Creating a multi-item archive in OS X

More things I never knew, and the first use I've had for the "Action menu". OS X has a clever way to put multiple items into a zip, without having to put them in a folder first.

Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Making ZIP Files (Compressed Files) in One Click:

...the Action menu (the button that looks like a gear up in the Finder window’s toolbar)...

... You can also compress several different files (like three, for example) into one single archive file — just Command-click (or Shift-click contiguous files) on all the files you want included, then choose Create Archive of X Items from the Action menu. A file will be created named “Archive.zip”...

Display full file name in OS X column view

Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Speed Tip: Faster Full-Name Viewing in List View.

Arggghhh. This has annoyed me for years. Now I discover there's a solution. In columnar view, to see a complete file name, hold the option key and place the mouse cursor over the truncated name (don't click).

I'm going to bang my head on the desk now.

Update: Another way to do something similar is to invoke Cmd-Opt-I. The resulting information display window changes as you click on an object. If you display the name field you can even edit file names this way. It's surprisingly convenient, especially in icon view. BTW, if you select several items and do Cmd-I you get an information window for each one, but if you select Cmd-Opt-I you get a summary window for all three. So clever. In the OS X world, it hardly ever hurts to try the Option key and see what happens. If the Cmd key is the "splat" key, the Option key is the "easter egg" key.

Podcasts - I find some I like

A while back I looked for podcasts that interested me, but I came up short. Since then my office has moved, and I have a half-hour commute instead of a 12 minute commute. Just enough time to fit in a podcast in the morning, and recently I came across two podcasts of interest. One is Public Radio's Marketplace podcast, the other is Steve Gibson's security cast. The latter has an intriguing series on VPN and SSH/SSL security; topics I do need to learn more about.

I didn't go the web sites to add these podcasts, instead I searched for them using iTunes. It worked quite well.

Using Folder Actions

Apple is doing a major revamping of their web site, with special pages targeting user communities. In general it looks like a solid improvement. This might help explain why so many of their web pages were becoming neglected and decrepit -- they were foregoing maintenance pending the new release.

Their "pro" site has a "tip" from Scott Kelby Mac OS X tip every Wednesday. Most annoyingly, there's no RSS feed. You have to remember to visit. Dumb. If they provided a title-only feed they get much more site traffic. Maybe that's coming. Today's tip was on Folder Actions, another Tiger features I've not found a use for ...

Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Adding Automation Through Folder Actions:

At the office, I’m on a network and I have a Drop Box where my co-workers (freaks that they are) can send me files. However, for a long time, if a freak put something in my Drop Box, I wouldn’t know it unless they called or emailed me and told me so. But now anytime one of them drops something in my Drop Box, a message dialog appears that says, “Something freaky is in your Drop Box.” This is a simple AppleScript ...

To assign a script to a folder, Control-click on that folder and choose Configure Folder Actions from the contextual menu that appears. This brings up the Folder Actions Setup dialog, where you toggle various scripts assigned to folders on and off, or even edit scripts (if you know how to write AppleScripts). Click the plus sign ( ) button at the bottom left of the dialog to add your folder to the list (this actually brings up a standard Open dialog showing your folder, so click on your folder in the dialog and click Open). Once you do this, a window will pop down with a list of built-in sample scripts you can assign to this folder, and their names give a cryptic description of what they do. Pick the one that sounds like what you want to do (to replicate my Drop Box warning, choose “add — new item alert .scpt”) and click the Attach button (you’ll see your newly assigned script appear in the column on the right of the dialog). Now click the Enable Folder Actions checkbox at the top-left corner of the dialog. This is a global on/off switch, so any folder to which you’ve attached scripts is now “activated.”

By the way, once you’ve applied actions to a folder, you can turn Folder Actions on or off globally by Control-clicking on any folder and choosing Enable Folder Actions or Disable Folder Actions from the contextual menu.

Export OS X Mail.app Address Book to CSV files

Finally - a tool for exporting Address Book to Thunderbird (and Gmail) - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Handy for moving data out of Apple's lockbox.

Looking for a BetterHTMLExport replacement

For years I used BetterHTMLExport to produce iPhoto web sites (iPhoto's default web export is pretty crummy). Alas, BHE has been sold and I didn't get a good feeling about its new home. I'd have to pay to upgrade to the iPhoto 5 compatible version anyway, so I went looking -- and found
Galerie

It's free (why?) and gets great ratings. Easy to use and install, and, unlike BHE, easy to uninstall. It doesn't mess with iPhoto. I dropped 339 images on it from iPhoto and it generated a nice set of pages using the default template. Alas, Galerie only works with metadata embedded in the image. It can't use the titles and comments from iPhoto.

So Galerie is pretty nice (though I wish it were not free), but I'm still looking.

Update 5/25/06: Galerie now uses titles and comments, so it's the perfect replacement.

Changes to comments

I've changed the Blogger comments settings. Anyone can comment now, there's no longer a requirement to register with Blogger. All comments have to be approved for now, but I'll see how much junk I get. Maybe the very annoying OCR Turing test (type distorted letters) will suffice to limit spam. (I dislike that test intensely since screen readers for visually impaired persons can't pass it.)