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Here you will find helpful and interesting posts related to Mac OS X and Eli’s ongoing training in Mac productivity. Eli works as a trainer with Brightstone (Expert Apple Technical Consulting and Support for the Portland Oregon Metro Region).

These posts supplement Eli’s workshop “Get Your Mac Act In Gear: Helping You Increase Productivity by Working More Efficiently and Effectively on Your Mac”. You’ll also find links to many of the tools, tips, tricks, and good information on his del.icio.us mactraining page. Eli is also available for individual and group mac productivity training sessions. For more information contact Eli at 503.258.7787 or eli AT brightstone DOT com. Thanks!

i’m kind of loving the new feature of 10.5 that lets you hover over a date or some contact info in a mail message and be prompted to make either a new contact or add to an existing one, or to make a new ical event or to just pull up that date in ical. it’s good at interpreting strings that aren’t clearly a date, like “tomorrow” or “at 5″ or 555-1212. but this one was just odd:

not sure what kind of an event that would be, i am so… what? excited? fed up? glad to see you?

Quicksilver is working again sans crashes. thank the makers.

d0öd! 10.5 madness! why don’t they tell us these things? well, i guess they do tell us a lot, but even i was not aware, that if you are all upgradified, you can now: record ichats, drop-in pdf’s to combine them in Preview, grid-view multiple files using quicklook and more. see what macapper calls the top ten leopard features you’re not using.

the supergreat missing manual series covers apple’s iwork, but only the ‘05 version. if you are new to the iwork collection of apps or want to increase your proficiency with them, here’s the basic (apple-made) places to go to to get deeper in and get better at them:

• all the iwork tutorials
• there’s “hot tips” sites for each: pages, numbers, and keynote.
• and each has a site devoted to their respective keyboard shortcuts: pages, numbers, and keynote.

then if you want to pony up the $, there’s a few screencasts at screencastsonline.com.

that said, i betcha DP is hard at work on an updated version of an iworks missing manual as we speak. Professor Pogue? care to comment?

like many quicksilver enthusiasts, i hardly ever touch spotlight. others have posted elsewhere about how spotlight is needed to index certain things on your drive, but it didn’t sink in until i recently realized that nothing was coming up when i searched for terms i knew were in mails in a particular folder. then i realized, i had turned spotlight indexing of mail off, forgetting that you need it even to search from within mail. but as it happens, it’s not enough to check off “mail messages” in the spotlight prefs (see pic at left). that will allow you to see results from an actual spotlight search, but not from within mail. if, like me, you’ve told spotlight to exclude everything from it’s index (turning spotlight “off”), you’ll need to go back and exclude just the things you don’t want indexed, excepting your Mail folder in ~Library. you can do that from the “Privacy” tab in spotlight prefs, like this:

it’ll take a few minutes, but well worth it. spotlight doing just what you need it to and nothing else. happy hunting.

Here’s a quick (50 sec) screencast explaining this cool relatively hidden feature in Tiger. Enjoy!

Despite it’s amazing usefulness thus far, some of us have had issues with the Quicksilver’s extracool Social Bookmark plugin (mostly problems scanning the source). For those of you not yet familiar with this fantastically handy function of QS, there’s a nice intro and set-up walkthrough over at lifeclever.

However, it turns out that the current version you are no doubt running is not truly secure. Passing data in cleartext is not the end of the world, but it’s nice to know that the new version fixed this vulnerability. Except, how the heck to you upgrade to the new version? You can’t do it from within the QS plugin pane. QS thinks it’s up-to-date with version 8F.

Thanks to MaxP, here’s how to upgrade to the Social Bookmark plugin version 92 (i’m pretty sure you need to be running the latest, ß51 (3800), comment here if your milage varies…) –

1. invoke QS and put this string in the first qs pane: qsinstall:id=com.blacktree.Quicksilver.QSDeliciousPlugIn
2. then tab to the next pane and select “open”
3. confirm the resulting prompts to install and relaunch (you may need to RE-invoke qs to see those prompts).
4. the plugin may take some time to rescan the source, you can do so manually from the QS plugins pref pane.

Enjoy!

i’ve updated the chart i made [pdf] comparing and contrasting the features of camino and firefox. enjoy.