Smart playlists have been a feature of iTunes since version 3.0 (circa 2002), and they provide a means for you to create automatically-updated playlists that fit a certain criteria. For me, they serve as a hands-off way to stay up-to-date on my latest music and Podcasts, as well as a repository for a certain genre of music. To create a smart playlist, click on "File" and select "New Smart Playlist" (or you can use the command-option-n keyboard shortcut).

If you want a playlist that contains only holiday music, you could specify that the playlist include all songs with either the "Christmas" or "Chanukah" genre tag on it. Because smart playlists auto-update, you needn't worry about adding songs to it: as long as the track's tags meet the criteria, it is automatically included in the playlist -- unless, of course, you choose the "limit to" option, which limits the the tracks in the playlist based on your choosing.

Read more for five of my favorite smart playlists, as well as criteria for how to create them.

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Mobile Me's Find My iPhone is a wonderful (relatively) new feature which can help track down your iPhone if it is lost or stolen, but it is not foolproof, and it must be configured before you need it.

Q: "Is it true that Find My iPhone does not work if you have 3G turned off or lose your iPhone where there is no 3G service available (EDGE only)?"

A: False. Find My iPhone works with the original iPhone, which did not even have 3G or GPS capabilities, so it does work with EDGE. If you have a 3G-capable iPhone and disable the 3G (Settings > General > Enable 3G > OFF) to save battery life, "Find My iPhone" will continue to work.

Q: "Will find my iPhone work over WiFi?"

A: True... sort of... Maybe... Not really. In my home I have very little or no AT&T service (or Sprint, or Verizon, or any other cell provider). I do have WiFi all over the house, and Find My iPhone has never failed to help me locate my iPhone when it is "lost" in my house. In order to test it purely over Wi-Fi, I put the iPhone into Airplane Mode (meaning that both EDGE and 3G were both disabled) and enabled Wi-Fi. I asked "Find My iPhone" to locate my iPhone and was told that it was near Orlando, Florida. It was, in fact, in Ohio. I repeated the test and it came back with the same information. Later, I tried the "Wi-Fi only" test from my home, and Find My iPhone could not find my location at all.

However, even in Airplane + Wi-Fi mode I was able to use the "Display a Message" and "Remote Passcode Lock" features. So you may not be able to locate it on a map, but you still may be able to connect to it.

Proper setup is your first crucial step

All of this is a moot point if you don't have three crucial settings enabled on your iPhone. Without any one of these, Find My iPhone will not work.

1. Settings > General > Location Services has to be on (this one is obvious, right?)
2. Under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > (Your Mobile Me account), you must set "Find My iPhone" to ON. This is not enabled by default.
3. Under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, you must either enable Push OR have fetch set to Every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or Hourly. If you disable Push and set Fetch to "Manually" Find My iPhone will not work.

One of the great torments of owning several computers is keeping all of your personal data in sync; having multiple copies of the same application speak the same jive. Take The Hit List, for example. I use this app on my MacBook Pro at work for organizing tasks and collecting thoughts like a virtual inbox to my brain. At the end of the day I need a way to get all the day's notes from my laptop into my home desktop, which also happens to be running THL as well. What to do?

The ideal solution is to get each machine sharing the same THL database file synced to the cloud, instead of a locally rooted file. Fortunately, there is an way to do just this, and all that is required is for each machine to be running Dropbox. By now all of you should be using this amazingly awesome free service for saving and sharing data to the cloud. If you haven't yet opened an account, and downloaded and installed the Mac desktop client, go now. It's ok, I'll wait. Got it? Good, now let's do this.

First, you need to locate THL's main database file which can be found hiding in /Users/userprofile/Library/Application Support/The Hit List. Look for a file called The Hit List Library.thllibrary. Find it? Good, now simply drag this file to your Dropbox folder. Hold on, we're not quite done yet. Here's where the magic happens.

Hold down the option key while launching The Hit List. A dialog window will appear, asking what the hell you've just done with its library. Just select "Choose Library" and point it the file located in your Dropbox folder. You must repeat this part of the process on every machine running THL. That's it!

There is one small caveat. It's a good idea to always ensure that Dropbox has fully synced all of your local changes before loading THL on another machine, or else you risk losing your most recent data. Be wise to this and you'll have no troubles at all. You're welcome.

By the way, if you use Things rather than The Hit List for your task management, be sure to see our previous post about how to sync it using Dropbox as well.

Quick Look is such an awesome feature of Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, making it really fun and easy to view files and folders from anywhere on your Mac. But what happens when you have a folder with multiple items and want to get a better idea of what's inside? Well, you could always just open the folder in Finder, but there's a cool modification you can make to get an even quicker view.


You can get this working on your Mac in a few simple steps:

1. Quit/Relaunch Finder using the Force Quit menu
2. Open Terminal
3. Paste (or type) the following command: defaults write com.apple.Finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1
4. Relaunch Finder

The contents of the folder will now be shown when you use Quick Look. In true Apple elegance, the files will even fade and cycle through the contents.

[via Mac OS X Hints]

1Password is one of my very favorite and most essential Mac utilities. Combined with Dropbox, I can have all of my login information synced to all of my Macs.

The other day I noticed that 1Password had gained a lot of weight, specifically around the backups area. I'm not usually one to comment on such things, but we weren't talking about "love handles," 1Password's backups had gone from 1MB to 21MB literally overnight. On August 28th, the backups were 1MB, and on August 29th, the backups were suddenly 21MB.

Wait? Did you say August 28th? Isn't that when Snow Leopard was released? Yes it was. And wasn't that when you switched from 1Password version 2 to 1Password version 3? Yes it was. Could that have something to do with it?

I contacted 1Password's excellent support staff who correctly diagnosed that the increase was related to the preview images which are used for Login and Software License icons. (These can be found in the 1Password.agilekeychain/a/default/thumb folder.) Each preview image take about 100K. With 600+ items in my agilekeychain, this quickly added up.

Fortunately, this is easily fixed. If disk space is a concern, the icons and previews can be deleted using 1Password > Preferences > General > Remove all icons and previews. I also unchecked the box next to "Automatically download icons and previews for new Logins." After I did that, the backup size went from 21.5MB to 889KB!

Why worry about space with today's hard drive spaces? I have 1Password set to backup to my Dropbox account, which is limited to a total of 5GB. Plus this meant having to upload 20+MB every day versus <1MB. Personally I neither use nor need the icons, so it's no loss to me, and it makes a big difference.

Many thanks to the 1Password folks for helping me get to the bottom of this mystery!

After my post earlier this week about transmitting Mac audio, readers contacted me about extending this solution. Although they liked the idea of direct audio while working out on a treadmill or exercise bike, several stated that they also wanted to watch from the sofa once the spouse or the kid go to sleep. The idea was the same: audio transmission to an iPhone or iPod touch. The source was different. They wanted to watch live cable TV or their TiVo. And for the punchline, their media center Mac lacks a tuner. Was there a similar quiet Mac-based solution that would let them transmit the TV audio from these non-Mac sources?

If your Mac has a microphone jack, internal or even through an external USB solution, the answer is yes. You can easily connect your TV audio to your Mac just like you would connect it to a pair of speakers. Run a cable between a spare audio output (modern TVs usually offer more than one, if not, you can use a splitter) to the microphone jack on the Macintosh. On my low-end TV, this means an RCA stereo cable that feeds to a standard stereo minijack plug.

Setting up the Mac host is simple. Instead of feeding audio via Soundflower, as described in the earlier post, choose your microphone audio input in the Skype settings. Start a call to your iPhone or iPod touch, switch the TV source (usually via a "Source" button that picks which signal to watch, such as Composite 1, Component 2, etc.) to your normal cable or TiVo input. Set the external speaker volume to zero. The signal arrives at the Mac microphone independently of those speakers.

You may find that the audio out signal tends to be on the low side. Many TV speakers provide their own amplification. If this is a problem for you, you can hook in an inline amplifier. (I use an old Radio Shack 277-1008C.) Alternatively, you can boost the audio via a third party program like Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro.

This solution takes a few more cables, components, and connections than the Mac Audio-to-iPhone through Skype set-up discussed in the earlier post. But if you have the cables on-hand already, it offers an inexpensive solution compared to many other wireless TV headsets on the market right now.

Earlier this month, I wrote about connecting my old Mac mini to my television . My mini offers a great Apple TV-style lifestyle with none of the Apple TV limitations. It's a real Mac running real Snow Leopard, albeit on an older, admittedly limited mini. I have Front Row, EyeTV, QuickTime, and more, all ready to entertain me on demand, as well as standard system access to mail, web browsing, etc.

The sound in my living room is powered by a couple of speakers that shipped with an ancient computer monitor. Their audio works fine for close-up TV watching and Wii playing. Move across the room and those speakers prove how limited they are. Add in a treadmill with its motor noises, and the sound decreases to virtually nothing.

So how can one listen to those great shows that are playing back on that lovely large screen across the room, especially when walking or jogging on the treadmill? I messed around with several solutions until I stumbled across one that really worked well for me. Using my home's 802.11g Wi-Fi network, I could call my iPhone from my Mac using Skype. With only the most minimal of lags, I was able to transmit live audio and watch my favorite shows on the Mac while listening on the iPhone from my treadmill.

Read on to learn how I accomplished this...

When iTunes 9 changed the behavior of the green "maximize" button to shrink the player to the mini player, I adapted quickly. Option-clicking is pretty easy to do since the option key (unlike control) is on both sides of my laptops' keyboards. But I forgot that option-clicking the green button on windows in OS X does other things too.

For many applications, simply option-clicking the green button will "maximize" all the open windows of that application. Of course, maximize behaves differently in some applications. For example, option-clicking the green button in Safari makes all the open pages taller, but not wider. That's by design in Safari, and I rather like it. If you come from Windows, however, you'll be mortified that the window does not occupy the entire screen. In Firefox, it does indeed maximize to fill the screen. It's a matter of preference, but the key point: option-click will max all open windows of that application. Some are "smarter" than others.

As our last trick, try option-clicking the green button Calculator. It toggles between the expanded, scientific calculator to the programmer's calculator to regular calculator. Neat!

More Xcode daily tips for Mac and iPhone developers.

Back in the old times, when dinosaurs roamed the earth (and used less sophisticated IDEs), Interface Builder offered a built-in class browser as part of the project window. This browser allowed to you navigate through the Objective-C class hierarchy, and add subclasses along with instance variables and methods. You could generate files from those classes as a skeleton for further development.

Then for a while, the class browser went away. And it was missed. But it is back again. New to Xcode 3.2, the Interface Builder Library pane hosts an updated class browser. This new subpane combines features that have recently been in the Class Identity Inspector (namely, adding outlets and actions to a class) with the ability to generate new subclasses from existing classes.

So how does it work? I may be a brontosaurus but I prefer the old style browser to the new style "Lineage" display shown here. The new pane is certainly pretty, and it fits in well with the Library pane concept of collecting elements that are universally used throughout a project, but it lacks a certain ease-of-browsing that the old tree-style presentation used to give.

All aesthetic and usability concerns aside, it's important to know that the Outlets/Actions interface has moved from its prior home into a new one. The interaction objects remain essentially unchanged. Use the + button to add outlets and actions, the - button to delete them. Double-click the default types to change them to a different class.

You can locate a class by entering a string into the search field at the bottom of the pane. The pop-down action menu on the bottom-left offers a number of class-related functions including subclassing, displaying group banners in the class list, writing out updated class files, and more.

More Xcode 3.2 tips for Mac and iPhone developers.

The LLVM/Clang static analyzer bundled with the Snow Leopard developer tools automatically detects a variety of memory management bugs in Objective-C programs. It's a terrific tool for finding memory leaks and other issues and it is now easily available to all developers, both for the Macintosh and iPhone platforms.

I first learned about using the analyzer with iPhone projects from a blog post by Joe Heck of rhonabwy.com. Heck pointed out that the Intel-only analyzer worked with the Intel-based Simulator code generated by the iPhone SDK, letting you use the analyzer with your iPhone projects.

At that time, you had to download a copy of the analyzer, install it by hand, and run it from the command line. It was amazingly helpful but a bit of a pain to use.

No more. Xcode 3.2 incorporates the static analyzer tool directly into its IDE. Choose Build > Build and Analyze (Command-Shift-A) and the analyzer automatically checks your code. and presents any bugs detected by the analyzer. Static analysis evaluates source code to automatically find bugs, issuing hints that are similar in nature to compiler warnings but targeted at Foundation (Cocoa) and Core Foundation memory management.

Each bug is marked with a blue icon and a description. I do wish that the text didn't seem to "cut off" so abruptly. Resizing the Xcode editor window does not affect the hard right alignment of the bug reports. This bug refers to the local watcher variable, which is allocated and initialized but not released.

The tool is not perfect. It may flag nonexistent "bugs" in programs, so there are definitely false positive results that will show up as well as gray areas. In this example, the watcher is used until the application teardown, so the fact that it's leaking is not really a problem. That having been said, the analysis is amazingly helpful and if you do find real bugs, the Clang Static Analyzer team solicits bug reports.

To learn more about your bug, click the blue branch icon in the code itself. The analyzer offers a detailed view of the bug and its issues. This presentation provides more information about the specifics of the issue at hand.

In this detail view, clicking any single blue arrow opens the Build Results pane, showing the analyzer result list. Hide or show analyzer information by clicking the blue branch icon in the left gutter.

It's easy to overlook the new built-in static analysis feature of Xcode 3.2, but you'd be missing out on a great feature if you didn't explore it further.

For those about to code, we salute you.

Developers: are you ready to upgrade your new Snow Leopard install to Xcode 3.2? The Xcode installer package appears in your Snow Leopard disc's Optional Installs folder. Double-click the mpkg file to open the installer and begin the installation process.

Xcode 3.2 offers a number of really great new features, several of which will be highlighted in upcoming daily tips. Standouts include the new built-in static code analysis, the two new LLVM compiler front ends (GCC 4.2 and Clang), and the new Build Results window.

Until you install, you may run into problems using the standard C compiler from the command line. (It threw errors about not finding <stdio.h>, etc.) This despite the fact that I had already re-installed the iPhone SDK.

Once I upgraded to the new Xcode, and rebooted, the command line cc started working again. The reboot step seemed necessary because cc didn't work until I did so. There might have been a less extreme alternative I'm not aware of to use instead. (If you know of one, please let me know in the comments!)

You'll need to re-install your iPhone SDK packages as well. Make sure you download the SDK versions that were built specifically for Snow Leopard. The iPhone Dev Center provides both Leopard and Snow Leopard SDKs for each of its standard and beta distributions. Install these packages after upgrading to Xcode 3.2. I did not and ran into trouble with project creation (as well as the already mentioned command line cc) until I finally got the install order corrected.

Update: Remember, the iPhone SDK packages do not include Xcode 3.2, so just downloading the iPhone SDK for Snow Leopard will not upgrade Xcode.

Thanks go to hatfinch for his help.

As all of us are starting to get familiar with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, we're starting to find little features that aren't immediately visible and are pretty cool!

My first surprise came when one application asked me to make sure that my date and time settings were correct. I dutifully popped into System Preferences, clicked on the Date & Time preferences pane, clicked on the Time Zone tab, and noticed a couple of things that were different:
First, the time zone I'm in (Mountain) was highlighted and as I moved my cursor left and right, a "ghost" appeared for whatever time zone I was currently over (see arrow above). That in itself wasn't anything great, but the check box at the top -- Set time zone automatically using current location (see oval above) -- was intriguing so I clicked on it. The map went to shades of gray, and then Snow Leopard used the SkyHook Wireless's Wi-Fi positioning service to figure out where I was.

One of the little frustrations in my everyday use of Leopard was the way it searched in folders. When in a Finder window, there was a handy-looking search box in the upper right-hand corner. I would place the cursor, type my query, and be annoyed by the fact that OS X searched my entire Mac.

Nooo. If I wanted to search the whole thing, I would have asked to search the whole thing.

Thank goodness Snow Leopard fixes this minor workflow speed bump. Now you can choose what you'd like to use as a default: Search This Mac or Search the Current Folder. You can even say "I'll have another" by choosing to Use the Previous Search Scope.

Unfortunately the default out-of-the-box action is still set to look everywhere on your Mac. But don't worry, it's easy to change.

1. Make sure Finder is your active app (either click on the Finder icon in the dock, click the desktop or a visible Finder window, or cmd-Tab to switch to the Finder).
2. Choose Preferences in the Finder menu. Or you can just use the Command-comma key combo to invoke Preferences.
3. In Finder Preferences, click on the Advanced tab.
4. Choose your desired search scope from the drop-down menu under the heading "When performing a search."
5. Close the Preferences and enjoy a search or two.

That's it. Just one example of the many little changes in Snow Leopard that make life with the OS easier and more efficient. I hope you find what you're looking for!

Let's face it, contact management is a pain. Address Book in OS X is a good tool, but one often overlooked feature is the "Smart Group" -- a way of quickly organizing your contacts together. If you're familiar with Smart Playlists in iTunes, it's the same but with contact info.

To start a Smart Group, go to File > New Smart Group. A dialog will drop down in Address Book for you to start entering criteria for filtering. For example, you could create a group of everyone whose birthday you have in your contacts by choosing the item Birthday from the first drop-down menu item, then adding the menu item "is set." Note that you can't create a list of people with birthdays in June, which is a bummer. But the Smart Groups have a variety of ways to filter, some more useful than others and several are dependent on the data (dates vs. text, for example).

To delete a group you'll have to make a trip to the menus, as no amount of right-clicking or key pressing will do it. Delete is in the Edit menu, under Delete Group.

One more thing: the notes field in Address Book extends the power of Smart Groups just a bit. After returning from WWDC I added the business cards of people I met and added the note "wwdc" to each one. I then made a Smart Group where the Note contains 'wwdc' and now I've got an easy way to see the group of people I met at WWDC. Think of the Notes field as a loose tag field, if you like.

I've also set up my Address Book to add family members based on a list of surnames, but that may only work if you have an oddball last name like mine!

Are you tired of all of those icons from screenshots you've taken cluttering up space on your desktop? If you would like them in a different place when you snap them, here's a command to change the location.

Using the Terminal, enter the following command to change the location:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures

This snippet will change the default location of saving the screenshot to the Pictures folder. You can also set this location to any folder or volume on your Mac, just substitute ~/Pictures in this command to whatever you want. Once you've run this command, you'll need to restart the SystemUIServer (used to control certain interface elements in Mac OS X), by entering killall SystemUIServer in the Terminal.

If you don't want to use the Terminal, many of the popular Mac maintenance utilities, including OnyX (free). TinkerTool (free), and Cocktail ($14.95), will allow you to change the location of snapped screenshots.

If you're snapping a lot of screenshots, changing the location can be very useful, especially if you're on a portable Mac with limited disk space. Each screenshot can sometimes be over 1MB in size, so if you're tight on space it can be a good idea to store your screenshots elsewhere, like on an external hard drive.

There's also a handy suggestion from our own TJ Luoma: redirect your screenshots to a cached/synchronized folder, like the Pictures folder on your iDisk (if you have iDisk Sync turned on) or a folder in your Dropbox, Live Mesh or SugarSync directories for instant screenshot sharing among multiple machines.