Tag Archives: tips

Seven Tips for Interacting with Companies on Twitter

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Your attitude and approach will set the stage for a good relationship with the companies you deal with.

Get more from your software.One of the videos in my Twitter Essential Training course on Lynda.com includes a discussion on how you can get customer support from companies that maintain Twitter accounts. In it, I include several real-life examples of how I got quicker results from companies through their Twitter accounts than through normal customer service channels. Since recording that course, I’ve had at least a dozen other similar experiences.

If you want to use Twitter to get support for products and services you buy, you need to have the right attitude and approach. With that in mind, here are seven tips for interacting with companies on Twitter:

  1. Tip: You can use Twitter’s search feature, which is covered in Chapter 7 of the current version of my course, to find Twitter accounts for companies or specific products. Hashtags are covered in the course, too.

    When tweeting about a product or company, include its Twitter account name or hashtag in the tweet. This makes it easy for the company to easily find your mention.

  2. Refrain from using foul language when sharing negative comments about a product or company. Many people are turned off by bad language. Your comment will have more impact — and a greater potential for retweeting — if it’s stated in work-safe terms.
  3. When complaining about a product or company, be specific. Saying “Company ABC sucks” isn’t nearly as helpful to the company’s support team or fellow Twitter users as “Company ABC takes too long to process orders” or “Company ABC’s website is difficult to navigate.”
  4. If you have a question about a product or service, use an @mention to direct it to the company’s Twitter account. Ask the question in a single tweet, being as specific as possible. For example, “@CompanyABC Does #ProductA have a warranty?” or “@CompanyABC The manual for #ProductB doesn’t explain how to use it with my iPad.” If the company is properly monitoring its Twitter account, you may get an answer within minutes.
  5. Don’t hesitate to praise a product or company you like. Last night, for example, I had an extra-good shopping experience and tweeted: “Just wanted to say that we got EXCELLENT service at the PHX Camelback @BedBathBeyond store. Advised on a sheet purchase by an expert!” If everything you tweet is a complaint, you’ll look like a whiner that’s never happy. Support staff could hesitate to help you if they feel you can’t ever be pleased.
  6. If a company you complained about satisfactorily fixed a problem you had, tweet a follow-up to let your Twitter followers know they made things right. Many companies really do try hard; don’t they deserve praise when they resolve a problem?
  7. Don’t lie about an experience. Good or bad — people may rely on what you say to make purchase decisions. Do you really want to mislead your Twitter followers?

Of course, if you’re in charge of monitoring a company’s Twitter account, its up to you to respond quickly and promptly to any Tweets that mention your Twitter account or products. I cover that in my Lynda.com course, too.

Let me teach you more about Twitter!

You can watch seven videos from my Twitter Essential Training course for free. Click here to get started.

Ten Lion Tips for Snow Leopard Users: Introduction

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What to expect when you step up to Snow Leopard.

Mac OS X Lion Visual QuickStart GuideI’ve just finished work on my latest book, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: Visual QuickStart Guide, for Peachpit Press. This new edition of my best-selling OS X book is a complete ground-up revision that reorganizes and adds lots of material. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out and I hope you’ll check it out in print, as a Kindle book, or in Apple’s iBookstore.

To help spread the word about the book, Peachpit and I put together a video tentatively titled “Ten Lion Tips for Snow Leopard Users.” (The video will be online soon; when it is, I’ll link to it here.) The idea is to show Snow Leopard users some of the things that have changed from Snow Leopard to Lion. I’m not necessarily talking about new features — I cover the big new features like Mission Control, Launchpad, and Full-Screen Apps in individual videos available from Peachpit Press, where I can really dig in and show how they work. Instead, the “Ten Lion Tips” video concentrates on ten changes that Snow Leopard users may notice right away — the changes that might have them wondering what’s going on.

You can learn more about how Lion will rock Snow Leopard users’ worlds on Peachpit’s Web site in an article I wrote titled “Ten Lion Tips for Snow Leopard Users.” Of course, the ten things covered in the article (and video) aren’t everything you need to know about Lion. It’s just a start.

Lion is a great new version of Mac OS, one with plenty of new features and interface changes to help make you more productive. I dug deeply into Lion while working on my book and was very happy with what I found. I’m excited about Lion and thrilled to be using it on my Macs. I think you’ll feel the same way!

Three Productivity Tips from a Long-Time Blogger

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A guest post for WordCast.

About this Post
I wrote this post to complement my participation in a Blog Productivity panel podcast for WordCast. I was invited by Lorelle (of WordPress fame), and I really enjoyed participating. If you listen to the podcast, it’ll soon become clear that I’m the “odd man out” (so to speak) in that I do things a bit differently than the rest of the pack. The podcast is full of great tips from all panelists and definitely worth a listen if you’re serious about blogging. This post appeared on the WordCast site earlier in the week.

I might not be the most influential blogger you’ve ever heard of — if you’ve heard of me at all. Or the most prolific. But I’m probably one of the most experienced: I’ve been blogging since October 15, 2003.

Still, I was extremely pleased to be asked to join a panel of expert bloggers for a recent WordCast podcast about blogging productivity. The folks at WordCast asked me to follow-up with a blog post sharing some of my tips. I can’t help thinking that my co-panelist’s tips were better, but here’s what I have to offer.

1. Create and Stick to a Blogging Schedule

One of the most important things about keeping a blog is adding new content regularly. “Regularly” is a tricky word. It doesn’t have to mean every day. It just means often enough to keep your readers checking in for more.

For example, suppose your life gives you enough free time that you can post once or twice a day for a few weeks or months. Suddenly, however, life takes as turn and that blogging time is gone — or you get bored with your blog and put it on the back burner. Go a week without posting something new and the folks who check in regularly for your words of wisdom may stop checking.

While I realize this is an extreme example, it does illustrate my point: regular readers will pick up on the rhythm on your posting and expect you to stick with it. When you don’t, they move on.

The way to prevent this from happening is to create a posting goal and schedule time to write. Perhaps you think twice a week is a good frequency. Pick two days a week — Tuesday and Friday? — pick a time that works for you — at breakfast with your morning coffee? — and blog on schedule. Make it part of your routine, part of your life.

I try to get a new blog post out at least five days a week. My schedule has me sitting in front of my laptop with my morning coffee every morning I can. Since I’m an early riser — usually up by 6 AM — I usually get my blog post done before I start my work day.

Got something coming up that’s likely to break your schedule? Vacation? Business trip? Family commitments? Write extra posts when you can and schedule them to appear in the future. This is particularly handy if your topic is not time-sensitive or you know you’ll be unable to blog on schedule in the future. Here are two suggestions:

  • Long posts can often be cut it into multiple parts with each part scheduled to appear on a different day. Not only does this stretch a single work out to fill a posting schedule, but if done properly, your readers will make sure they come back for the subsequent parts.
  • Do double-duty and write two posts at a sitting, scheduling one of them to appear in the future. If you’re able to write a lot very quickly, you can actually write a week’s worth of content at one sitting. No one has to know that each day’s new post was actually written some time ago.

2. Take Notes

How do you know what to blog about? One way is to take notes. As ideas and thoughts come to you — either from the workings of your own mind or from something you read online or heard in a conversation — jot them down. If you spend enough time thinking and reading and listening, you should be able to accumulate plenty of ideas.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t use software or web-based tools such as Evernote to organize notes and clippings. I use paper. I keep spiral-bound notebooks on my desk and in my computer bag and make notes as things come to me. When I’ve processed the note — blogged about it, made the call, tracked down the Web site, ordered the product, etc. — I recycle the paper. The huge file containing all my thoughts and ideas is my blog.

The point is, it doesn’t matter how you take notes. The important thing is to take them. Keep track of the little ideas that pop into your head when you’re in the shower or driving. Write down the key words of a conversation that’ll help you remember what you found so intriguing. Then, when you’re ready to compose a blog post, you’ll have most of the material you need to get it written.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not knocking software tools. I just can’t be bothered climbing up the learning curve to use them effectively. Pen and paper works for me.

3. Automate!

There are lots of software tools and solutions out there to help automate tasks. After all, isn’t that what computers are for? To do the work and make our lives easier?

Here are three examples of tools I use to automate blogging-related tasks:

  • Delicious with Postalicious. Delicious is a bookmarking Web site. You read a Web page, want to remember it, and create a Delicious bookmark with its URL and a description and tags you specify. I’ve been using Delicious for years, since it could be found only at http://del.icio.us. Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that creates a blog post based on your new Delicious entries and the descriptions you provide. It then automatically posts the links entry to your blog at a predetermined time. You can find plenty of examples on my blog. Postalicious also works with other services, such as ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes. I rely on this combination of tools to collect and share Web-based content that I found interesting and want to share with my readers. The format isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly good enough for my needs. Oh, and one more thing: I use the RSS feed for my Delicious bookmarks to generate a list of recently bookmarked pages in the sidebar of my blog.
  • Twitterfeed with Twitter. Twitter is an incredible tool for communicating short snippets of information with other people all over the world. (If you haven’t heard of it or tried it, crawl out from under that rock, brush the dust and cobwebs off your clothes, and join the rest of the social networking community.) Twitterfeed is a Web-based service that scans your blog’s RSS feed and tweets links to your new posts. This is a great, automatic way to tell your Twitter followers about new content on your blog.
  • Feedburner’s Email Subscriptions. Feedburner is a service that modifies your RSS feed to add features. Although it was started as an independent service, it’s now part of Google, so you need a free Google account to take advantage of its features. The Email Subscriptions feature creates e-mail messages based on your RSS feed and sends them out to subscribers. The subscription list is maintained inside Feedburner, so you don’t have to deal with it; users can add and remove themselves without bothering you. This is a great way for folks who want to read your content regularly to get it on a timely basis without using RSS readers. Best of all, once you set it up, it’s automatic.

Conclusion

When thinking about blog productivity, it all comes down to working smart. Make blogging part of your life schedule. Keep notes about the topics you find interesting so you have plenty of topics to write about when you’re ready to blog. And automate tasks whenever possible.

These are just three tips. Give it some thought — or read the blog posts of my co-panelists here — for more.

About the Author

Maria Langer is a freelance writer who has been writing about computers and the Internet since 1990. She’s the co-author of the first-ever book on WordPress and has since authored three WordPress video titles for Lynda.com. Maria’s also a commercial helicopter pilot and serious amateur photographer. Her blog, An Eclectic Mind, can be found at aneclecticmind.com.

Mac OS: Ejecting a Disc So You Can Start from Another

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Eject a disc so you can insert the disc you want to start from.

Here’s the scenario:

You want to install Snow Leopard on your Mac but, for whatever reason, there’s a bootable CD or DVD in your computer’s optical drive. If you hold down C while starting up, it’ll boot from that disc. If you don’t hold down anything while starting up, it’ll boot from whatever disk it last started from or the disk set in the Startup Disk preferences pane. If you repeatedly press the Eject Media key while starting up, it may or may not eject the disc you don’t want to start from — in any case, it’ll likely start before you can insert the correct disc.

Sound far-fetched? It isn’t. It happened to me the other day.

My iMac’s hard disk was feeling ill and simply wouldn’t boot. I’d last started it with my old Leopard install disc inserted. When I got my Snow Leopard Install disc, I decided to run its Disk Utility First Aid routine on the sickly hard disk. Trouble was, I’d shut down the computer with the Leopard disc inserted.

Here’s how to eject a disc so you can insert another disc for startup. (The “screenshots” here were created with my digital camera, since it’s impossible to create a screenshot from within Mac OS X before the computer has completed its startup process.)

  1. Hold down the Option key while starting your Mac. Keep the key held down until a screen with startup disk icons appears.
    Fig1
  2. Click the icon for the disc you want to eject to select it.
  3. Press the Eject Media button on the keyboard. The disk comes out and its icon disappears from the screen.
    Fig2
  4. Insert the disc you want to start from. Its icon appears onscreen.
    Fig3
  5. Click the disc icon to select it.
  6. Press Return. The computer completes the startup process, using the disc you selected.

As you may already know (or should have realized after reading this), if you hold down the Option key at startup, you can choose your startup disk on the fly. You might find this useful if, for some reason, you have multiple bootable disks on your computer.

It’s in the Book!

Snow Leopard Book CoverYou can find more information about hard disks and using Disk Utility with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.:

  • Storage Media is covered in Chapter 6, pages 97-126.
  • Mac OS Utilities is covered in Chapter 24, pages 569-594.

Snow Leopard: Five Tips in Five Days

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On Peachpit.com.

Snow Leopard Book CoverIn the crazy days before the release of Snow Leopard, Peachpit asked me to pull five Snow Leopard tips from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide for release on their Web site over a five day period. The tips began appearing on August 31 and they’re now all available.

Here are links for your convenience:

Five Tips for Composing a More Effective Social Networking Bio

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Is yours saying what you really want to say?

I’m a member of several social networking services: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, etc.

All social networks have the same idea when it comes to setting up your account. You provide information about yourself in a “bio.” The maximum length of a bio can vary from site to site. Twitter, on the low end, allows only 160 characters. LinkedIn has no maximum length. Other services fit in between.

Your bio is your primary way to tell people who don’t know you what you’re all about. If they’re heard about you from someone else or stumbled upon one of your Twitter tweets or Facebook wall posts, they might be interested in learning more. They might even want to become your . . . wait for it . . . friend.

Whatever.

The point is, they’ll start with your bio to learn more about you, so it’s in your best interest to create a good one.

Here are some tips for creating an online bio for social networking:

  • Be brief. This is required on Twitter, which allows only 160 characters. As such, you’ll need to keep the text tight and specific. Lists usually work well here. Even if the service allows longer bios, don’t get carried away. Start off with the basics — the “must-know” info about you. Then expand in additional paragraphs. Nobody is going to slog through hundreds of words just to decide whether you’re someone they want to follow or be friends with.
  • Be accurate. Include the things that are important to you, keeping in mind the audience of the social networking service. The things you put on a Twitter or Facebook bio are likely to be very different from the ones you put in a LinkedIn bio, since the services are set up for different purposes. Don’t make stuff up. If you have to make up things about who you are, you really need to step away from the computer and get a life.
  • Be meaningful. Sure, lots of folks think it’s cute or cool to have a one-line bio with some spiffy saying, possibly snatched from a punch line in a movie. If a movie-one liner describes you to a stranger, I’m impressed by the shallowness of your character. The folks I want to know tend to be a bit deeper.
  • Be aware of turn-off words. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be friends with anyone who is a self-proclaimed guru or expert. These are words that other people should apply to you — not words you apply to yourself. Other turn-off words vary from person to person. If you are a woman and describe yourself as “sexy,” a heterosexual woman like me is not going to be impressed. But a teenaged boy or a lesbian might.
  • Be aware of providing too much personal information. Do we need to know that you’re rebuilding your life after a divorce? Or that you’re a recovered alcoholic? And while you might be proud to be a “Christ follower,” when you include that in your bio, you shouldn’t expect to make many friends with people who aren’t fundamentalist Christians or not religious at all.

Learn it all.Think of your bio as bait on a fishing line. Who will it attract? But, at the same time, how many people will ultimately be disappointed by the mismatch between what your bio says about you and who you really are?

What do you like or hate about things people put in their social networking bios? Use the comments for this post to share your thoughts.

Tips for Promoting Your WordPress.com Blog

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A few tips for WordPress.com bloggers interested in attracting more readers to their blogs.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with WordPress.com lately, preparing some new training material to cover the new features and revised administrator interface. Part of my new material is a list of tips for WordPress.com bloggers who want to attract more readers. Here’s the list:

  • Create original, well-written content. Too many blogs just rehash what’s already out there on the Web. But if your content is new and original, you’re more likely to attract readers who want fresh information or a different, independent point of view.
  • Blog regularly. If you’re serious about attracting readers, you’ll need to post new content at least a few times a week. Be committed and you’ll be rewarded with a strong following.
  • Stay focused. Studies have shown that popular blogs have one thing in common: they focus on a limited number of topics. Readers find this attractive because they know that if one of your posts interests them, they’re likely to find other posts that also interest them. This simply isn’t true if your blog covers a very wide range of topics.
  • Comment on other people’s blogs. When you comment, you often have the opportunity to include a link to your site. If your comment is thoughtful and appropriate, you might encourage others to come visit your site.
  • Share your blog URL everywhere you can. Three good places is on business cards, letterhead, and your e-mail signature. I bet you can think of a few more places if you try hard enough.
  • Use appropriate keywords in your blog posts. Key words are picked up by WordPress.com. If you apply an appropriate keyword, WordPress.com visitors may discover your blog when exploring a keyword.
  • Enable the Related Links extras feature of WordPress. This includes your blog among those blogs that can appear in related posts list on other WordPress.com blogs.

What do you think? Can you apply these tips to your blogging activity?

Shortcut Keys, Part III: Spotlight

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A list of shortcut keys you can use with Spotlight.

Spotlight, Mac OS X’s search feature, can be accessed and used with a number of shortcut keys. Here’s a quick rundown for reference.

Opening Spotlight

Spotlight MenuCommand-Spacebar activates the Spotlight menu on the far right end of the menu bar. You can then type your search word or phrase into the field at the top of the menu.

Spotlight WindowCommand-
Option-
Spacebar opens the Spotlight search window. You can then type your search word or phrase into the search box at the top-right corner of the window.

Selecting Items in the Spotlight Menu of Search Results

Spotlight ResultsReturn opens a selected item.

Command-Return opens the window for the Top Hit item on the Spotlight menu or, if another item is highlighted, that item. This is the same as Command-clicking on a selected item. (Thanks to reader Tom for clarifying this.)

Command-Click displays the item you clicked in the Finder but does not open it.

Down Arrow or Up Arrow selects the next or previous item in the menu.

Home selects the Show All option at the top of the menu.

End selects the Spotlight Preferences option at the bottom of the menu.

Command-Down Arrow or Command-Up Arrow selects the first item in the next or previous category.

Option-Down Arrow or Option-Up Arrow moves the insertion point to the end or the beginning of the text in the Spotlight menu’s search box.

Note that Apple’s Help feature includes a few additional shortcuts. These don’t seem to work with Leopard, so I haven’t included them here.

Chapter References

Product ImageChapter 5 of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide covers Spotlight in detail. It explains how to use the Spotlight menu and the Spotlight Find window, as well as how to create, save, and reuse saved searches. Chapter 5 also explains how to set Spotlight preferences to set the order of search result categories, add or remove categories, and exclude folders from searching.

One Way to Speed up Word’s Launch Time

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It works but it’s not for everyone.

Tired of waiting for Word to optimize its font menu each time it launches? Tell it not to. This will speed up the launch process — especially if you have many fonts installed — but it will also stop Word from displaying font names in their typefaces.

Give it a try and see if it’s worthwhile for you:

  1. With any Word document open, choose Microsoft Word > Preferences.
  2. In the Preferences dialog that appears, click the General option in the list of categories on the left side of the window.
    Word General Preferences
  3. Turn off the WYSIWYG font and style menus option.
  4. Click OK.

Try this for a while and see if missing out on the WYSIWYG menus bothers you. If it does, you can always turn this feature back on.

Shortcut Keys, Part II: Starting Up

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A list of shortcut keys you can use at startup.

There may be times when you want to alter the way your computer starts up. These shortcut keys will do the job.

C

Holding down the C key as your computer starts tells it to look at the CD/DVD drive for a startup disc. If it finds one, it will start from that.

Keep in mind that a startup disc must have a valid System folder for your computer. A good candidate is always the System Software or Restore disc that came with your computer or an installation disc for the latest version of Mac OS.

Option

Holding down the Option key at startup should display a plain screen with buttons representing the available startup disks. Choose the button for the startup disk you want to start from that disk. Keep in mind that this doesn’t work on all Macs.

Command-X

Pressing Command-X right after the startup tone on a computer with both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 installed will start using Mac OS X. As you can imagine, this feature is only supported on computers that support Mac OS 9 — otherwise why would it be installed?

T

Holding down the T key as your computer starts starts it in Target Disk mode. To take advantage of this feature, the computer should be connected via Firewire cable to another Mac OS computer that is already running. When the Target Disk mode computer starts, its hard disk appears on the other computer’s desktop and can be accessed like any other disk. The Target Disk computer cannot be run like a regular computer until it is restarted with Target Disk mode disabled.

Startup Disk Preferences PaneIf you know in advance that you want to start a computer in Target Disk mode, you can click the Startup Disk Mode button in the Startup Disk preferences pane, shown here. This immediately restarts the computer in target disk mode.

Shift

If you press and hold the Shift key (either one) right after the startup tone and release it when you see the spinning gear progress indicator, you’ll start the computer in “safe mode.” This loads only essential Mac OS X software. This is useful for tracking down software conflicts, but your applications may not work correctly until you perform a normal restart.

If you press the Shift key (either one) after clicking the Login button at the login screen, you prevent login items and Finder windows from opening when logging in. This can speed up the login process and prevent unwanted applications from starting up.

Left Shift

Holding down this key as the spinning gear progress indicator appears onscreen disables automatic login for the current session. This is handy if automatic login is set up for a user account but you want to go directly to a different user account.

Mouse Button

Okay, so it isn’t a shortcut key. But if you hold down the mouse button as the computer starts, it will eject any removable discs. This is a good trick if your computer insists on starting from a CD that you can’t otherwise eject.

Command-Option-P-R

This combination of keys at startup will reset parameter RAM. Hold them down until you hear the startup tone at least twice. You might want to reset parameter RAM (or PRAM) if you’re having network related problems. You can learn more about PRAM in Mac OS X in the “Mac OS X: What’s Stored in PRAM?” article on Apple’s Web site.

A Few More Seldom-Used Shortcuts

Here are a few more startup shortcuts that the average user will probably never use. But since they exist, I thought I’d list them for reference.

  • N starts the computer from the default NetBook disk image. Of course, you need a NetBoot disk image for this to work. (Anyone out there using NetBoot? If so, leave a comment here to tell us why.)
  • V starts the computer in “verbose mode,” which displays detailed status messages.
  • S starts the computer in “single user mode,” which enables you to troubleshoot the computer using Unix commands.

Page References

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

  • Startup Disk preferences pane and Target Disk Mode, pages 581-582
  • Login Items, page 511
  • Ejecting discs, page 105

Leopard Quick Tip: Click to Find Where a File Lives

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A Command key trick.

While working in a Finder window, you can use the Command key and mouse to learn where the window’s folder resides in the file hierarchy. Just hold down the Command key while clicking on the folder icon in the title bar:

Command-Click a folder Name

Okay, so maybe you already knew that. But did you know that you can do the same trick in a document window when that document is opened in an application? Command-click the document icon and see the path to its location on disk.

Command-Click a Document

Either way, choosing a folder in the hierarchy opens that folder in the Finder.

Shortcut Keys, Part I: Dialogs

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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

Open DialogThe 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

Delete PodcastPressing 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

Go to Folder in a DialogYou 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

Product ImageMac 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

Leopard Tip: Delete the All Documents Search

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Do you really need it?

I installed Leopard on my aging but otherwise faithful 12″ PowerBook G4 yesterday. I hadn’t planned on updating it because I didn’t think it had enough processing power to handle the new OS. But it met Mac OS X 10.5 requirements, so I figured, what the heck? I could always bring it back down to Tiger if I needed to.

The problem with older Macs running new software — including operating system software — is that they often don’t perform as well as a newer Mac will. You’ll notice this when attempting to complete processor-intensive tasks, such as opening large documents, applying filters in Photoshop, and — dare I say it? — searching for items on your hard disk.

Sidebar Searches

Leopard SidebarAnd that brings us to Leopard’s built-in Sidebar searches.

A Leopard installation reconfigures the Mac OS X Sidebar to make it better organized and a bit more usable. But what it also does is set up a Searches section that is preconfigured with six searches: three time-related searches and three file type related searches. Clicking a search in the Sidebar performs that search.

ImageI want to point out here that the Smart Folders feature, which is used to create these Sidebar search items, was available in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, too. It just wasn’t an in-your-face feature set up in the Sidebar by Apple. As discussed on pages 98 through 99 in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Visual QuickStart Guide, Tiger made it possible to save a search as a smart folder, which could be added to the Sidebar by clicking a check box in the Save As dialog. Leopard works the same way (see pages 93 through 94 in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide, but Apple evidently wanted to prove how useful this feature was by putting a few examples in the Sidebar for all to see and use.

But just how useful are these examples? I’m not sure they’re useful at all. While you might find it helpful to click a Sidebar item and quickly find all files that have changed today, that list contains all files — not just documents. As I type this, the Today search brings up 108 items on my little PowerBook, most of which are RTF files that may have been installed with the update I did twenty minutes ago. How useful is that? And I’ve only been using the computer for an hour so far today.

What Do You Think?

Give those preconfigured searches a quick try and see for yourself what the results are. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay. Now tell me: are they useful? Did you get the results you expected? Where they results you could use?

And did you try the All Documents search? That’s the one on the bottom of the list.

Search for All DocumentsI tried it this morning on this PowerBook, which has a 867MHz G4 processor (the minimum for Leopard), and started the computer on a mission it took quite a while to complete. Why? Because it came up with several hundred search results, most of which were configuration files buried within the depths of Mac OS’s file hierarchy. And this is on a computer that, so far, contains only a clean installation of Leopard (without all the extra fonts and printer drivers the installer offers to add), ecto (which I’m using to compose this blog entry), and Firefox. That’s it. I don’t even have my own documents installed yet!

Because the Leopard installation was new and the hard disk had not yet been indexed, the computer had to churn through all the files to find them. That slowed down the entire system, making me regret that I had installed Leopard at all. But now that the hard disk has been indexed, clicking that search displays results more quickly.

The question remains: how useful is the All Documents search?

Out with the Old, In with the New

What you might not realize is that the Sidebar is configurable. That means you can add or remove things from it.

As I explain in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide (on page 158, in case you’re wondering), you can remove an item from the sidebar by simply dragging it off. Try it for yourself right now. Get rid of the preconfigured searches you don’t think you’ll use.

That’ll not only clean up your Sidebar, but it’ll prevent your computer from having to churn through files in the event that you accidently click one of the searches.

With the searches you don’t need out of the way, you can feel good about adding the searches you do need. Use the Spotlight menu or search box or the Find command to creating a meaningful search that you think you’ll use again and again. Then save it as a Smart Folder and use the check box in the Save As dialog to add the search to the Sidebar. (Remember, you can always remove it.)

Curious about how this feature works? It’s simple. A smart folder is a saved search query file that, when clicked, performs the search. The default location for a smart folder is the Saved Searches folder inside the Library folder in your Home folder. (So this means you can have different saved searches than another user on your computer.) When you add a smart folder to the Sidebar, it’s the same as adding any other file to the sidebar — your Mac creates an alias of it. When you remove it from the Sidebar, the original item you created remains in the Saved Searches folder, so you can add it back. (This is not true with the predefined searches, which are saved elsewhere and cannot be easily added back when you remove them.)

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart GuideWant to learn more about searching in Leopard? Check out my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. You can find it in Apple stores and on Amazon.com.

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Ping to Keep Your Connection Alive

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A quick tip for folks who use a cell phone to connect to the Internet while on the road.

One of the reasons I bought my Treo back in May was because I wanted a phone that I could use with my laptop to connect to the Internet when I was away from WiFi access. The Treo has Bluetooth, which my 12″ PowerBook also has. After a bit of fiddling around, I taught the computer to use the telephone to connect to the Internet using Verizon’s Internet access.

Unfortunately, the Treo (or Verizon) setup drops the connection if it’s idle for a specific length of time. I don’t know what that length of time is, but I know it’s too short. For example, I can fetch my e-mail messages, but the connection will drop while I’m replying to one of them. Or if I take more than a minute or so to browse a Web page, the connection will drop. As a result, I have to reconnect. This is a pain in the butt.

The workaround that I found is to use ping. Simply set up your computer’s ping utility to ping a domain name continuously. This keeps a small amount of data going through the Internet pipeline, which keeps the connection open. It works like a charm.

Now don’t ask me how to ping on a PC. I don’t know how. But here’s how you can do it on a Mac.

  1. Open Network Utility. You’ll find it in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder.
  2. PingClick the Ping button.
  3. Enter the URL you want to ping. I’m a wiseguy, so I ping www.verizon.com. I suggest you ping your telephone service provider’s Web site.
  4. Select the radio button marked “Send an unlimited number of pings.” This keeps the pings going until you stop them.
  5. Use your regular procedure to connect to the Internet via your cell phone.
  6. In the Network Utility window, click Ping. The pings start and the Ping button turns into a Stop button.

You can now do whatever you like on the Internet and take your time doing it. The connection should stay open. When you’re ready to go offline, just quit Network Utility and disconnect.

If someone wants to use the Comments link or form below to explain how to use Ping on a Windows PC, be my guest. I’m sure there are a few people out there who’d like to know.

Changing the Order of Menu Icons in Mac OS X

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Put them in any order you like.

Here’s a quick tip from my Tiger book that I didn’t remember until I stumbled on it today. More proof that writing a book about something doesn’t mean you remember everything in it.

ImageYou can change the order of the icon menus on the far right end of the menu bar. Just hold down the Command key and drag the icon to the left or right. The other icons will shift to make room for it. The screenshot here shows me moving the battery icon on my MacBook Pro to the left.

The only menu icon you can’t move using this technique is the Spotlight menu.

300 Mac Tips

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Miraz makes a milestone.

Just a quick note to you Mac OS users out there…

Miraz Jordan, who co-authored WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide with me last year, has just released the 300th issue of her Mac Tips newsletter. In case you’re wondering how long it takes to issue 300 Mac Tips, Miraz has been at it for six years.

Haven’t been checking in? Well, what are you waiting for? You can find the Mac Tips archive at http://mactips.info/tips/. That’s also where you can subscribe to the RSS feed and get Miraz’s Mac Tips delivered to your RSS reader’s in box automatically.

Congratulations, Miraz!