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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Ever since I installed Snow Leopard, I've been dealing with a particularly annoying bug. Terminal keeps forgetting my shell preferences.

I generally prefer to use tcsh rather than bash. This is mostly because I'm a technological dinosaur. I also have a lot invested into my ancient and extensive .cshrc that has taken years to grow and develop.

Normally, I set the default shell inside the Terminal app preferences. But there's a problem. Snow Leopard keeps losing my preferences for reasons I do not begin to understand. With this Snow Leopard bug, I had to find another approach for choosing my shell. Terminal preferences were no longer going to work for me.

There are actually two very good ways to handle this problem.

First, there's chsh, as pointed out by Richard Buckle and Brian "Shmit" this morning. A command line utility, chsh edits the OS X user database, allowing you to change a user's default shell. chsh is built into OS X, and you can pull up a man page to read details about its use. Supply the shell you want to use, authenticate, and you're set. There is, however, an easier solution.

It's System Preferences. As Bill Bumgarner and Jordan Breeding reminded me today, you can access advanced user settings by right-clicking (or Ctrl-clicking) a user name in the Accounts settings; then choose Advanced Options. (Please note that you must first unlock the settings before this trick becomes available.)

When selected, an Advanced Options screen appears. You can set the new login shell in this screen. A simple pop-up list offers easy access to all installed shells. Select the one you want to use and, once selected, click OK to dismiss the screen and return to the Accounts settings pane.

This solution works a lot better than the bash .profile approach I had been using for a few weeks. Running tcsh through the .profile initialization file had caused an extra layer of interaction each time I wanted to close a terminal window. The application warned me that I was about to kill a running process (i.e. my tcsh subprocess). Changing my default shell meant I could create and close windows on demand without that extra dialog, a welcome respite.

In conclusion, while I'm not sure why Terminal keeps losing its preferences, I'm pleased that I at least learned a way to bypass the shell issue. Hopefully, Apple will get this bug fixed soon.

Snow Leopard introduced many welcome changes to Leopard and one huge annoyance. When copying an email address from Mail, Snow Leopard wraps the address in "< >" brackets, for example, "<annoying@email.com>". When pasting, you've got to go back and remove the brackets.

Mac Daddy World has identified the preference setting and posted the simple Terminal commands that will eliminate the brackets. I tried it and it's working perfectly! Thanks, Mac Daddy World. That was very simple and most welcome.

While most users are happy with Snow Leopard, there are these annoyances. Is there something bothering you?

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]

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...

Welcome to a brand new series focusing on music creation on the Mac and iPhone platform.

As you know, here at TUAW, we are crazy about anything Apple. We just love it! But, dear reader, this is not the be all and end all of our hearts. For many, if not all of us, music is a great passion of ours too. So, when these two worlds collide, naturally, it's a beautiful thing.

Recently, you may have seen a few posts on TUAW covering iPhone apps such as FourTrack and Noise.io or Soundboard for the Mac. Well, in this series, we are going to be singing a similar tune but taking a bit more of an in-depth look, or, if you will, taking things a semi-tone down (OK, enough with the music word play).

What exactly can you expect from this (fortnightly) series? If you're a home studio enthusiast (or a singer-songwriter trying to make ends meet) there will be tips, tricks and how-tos from Garageband all the way to Logic Studio and everything in between. Reviews on some of the latest and greatest music creation software and hardware for the Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch as well as, every now and then, a bit of inspiration for those rainy days.

But don't fret (oops!) if you can't hold a tune. For those less musically inclined we know you still need a soundtrack for the holiday you had with Granny last year and she wants to share the photo's on a DVD with some 'hip and happening' music in the background - we've got your back.

Stay tuned and leave a comment if you have any bright ideas for what you'd like to see covered in this new series.

Dear Auntie TUAW,

With all the shiny goodness of iTunes 9 and a way to finally organise iPhone/iPod Touch apps without getting a friction burn on my thumb, I settled in for some music lovin'.

Now I don't know how everyone else in the world likes their iTunes experience, but personally I'm quite fond of using the miniplayer. I love having it floating atop everything else for quick track skipping without having to resort to any kind of ghastly menu bar or dashboard trickery (I'm a purist maybe?).

To my dismay the zoom button now... actually... zooms the iTunes window rather than presenting me with my favoured miniplayer. It's no great loss (considering the hot key is only shift+cmd+M) but I liked the simplicity of "The green one gives me small happy player."

Love and kisses,

Your Nephew James



Dearest James,

Auntie TUAW wanted me to answer for her; she's in the process of baking some cakes for the annual church social at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion, so she's a bit tied up right now.

I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with the new functions of iTunes 9. I have hope! Apple didn't change the functionality too much. In fact, they made it more consistent with the rest of the operating system. The green "+" button now acts as a proper zoom button like every other app out there -- BUT -- if you hold the option key while pressing it you still get the mini player like the previous versions of iTunes. Sure, you can use the shift+command+M hot key if you'd like, but there's a still a mouse click solution that will hopefully help you and the rest of our readers out.

With best regards,

Cousin Josh

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.

I consider myself a power Keynote user, and overwhelmingly prefer the app over PowerPoint (on both the Mac and PC) -- even though though I'm just as well-versed at PowerPoint. Only on rare occasions do I start my presentation workflow in PowerPoint (if the deck is going to be chart-centric, to avoid the limited axis and error bar support in pre-09 versions of Keynote).

While both Keynote and Powerpoint get you from Point A to Point B, it's the "little things," such as alignment guides and better graphics support (i.e., native support for Photoshop PSDs and Illustrator AIs), that make the presentation journey that much more enjoyable and more presentable.

One of these little things is Presenter View. Although PowerPoint has a similar feature (in both Mac and PC versions) it lacks the polish and ease-of-use found in Keynote. Presenter View allows you to look at your slide's notes, and upcoming slides and builds, without your audience's knowledge.

One of the highly touted features of the new iPhone is the ability to have the map display your direction of travel. A great idea, long overdue. As people were walking out of the Apple Store today it was one of the first things some people wanted to try. They brought up the Google Map app, and then started spinning around. But these whirling dervishes weren't getting anywhere.

Since I was the real smart TUAW dude, I told them I could get it going. Nope. Nada. Zero.

After a bit of a search at the Apple web site when I returned home, I found it. You have one more tap to do on the map. When you tap the location icon at the lower left of the map screen a second time, it changes to a new, previously unseen icon. It looks like a little wedge in a circle. When you activate it, you're good to go. Or spin.

I think if I were designing this I would have made it an option on the map to default to direction of travel, or North at the top. Oh well, nobody asked me. Not the most obvious GUI design, but I guess once you know it, you know it. Now you know it too.

Yesterday I tried to open up iPhoto '09, and was greeted with a screen telling me that my iPhoto library needed to be updated. This was sort of odd, since I had run the program many times since the software update of June 4th bringing the program to version 8.0.3, but what the heck. I clicked on upgrade and the program crashed displaying one of the wonderfully unclear error screens of hex numbers.

After trying all the usual things like rebooting, resetting the PRAM and saying 'Candyman' three times in front of a mirror, I sheepishly gave up and called Apple. It turned out that this has been happening to many people. Up until two days ago, Apple had been capturing reports to find the source. I was told that they stopped capturing reports when they numbered around 3,000.

What Apple found was a bug in the 8.0.3 updater, and apparently the bug could bite just about anytime since it didn't necessarily rear its head directly after the update. The bug, in various incarnations with various solutions, is to be cursorily found in the support forums, but here is the authorized Apple fix:

Hold down the option key as you boot iPhoto and you'll see a screen like the one displayed here. Just choose your library (there should only be one) and iPhoto will boot normally. Problem solved! As of now the problem hasn't resurfaced for me, and according to Apple tech support, it shouldn't. This bug will be squashed in a future iPhoto update but for now it's easy to get around.

Problem: Some piece (or pieces) of rogue software have cluttered up your Open With contextual menu, which you can see by right-clicking or control-clicking any document in the Finder. This problem seems to be most prevalent with virtual machines that allow you to open documents with Windows applications, but tend not to clean up after themselves. After having both Parallels and VMWare installed on my MacBook Pro, my Open With menu was a mess.

Solution: Lucky for me, I noticed David Chartier's question about this on Twitter around the same time as I was wondering what to do about it. Some friendly person pointed him to a posting on Apple's discussion forum (also noted on Mac OS X Hints here and here), noting that running a specific command in a terminal window will rebuild your launch services, which repopulates the Open With menu with a current list of applications, without duplicates. It worked perfectly for me, but beware, on my system it took about 10 minutes to complete, and I suspect it could take more on a sufficiently gummed-up system.

Here's the Leopard version of the command (the path to the tool is different in Tiger, see here). I broke it into three lines for readability, but the \ at the end of the line is bash-speak for "keep on going with the same command" -- you can copy and paste it directly and it should work, or if you type it on one line without the backslashes, it will also work fine.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/\
 LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill\
 -r -domain local -domain system -domain user 

If, preferring to avoid the Terminal, you want a handy GUI app to rebuild the Launch Services database with a couple of clicks, check out Titanium's OnyX or Maintenance utilities, both free of charge.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a two-day business trip to Kansas City. As usual, the moment my plane landed I turned on my iPhone and gave my wife call to let her know that I had made it to my destination safely. I told her I'd text her as I got my rental car, and then call when I got to my hotel.

Heading out the door of the terminal to catch the rental car shuttle, I reached into my pocket for my iPhone only to find that it was gone. I did a quick search of my other pockets, my briefcase; anything within reach. Nothing. The next step involved running back into the terminal, talking to the folks at United to see if they could have someone check my seat on the airplane. They did, with negative results. I gave them my name and home phone number so that they could call me if it was found on the airplane when the cleaners did their job, and then I headed on to collect my rental car and go to the hotel.

The next morning, I called the lost & found office at the airport, and nothing had been turned in. Since I depend so heavily on my iPhone for my work, I ended up going to the nearest AT&T store to buy another phone. Read on to see what I learned from this experience.

UsingMac has posted an exhaustive look at iTunes from the perspective of making your working life better. From basic tips like shuffling songs and shuffling movies to more advanced tips like using Terminal to set a half-star rating, it's well thought out.

My favorite tip involves browser mode. Many people (in my experience at least) overlook this feature. I find it to be a killer way to categorize and find just what you're looking for, across genres, years, styles, etc. Of course, I'm that annoying guy who gets all excited over tags, charts and graphs, so keep that in mind.

Check out the article and feel free to share you own.