2 Dock related tips I take for granted
Part of the reason I like to post tips and tricks to my blog is so I can refer to them later if I’m doing a fresh install or setting up someone else’s machine. But there are at least two tips I just thought of that I’ve never posted because they are automatic for me.
1. 2D Dock. I’ve just never been a fan of the 3D Dock introduced in Leopard. Here’s how to get it.
2. Recent Things Stack. There is a recent items option in the Apple menu but that requires two clicks. With this tip you can get there with one click. I typically keep it set to recent applications. Here’s how to get it.
iPhone Home Screen Experiment
Minimal Mac had a nice idea two weeks ago for discovering which apps should be on his home screen. I decided to duplicate the experiment. On Tuesday I cleared all of the apps on my home screen, except for the Phone, Messages, Mail and Safari icons in the Dock. (I agree that those four should not be moved in principle, but find they are by far my most commonly used apps anyway.) Over the course of the week, any time I use an app I move it to the home screen. After seven days, I’ll see what I have!
For reference, here’s what my home screen looked like before:
And here’s where I am after two days:
There are already three apps that I didn’t have on my home screen before!
Online Deposits
Yesterday I received an email from my credit union announcing a new feature called Online Deposits. You can now deposit checks by scanning them. What an incredible feature!
With Online Deposits, you can deposit original personal checks, corporate checks, and cashier’s checks using a scanner connected to your computer. Once you scan the front and back of the check, the electronic image is sent to BECU with the deposit information.
And like ATM deposits, most deposited checks are made available immediately up to a certain amount.
Fake Steve on why Google really left China
Fake Steve at it again with the conspiracy theories! This one doesn’t sound that far-fetched to me.
As for Google suddenly growing a conscience, come on. You know why Sergey freaked?
It’s because he found out that his own employees in China were actually working for the Chinese government, and were using their access to Google’s internal systems to steal information about Google’s precious little search algorithm. How can you do business in China if everyone you hire is going to steal from you? That’s why Google is backing out.
Smart Folders in OS X
Nice walk-through on how to use Smart Folders in Mac OS.
WordPress 2 for iPhone
Not sure how I missed this but if you use the WordPress iPhone app make sure you have the 2.0 release. I’m perplexed at why they did it this way since both versions are free but they made version 2 a new app. In either case, just got it and it is way better than the original!
Restore default icons in Mac OS
Once again, a simple and intuitive solution to a problem that had been nagging me for a while. If you’ve ever changed the icons of folders in your user directory and wondered how to get them back to the originals, there is a drop dead easy way… Just Get Info, click the icon and hit backspace!
Post #4 claims an AppleCare “Genius” didn’t even know this. Why am I not surprised..
Dashboard Kickstart
Here’s a utility that auto-refreshes your Dashboard widgets on login and wake so that when you activate the Dashboard they appear instantly.
Using email aliases in Mail.app
Impressive that after over 6 years of using Mac OS I’m still discovering useful new tricks. If you use Mail.app and want to easily send mail using different email “aliases” (from addresses) this link describes the simplest way to do it.
DashNote
Really digging this Dashboard widget for SimpleNote. I prefer it over the web app. Looks nice too.
