December 2007

Shut Down for a while
Mac Tip #320/19-Dec-2007

In New Zealand it’s summer and time for a holiday, so this week’s Tip is particularly relevant.

1. Go to the Apple menu.
2. Choose Shut Down … An alert appears.
   
3. Either click the Shut Down button or wait for a minute. The computer shuts down.
4. Secure the computer and head off to the beach if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, or to a warm spot if you’re in the North.
5. Enjoy the holiday.

The Tips are taking a summer break now. We’ll be back in a few weeks.

Thanks for reading the Tips, your comments and all your support this year. Have a good holiday break yourself.

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Mail.app’s Photo Browser
Mac Tip #319/12-Dec-2007

While you’re free to use whatever software you like on your Mac, there can be advantages to using the software Apple provides. That’s because it’s highly integrated, allowing you to easily move information between applications.

iPhoto is a good example of this integration, as it shows up in many applications in the form of the Media Manager or Photo Browser.

Note: I’m using Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) when I write these Tips. If you’re using an older version of the Mac Operating System some things may not be the same.

Find a photo

In the old days you had to begin in iPhoto if you wanted to email a photo. Now you start by creating a new message in Apple Mail.

To include a photo from your iPhoto Library click the Photo Browser button in the email message’s Toolbar. The Photo Browser window appears.

Resize the window if you like

The Photo Browser window can be resized in the usual ways. I like to drag the diagonal bars in the bottom right corner to make it bigger so it displays more photos at a time. Drag the dividing line between the list of albums and the photos themselves to make either part bigger.

Find a photo

Select an album in the top part of the window and scroll around or use the search field to find the photo you want to send. Type part of a filename into the search field to filter the list of photos.

Customise the display

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Hold down the Control key and click in the photo area. A contextual menu appears. If you’d prefer to see a list of photos choose Display as List. Call up the contextual menu again to choose to display extra columns for dimensions and file type.

Insert a photo into a message

Select the photo to send and drag it into the body of the email message. Then close the Photo Browser window, or move it out of the way.

Status Bar information

The Status Bar at the bottom of the email message now displays information about the size of the message. It also includes an ‘Image Size’ pop-up that allows you to resize the included image on the fly.

Resize the image

Experiment with different sizes from the pop-up. You’ll see the image dimensions change. In general, as the image is made smaller, so the message size decreases.

In two screenshots I have the photo at its actual size — it fills the message window and ‘weighs’ 79Kb; and at a small size — around a quarter the size of the message window, and ‘weighing’ only 61Kb. I used the OmniDazzle software for the screenshot to add a highlighted border around the Status Bar and darken the rest of the image.

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Because the photo I started with was already sized for a web page or email message the difference wasn’t very noticeable, but if the photo had come straight from my camera the difference in both size and ‘weight’ would have been dramatic.

Keep it small

People who use dial-up don’t appreciate huge email messages, and even people with broadband might not want huge emails. A handy rule of thumb is to try to keep email messages below about 100Kb for dial-up users and below one or two megabytes for broadband users.

If you have a lot of photos to share consider finding another way to do it, such as Flickr or a file-sharing service.

Useful Learning Centre articles

1. Flickr your photos
2. Flocking to the pictures
3. Be careful with Filenames
4. Get the picture
5. Power Up to a Flash Slideshow
6. The 12 Days of Email
7. YouSendIt — email attachments made easy

And be sure to check the full list of Learning Centre articles.

Mail.app has other interesting ‘integration’ features too. We’ll look at them in other Tips.

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Customise Leopard Spaces
Mac Tip #318/05-Dec-2007

After the last few Tips you may have Spaces almost completely under control, but there are a few final steps to taking total charge.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Visit System Preferences > Exposé and Spaces > Spaces and look at the Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts section.

Choose from the pop-ups how you’d like to Activate Spaces, Switch between Spaces, and Switch directly to a Space. Notice too that you can hold down any or all of Command, Control, Option and Shift in combination with the keys listed for each choice.

I’ve left my settings at the defaults so, for example, Control right arrow (or left arrow) cycles through each Space in turn moving to the right (or left). Control 1 takes me straight to Space number 1. [My screenshot shows that I was holding down Shift and Command while making my selection (as required by Snapz Pro X, my screenshot software).]

Rows and Columns

Customise how many Spaces you use, and how they are arranged, by clicking the + and - buttons beside Rows and Columns. A friend expressed a wish for 3 Spaces. To make 3 in a row click the + beside Columns, and the - beside Rows.

If you try to remove a Column or Row to which you’ve previously assigned applications an alert appears warning you that assignments will have to be moved.

Collect Spaces

After pressing F8 (or whichever key you’ve assigned) to see an overview of all Spaces, press the C key to collect all windows into one Space. Press C again to put them back.

Note: I found I couldn’t put the windows back into their Spaces with the C key after I’d created a new column between times.

Set an active screen corner

Visit System Preferences > Exposé and Spaces > Exposé > Active Screen Corners and select Spaces from one (or more) of the 4 pop-ups. In future when you move the mouse into that corner the Spaces overview will appear.

Again, note that you can hold down Shift and other keys while making your choice, to require those keys. [My screenshot shows that I was holding down Shift and Command while making my selection (as required by Snapz Pro X, my screenshot software).]

Thanks

With thanks to Andy Piper who pointed out the C key and hot corner in a very useful comment on the first Tip in this series.

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