Flexibits has just released Cameras, an application designed to manage multiple camera hookups on your Mac. With Cameras, you can direct which programs launch when you connect any number of photo-related devices to your computer; including digital cameras, the iPhone or a digital media reader.

Cameras installs a preference pane in System Preferences. The first time you connect a new device to your Mac and start to sync it, the device will show up in the preference panel. From there, you can choose what that individual camera does when connected. It's a simple, great application for managing different cameras and keeps unwanted programs from opening when you connect them and works well when multiple devices are developed.

Cameras is a free download and requires OS X. 10.4.11 or later.

There are two types of Mac users: the mouse-centric, the keyboard jockeys, and those who refuse to sleep with Windows users. OK, three types.

This tip is for users like me whose knowledge of each application's set of keyboard shortcuts is prodigious. Even we get stumped occasionally when a shortcut doesn't work as expected or is simply missing. This is very easily remedied.

In the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane in System Preferences, you'll see a little "+". Click it, identify the application you're after and type the name of your target menu item. Next, simply pick a shortcut, click "Add" and you're done! You shortcut is in place and you can avoid another time consuming journey from your home keys to your mouse.

A little while back, I posted about some undocumented SpringBoard settings on the iPhone. Many readers seemed to enjoy learning about these settings, but they wanted to avoid performing the esoteric property list edits needed to adjust them.

In response, I give you the following: controls that actually show up in your Settings application and allow direct manipulation. Here's what you need to do. You will need secure shell access to your iPhone's command line (ssh).

1. Start by backing up your /Applications/ Preferences.app/ Settings-iPhone.plist file. Make sure you copy the file to a safe place so you can recover it if needed.
2. Replace that file with http://pastie.textmate.org/124408. Copy the entire property list from the field at the bottom of the screen and paste it into a new text file. Rename that file to Settings-iPhone.plist and place it in /Applications/Preferences.app.
3. Run settings, and voila! I divided the settings into two groups. The first group works instantly and you can immediately see their results. For the second group, you must restart SpringBoard (my restart utility may help) for the settings to take effect.

TUAW reader Simon wrote in to us, to share one of his favorite new Leopard features--and its unexpected consequences. After clicking on an All Images search, he was astonished to find any number of odd gifs and jpgs pertaining to, um, Viagra, and er, male enhancement. He quickly realized that All Images was displaying bits (and we do mean bits) from Mail's download cache. This means that although he set Mail to not download HTML images, they're getting downloaded anyway. Simple annoyance or possible security breech? You tell us in the comments.

While poking around at my favorite new app for getting a lot of my writing done, I found a way to enable a bit more control when creating new entries. By default, Journler has this 'Use quick entry creation' preference checked under the Advanced pane, which allows you to create a new entry using the date as a title and the cursor inserted in the body of the entry, ready to rock 'n roll. Unchecking this pref, however, will instead present you with the dialog you see pictured, prompting you to edit the title, category, tags and other aspects of the entry before you get down to work. It all depends on how you want to get writing, but toggling this option can definitely give more power over creating entries to those who are using Journler for more than, well, a daily Journal.

Everybody has programs that are pretty much always open (Mail, iTunes, Quicksilver, etc.), so it's good to have them launch automatically at startup. There are a couple of different ways to do this. If the program is already running you can hold down your (left) mouse button on its Dock icon and choose "Open at Login" from the pop up menu. However, the best way to manage these is in "Login Items" tab of the Accounts Preference Pane in your System Preferences. Here you can manually add login items. In fact, in addition to adding login items (just by clicking the plus sign), you can also remove anything you don't want (with the minus). It's useful to scan the list periodically and remove anything you don't commonly use (sometimes developers, e.g. Adobe, will put things in there without asking). Removing these unused items can free up system resources for more useful things. But be careful that you do not remove anything important (basically if you don't know what it is, don't remove it). In addition to adding applications to the login items tab, you can also add Volumes to mount on login, including network mounts. Just mount the network drive first in the Finder, then after hitting the plus sign select it and it will be placed on the list, as you can see for my WebDAV mount above.

I like a relatively neat Desktop. I keep out just those items I need to access right away for my day-to-day work. It's so easy to clutter Finder, especially when you use multiple hard drives and partitions, an iPod, a memory card reader and the odd CD or DVD. An often-overlooked Finder preference can come to the rescue.

To hide volumes on your Desktop, choose Finder -> Preferences (or just type Command-, when Finder is active). In the General tab, choose which items you want to show on your Desktop. Place a check next items you want to see or clear the checkboxes to hide items. You can always bring hidden items back by updating your preferences later.

And don't forget: whether you hide disks or CDs on your desktop, they're always there on the side drawer of your Finder windows where you'll find all hard drives, servers, removable media and so forth.

Apple has updated their My Info site to allow more Apple ID editing goodness. It's been a while since I've taken a crack at changing any of this information, but last I remember, it wasn't possible to change the actual email correspondence address of one's Apple ID. The My Info site offers a slim, effective UI for adjusting your contact and shipping info, as well as setting your Apple communication preferences (do you want email/mail/phone calls, etc.). Too bad there isn't a new option called "alert me the next time you're about to rev one of your products 15 days after I buy the old 'n busted model."

Thanks Brandon M

WiLMa is a utility for adjusting various settings like Mail servers, default printers and even desktop wallpaper based on which Location you're using (check your Apple menu if you're unfamiliar with the Location menu). WiLMa can even open and close applications and set a default network to join. If you're a nomad who bounces from places like work, school, home and who knows where else, this could be quite a handy utility, though it isn't without at least one disadvantage: it runs as an application, which means you need to have it in your dock if its corresponding menubar item will be accessible. Location X, by comparison, is more of a daemon that runs in the background, watching which Location you're using and automatically adjusting these settings to your preferences, without the need for an app to run in the dock.

Of course, with WiLMa's more attractive $12 price tag (Location X is $20), Universal Binary status and unique features, WiLMa definitely has a good thing going for it. A demo is available from Codehackers.

Location Switch is an Automator action that adds some painfully missing features to Mac OS X's built-in Locations option (y'know, that feature you never touch in the Apple menu?). Location Switch can a whole host of application preferences and settings based on which location you chose, such as sound volume, SMTP servers, default printer, etc. Before you use it, however, the action requires some customization on your part, so check out the accompanying ReadMe file for instructions, and open the action in Automator to give it your personal touch.

Location Switch is available free from Automator World, but if you enjoy it, consider sending its creator, Charles Schoenfeld, a donation at his site.

[via Hawk Wings]

Opera, the little browser that could (and did - go free, that is), has finished its beta and reached version 9, going Universal in the process. New features include:

• a built-in BitTorrent client
• adding your favorite search engines to Opera's search bar simply by right-clicking them
• site-specific preferences for cookies, pop-ups, etc.
• thumbnail previews of tabs when hovering over them
• widgets (hey, at least they didn't call 'em 'gadgets')
• customizable content blocker
• and more

This version definitely seems snappier now that it's Universal, and (say what you have to) these new enhancements like a built-in BitTorrent client show that Opera is blazing a trail faster than its competition. Give this version a whirl if you haven't touched Opera in a while but are still curious about it. If you need help with a browser transition, why not check out some of the del.icio.us tools (like my personal favorite: Delibar) we've blogged that take the 'bookmarks bar' out of the browser and into Mac OS X's menubar, removing the need for worrying about which browser you're using.

Maintenance, the Automator action that performs many system repair and clean-up tasks, has been updated to version 3.5. New features include:

• Ability to automatically restart after Maintenance has run
• Ability to automatically view the results file
• Time stamp added to results file

Also, for a few versions now, Maintenance has included an AppleScript that I believe performs the same tasks for pre-Tiger 10.4 versions of Mac OS X. Included with the download is a ReadMe PDF that explains what each task is and when/why you should run them.

Maintenance is free and available from Automator World.

Today's "what were you thinking, Apple?" is brought to you by the .Mac System Preference pane, iSync and that "Sync Services wants to sync more than X% of your items" popup window.

In case you can't figure out the silliness that is the image I've included with this post (and I don't blame you), it's a combination of the .Mac System Preference Pane (on left), the .Mac tab of iSync (bottom right), and iSync's preferences that allow me to chose the Data Change Alert percentage threshold (top left).

I recently added about 200 notes to Yojimbo on my iMac that I exported out of an old copy of StickyBrain a while ago. On my PowerBook, this obviously triggered the .Mac Sync warning of "you're about to change more than 5% of your data, are you sure you want to do this?" dialog. I then thought to myself: "hmm, since I change a lot of my .Mac stuff on a regular basis, maybe I should increase that percentage so this dialog doesn't bother me again."

I haven't done this in a while, but since I came up through Jaguar and Panther I was used to tweaking .Mac stuff in iSync. So I strolled on over to the .Mac tab in iSync to - oh but wait! As you can see in the bottom right of my screenshot, it sounds like iSync is no longer used to manage .Mac information. Woops, my mistake. Maybe I should open up the .Mac System Preference pane to - wait a minute... I don't see any place in that preference pane to tweak the Data Change Alert setting!

By now you probably get where I'm going with this, so I'll just leave you with a question: how on earth did this happen, Apple? With Tiger, you said that you unified and improved the .Mac user experience... by sending me to three different locations and preference systems to get this figured out?

Here's hoping Leopard brings with it the Mac-daddy (haha) of updates to one of your most-pimped features of OS X.

Yesterday Quicksilver started acting a little goofy, and I wasn't surprised; I have just about every beta and extra turned on as I just can't stop exploring all the neat stuff this app can do. During my troubleshooting efforts I resorted to the simple trick of quitting Quicksilver and simply moving its preference file (located with other preference files in ~/Library/Preferences) to my desktop, forcing Quicksilver to re-create a clean new preference file. This fixed the issue, but it also forced me to dive back into my preferences to tweak, toggle and change some of the options I use to make Quicksilver do what I want.

That experience made me realize, however, that part of the Quicksilver learning curve for new users really is to get to know its preferences, since they act as a handy springboard into what Quicksilver is capable of. A lot of fantastic tutorials, like those at 43 Folders and Blacktree's own site (the makers of Quicksilver), sometimes assume that you already know what you're doing with Quicksilver. Another complication is that the actions (and sometimes plugins) used in these tutorials are not installed or enabled by default. Some of the email actions - for example the "send item immediately" action that allows you to email an item to someone without ever touching a mail composition window - are oddly not enabled in a default Quicksilver installation, which means a user has to open Quicksilver's preferences (once invoked, a quick cmd - , does the trick) and dig around in the Actions section to find what they need. Ultimately, I figure there are three key areas of Quicksilver's preferences that might help new or aspiring but confused users get their feet grounded: Catalog, Actions and Plugins, and here is a brief explanation of each:

• Catalog - this is a pretty straight-forward list of everything Quicksilver keeps track of on your Mac. Looking through the Catalog and the Actions preference panel should help you get a grasp of what items Quicksilver can find and manipulate, and then how you can manipulate them.
  
• Actions - this is a list of the defining ability that separates Quicksilver from mere seek-and-find applications. Actions allow you to do something with the item you have found, far above and beyond simply opening it. Actions are (loosely) categorized to help you find your way around: Address Book actions allow you to do more with your contacts, Text actions (an optional plugin) allow you to do things like looking up word definitions right from within Quicksilver and appending text to a file buried somewhere, etc. If this panel doesn't excite your inner productivity geek, you should consider consulting your physician.
  
• Plugins - Quicksilver is highly, highly plugin-able, which is where even more of its beauty radiates from. Plugins for Backpack, alternative browser bookmarks, the Mac OS X Keychain, NetNewsWire headlines, a multiple-item clipboard, hundreds of web search engines and much, much more all have your name written on them. Go wild.

Quicksilver is one of the few apps that is so different and powerful that the classic "just open and play with it" phrase might not be enough for some users to grasp what's going on. If you are one of these users, I hope this brief explanation will help you to take your first step into the wide, wonderful universe of Quicksilver.

Chax is one of those addons that makes you go "ahhh, at least someone's listening." This is a powerful, feature-packed and altogther necessary preferences plugin for iChat. The developer's site offers a lengthy list of features this fantastic plugin brings to the table, but for now, here's a short rundown to get your mouses clicking:

• Save and restore window positions for individual screen names (To Kent Sutherland, the developer: I cannot thank you enough for this. The fact that iChat doesn't already do this is just plain silly.)
• Display Address Book nicknames instead of full names
• Option to auto-accept text chats, skipping new message notification window
• Option to open images sent through direct connect directly in Preview (thank you!!)
• Unread message notification in the dock
• Change the delay of or disable auto-away (thank you!!)
• New message windows cascade properly instead of always appearing on top of each other
• Built-in log viewer

There are over 25 features that Chax enables, all wrapped up in its own clean, easy to use preference pane that is simply added to iChat's preferences. Kent also offers a list of upcoming features on his site, but I'd like to echo one of his requests: please don't ask him for tabbed chatting. Developers like him are (usually) under enough pressure as it is, which brings me to a request of my own: this plugin is free, but please consider donating if you wind up appreciating it even half as much as I do. Great stuff like this really deserves some love, and PayPal for some reason doesn't do hugs yet.

[via MacOSXHints]