I use Boot Camp pretty regularly, and one thing that always annoyed me about booting back into the world of the living the Mac was that my clock was always eight hours behind (I live in the Pacific time zone). Windows likes to set the system clock to my local time of GMT –8. Mac OS X, on the other hand, likes to keep the hardware clock at GMT, and set it "softly" using the operating system software. There are some hairy registry fixes for the Windows behavior, but they're unsupported.

While manually setting my clock back for the eleventy billionth time, I noticed that just opening and closing the Date & Time preference pane sets the clock automatically. Of course, I had to be connected to the Internet, and have the "set date & time automatically" checkbox selected.

Sensing an opportunity to make my life easier, I wrote myself an AppleScript that simply opens the Date & Time preference pane, leaves it open for a few seconds, and then closes it. I saved it as an application, and set it to run at startup.

That way, by the time my computer is finished booting, the clock is right, and I didn't have to even think about it.

After the jump, some code and instructions on how to do this yourself.

Over at Mac OS X Hints I recently ran into this doozy of a hint that I somehow missed on its first go around. Basically the idea is to capitalize on a great new feature in Leopard's help. You can get to any menu item without your mouse by activating the help menu with the keyboard shortcut ⌘ + ? (i.e. ⌘ + shift + /). Then type the name of the menu command you want and scroll down to it with the arrow keys. That command's menu will automatically drop down with the item highlighted, hit enter and you're done! If you're a keyboard maven this is a really easy way to get to your menu items (though you can also activate the menubar from the keyboard with ⌃F2).

Thanks Brandon!

You probably thought exactly the same thing I did when I first saw Piet Jonas' tip: the iPhone as a digital picture frame? That's a pretty darn expensive digital picture frame. And his tip is pretty simple-- all he suggests is to turn off the AutoLock feature on the iPhone, thus leaving the screen on to display a slideshow. At first glance, it's not that big a deal.

But the more I thought about it, the more genius it was. I've been pining after a Nabaztag lately, and an always-on iPhone just sitting there on the charging dock could serve exactly the same purpose-- you could have it spit out the time, constantly updated stock info, or even watch your email come in. With Piet's suggestion of webcams, the iPhone could work as a little monitor right there on your desk. And if Apple ever gets this rumored RSS reader off the ground, you could watch RSS headlines fly by on that screen. When you think of all the things you could display on an iPhone sitting in the dock, it's not a bad picture frame at all.

Any other ideas of constantly updated information you could put on your always-on iPhone?

Leopard may be just around the corner but we're not ignoring you readers who aren't ready to upgrade. Here's a quick tip for those of you who plan on staying in Tiger land. Sometimes you want to view pictures by previewing them directly in Finder. To automatically view the largest possible preview, just double-tap the column resizing handle at the bottom right of the preview image. This automatically maximizes the picture without affecting your other columns.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but personally I'd nominate frustration instead. Lots of the time, the things you need to do, or think you need to do (get more exercise, pay your taxes) get pushed off or procrastinated into irrelevancy, but the things that frustrate you -- even if they're below the radar -- will drive you to the point of saying "I'm going to fix this @!#*& problem no matter what it takes!" Inventions motivated by frustration tend to be quick hacks that provide at least a momentary sense of achievement, if nothing more.

If I wasn't deeply frustrated with the QuickTime Pro feature that lets you quickly email a movie, but only if you use Mail.app as your email client, I wouldn't have spent the time and energy to whomp up this Applescript. Entourage users can throw it into the Entourage script menu, or stash it in a quick-run location or under a hotkey if you want. All it does is export the frontmost movie from QuickTime Player (standard or Pro), then it encloses the exported file in a new Entourage email. Nothing too fancy, minimal error checking, and it will not respect odd/widescreen aspect ratios... but it does seem to work. If you are recording quick video clips with your iSight and emailing them off, or doing mini-screencasts, this may be something that finds a home on your machine. Download it here.

Please note that the script is placed in the public domain, in readable form, and is provided with NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER. Use at your own risk. Any ill consequences to you, your computer, your videos, your sanity or your interactions with friends & family who are now bombarded with your video snippets are your own problem and in no way the responsibility of me, TUAW, Weblogs, Inc. or AOL. In case of a water landing, your seat cushion serves as a flotation device. Exits are under the lighted signs. Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light.

Sometimes even the best intentions of developers can't account for user preference, and after speaking with many other Mac users, this certainly seems to be the case with OS X's habitual tendency to preserve the formatting of text copied to the clipboard. For example:

I copy text from OmniWeb:

Pasted text before running the trigger:

Pasted text after running the trigger:


Quicksilver maven Dan Dickinson has figured out a sneaky way to strip out this formatting, and has turned the method into a handy Trigger. The trick works by pasting the contents of the clipboard into a terminal shell (where it loses all formatting), and then re-copying the text to the clipboard. For the trigger to work, you must have the Terminal Plugin installed. A full how-to is available on Dan's website.

These days, people do a lot of uploading to the Internet. Whether you're adding videos to YouTube, or sending pictures to your favorite hosting site, OS X offers a simple feature that really helps you locate your files. Although you can't drag and drop onto Internet sites, you can drag and drop files onto the Open dialog. The dialog automatically updates to the proper folder, saving you some navigating time by quickly getting you to the right place. Then it's just a matter of click your upload button to get things going. Give it a try. You may be surprised by the effort it saves you, particularly if you do a lot of uploads to websites and weblogs.

Out of the box, the iPod is designed to work seamlessly with iTunes, so the system automatically syncs (by default) when you connect your iPod. This is typically fine for most users, but what about those times when you don't want this tag team to kick into gear for one reason or another? Perhaps you just had a library goof-up, and you need to use iPodRip to recover some playlists or media files before iTunes syncs and blows either away, or perhaps you're just in a hurry and don't have time to sync down that new 1.5GB movie you just bought, though you you still need to dump some files over for work or class. Whatever the scenario, there are a couple of simple ways to arbitrarily prevent iTunes from working its magic on a case-by-case basis.

The first method, I feel, is the least intrusive and most useful: assuming iTunes is running, all you need to do is hold down cmd+opt (possibly ctrl+alt on Windows, though I don't have a machine to test that on) when connecting your iPod to make iTunes look the other way and not begin a sync. The iPod should mount on your desktop and even appear in iTunes, but it simply won't sync. You're free to go about your business and eject the iPod as quickly as it mounted, with no argument from iTunes.

The second method assumes that you have enabled hard drive use for your iPod, and you don't have iTunes set to automatically start when you plug the 'pod in. In this case, simply quitting iTunes when plugging in your iPod will solve your problem altogether. Simply do your business and eject to get on your way quickly.

I'm told that one of things Switchers miss when they come over from the dark side is the ability to create new files simply by right-clicking and choosing a type from the "New" submenu in Windows Explorer (their Finder equivalent). For those people, Ankur Kothari (aka the Vacuous Virtuous), has a nice solution using everybody's favorite Mac utility: Quicksilver. Basically Alcor (the Quicksilver developer) has included a default action "Make New" which is not usable without a little setup. What you need to do is create a folder called "Templates" in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver. In that folder you just add files of the sort you create on a regular basis, e.g. Word Documents, text documents, spreadsheets, whatever.

Now whenever you want to create a new file of that sort, just start Quicksilver and navigate to the directory where you want the file to be created (e.g the Documents folder as above), tab and select the "Make New" action, then tab to the third pane and select the file type from the dropdown list (you see above I've created two document types, a Markdown document in TextMate and a rich text document in TextEdit). Hit return, and the appropriate application will start up with an untitled document ready to go. But it gets even better, the documents you save in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Templates do not have to be blank. Rather, as you might expect, they can be templates what already have some content (e.g. headers or formatting). This is such a handy trick that even non-Switchers may find it useful.

[Via MacBreak Weekly]

Oh isn't this clever! A developer put together a series of images with pre-calculated tip calculations and bill splits so you could load it onto your iPhoto-compatible iPod as a quick reference. Each of the images offers a bill amount, a 15% and a 20% tip (plus the grand total), and the way you can split the bill and tip between 2, 3, 4, or 5 people. You just use your scroll wheel to move the price to the nearest amount of your bill and all your information is right there for you.

Sure you could build this by yourself, but it would probably take more time and effort than you'd want to put in compared to the reasonable $5 price tag. For those five bucks, you get a lot of nicely designed graphics and all the tip amounts you'll probably ever use.

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.

Over at MacOSX Hints, a poster has figured out how to rotate a single page in Preview without affecting any other pages in a PDF file. The secret lies in the option key. By holding it down before clicking either Rotate Left or Rotate Right, you limit the rotation to the currently displayed page rather than the entire document. This is particularly convenient when you want to rotate a single portrait figure into landscape or vice versa.

For those of you looking for the Rotate Left and Rotate Right icons while displaying your PDFs, be aware that you may have to resize your window to reveal the entire tool palette.

Along with Quicksilver, TextExpander is one of my must-have Mac utilities. TextExpander is a "snippet" utility that will automatically paste in content based on user defined abbreviations. For instance, I have "bc" set to expand to "because." However, the pasted text can be much longer (e.g. "sig" becomes a several line email signature). Today on the SmileOnMyMac Blog, I ran across a great tip I hadn't previously known about TextExpander (RTFM), viz. that you can use "%clipboard" as a variable in your snippets. When the snippet expands the clipboard content is automatically placed wherever "%clipboard" appears. The original tip involved using this to create Amazon.com links, but it quickly occurred to me that I could use this to easily create hyperlinks when for posting on blog comments (not TUAW) or on forums.

The guru of all things Mail.app, Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings, has posted a tip that seems to offer a considerable speed boost to Mail. Basically performing the tip strips the "bloat out of [Mail's] Envelope index, an SQLite database Mail uses to store senders, recipients, subjects and so on." It requires a little bit of terminal jockeying, but this is limited to running one command using sqlite3. Tim himself reports considerable speed gains, as do many in the comments. As always, backing up before attempting such things seems like a good idea, but quite a few people have performed the trick without adverse results. Check it out for yourself over at Hawk Wings.

I've been covering Mac news for over two-and-a-half years, and I've been keeping a close eye on the rumor mill for at least twice that long. While I'm certainly not the most experienced reporter in the field– especially when compared to some industry veterans, I have a pretty good grasp on how to stay sane in a system which is constantly throwing information at me.

Recently, especially the past 6 months or so, I've noticed a dramatic increase in the number of sites purporting to have solid information about upcoming announcements. Naturally, most of the rumors turn out to be false. What surprises me though is how many of the big-name experienced news sites pick up on these stories. It's obviously impossible to fact-check a rumor, but that doesn't mean one can't carefully examine a story before hitting the publish button. These are a few of the things I consider before deciding whether to put my faith in and publish a rumor:

• Common Sense - Does the info sound too good to be true? If it does, it probably is.
• Strategy - How well does the information jive with Apple's current product-line and business strategy?
• History - Has Apple done anything like this in the past? Have we heard previous rumors about this?
• Detail - How much detail does the story provide? Am I presented with hard data, or just broad generalizations.
• Source - Does the site say where they got the information, or does it just seem to have appeared out-of-the-blue?
• Site - This is the most important factor. Is this the first time this site has published this kind of information? If not, how reliable have they been in the past? Are they big enough to be the site-of-choice for would-be tipsters? Look for the original source of the information, not just who is re-reporting it.

These six simple criterion can make weeding through the rumor cruft tremendously more easy, and has the added bonus of making you sound smarter when you discuss the information with others.

Keep your wits about you, and happy rumor-mongering!