Here are some quick tips that are handy if you work in a Terminal window a lot (I know I do!). They show various ways to open files and folders right from the command line.

Opening a file

You can open a file using its associated application by typing:

open filename

For example, opening an image file with open usually displays it in Preview, while opening an HTML file displays it in your default Web browser.

Wildcards are allowed, so you can open all PNG files in the current folder with:

open *.png

You can also specify the application to use when opening the file by using the -a option:

open -a /Applications/Preview.app myimage.png

If you want to edit the file in TextEdit, use:

open -e filename

You can even open URLs:

open http://mac.elated.com/

Opening a folder

This trick also works on folders, in which case the folder opens as a new Finder window:

open foldername

For example, you can open the current folder in the Finder with:

open .

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If you use Mac OS X Leopard, you’re probably aware of the Web Clip widget. This is a new type of widget that lets you display part of any Web page right on your Dashboard. To use it, simply visit a Web page in Safari, then click the Web Clip button in the toolbar:

Drag the mouse around to highlight the area of the page you want to capture, then click. You can then fine-tune the area with the resize handles, and click the Add button in the top right (or simply press Return) to create the widget. Now, whenever you switch to your Dashboard, you’ll see that area of your chosen Web page right there in the widget.

If and when the Web page is updated, the widget updates too. This makes Web Clip very useful for any Web page content that gets updated frequently, such as news and sports results pages.

Here are a few tips for using Web Clip:

• You can go back and edit a Web Clip widget. Click the little ‘i’ button in the bottom right corner of the widget to flip it round, then click Edit. The widget flips round again, and you can click and drag with the mouse to reposition the Web page within the widget. You can also resize the widget at the same time. Nice.

• The widget reloads its “page” every time you enter the Dashboard, but you can also reload it at any time by clicking it and hitting Command-R.

• If the page you’re clipping is text-heavy, and you want to make your widget as small as possible, first use Command and - (minus) to make the text smaller in Safari, then clip the page. The widget remembers your selected text size. You can then revert to your normal text size in Safari.

So that’s how you create and use a Web Clip widget. What sort of things can you use this feature for? Here are 6 of my favourite uses for Web Clip:

1. Weather forecasts

A classic use for Web Clip. Visit the weather forecasting site of your choice - for example, Weather Underground or AccuWeather.com - find the forecast for your local city, and turn it into a widget. Of course, the Mac comes with a built-in Weather widget, but by using Web Clip you can get much more specialized info. For example, I’m in Sydney, Australia, and I like to have the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Sydney Radar Loop on my Dashboard, so I can see where the rain is right now:

(By the way, speaking of the BoM, if you happen to be in Australia then check out TheBom Weather Widget - it’s lovely!) (more…)

I admit it: With my hunt for nice widescreen wallpapers, and my reviews of DeskLickr and Desktoptopia, I’ve gone wallpaper-mad over the past month. I now have a collection of over 100 gorgeous desktop images, with new ones coming in all the time. Somehow, though, having these beautiful images lurking behind my Mac windows - occasionally revealed with Exposé via the F11 key - doesn’t do them justice.

So how to make my wallpaper more front-and-centre? Ideally I’d like some sort of utility that faded my windows away when I’m not really using my Mac, revealing the wallpaper behind. Then I was hit by an attack of the blindingly obvious: Use a screen saver!

(This tip is not rocket science. But it took me a while to think of using a screen saver, so maybe it’s not that obvious. )

Luckily the Mac ships with the ability to display one or more images as a screen saver. I already had all my wallpaper images stored in a ~/Pictures/Wallpapers folder, so it was just a case of choosing Apple > System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver, then opening up the Pictures screen saver in the left-hand list and clicking Choose Folder. After selecting my Wallpapers folder, it appeared in the list:

And that’s it! I set the screen saver delay to 5 minutes, and now I get to see my lovely wallpaper images in all their glory whenever I come back to my Mac. And because the images are already designed to look great on the desktop, they make for a fantastic screen saver. Simple but effective.

By default you get the old Ken Burns effect on the images; to turn this off click Options, then deselect the Zoom back and forth and Keep slides centred options. Now, when your screen saver kicks in, it’s almost exactly as if your windows have simply faded away. (And your menu bar. And the Dock. And mouse pointer. Err, and any icons you happen to have on your Desktop. But you get my point.) (more…)

If you’re a Web coder, Safari 3 offers some really nice debugging features - if you know where to look for them. First, you need to turn on Safari’s Develop menu (hidden by default). To do this, choose Safari > Preferences, then in the Advanced tab check the Show Develop menu in menu bar option. You’ll see the new menu appear to the right of the Bookmarks menu in the menu bar.

The first option, Open Page With, lets you open the current page in any other installed browser - handy for cross-browser testing. The second, User Agent, tells Safari to masquerade as another browser when viewing websites. Safari still renders pages as Safari, but sends another user agent string to the Web server. This can be useful if you’re testing browser detection code, for example.

Call in the Inspector

The fun really starts with the next option, Show Web Inspector. The Web Inspector window is reminiscent of the Firebug Firefox add-on, and shows you the syntax-highlighted markup (or, by clicking the button in the toolbar, the DOM tree) of the current page, the contents of any linked style sheets, the images used in the page (with info), the source code of any JavaScript in the page, and info on any other page elements it finds.

Click the Console option at the bottom left of the window, and you can see JavaScript errors and other messages; click on an error to jump straight to the JavaScript line that caused it (nice). You can also type your own JavaScript commands into the single-line box at the bottom of the console window and see the results appear above - great for finding out the current state of variables and so on. (more…)

I’ve ranted at great length about the usability nightmare that is iCal - and the fact that Leopard’s iCal is, if anything, worse than Tiger’s. One saving grace of Leopard, though, is that Apple have opened up the iCal framework, allowing other apps to create and edit events and To Dos. And sure enough, such apps are starting to emerge. Here’s a quick look at a couple of free To Do applications for Leopard.

FlexTD

One new app I’m currently playing with is FlexTD. This app’s sole objective is to make it quick and easy to enter new To Dos. It installs itself as a preference pane; all you have to do is assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Then, whenever you want to add a new To Do, you press the keyboard shortcut (from within any app) and start typing. It’s fully keyboard accessible, so you can set the calendar, priority and due date easily via the keyboard.

It’s nicely done, but it’s a shame you can’t edit the Note field as you’re creating a To Do, which makes project entry a la GTD a pain.

Anxiety

Another free To Do app is Anxiety. Unlike FlexTD, which only lets you add To Dos, this one also lets you view and edit your To Dos. Well, sort of. You can scroll through your current list of To Dos by calendar and mark To Dos as done, but you can’t edit a To Do’s title or other info; to do that you have to double-click (Arrgh! No keyboard shortcut) a To Do to open it in the dreaded iCal. Also, like FlexTD, you can’t view or edit a To Do’s Note field without switching to iCal. (more…)

Apple’s bright Mac displays are great for showing off beautiful photos, and I love having stunning wallpapers on my iMac’s desktop. However, not all wallpapers are a good fit for the widescreen displays used on current Macs. So I thought I’d hunt around for some really good quality widescreen images.

Here, then, are 5 wonderful widescreen wallpaper sites that I discovered on my travels:

InterfaceLIFT

InterfaceLIFT provides a nice selection of over 1,500 high-res widescreen wallpaper images - perfect for the Mac’s screen. They also provide nice icon sets that you can use to customize your file and folder icons (info on how to do this).

Widescreen Wallpaper Flickr group

Then there’s the Widescreen Wallpaper Flickr group pool with all sorts of highly original wallpaper images from around the world. New ones are added all the time, too. (more…)

Want to know how big a folder is in Mac OS X, including all the files and nested subfolders inside it? This can be very useful, especially when you’re trying to reclaim some disk space. Here’s how to do it.

You can use Finder’s List view (Command-2) to show you the sizes of files in the current folder, but by default all folders show “–” in the Size column:

To change this, choose View > Show View Options (or press Command-J) and enable the Calculate all sizes option:

After a while - depending on how many files you have inside your folders - you’ll see the Size column start to populate with the total size for each folder:

Then it’s simply a matter of clicking the Size column header to find your biggest folders:

You can then click an arrow to the right of a folder to expand it and view the sizes of all its subfolders, and so on. Easy!

For some reason StuffIt ended up getting installed on my wife’s iMac. All very well, but I started finding its presence, and its association with every zip file on the Mac, somewhat annoying and unnecessary (what with unzipping now being built into Mac OS). So I tried to uninstall it. Easier said than done! There’s no uninstaller, and what’s more, it insinuates itself into every nook and cranny of Mac OS, and is a pig to remove manually.

I was pretty chuffed, then, to discover this Automator script on StuffIt’s maker’s website. Download NukeStuffitMac, unzip, run, and wait (it takes a while), and every trace of StuffIt is removed from your Mac. Nice! (I found I needed to restart the Mac afterwards to finish the job completely.)

I use Google Analytics a fair bit to track my sites. It’s a fantastic tool, but it’s a bit of a pain to have to login via a Web browser each time you want to see your stats.

Not a problem if you’re a Mac user though! Dashalytics is a really handy Dashboard widget that lets you view your stats right on your Mac. The widget asks you for your Analytics login details, then logs in behind the scenes and displays your Analytics data in all its glory.

You can view the number of visitors per day, week, month and so on, and view other key metrics such as pageviews, time on site, and bounce rate. The graphs look lovely, and you can hover over the Visitors Overview graph to see the actual data - a nice touch.

Because it’s a Dashboard widget, it stays logged in and updates the graphs periodically. You can also add multiple instances of the widget to track more than one site. If, like me, you run several sites and want to see how they’re all doing, then this widget is a wonderful time-saver!

I was so glad when I discovered this little gem. You know when you paste a bit of quoted text (text with one or more coloured bars down the left side) from one Mail message window to another, and it brings the coloured bars with it? Very annoying.

How to remove the coloured bars? Simply select the pasted text, then press Command-Option-’ (single quote) until they’ve gone. Brilliant! You can also choose Format > Quote Level > Decrease. (I must have looked for such a menu option well over a dozen times before I found it. For some reason I was expecting it to be under Edit or View.)

Of course, you can also add quote levels (coloured bars) by choosing Format > Quote Level > Increase, or pressing Command-’ (single quote).

Marvellous!