When I use OSX I find always finding myself discovering little things that if I’d known them before I could have done things much more efficiently. Here are a few of ‘em:

Using wildcards to build iPhoto smart albums

This is an interesting little iPhoto feature I just found. When making a smart album, ? and * are wildcards. A ? will match “any single character,” so that K??e will match “Kate” and “Kyle.” A * will match “any number of characters,” including none, so K*e will match “Kate” and “Kill me” and “Ke.”

I couldn’t, however, discover how to search for the actual ? and * characters. Backslashes — the usual escape character — don’t seem to work; K?ate is treated the same as Kate, but K\ate will find only “Kate.” Adding an ‘escape’ character (Control-Q, Esc) also failed.

Launch apps after network connection is established

In having frustrations of having to go back and hit the reconnect on Yahoo and MSN Messenger after booting up my Mac at home (iChat works fine) due to the slight delay in logging on to my Airport network, I decided a script was in order. By the time the startup items are complete and you’re ready to use it, all of the IM sessions are logged in, instead of having to click on the reconnect buttons. I also added WeatherPop to this so it won’t try to run and grab your forecast when the network isn’t there yet.

on idle
try
do shell script “curl www.google.com”
tell application “MSN Messenger”
activate
close the front window
end tell
tell application “Yahoo! Messenger”
activate
delay 2
close window “Yahoo! Messenger”
end tell
tell application “iChat”
activate
close the front window
end tell
tell application “WeatherPop”
activate
end tell
quit
on error
— say “Network Not Available!”
end try
return 2
end idle

Use the ‘Stay Open’ option when saving this AppleScript, and it will check every two seconds for network availability. Then it launchs the IM’s and WeatherPop. You’ll probably need to modify the script if you’re on a proxy.

One-button access to Firefox’s contextual menu

I just noticed this behaviour in Firefox. If you hold down the mouse button, after about two seconds the context menu will pop-up. This seems to only work in Firefox. This is a huge help for laptop users who use the built-in trackpad. Now if only the rest of OS X could adopt this behaviour, Apple’s one-button mouse philosophy would work even better.

Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution

Having the date and time in the menubar clock is an often-requested hack for OS X — there have been a number of hints about how to do this, as well as a previous Pick of the Week (iClock). Here’s yet one more, this time by Peter Maurer, author of my all-time-fave utility, Butler. Calendarclock is a simple application that places the time and date (or some combo thereof) in the menubar when it’s running.

Calendarclock puts nearly any version of date and time in your menubar that you’d like to see — it uses the syntax from the Unix strftime command to display a format of your choice (with a number of pre-defined options). Do a man strftime in the Terminal and you’ll see the various formatting options available. After some experimenting, I settled on %a %b %e %1I:%M%p, which leads to a date/time display of Mon Aug 2 9:03am (I’m usually alert enough to know the current year).

In addition to the date/time display, Calendarclock will display a full-month calendar when you click on the date/time in the menubar, as seen at left. The pop-up menu at top lets you change the month shown, or you can use the small arrows below the calendar. If you double-click a date in the calendar, iCal opens with that date selected. Below the calendar, the selected day’s iCal entries are shown (they can be hidden by clicking the circular three-line icon). Alternatively, you can use the preferences to display the entire month’s iCal events, but such a list will tend to be quite long. And yes, I do have Kylie’s pick-up time scheduled, mainly so I get a reminder that I need to go pick her up! The circular down-arrow icon lets you donate, open Calendarclock’s preferences, and launch iCal or the Date & Time preferences panel.

There are obviously other tools that do this, including the previously-discussed iClock and wClock, but I prefer Calendarclock. The only reason it lost a point at all is that it cannot be moved from the top-right corner of the menubar, and I’d prefer to have something else in that corner. However, this is a minor quibble, and the flexibility of Calendarclock more than makes up for it.

Well folks, that’s all for now. That last one maybe doesn’t fit, but I’ve been wanting to tell you guys about it for a while. Anways, if you’ve got any tips or suggestion(s) for future Mac Tips, please let me know, peace out-

-b