rd generation iPod classic to the iPhone 3G S, and from The Arcade Fire to ZZ Top, there exists an eclectic iPod and music mix in my family. How I would sync music for each person varied on a case-by-case basis, and usually took shape in syncing specific folders, playlists, smart playlists, and genres. For the iPod shuffle, however, I would typically click on the "music" within the device and choose playlist-based "autofill."

This morning, my sister brought over her shiny new third generation iPod shuffle. And to my surprise, it, unlike its predecessors lacked the "autofill" feature. Or so I thought.

After spending a half hour or so creating a size-limited smart playlist with random songs, I said to myself, "Self, there's gotta be an explanation for this. Surely, the folks at Apple wouldn't leave out something as important as autofill."

And they didn't. They just put it in a different place for the third generation shuffle, and have now extended the feature for all iPods and iPhones.

To enable autofill on your iPod or iPhone, click on "summary" tab for your device (in the "device" section of iTunes). Then place a checkmark on "manually manage music [and videos]."

Now here's where I got lost and confused, and I don't want you to pull out your hair like I almost did mine just because I didn't read the Apple support forums carefully enough. Except for first and second generation iPod shuffle models, the autofill option for all iPods and iPhones is activated by expanding the device (by clicking on that little triangle to the right of it) to reveal its media folder hierarchy. Then, you'll want to click on "music," and now you'll see the autofill option in the bottom left hand corner. The whole time, I thought it'd be located on the "music" tab within the device, much like how it's on the "contents" tab on the second generation iPod shuffle.

Autofill is now available for all iPods and requires iTunes 8.1.

The more you know...Dun, dah, duh, ding.

The iWork suite of apps (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) play nice with each other -- for the most part. Objects such as shapes, text boxes and tables created in one app can easily be copied and pasted onto another and retain their styles. Even an image with an instant alpha filter applied will retain its transparency when pasted onto another iWork app. However, the iWork apps don't always play nice with each other when it comes to charts.

In particular, copying a chart created in Numbers and pasting it onto either a Keynote presentation or Pages document doesn't always bring the chart's legend with it respective to how it looked in Numbers. Sometimes, the legend may be misaligned, and sometimes it may even show up on a completely different page in the document.

To address this annoyance, just highlight all of the elements (the entire chart and the legend, or anything else you want retained) of the chart that you'd like to copy. Then click on Numbers "Arrange" menu and select "Group" (or hit Command-Option-G). Now, the legend of your chart retains its alignment when pasted onto either a Keynote presentation or a Pages document. To alter or undo this, just select "Ungroup" (Command-Option-Shift-G) from the same file menu.

The iTunes Store and App Store have mastered the art of the impulse purchase. "Only two bucks? Sure, why not?" The good news is that you can send a song, album, movie or TV show to a friend just as easily.

Let's start with music. First, find the album or song you'd like to send. If you're sending a song, you'll see a drop-down arrow next to the track's "Buy" button. Click it to reveal the menu at right, then select "Gift this song."

You're brought to a new screen (in the gallery below). From there you only need to enter some information, click continue and you're done! Your recipient will receive a nice email message with a download link. The process is the same for albums, individual TV shows, audiobooks (though the "Gift this audiobook" looks different) and movies.

Note that you can't gift entire TV seasons (bummer) or iPhone/iPod touch apps. However, you can opt to share a link to an interesting app. With the app selected, click the same drop-down button to reveal the "Tell a Friend" option. The same is true of Podcasts - hit that "Tell a Friend" button to let everyone know what you're listening to. With just a few clicks, you can share your favorite content with anyone you want!

Text replacement: it's one of Snow Leopard's really cool features. With it, you can type abbreviations and they'll automatically expand into full text. You can convert your most common phrases into just a few keystrokes, and let Snow Leopard take care of the rest. Here's a quick summary of what you need to do to make text replacement work for you.

Creating Macros in System Preferences.

Open System Preferences (it's in the Apple menu at the top of your screen) and navigate to Language & Text > Text. There you'll find a Symbol and Text Substitution list. Click the + button to add a new item. For this example, put (tuaw) into the Replace column and The Unofficial Apple Weblog into the With column. Leave the box to the left of these items checked.

So why use the parentheses? Strictly speaking, they're not necessary. You can define text substitutions on any set of characters, as shown in the screen shot below. What these parentheses do for me, is that they distinguish between when I want to type TUAW and not have it expand, and when I want the abbreviation to transform into the full Weblog name.



Enabling Text Replacement

Text replacement works on a per-application basis. Many applications default to this feature being off. To make text replacement happen, right-click within any text entry area such as a composition window in Mail or the text entry field in Colloquy, etc. The contextual menu provides a Substitutions submenu. Make sure Text Replacement is checked. If it is not, select it to toggle the option from on to off or off to on.



Applying Text Replacment

The big secret to making text replacement happen, once you've defined the shortcuts and enabled Text Replacement in the contextual menu, is the space key. Snow Leopard does not apply the shortcut replacement until it detects you have finished typing a phrase. Only then does it perform its internal look up and substitution.

Also prepare to wait a second or so. The replacement text often lags behind your typing. So go ahead and keep entering text. The operating system will catch up and perform its substitution work without your oversight.

For Mike G., with TUAW affection

RSS reader support has been a built-in feature of Mail.app since version 3.0 (when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released). Although I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds, I've yet to find the need for a dedicated RSS reader app -- such as Newsgator's NetNewsWire.

I like having my email and news feeds in the same application. By default, RSS feeds that you subscribe to in Mail will appear in their own folder. If you'd like your RSS feeds to appear in your inbox, just click on the upward pointing arrow of an RSS feed(s) within the RSS section in Mail.app.

On the downside, this view of RSS feeds may flood your inbox and be overwhelming, depending on the number and the activity of feeds you're subscribed to. As a result, you may want to be selective in choosing your feeds. However, I've found this view particularly handy with time-sensitive feeds, and have used it on numerous occasions to score in-demand concert tickets (at face value prices, too!) with search-based Craigslist feeds.

I know that many of our readers will be traveling during the holiday season, so I wanted to share a walk-through that will help keep your MacBook of choice connected on the go. This is an article intended for those using iPhones on carriers that do not officially support tethering. TUAW would like to remind you that this is unsupported and is enabled at the user's own risk. This does require jailbreaking your iPhone, so the unadventurous in the audience may want to pass this up. If you're not already jailbroken, you can download the necessary software, like blackra1n from George Hotz or Pwnage from the iPhone Dev Team.

Once you've jailbroken your iPhone, install or open Cydia and navigate to the "Featured Packages" section. Find and install the package named "Modem." That's it on the iPhone side of things, on your computer, navigate to iphonemodem.com and download the helper application or register the application for $9.99 to disable the registration reminder in the iPhone app (As far as we know, the free version is fully functional). Drag iPhoneModem to your Applications folder.

The setup is really that simple. Now all you have to do is open the application on your computer, click connect, then launch the companion app on your iPhone. The iPhone application will find the network your computer creates and share the Wi-Fi connection between the two devices so you can use your iPhone data plan on your laptop for better browsing. Here's how the developers say it works:

On the computer, the helper application creates a new computer-to-computer (or ad-hoc) Wi-Fi network and configures the system preferences to use the iPhone as an Internet gateway and proxy. On the iPhone, the application opens a routing engine, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS proxies and connects to the helper on the computer.

I've had pretty good success with this application in my time with it. I've been using it on and off for over a year -- it's been a great app in clutch situations. I'd recommend it as a virtual stocking stuffer if you have a friend or family member who's jailbroken their iPhone. Let us know your thoughts or your experiences with the app in the comments.

Update

As several commenters have pointed out, there are several other free solutions that seem to be just as easy as iPhoneModem. Please read through the comments to see if any of those solutions suit you better.

Now that the holidays are approaching, you'll probably be asked to service your relatives' computers. "You like computers, right? Will you take a look at this for me?" Prepare yourself, it's coming.

Some fixes are easy, including the stuck disc. It can happen for a variety of reasons that we won't go into here. After all, when the Titanic is sinking, you don't stop to yell at the iceberg. So let's just eject the disc.

The fix is simple. After trying the obvious (hit the eject key, drag the disc into the trash), restart the machine and as it starts up, hold down the mouse button (or trackpad button if the offending Mac is a laptop). The disc should now eject as the Mac continues to start up. If not, you may have optical drive issues to worry about. But chances are you'll get mom's extended edition Murder, She Wrote DVD ejected safe and sound.

I always thought it would be cool if you could customize the background image of the Mac's login screen. That's the image you see behind the login panel when you turn your Mac on (if you have disabled Automatic Login in System Preferences). Why? Because if I could have the login image match my desktop image it would create a more fluid transition if, when I entered my password, the login box would fade away and my desktop and all its items would seamlessly appear. Necessary? No. Cool? Heck, yeah!

Until Apple gets around to building this functionality into the OS, I'm going to show you how to do it on your own.

Step 1: Set your desktop background image. Open up 'Desktop and Screen Saver' in System Preferences and select your desired desktop image.

Did you get in on the recent Dell Mini 10v hackintoshable laptop deal? (Even if you didn't, that $279 regular pricing is still a pretty darn good deal.) Now that Black Friday minis are showing up at the door, TUAW is holding a live Hackintosh clinic to offer peer support and insight. Join Joachim Bean (our newest Hackintosh expert) and Erica Sadun (who has been known to dabble) on Friday, 10 December at 2 AM 11 December at 2 PM Eastern time to chat live. Lend your expertise or ask your questions during this informal peer clinic.

Now that most all Apple computers come with their own built-in iSight, the standalone iSight has taken a bit of a back seat. It always was a gorgeous piece of Apple art, though, and I really wanted to use it in a functional way. An easy way was to attach it to the Mac mini I have in the baby's room, acting as a video baby monitor, but the iSight doesn't do that well in low light, and of course works not at all in no light. And while the audio was just fine, there are some neat new "push on motion" capabilities in camera monitoring software that I liked. It will even record on motion, thanks to today's update.

"Night vision" is predicated on the idea that infrared light bounces off of objects the same way that any other kind of light does, only that our eyes can't see IR light. So while a room could potentially be brightly lit with an infrared light source, you would see only darkness. Fortunately, camera CCDs aren't human eyes and many are as sensitive to IR light as they are to the visible spectrum. So, ostensibly, all you need is an IR light source. Heck, even a television remote control would do the trick, albeit dimly.

The problem is that cameras that are not intended as night-vision cameras have an IR filter built-in so that the camera's reaction is limited to light sources the human eye can see. And, specifically, on the external iSight, that filter is a coating that's bonded to a small block of glass inside the iSight.

Now I had a project. After first scoring a broken iSight on Craigslist, should I need parts, I took the iSight apart, took out the glass block, and removed the IR coating in a quick bath of sulfuric acid. [Do not try this at home unless you know what you are doing, please. –Ed.] You could see the film slide off the glass.

Once the iSight was reassembled and an IR light source applied, bingo! Night vision. The only downside has been that because sulfuric acid is a bit of a blunt-edged instrument (to put it mildly), whatever was giving it the ability to correctly sense the rest of the red is now gone. In the gallery, you can see the result in the last image. Ah well. If I ever want it to return to regular function, I can drop in the intact lens from the broken iSight. But for now, the increased range is a great asset. My iPhone is a little monitor that follows me around the house and pushes notification of any motion.

Special thanks to Jason Babcock, for blazing the trail on iSight tear-downs.