Set Dock switching mode to ‘hide others’ by default

If you prefer being able to focus on one application at a time, you may find this hint useful — it sets the Dock to automatically hide every application other than the one you’re switching into. So when you click on Mail, for instance, the effect is as though you activated Mail and then chose Mail -> Hide Others (or pressed Command-Option-H).

To enable this switching mode, open Terminal and type these commands:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool TRUE$ killall Dock

From now on, clicking on an application in the Dock will hide all other open apps while switching to the selected application. You will not see this behavior if you use Command-Tab to switch, or click directly on another application’s windows. To disable the feature, repeat the above commands, but replace TRUE with FALSE. (Alternatively, you can delete the entry entirely with defaults delete com.apple.dock single-app.) Remember to r…

Template: Holiday or Winter vacation photo album

Create a photo album keepsake to commemorate your winter holiday event! A great gift idea for those who participated in your holiday event. You can save it to CD or share it up on your web site.

Edit a presentation that is marked as final

See how to determine if a presentation has been marked as final, which makes a presentation read-only. Note that anyone who receives an electronic copy of a presentation marked as final can reverse the Mark as Final status and edit the presentation as this command is not a security feature.

Embed fonts in a PowerPoint presentation

Learn how to embed fonts in a presentation, thus saving the font with the presentation. When you embed fonts your text will always display as you want even if the host computer doesn’t have the fonts you are using installed.

Partially hide Office 2007 ribbons

Anyone who’s taken a good look at Office 2007 knows about the infamous ribbon. Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. The main complaint I hear is that you can’t customize it, not easily anyway. Another complaint is that the ribbon steals too much space. That is true — it’s definitely larger than the standard menu bar. Fortunately, you can hide the ribbon to free up a bit of space, using one of the following methods:

• Choose Minimize the Ribbon from the Quick Access toolbar’s dropdown list.
• Press [Ctrl]+[F1].
• Double-click the active tab.

Any of these toggle methods will hide or display most of the ribbon. However, the tabs stay — you can’t totally get rid of the ribbon without some serious programming tricks or using a third-party product.

How to print small time increments in an Outlook 2007 calendar

Having a hard copy of your calendar is handy, especially if you like to make notes or pencil in changes throughout the day, instead of working directly with Outlook. They’re also convenient to refer to in meetings when you don’t have access to your system.

Printing appointment blocks in small increments, such as 10, 15, and 30 minutes use to be simple. Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 has changed the format and now printing 10, 15, and 30 minute appointments seems impossible.  

Outlook 2007 allows more room for handwritten notes, but at a price.  The smaller the appointment interval, the fewer hours you can print. For instance, if you want a 10 minute appointment interval, you can print only 5.5 hours. To print 15 minute appointment intervals, you can print 8.5 hours. You can still have the smaller intervals, but you’ll have to sacrifice overall hours. If you need more hours, print more than one calendar.

Set half-star ratings directly in iTunes

iTunes has long supported half-star ratings, but I recently discovered (I thought) that iTunes 8 added support for setting these half-star values directly within the iTunes interface. After submitting a hint, robg told me that he couldn’t replicate the trick, nor could any of the others he asked to also test it out. So I went back to my machine to figure out why it works for me.

After some poking around, I figured out that I’d read about a hidden iTunes preference that enables half-star ratings. After reading about it, I must have tested it, because it was enabled in my version of iTunes (confirmed via a defaults read... check in Terminal). Here’s how to enable it on your copy of iTunes. First, quit iTunes, then enter this command …

Overcome iTunes’ criteria for a skipped track

I have many smart playlists in iTunes that rely on skip counts. For some reason, iTunes only counts a track as skipped if the track is advanced during the first two to 20 seconds of the track.2brTo overcome this limitation, I created a simple Applescript which moves the position of the track to two seconds, and then advances the track:

property differential : 2 -- secondstell application "iTunes"  if player state is not stopped then    set player position to (differential)    next track  end ifend tell

Save this to your user’s Library » iTunes » Scripts folders for easy access within iTunes.

How to disable Spector system monitoring software

Spector is a package that takes periodic screen captures of your system. It then saves these as hidden files on your computer somewhere, and can be set up to email them to someone at set intervals. To check if you have Spector on your machine, type top into the Terminal (or load up the Activity Monitor). You’re looking for a process called DriverSPD. If that process appears, someone has installed Spector on your computer.

To remove the Spector process (you need to be an admin user to do so), just go into /Library/StartupItems/ and delete LiloDS, DriverSPD, SystemStart, SystemStartState, and StartupParameters.plist. Log out and log back in, and DriverSPD should no longer appear in Activity Monitor. You’ll also want to remove the snapshots/keylog files that Spector saves on your computer. In fact, if someone has installed this program on your computer, and you don’t want them to know you found it, you may …

Watch this: Record, edit, and run a macro in Word 2007

Streamline your work by combining tasks and starting them with a single click. This video shows you how.

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