Do you find it annoying when you go to type in an e-mail address or hyperlink into Pages and it automatically thinks you want the text turned into a hyperlink? Well, you can easily change this setting in the preferences.

Just open Page's Preferences (Pages > Preferences, or use command + , (comma) to open preferences). Once there, select the "Auto-Correction" tab and un-check the box labeled "Automatically detect email and web addresses." Now when you start typing a link or e-mail address inside of Pages it will appear as text.

[via New Mac User]

Update: Alas, it looks like I'm going to have to withdraw this one. Do not use this tip, particularly on PPC Macs. Although it worked fine in my initial testing on an Intel Mac, it's becoming clear that this doesn't work for everyone, nor does it persist after a restart. So while I don't think it's dangerous (if you tried this and it didn't work properly, just force-restart the Finder to return things to normal), it is not actually a good solution. See our earlier Ask TUAW post for other, more permanent ways of doing this.

On an older Ask TUAW we were asked how to add the Trash to the Finder sidebar. I pointed to several different solutions to this, but just recently reader DG left a comment on that post with far and away the most elegant solution. Basically, show the Trash folder in the Finder by clicking on the Trash can in the Dock. Next hit ⌘-i to reveal the "Trash Info" window (right). Click on the triangle to reveal the Preview if it's not already visible and then drag the preview icon onto the Finder sidebar and drop it.

This will place the Trash in the sidebar with the proper icon and you can now drag and drop files to the Trash from the Finder. Not only that, the icon will even animate to show whether the trash is empty or not (though it may take a few moments to refresh your Finder window so you can see it).

Thanks, DG!

This whole 'electronic mail' really seems to have taken off with the internets, and we need to rely on it for an increasing amount of communication with email lists, coworkers, friends and more. While many Mail.app users have at least some sort of Rules system for filing messages into folders (or tagging them with Scott Morrison's spectacular MailTags plugin), I have recently been getting cozy with a lesser-known feature that can save a lot of time with hopping between folders. Under Mail.app's File menu is a New Viewer Window option (opt-cmd-n) that opens - drum roll please - a second window in which you can browse through your messages. This is particularly useful if you have a folder (or perhaps a Smart Folder) which you keep checking throughout the day; this way, you can simply keep one viewer open to your inbox (or whatever default location that suits you), with the second viewer set on that other folder. Go up to View > Hide Mailboxes (cmd-shift-m) for either window to give you some extra room to stretch out those From or Subject headings, and you just took another step up the ladder of email zen. Finally: have no fear if you need to quit Mail or restart - Mail remembers your multi-viewer setup and will put everything right back where it belongs the next time your get your email on.

I don't know about you but my iTunes source list gets crowded. Sometimes I just need a little more space for my list. Command-G gives me that space.

Its menu equivalents (View -> Show Artwork and View -> Hide Artwork) aren't exactly hidden features menu-wise but this option isn't as widely known or as widely used as it could be. It's a simple but convenient arrow to add to your arsenal. And, speaking of arrows, did you know that you could click the top bar in the Artwork display to toggle between displaying the Album art for your currently-playing item and your currently-selected item?

This isn't the most advanced tip in the book, but I found the trick darn handy last night while performing some badly needed library cleanup. In iTunes, you can open a second window for almost any item in your sources list on the left - the iTunes Store, a playlist or - interestingly - even a folder of playlists. While your library items such as Music, Movies and TV Shows are unfortunately exempt from this convenience, you can simply double-click any of these items to open them in their own window, minus a source list of their own. This is great for having easy access to playing music in one window while you work in another, perhaps cleaning up files, like I was, shopping at the store, or building a new playlist.

I just recently plunked down some of my sweet, sweet blogging money for a 24 inch Dell monitor (check out my setup) which I am loving. Setting it up with my MacBook running OS X 10.4.8 was very easy (as long as you have one of these). There are a few things that did get me, which I thought I would point out for you readers out there.

Above you see the Arrangement section from the Display preference pane in System Preferences (note that each display will popup its own Display pref pane, but only the main display will have the Arrangement option). This is where you can do a few things:

1. Arrange the displays by dragging the boxes that represent them around
2. Move the Dock and the menu bar to whichever monitor you want to use as you main monitor (as you can see I'm using the 24 incher as my main display)
3. Mirror the output on each display

This is where you should first go when you have multiple monitors, however, the fun doesn't end there.

Yesterday I wanted to do something simple with my MacBook Pro: burn a CD. Nothing fancy, I just had a 200 meg file that I needed to give someone and there wasn't a USB drive to be found, so a CD it was. I inserted my blank CD into my MacBook Pro and nothing happened.

I thought, perhaps, I had a bum CD so I tried a few more (5 to be exact). Each time I got the same result: nothing. I double checked my prefs to make sure I had 'Ask me what to do,' when inserting a blank CD, and I did.

What the heck was going on?

I was running Parallels, and it was being helpful by taking over the CD burner of my Mac, just in case I wanted to burn a CD from Windows. That's why it wasn't showing up in OS X! Luckily, this is a simple thing to fix. If you go to the lower right hand corner of your Parallels window you'll see a little CD icon. Click on it and the menu pictured at the top of this post comes up. Click 'Disconnect.' Boom, OS X sees your blank CD and asks for instructions.

TUAW-lover Andrew accidentally discovered that if you select a file in the Finder and press Apple + Shift + B (aka Command+Shift+B), it brings up the Bluetooth File Exchange application and prompts you for which device you want to send the selected file(s) to.

I love keyboard shortcuts and I know an awful lot of them but this is one that I either never knew or once knew but quickly forgot. Incredibly handy!

Thanks, Andrew!

As I was working on an AppleScript-related post this morning, I couldn't seem to find any TUAW Tips in our vast archives that explained how to enable that AppleScript menubar item (pictured) that is mentioned so often in Mac software circles. This, of course, called for just such a tip.

So: the AppleScript menubar item. It's a very handy tool for accessing all those AppleScripts you hear about that automate this or toggle that. As long as you save those scripts in ~/Library/Scripts (where ~ is your Home folder), they'll appear in this AppleScript menu - once you've enabled it. I personally think this menu item should be included in the default set of every Mac, but I'd wager that Apple sees this as a little too nerdy of a feature to drop on brand new users. Fair enough.

To enable this menu (nerd) in Tiger, go to /Applications/Applescript and open the AppleScript Utility. It offers a few options for handling AppleScripts, including turning on this menu and the order in which the menu displays scripts from both the default system level /Library/Scripts (in your main hard drive) and your personal ~/Library/Scripts folder. If you're on 10.3 (Panther), I *think* you have an /Applications/AppleScript folder, but instead of a full-blown AppleScript Utility app, it's an AppleScript called 'Install Menu' or something similar. Back on Tiger in the AppleScript Utility - you don't worry about the GUI Scripting option unless you come across a script that specifically needs it, though I don't think enabling this for simplicity's sake can harm anything either.

If this process went according to plan, you should now have your very own AppleScript menubar item like I have in the screenshot here. clicking it will offer a simple menu of all the scripts you have between the two directories you chose to display. As long as you enabled your personal Home script directory, any scripts you save there should appear in this menu immediately after saving, ready to carry out your bidding.

With that said, why not check out some of our past AppleScript posts, such as one of my personal favorites: an AppleScript from Fraser Speirs that opens iSync, syncs all your devices (such as a phone or PDA), then quits iSync. If you use an application launcher such as Quicksilver, you can tie handy scripts like these to Triggers (system-wide keyboard shortcuts) for even more convenience.

I don't know whether it's just me, but the one thing that I've always felt was lacking from Spotlight was the ability to quickly and easily reveal the enclosing folder for search results. It was never a major problem, but on the rare occasion when I do use Spotlight, I often seem to need to see the search result's containing folder. Earlier I was looking up a rogue "mds" process which was hogging 60% of my MacBook's CPU when I came across an article on Macintouch, with this little tidbit at the end from Chong-Yee.

"Apple's "Spotlight Tips" page is good, but doesn't include the following tip I discovered. If you want to reveal a file in its enclosing folder from the drop down Spotlight results list, hold down the Command key and click the result."

This is probably something I should have discovered on my own anyway (holding down Command during any action in OS X usually reveals some kind of useful alternative action), but because the problem wasn't so annoying that I felt the need to research it (hence my accidental discovery) I never thought to try. Usually I'd click "show all", and then right click the item and press "reveal in Finder". That usually took a few seconds -- now the process takes less than a single second.

This personal example reminds me of Steve Garfield's entertaining interview with David Pogue (seriously, check out the bit at the end where David sings and plays the piano) where he talks about cool shortcuts that developers put into their work which, for whatever reason, don't make their way in the official documentation.

It appears that while typing a word in many OS X apps, such as iChat and Yojimbo, hitting the Esc key will present a drop-down list of word completion options. I *think* this might be a Cocoa-related service of Mac OS X (sorry, Firefox users), but I'm always hesitant to toss out a guess like that because I am constantly surprised as to which apps are actually Cocoa (Finder, for example, is still Carbon, even in Tiger). I get this popup in Ecto, Stickies and Mail as well, but not in any input areas on websites in Safari, so feel free to experiment with this handy but (as far as I know) undocumented feature.

Dave Caolo showed you how to take control of the Finder's sidebar a couple weeks back. Today, I wanted to shed the same light on the Finder's toolbar, as you can customize it and add some tools not found in a default Mac OS X installation.

The first thing I like to do is add 'other' kinds of folders (and files) up there, such as my Library, that I don't necessarily want in my sidebar. To do this, you can drag a file or folder up next to the buttons in the Finder, and wait a second - you won't receive instantaneous feedback like you do when adding something to the sidebar. After a second or so, the Finder's search box will move over farther to the right (like when you add something to the Dock), signifying that you can now add that item to the toolbar.

You can also add a few more tools to the Finder toolbar by right-clicking on it (just like many other application windows) and choosing "Customize Toolbar." You will be presented with a whole set of handy buttons and actions you can drag and drop to add such as eject, get info, connect to server, burn and more. Even though we covered how to get a file or folder's path by command-clicking on a window's title bar icon, I also like to add the Path button to the Finder's toolbar with this trick for one more level of convenience.

Since I'm willing to bet that I haven't covered all the Finder toolbar tricks, feel free to share yours in the comments.

Menulets are those little menu bar widgets that reside in your menu bar to control such things as monitor resolutions, sound, Airport network selection, and iChat status. While there are ways to enable most of the menulets via System Preferences--for instance, you can enable the Display resolutions menulet from the Displays System Preference pane--there are several that are quite useful that don't have easy ways to get turned on. Two that come to mind immediately are the PPPoE menulet used for connecting/disconnecting to a PPPoE-based DSL service like Verizon, and the Eject menulet which allows you to open the tray or eject CD/DVD from your optical drive without having to use the keyboard's eject button.

Launching a menulet to enable it in the menubar is easy once you know where they are located. For both Panther and Tiger, Apple's system menulets are located in: System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. Double clicking a menulet will enable it in the menu bar.

You can remove a menulet from the menu bar by holding down the Command (Apple) key and dragging the selected menulet off the menu bar. It disappears with a satisfying poof. You can also rearrange the Apple menulets using this same keyboard command and dragging them in the order you desire.

This is a simple little tip to speed up iPhoto a bit. Launch iPhoto and go to iPhoto's preferences. Choose 'Appearance' and you'll see something like the above pop open (this screen shot was taken with a copy of iPhoto 6, iPhoto 5 will look slightly different).

Uncheck both 'Outline' and 'Drop shadow.' Slide the 'Background' all the way to White, and you should notice that iPhoto will startup a little faster. This tip helps with iPhoto 5's performance mostly, but if you want a real performance gain upgrade to iPhoto 6. That puppy really zips along on my iMac G5.

Today's tip is all about your Finder sidebar. I've altered mine a bit from the default setup to better accommodate the way I work. The first thing I do is to remove the Movies, Music and Pictures folders. They're really only a single click away from my home folder, plus I use iTunes to manage my music and videos, and iPhoto handles my photos. So I rarely need to go poking around those folders manually. To remove a folder or other item from your sidebar, simply click and drag it out of the list, then let go and it's gone.

Next, I've brought in my current projects. To add an item to the sidebar, simply click and drag it into place. A thin, blue line appears between existing items. Drop it in and you're all set.The four folders you see below my "Documents" folder contain the files that are currently receiving all of my attention. Now they're only a click away, no matter where I've navigated to in the Finder.

The "Trash" is actually a super simple Apple Script that reads:

on open
tell the application "Finder"
move the selection to the trash
end tell
end open

I saved my script as an application, moved it to my "Documents" folder, gave it a sweet icon from The Iconfactory and dragged it into my sidebar. Anything dropped onto it will be moved to the trash. Finally, my Quickdrop folder is where I store all the junk that I accumulate during the day (I like a clean desktop). At the end of the day, I decide what I want to keep from in there, move those items to their proper locations and send the rest to the trash.