iSights.org

Quick Tip: Set Download Priorities In iTunes 7.6

Purchased a couple of movies and TV shows and some music all at the same time?

And now you're waiting with nothing to do?

In iTunes 7.6 that's no problem. Just drag the songs to the top of the Downloads list and they'll be done first. Rearrange the movies and shows to your liking too.

Then you can listen to your new music while you wait.

Quick Tip: Resume Music Playback On iPhone

As you probably already know, you can click the iPhone's headset's microphone button to pause your music or your audiobook in case of an interruption, then click it once again to resume playback.

All well and good.

But sometimes you wait too long and you find your iPhone's decided to go to sleep. Now you have to get out your phone, press the "sleep/wake" button, do the finger slide, navigate to iTunes, press "Play", lock the screen using the "sleep/wake" button, and then put it away again.

A hassle.

But there's an easier way. Just reach into your pocket and press the "sleep/wake" button. Now, without doing anything else, click the microphone button on the iPhone's headset.

Boom. Playback resumes, and life is good.

Quick Tip: Copy And Paste With No Style Whatsoever

I know, I know, usually articles are about doing things with style, but this one is different.

How many times have you wanted to copy and paste a clipping from a web page into an email, but found that when you hit command-v your nicely formatted email is suddenly full of purple 16-pt Times Roman text? Doing a command-c, you see, copies the both the web page's text and the style in which it's formatted.

I used to keep a plain TextEdit document around for just these situations, doing a quick paste/select all/copy just to lose the clipboard formatting. But now it's goodbye TextEdit, because many of the new applications in Leopard and in iLife '08 now sport a "Paste And Match Style" Edit menu item.

Choose it (or type the finger-bending command-option-shift-v) and your pasted text will automatically pick up the style at your document's insertion point. This tip works in Mail, TextEdit, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

Try it, and soon you too can be style-free.

Quick Tip: Multiple Safari Windows In Spaces

Julian of Visual Lizard posted a tip on how to easily get a new Safari window in your current space using the Dashboard... which leads me to believe that some people have overlooked the obvious solution:

Just right-click the Safari icon in the Dock and select New Window from the popup menu. (You can also activate the menu using a control-click or a click-and-hold.) Boom. One new Safari window, right where you need it.

The same menu also lists all of Safari's active and minimized windows by name. This can be useful when you need to return to a specific site, or if you've forgotten the space where the window was located.

More Spaces tips and discussions can be found in our Spaces article index.

[via Visual Lizard]

Quick Tip: Cycle Through Spaces With The Dock

This one is quick and easy. If you have windows from the same application open in multiple Spaces, you can cycle through each of those spaces just by clicking that application's icon in the Dock.

So let's say you have Safari windows open in spaces 2 and 5, and you're in space 1. Click on the Safari icon in the Dock, and the frontmost Safari window in space 2 appears. Just as you'd expect.

But click again, and now you're looking at Safari's frontmost window in space 5. Do it again, and you're cycled back to space 2. Repeat. Rinse.

And as always, enjoy.

Quick Tip: Even BETTER Icons For Stacks

This version combines combines a custom set of icons with the file-within-a-folder technique illustrated in my previous tip, giving you a virtual set of file drawers that look a lot cleaner than Apple's file-pasted-on-the-folder design.

I've already changed my dock to use them and they look great.

I also think it's a bit funny that so many people are working so hard to change the look-and-feel of Stacks. That being the case, I think that Apple needs to listen to its customers and consider that maybe, just maybe, they got this one wrong. (Now if we could just figure out a way to get hierarchical menus back...)

Anyway, since this tip isn't mine I'll just link directly to it. Enjoy.

Stacks Overlays

Quick Tip: Make "Print Preview" The Default

I try not to simply post items found on other blogs, but this tip is too good not to share. As you may know, Leopard adds a spiffy new miniaturized Print Preview to its Print dialog.

By default, however, it's not shown and you have to click the "expand" button to make it appear. And you have to expand it in every application in which you want to see it. But by changing a single system preference, we can make every print dialog start out in the "expanded" mode.

Quick Tip: Grab Screenshots With Preview

Need screenshots for your blog or documentation? Use Preview!

Let's say you need some screenshots of a window. Open Preview, then select File > Grab > Window. Then simply click on the desired window. Preview will snag the screenshot and place it in a new Preview window, ready to be resized or cropped and then saved in the proper format.

Quick Tip: Screen Shots In Leopard

You probably know know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture.

But have you tried it in Leopard?

Quick Tip: Better Dock Icons For Stacks

Don't like the way the Dock's overly shy Applications folder likes to cover itself with the first application it can find?

Here's a quick and easy solution that also works for the other "special" folders in your life, like Documents, Downloads, and Utilities.

Quick Tip: Assigning The Finder To A Specific Space

I've found that it's become helpful to assign Leopard's new Finder to a specific Space so that new Finder windows always appear together with their brethren.

However, while many people know how to assign an application to a given space using the Expose/Spaces pane in System Preferences, doing the same thing to the Finder is a bit of mystery, since it's nowhere to be found in the Applications folder.

Quick Tip: Eliminate the "Glass" Dock in Leopard

Some people, including myself, like the new "Glass" dock in OS X Leopard. Others can't stand the thing. If you belong to the later group, thank Michel Jansen, who discovered that it's now possible to change the dock's appearance with a well-typed system command.