Have you forgotten a password to a website, email account, or other password? If you use Mac OS X's Keychain, chances are that your password can be easily retrieved.

First off, open Keychain Access.app (located in /Applications/Utilities/). Once there, scroll through the list of keys until you find the one that you're looking for. Double click on it and check the box that says, "Show Password." Once you authenticate with your user credentials, your forgotten password will be displayed in the text box.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

We love the quick tips that Tekzilla brings everyday. The other day they showed off a tip that we just couldn't turn down spreading. When you're in PhotoBooth you can use two key combos to either turn off the flash or temporarily disable the count-down.

Hold down the shift key when you press the take picture button and your picture will be taken without using the flash. If you hold down the option key when you press the take picture button your picture will be taken without using the count-down delay. If you hold down both the shift and options keys, your picture will be taken immediately and without the flash.

We've got our iPhones. Now it's time to see what these puppies can do. This is the first in a series of posts intended to explore the iPhone's features.

This time, it's about the keyboard.

With the iPhone, Apple eschewes the "real" keyboard of some other smart phones, and offers virtual replacement. It shows up when needed, and disappears when it's not. It's available in both landscape and portrait orientation, depending on what you're doing. Let's look at an example of each.

First of all, the iPhone's response to your keystrokes is immediate. The "Notes" application (as well as a few others) requires you to use the keyboard in portrait mode. Create a new note and the keyboard emerges, taking over the lower half of the screen. By default, letters are displayed with a QWERTY layout, as well as a backspace button, shift, and spacebar. An additional button swaps letters for numbers and symbols (for punctuation, etc.).

Click any key and it immediately "grows" from underneath your finger to confirm your selection. The problem for me, at least, is that I don't always see the letter I expect.

Typing on this thing in portrait mode with 100% accuracy requires the hands of a adolescent girl. When typing a 27-letter phrase ("This little piggy went to market," if you must know), I made 5 "errors." That's not a whole lot, but it's enough to be kind of annoying.

Apple must have predicted that people with adult-sized fingers would have trouble, so they've built in a helpful feature. As you type, the iPhone takes a guess at which word you're after, and places it on the screen just below the cursor. To accept the guess, simply hit the spacebar. While this is handy for avoiding errors in portrait mode, it's a real speed booster while in landscape.

This is where things change. Typing in landscape mode - say, while using Safari - is much easier. Because it's got more real estate, the keyboard is wider and the keys are larger. I was able to type my test phrase with no errors and as quickly as I could find the necessary keys. Speaking of Safari, the keyboard acquires a handy ".com" button while you're on the net.

It's also more comfortable to type in landscape. Your hands quickly learn how to position the iPhone so that it's secure in your grip while leaving your thumbs free to type away. I wish there was some why to flip all applications on their sides, just so I could make use of that nice, wide keyboard.

If anything is at fault here, it's my massive Meat Mittens, not Apple's software. However, I would imagine that a number of users have hands like mine. For us, "slow and deliberate" is the name of the game.

This simple tip was actually sent to us by TUAW reader Zoli Honig. It works on my MacBook Pro, and I assume other portables: if you hold the option key while pressing any of the F-key shortcuts for display brightness, keyboard brightness or audio volume settings, System Preferences will open and take you straight to the relevant preference pane. I don't know if this is Mac OS X Tiger only, and I don't have desktop machine to test with, so if you're still on Panther or using some kind of desktop Mac, feel free to share whether this tip works on your machines in the comments.

I need to come clean: I thoroughly enjoy working on my PowerBook far more than my iMac G5. Why? Other than the obvious portability factor: it's the keyboard. Aside from an ergonomic (where'd those go, anyway?), the PowerBook's keyboard is about the best darn keyboard I've ever laid hands on. Every standard desktop keyboard just feels big and clunky, and the keys have a lot more travel to them. I can type much faster on my PowerBook's keyboard, and nowadays it's gotten so bad that I stumble and trip up on regular desktop keyboards. When you blog for a company like Weblogs, Inc. who revokes one day's lunch privileges for every typo they find, this can become a serious problem (just kidding about the lunch thing, but let's just say I'm missing a toe or two).

If you're nodding your head in agreement to any of my keyboard obsessiveness, I think Kensington has a good solution for all of us. I found their SlimType Keyboard for Mac at a CompUSA last weekend, and wow did it feel like my PowerBook. Its layout is slightly different from both a PowerBook and standard Apple desktop keyboard, as the Home/End and Page Up/Down keys are lined vertically on the right of the Delete/Return side of the keyboard, but its keys have the same low rate of travel and a very similar, solid feel. I haven't grabbed one yet, but they retail for $40, and some of the online retailers that Kensington's product site link are selling it for as low as $30.

If you pick one up or already own one, feel free to sound off with your thoughts.