Set keyboard shortcuts in Mail for outgoing e-mail accounts
As I was sending an e-mail today, I wondered if there were any easy way to choose my outgoing account in Mail. Like many people, I have several accounts, and need to choose specific ones for messages I send to certain clients. So I wondered -- since you can apply keyboard shortcuts to menu items using the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane -- maybe that would work for this drop-down menu in Mail. So I went to that preference pane, clicked the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and clicked the + button to get the new keyboard shortcut dialog. I chose Mail as the application, then entered the exact information that displays for one of my accounts (in the Mail 'From' drop-down menu). The format of each menu item is: First_name Last_name <my_email@my_host> Make sure to include the angle brackets, and put a space before t...
published on Friday, the 21. November 2008, macosxhints
Apps: KeyCue, Combine PDFs, AppDelete
KeyCue 4.3 ($27) helps users to make better use of keyboard shortcuts that different applications provide. After holding down the Command key for a set period of time KeyCue opens and displays a table of all currently available menu shortcuts. In the new release, the keyboard combination used for activating KeyCue can be defined by the user and a new double-tap option to activate KeyCue by pressin...
published on Wednesday, the 19. November 2008, macintosh-news-network
Create arbitrary keyboard shortcuts for bookmarklets
One of the things that makes Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) so useful it that it can integrate, to varying degrees, with all broswers via its JavaScript bookmarklets. Many other sites also use these -- for example, I have bookmarklets for Digg, FaceBook, and more. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to activate these from a keyboard shortcut? You can!Add a bookmarklet to your Bookmarks menu, not to your favorites bar.In System Preferences, go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, and add a keyboard shortcut with the exact name of your bookmarklet. You can specify the application as either your chosen browser, or for All Applications if you use multiple browsers. If you choose All Applications, just make sure the bookmarklet has the same name in all browsers. Now I can post to Delicious by pressing the same keyboard shortcut everywhere. Yay![robg adds: This work...
published on Wednesday, the 19. November 2008, macosxhints
Quick Tip of the Week: Help Pointers
Need help with an application? In Mac OS X Leopard, you?ll find Help in the menu bar of every application. Help points the way to tutorials, user guides, keyboard shortcuts, and other valuable resources. Specific to the application you?re using, Help offers Numbers help when you?re running Numbers and Pages help when you?re using Pages. Learn more about Help in the latest Quick Tip of the Week.
published on Monday, the 17. November 2008, apple-hot-news
Hyperspaces brings customization to Leopard's Spaces
Hyperspaces is a new third-party app that adds some customization options to Leopard's virtual desktop Spaces feature. If you have been jonesin' for custom backgrounds and more keyboard shortcuts, Hyperspaces might grant your wish.Read More...
published on Wednesday, the 29. October 2008, ars-technica
Use AppleScript to ease Greek, super/subscripts in Word
Word 2008's synchronized audio recordings in Notebook Layout format are ideal for taking notes in college lectures, but what about that physics or math lecture where you want to type in a ton of Greek letters, superscripts, and subscripts, and the toolbox just won't cut it? Go to Word, open the Scripts menu, and in the About this menu... item, choose Open Folder. In that folder, create (using ScriptEditor) the following three AppleScript files. Note that the backslash (and following characters) in their names create keyboard shortcuts for each script, which you'll see in Word's Scripts menu: AppleScript #1: Save this one as GreekToMe\scC.scpt after pasting into ScriptEditor: set textReturned to text returned ...
published on Monday, the 27. October 2008, macosxhints
Toggle AirPort on and off using keyboard shortcuts
This is the simplest way I've found to toggle the AirPort card on and off without using third party applications or too many buttons. Hopefully others will appreciate this function as I do. Note: This function is tailored to a MacBook, as the F5 and F6 keys have no predetermined function on these machines. Other machines may need the shortcut keys to be edited. Create two keyboard shortcuts. Go to the Apple menu » System Preferences » Keyboard & Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Click the plus sign at the bottom of the window, and select All Applications from the pop-up menu in the next dialog. In the Menu Title box, type Turn AirPort On with that exact case and spelling. Set the Keyboard Shortcut to F5, then click Add. Click the plus sign again, leave the pop-up menu set to All Applications, and in the Menu Title box, type Turn AirPort Off with the shortcut key also set to F5 -- only one of these functions will be displayed at a time. In t...
published on Friday, the 17. October 2008, macosxhints
Keyboard shortcuts and the ellipsis character
When adding a keyboard shortcut to System Preferences (for a menu item for a given application), you sometimes need to add an ellipsis (?) at the end of a menu item's name. A previous hint mentions the need to use the Character Palette to generate this character (or press Option-; on a US keyboard). Today, I was assigning a keyboard shortcut to an application's menu item, and I kind of forgot to enter the actual ellipsis character, and instead typed three periods. Interestingly, the shortcut worked. I don't know when this was changed (I have written a couple of articles in the past few years about keyboard shortcuts, and always found the need to type the ellipsis character), but it is certainly recent. This saves time and makes it much easier to enter a keyboard shortcut.While I'm on the subject, I also noticed that the shortcut was active immediately; I didn't need to quit and relaunch th...
published on Tuesday, the 14. October 2008, macosxhints
10.5: Use keyboard shortcuts to file in iTunes and Mail
In, Leopard, it's possible to make a keyboard shortcut for contextual menu items -- for instance, for the Show Package Contents entry in the Finder's contextual menu. This feature can be quite handy in other programs as well, such as Mail or iTunes. In those two programs, I use it for the commands to move messages or songs to mailboxes or playlists. The key is to create a shortcut in Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel with the name of the playlist or mailbox you want to move an item into, and choose the appropriate program as the Application. Note that this will only work if your playlist (or mailbox) name is not already a menu item somewhere (so your "Close Window" playlist is out). If you have more than one playlist (or mailbox) of the same name, the fi...
published on Thursday, the 7. August 2008, macosxhints
Easily add lyrics to iTunes songs via AppleScript
Often programs like PearLyrics or SingThatiTune just don't find the song I am looking for, and I have to find the lyrics manually. I found it tedious to find the lyrics in Safari, switch back to iTunes, highlight the song I want to add the lyrics to, open the song's info panel, paste in the lyrics, and finally, close the window. So I wrote this simple AppleScript instead: tell application "System Events" set sel to (the clipboard as text) end tell tell application "iTunes" set lyrics of current track to sel end tell I then bound this AppleScript to a keyboard shortcut using iKeys (any macro-capable program should work just as well). It will copy any text currently in the clipboard to the currently playing song's lyrics.
published on Wednesday, the 16. July 2008, macosxhints