iLifeZone Episode 32
Tip Monsters After Tip Monsters
Run Time: 46:35

Scott Bourne www.podcastingtricks.com and www.podcastgearguy.com
Chris Breen MacWorld and Playlist Magazine
Kenji Kato Kenjikato.com
Craig Syverson Grunt Media
John Foster Beerschool.com

Let's get going right away and startpumping out the tips!

Kenji: In iTunes, you can full-screen Coverflow (the album art work flippy thing) by clicking the expanding square next to the scroll bar. If a video pops in while you're playing your music, you can switch to the video player by pressing Command+Tab and switching to the video player.

Craig: In Microsoft Word for Windows, the default format is DOCX, and you can't open them by default with Word 2004. You can change the extension from .DOCX to .ZIP, unzip the file, and find the XML file, then drag it into Safari and you're good to go! (Vinny's tip: If you have some extra time and you're not in too big a rush, check out Zamzar which claims DOCX as a format it can convert to and from; be warned though, it sometimes takes awhile to get the link back for the file you're converting). Scott suggests simply telling people not to send you those kinds of files.

John: In Mail.app, you can colorize mail from specific people. Select the e-mail you want to monitor, then click Preferences - Rules. Click Add Rule and give it a good descriptive name in the top. The FROM CONTAINS ______________ should be filled in with the e-mail address. In the bottom half of the screen, choose SET COLOR, of background, and then choose a color. Whenever a message comes in from that address, it'll be colorized making it much easier to find!

Chris: With Coverflow in iTunes, you can click on an album cover and drag it to the desktop which will copy all the individual tracks to your desktop.

Scott: From Carl W. Smith of Fort Lauderdale, FL: Most people seem to breeze right past Crossover from Codeweavers when talking about Windows compatibility on the Mac. The nice thing about Crossover is that you don't have to install Windows to make it work like you do with Bootcamp or Parallels.

Kenji: Because of security concerns, Flash content is disabled in Quicktime. If there's Flash in a QuickTime movie, it won't play for you, so you need to go to System Preferences, choose QuickTime, and on the last tab (Advanced) there's a checkbox to enable Flash and a movie's interactive features.

Craig: In Keynote, you can Copy Styles and Paste Styles from one object to another. For example, if you had a black square, and you wanted to match the style on another one, you can just copy style from one and paste it to another.

John: You can have your Mac read something to you by choosing Start Speaking Text from the Services menu.

Chris: You can download the Harmonic widget and it will grab the lyrics for the current song in iTunes. It then copies the lyrics to iTunes and syncs to iTunes!

Scott: In OSX, partitions greater than 1 terabyte are problematic. If you get a huge drive, partition into smaller disks using Disk Utility.

Kenji: To use the speech function even easier in Mail.app, highlight all the text, right click and click Speech, Start Speaking. This also works with Safari and other Cocoa Apps.

Craig: In Keynote, you can use the iPhoto Media Browser. In the inspector, you can see the actual name of the file. Go to the File Info tab in Keynote and find the icon. You can then drag that into the dock and it will put that file into a separate library so that everything can be easily located later.

John: Devon Technologies makes something called Word Service. It can reformat text, remove multiple spaces, and a bunch of other functions all with a right click. Find out more about it here . It works in all Cocoa Apps and in any Carbon app that supports services! And it's free!

Chris: Buy Spamsieve . Now that you've gotten that out of the way, you can also get rid of a lot of spam by creating a rule that wipes out Imagespam. You can find a complete set of detailed instructions here . You'll find that it gets rid of a lot of the spam you're getting right now.

Scott: Heinrich Berg suggests that in OSX, the CMD+Left Bracket helps you cycle through all windows in the same application. (Vinny's tip: This may not work in all applications because some, like TextMate use that as a shortcut. In those cases, CMD+` will do the same thing and since it's a sytem-wide function, applications can't co-opt it)

Kenji: Speaking of TextMate, Kenji recommends it because it has a huge amount of libraries, it does syntax highlighting (meaning it highlights special keywords for you) and there are even tons of plugins out there for it. You can grab it at macromates.com .

Craig: Likes to record directly into his Mac for video, but it's not as reliable as it could be. QuickTime Pro will continuously write to the disk so even if the disk has a problem, you won't lose everything whereas with some other programs, you might.

John: Recommends AcidSearch . It installs into Safari and allows you to change your search engine from something other than Google. It brings the search bar on par with what you can do with FireFox. You do need to have SIMBL installed, but it is free!

Chris: If you burn an audio CD in iTunes, your SoundCheck settings will go with it. It will also burn a gapless album. Crossfades will not burn, however. If you want to do that, Roxio Toast Titanium 8 will do it. iTunes will also not burn over any EQ settings, but it will copy over CD Text. Scott points out that Roxio Toast is also another app that you should absolutely own.

Kenji: In Safari, and you see a blue RSS button in the address bar, click it. It'll take you to the feed for that site that'll let you view the site's headlines, and in some cases the entire articles. It's fantastic because it brings all your news and sites into one place. If you have those RSS feeds, and you drop them into your menu bar, it'll show you how many new items there are.

Craig: In iWeb, and in the blogging tool, you can only make images a certain size. Using EasyCrop ($15) , you can resize it properly before you insert it into iWeb.

John: In Spotlight, you can set it up so that you're only searching through things you care about using the Spotlight System Preference and you can remove the keyboard shortcut. After turning a bunch of searches off, applications seemed to run quicker.

Chris: If you're using GarageBand, there is a ducking feature. Ducking drops the music track under the vocal track. Unfortunately, it isn't that great. You can draw lines to simulate the ducking feature and you'll probably end up much happier with the results. (Vinny's tip: Manually doing it also saves the problem of the music bouncing up and down if there's a break in your vocal track). Scott suggests to make sure your ducks line up correctly.

Scott: For podcasting, there are a few things you can do to improve performance during recording. 1: Turn off all the energy saver stuff. It messes up the timing with these programs. 2: Turn off Spotlight! 3: Turn off your screensaver! 4: Don't record really long files without stopping periodically because some programs love to mangle longer recordings.

That's a wrap for this week! Our next show will be about photography and the Mac.

This episode was sponsored by Overstock.com and ShieldZone .

The next show lands on May 10, 2007. For more information email us at info@ilifezone.com.

Thanks also to Vincent Ferrari for the shownotes!

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