Preview Widgets

If you download new Dashboard widgets, you have to install them to your Dashboard before you can run them. This is counter intuitive because it might transpire that the widget isn’t much use, in which case you have to go through the work of uninstalling it.

However, if you double-click a downloaded widget to open it and then hold down Option+Command when the installation dialog box appears, you’ll see that the Install button changes to Run. Clicking this button will then run the widget from its current location in your Downloads folder, without actually installing it.

After trying the widget in Dashboard using this technique—regardless of whether you want to keep it—you must close the widget by holding down Option and clicking the close button at the top left of the widget. Then, if you want to install the widget, you can do so in the usual way by double-clicking it and choosing the Install option. If you decide you don’t want the widget, drag it to the trash like you would any other file you want to delete.

See a Big Long List of Your Contacts

Here’s a tip that lets you view all your contacts in a long list, alongside which you’ll be able to see each contact’s email address or their telephone number(s). It uses a debug setting within the Contacts app.

1. Close the Contacts app if it’s open, open a Terminal window (open Finder, select the Applications list, and then in the list of applications double- click Terminal within the Utilities folder), and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.AddressBook ABShowDebugMenu -bool true

2. Open Contacts, and you should see a new Debug menu option. Select the Show People Picker Panel option. This will open a new window showing all your contacts in one long list with their email addresses alongside.

3. Click the Email heading to switch to show telephone numbers alongside the list of contacts.
Note that the same list showing only email addresses is also available within Mail; just click Window→Address Panel. From either list you can click, hold, and drag to create .vcf files by which contacts details can be exported to another computer

Close the window when you’re finished. To deactivate the Debug menu option, again close Contacts, and open a Terminal window, typing the following:

defaults delete com.apple.AddressBook ABShowDebugMenu

Prefer Plain-Text Emails

Once upon a time all email was sent in plain text, but nowadays HTML emails —that feature alternative fonts, colors, and images—have become the norm. Yet most of these emails come with a plain-text version hidden inside them. This is included for those who might have email clients that can’t display HTML.

While the Mail app in OS X is fully compatible with HTML email, you can hit Option+Command+ P to switch the email currently being viewed to a plain-text rendition, sans any kind of formatting.

This is only temporary, however. Just select another email in your email list, and then select the original email again to view it with its formatting intact.

Setting Plain-Text View

To always view emails in plain text, you can change a secret setting that makes it prefer the plain-text component of emails, if they’re included in the message (and they nearly always are). This will mean you should never see another HTML email!

To activate the setting, shut down Mail, open a Terminal window (open Finder, select the Applications list, and then in the list of applications double- click Terminal within the Utilities folder), and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

Restart Mail, and you’ll see that any HTML mails are now shown as plain text. Should you subsequently want to view the full HTML-formatted email, you’ll see that most messages include a link at the top that lets you view the email at the sender’s website.

Restoring Default Settings

To return to Mail’s automatic displaying of HTML emails, again close Mail, open a Terminal window, and type the following

defaults delete com.apple.mail PreferPlainText

Restart Mail for the changes to take effect.

Let OS X Create Passwords

If you’re looking for a memorable yet secure password (that is, one involving numbers, capital letters, and symbols), you can let OS X do the hard work, as follows:

1. Open Keychain Access, which is the application in OS X that handles password and certificate security. You’ll find it in the Utilities folder of the Applications view in Finder.

2. Once the app has started, click File→New Password Item. Don’t worry— we’re not actually going to create a new item for the keychain. Instead, we’re simply going to make use of its password tool.

3. In the dialog box that slides into view, click the small key icon alongside the Password textbox. This will open the Password Assistant, which is what we’re interested in.

4. In the Password Assistant dialog box, ensure the Type drop-down list is set to Memorable. Then look in the suggestion box for the password that’s been created for you. To generate another, once again select Memorable from the drop-down list.

5. The Length slider lets you create longer passwords, and it’s wise to slide this a little to the right. The green Quality bar shows how secure the password is, which is to say how theoretically easy it is to crack. However, a password of twelve letters is normally considered extremely strong within the wider security community, even if it means the green bar doesn’t entirely fill.

Once you’re happy, you should attempt to learn the password. This can be done by saying it out loud ten to twenty times or by typing it into a blank document the same number of times so that you learn it by rote.
You can close Password Assistant and then click the Cancel button to close the Keychain Access dialog box. You can then quit Keychain Access.

Control QuickTime Player Using Keys

The following keyboard shortcuts let you control QuickTime Player without touching the mouse:

• Space: Start playback, or stop it if it’s already playing. 

• Up/Down cursor keys: Increase/decrease playback volume. 

• Option+ Up/Down cursor key: Maximize/mute playback volume. 

• Left /Right cursor keys: Hold down to cue in slow-motion back and forward. Tap to advance frame by frame. 

• Command+ Left /Right cursor keys: Start cueing backward and forward; Space restores playback to normal (repeated presses of the cursor keys while still holding Command will speed up cueing). 

• Option+ Left/Right cursor keys: Move to beginning or end of movie file. 

• Command+ + / - : Increase/decrease the size of the playback window ( Command+ 1 restores it to its actual pixel dimensions).

Stop the Dock from Getting Broken

It’s very easy to accidentally re-size the Dock when using a Mac or delete icons from it. All it takes is a misclick of the mouse. The following two commands typed into a Terminal window will “freeze” the Dock, making it impossible to re-size it or to remove/rearrange/add icons:

defaults write com.apple.dock size-immutable -bool TRUE 
defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool TRUE;killall Dock

To “unfreeze” the Dock so you can resize it and add/remove/rearrange icons, issue the following two commands in a Terminal window:

defaults delete com.apple.dock size-immutable 
defaults delete com.apple.dock contents-immutable;killall Dock

Notify from the Command Line

There’s no official way of making a notification pop-up appear from the command line. This would be useful to send a message that a certain command has completed, for example. The good news is that you can use a Ruby gem called terminal-notifier to do so (gems are extensions to the Ruby programming language that’s included with OS X). To install terminal-notifier, open a Terminal window in the usual way, and type the following:

sudo gem install terminal-notifier

Type your password when prompted. Installation should take seconds.

Using terminal-notifier is easy. Just use the -message command option to specify the message, which should appear within quotation marks (or be escaped in the usual way), and use the -title option to specify the title of the notification dialog. Here’s an example:

terminal-notifier -message "Mac Kung Fu goes places other books don't dare" -title "Mac Kung Fu"

You can also specify things to happen when the notification dialog is clicked: using -open, you can specify a URL (which must include its http:// component), for example. You can find more information at the GitHub site for terminal- notifier.