10 Apple Tips

The Magic Trackpad normally slants up to match the keyboard angle. Some may prefer to use it slanted down in their lap, on the couch, or on low desks with a gel palm rest. With this hidden pref, the trackpad auto-detects hand orientation from 5 resting fingers and rotates the coordinate system to match.

As many know, Spotlight in the menu bar provides calculator functions. If, for example, you enter

Here's an easy way to make Audiobooks in iTunes 10.

I searched for too long to figure out how to best move Microsoft Outlook data (Contacts and Calendars) to a Mac (Address Book and iCal).

You may receive a build error when compiling some packages in Fink of the form

I wanted to create an automated email to send hourly reminders to a co-worker who was forgetful about many things. So I used Automator and (because of corporate Exchange email) Entourage 2008.

Mac OS X 10.6 tightened security and now one administrator user cannot unlock the screensaver of another admin user. However, many IT professionals need to be able to grant their users admin access to their Macs while still being able to effectively administer the machine in their absence.

I wrote an AppleScript droplet to manage the settings of Spotlight indexing for a volume. It's called Refocus, and may be downloaded from here.

Quartz Debug is a part of the Apple Developer Tools and may be found in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools. It's used to test and optimize graphics performance when writing a new Cocoa program. One thing bugging me with Quartz Debug version 4.0 in Snow Leopard is that the window list which listed all the open windows on the system along with their id, size, and memory consumption statistics is apparently gone. This was quite handy when debugging an application that uses multiple windows.

With Snow Leopard the ScreenSaverEngine application is a 32/64-bit binary, and if your system supports it will run in 64-bit mode. This means that any screen savers without 64-bit code will not run, and this is primarily old unsupported screen savers.