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!

One reason I switched to the Mac was because Mac OS applications are supposed to have consistent user interfaces. This is mainly due to the much-lauded Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

On the whole, I’m impressed with the way Mac apps have consistent menus and keyboard shortcuts. For example, with a few notable exceptions - I’m looking at you, Photoshop - you can nearly always get to an app’s preferences by hitting Command+, (comma), and hide an app with Command+H.

But what’s the shortcut for switching an app to full screen mode? Good question. It changes from app to app; there’s no standard. And surely, if there’s one thing you need a consistent keypress for, it’s full screen mode - especially exiting full screen mode. Try getting out of DVD Player’s full screen mode without knowing the keyboard shortcut. (And no, Esc doesn’t work.)

“Full screen” shortcuts for various apps

Just to show how ridiculous the situation is - but also to provide a handy reference - here’s a list of the “full screen” shortcuts for the apps currently installed on my Mac:

• DVD Player: Command+0 (zero). Obviously.
• QuickTime Player: Command+F. (Even Apple’s own apps aren’t consistent with each other.)
• VLC: Command+F.
• Skype: Control+Command+F.
• iChat AV: Control+Command+F. (Well at least those two are the same.)
• RealPlayer: Command+4. (Huh?)
• Parallels Desktop: Option+Return (my brain hurts).
• iTunes: Command+F.

If Apple can come up with standard shortcuts for things like preferences, surely a standard full-screen shortcut isn’t out of the question?

(Here’s a handy related tip: If you ever need to decipher the strange characters used in menus to represent various special keys - such as Control and Option - switch to the Finder, choose Help > Mac Help, and search the help for “Symbols for special keys”.)

Happy New Year to you!

Front Row. Where would we be without it? We use it all the time to watch DVDs and movies, and listen to music, on our living room iMac. Without Front Row and the Apple Remote, it would be a painful experience.

Still, it has its painful moments, such as the times when Front Row completely freezes. I’ve had this when playing DVDs, and occasionally when browsing the Movies folder (though often in the latter case it was simply being slow).

It’s not obvious what you can do in this situation. The Mac doesn’t respond to the keyboard, mouse, or remote. My previous solution was either to ssh from our other iMac and kill off the Front Row process (not an option if you only have one computer), or simply to power cycle the iMac (not ideal, obviously).

However, the other day I remembered that there was a keyboard shortcut for the Apple > Force Quit menu option when working in “normal” (non-Front-Row) mode: Command-Option-Esc. This brings up a “Force Quit Applications” dialog, allowing you to choose an application to kill. So when Front Row next locked up, I thought I’d try pressing Command-Option-Esc. Amazingly, it worked! I was immediately returned to the Desktop. It didn’t bring up the “Force Quit Applications” dialog, but it did kill off Front Row, which was the main thing. A handy trick to remember.

On a related note: Tired of having to press MENU on your Apple Remote five or six times to back out all the submenus and return to the Desktop? There’s a quicker way: simply press any key on the keyboard apart from the Front Row control keys (Return, Enter, Spacebar, Esc or the arrow keys). Front Row quickly exits, returning you to the Desktop with a single keypress. (Amazingly I only discovered this because our pesky 11-month-old loves to hammer on the keyboard while we’re watching movies!) Naturally this tip requires you to walk over to the iMac - unless you have a Bluetooth keyboard - but hey, we could all use the exercise, right?

Happy Front Rowing. (Note: these tips work on Tiger. Not sure about Leopard, as I’m too scared to upgrade right now!)

So here’s today’s little teaser. My wife runs Windows XP under Parallels on her iMac, and she wants to print to the printer that’s connected to my iMac. How’s it done? The obvious thing would be to share the printer on my iMac (System Prefs > Sharing > Services > Printer Sharing, followed by System Prefs > Print & Fax > Sharing > Share these printers with other computers > [check the box next to the printer]), but of course that would be too easy, so it doesn’t work. In Windows XP I tried Start > Printers and Faxes > File > Add Printer > Next > Network printer > Next > Browse for a printer > Next (phew!) but, although the iMac’s name appears in the list, it shows no printers attached. Sodding thing.

After much mucking about trying to get the ever-stubborn Windows XP to recognize the printer, I came up with a nice bit of lateral thinking. What about Bonjour for Windows? Bonjour (previously known as Rendezvous) is the Mac’s zero-config system allowing auto-discovery of stuff on a network, such as computers, printers and routers - and, handily, they make a Windows version, too. It’ll never work, surely…!

Seriously, it was as simple as:

• Download the EXE
• Double-click said EXE to open it in Windows XP (in Parallels)
• Run the setup (no reboot required!)
• Double-click Bonjour Printer Wizard on the desktop
• Click Next
• There’s my printer! Click it, then click Next twice followed by Finish
• Boom!, as Steve Jobs would say - the printer is installed, and usable under Windows XP.

Why can’t Windows always be as straightforward as that?

If you’ve ever worked on a computer for long periods late at night with the lights dimmed, you’ve probably ended up with a headache or eyestrain by the end of it. The obvious way round this is not to work late at night, but if deadlines are looming and you have to pull an all-night session then you’ll find Blacktree’s little Nocturne app very useful.

The theory behind Nocturne, and other similar apps, is that viewing white on black is a lot easier on the eye than black on white. Therefore they invert the colours of your Mac display so that most of the screen is black, or dark, while text appears white, or light.

You can achieve a similar effect via the Universal Access preference pane in System Preferences, but Nocturne produces much better results. For example, you can tweak Nocturne’s colour settings so that the inverted colours look more natural, and you can also hide the desktop background to further remove distractions.

Give it a go - it’s free!