Maria’s Guides

A list of shortcut keys you can use in most Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard dialogs.

This is the first in a series of quick articles that list shortcut keys available in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. In this piece, I’ll tell you about some of the shortcuts you can use in Mac OS X dialogs.

Tab

The Tab key advances you to the next area of a dialog. So, if a dialog contains multiple text boxes for entering information, tab moves you from one to the next. You can tell when an item in a dialog is active because a blue border appears around it or a blue (usually) selection bar appears within it (or both, depending on the item).

In this example of the Open dialog for Apple’s Pages application, the Search box is active; you can see the blue border around it. If any of the list items were active, they’d have a blue bar on the selected item.

Return or Enter

Pressing return or Enter “clicks” the default button in the dialog. The default button is blue and pulsating — it stands out from other buttons in the dialog.

Not all dialogs have a default button and, in many cases, the default button isn’t the one you’d expect it to be. For example, when I select a podcast and press the Delete key in iTunes, I’d expect the Move to Trash button to be the default. It isn’t, as shown here. The Keep Files button is the default. Pressing return removes the file from iTunes, but who knows where it is or goes on disk?

Keep in mind that although these shortcut keys should work in the Finder, they may not work in all Mac OS X applications. It really depends on the software developer’s implementation of Mac OS standards. Try them and see for yourself!

Letter or Command-letter

This one is kind of tricky and doesn’t work all of the time. But I’ve found that it works in many applications.

If you have a dialog with multiple buttons, you can “click” one of the buttons by pressing the letter key corresponding to the first character in the button name. So in the dialog shown above, you can choose Move to Trash by pressing M.

In some applications, you might have to hold down the Command key while pressing the letter key.

You can also use a letter key to quickly go to the first item starting with that letter in a selected scrolling list.

Escape or Command-. (period)

Pressing Escape or Command-. is the same as clicking the cancel or close button in a dialog. At least it should work that way.

Up Arrow and Down Arrow

Pressing one of these arrow keys highlights the previous or next item in a selected scrolling list.

Left and Right Arrow

Pressing one of these arrow keys enables you to move horizontally in a multiple-column list. For example, in the first screenshot here, if the first column was active, you could use the right arrow key to activate the second column.

Page Up and Page Down

Pressing one of the Page keys scrolls a selected list one windowful at a time.

Command-Shift-G

You like the Go To Folder dialog that you can use in the Finder? Well, you can also use it in an Open or Save As dialog. Just press Command-Shift-G while the dialog is open. You can then enter a path to the folder you want

I have a mental block when it comes to that dialog and never seem to enter the right path on the first try.

Page References

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide includes more information about these topics:

• Keyboard shortcuts, page 23.
• Dialogs, pages 207-209
• Go To Folder Command and Dialog, pages 52-53

Hidden away in iTunes U.

The iTunes Store is a vast place. But don’t let the word “store” keep you away. Besides being an excellent source of free podcasts and video podcasts on a wide range of topics, the iTunes Store is also home of iTunes U.

The U stands for University. Wander through there with iTunes and you’ll see an amazing collection of lectures from major (and not so major) universities and other institutions of higher learning.

Now drill down to find the University of South Florida’s Lit2Go Audio files. These audio files, which are available as podcasts you can subscribe to or MP3s you can download singly, include recordings of public domain fiction and non-fiction from authors like Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Emily Bronte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and so many more.

Okay, so the works aren’t read by their authors. And the readers aren’t incredible audio actors, like Jim Dale, who reads the Harry Potter books. But they are complete audio books of dozens of classic works. And they’re free.

As I type this, I’m downloading all chapters of Mark Twain’s classic novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I’ll be loading it into my iPod. During Thanksgiving week, I fully expect to be trapped on an airplane for at least the 10 hours of total scheduled flight time. I’ll be prepared.

Know of any other sources of free audio books? Don’t keep it to yourself. Use the Comments link or form to share what you know.

Download it for free!

I’m always the last to know…

Peachpit said they were putting a free chapter of my book online as a sample. We even discussed which chapter to use. But I somehow missed the memo that said it was available for download.

It is. Download Chapter 7 from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide from Peachpit Press’s Web site as a PDF file.

Enjoy!

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After over a year of soul-searching, I decide to spin off my book support topics to their own site.

I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under MariaLanger.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?

Information from Software Update.

This update is for 20-inch and 24-inch aluminum iMac computers with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics running Mac OS X 10.4.10 with iMac software update 1.2.1 or Leopard with iMac software update 1.3.

It updates the graphics firmware on the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro to improve system stability.