Friday, July 25, 2014

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