Quicktime Title Page

Note: This requires Quicktime Pro.

Admittedly, it’s frustrating that Apple doesn’t include Quicktime Pro with OS X. To be fair, you get iMovie with a Mac purchase, and that more than evens you out with the Windows crowd.

For some, Quicktime’s simple appearance is deceptive. It’s quite powerful, and can be automated for all kinds of repetitious tasks. People who need that functionality probably have no qualms about shelling out thirty bucks. But what about the rest of us?

When you just want to make some quick cuts or export to a new format it’s hard to beat QT Pro. You don’t have to pull your movie into a different file format like you do with iMovie. And for many tasks you can simply save your results as a reference movie, without taking up tons of disk space.

But those are things for another day. The screencast shows how to add a title to the beginning of your movie. If you followed Murphy’s instructions on making a Quicktime skin for your movie, you might want to do this so people will know to hit the spacebar for playback.

If you want to see the resulting .mov file (starring Murphy’s cat) from the screencast, download it here.

iPhoto Mini Browser

Using a single Automator action you can pop open a mini iPhoto browser that lists your library, albums and images. You get quick access to your photos without fully opening iPhoto.

The action is designed to kick off workflows, letting you select the photos other actions will act upon. So the Workflow is active while the window is open.
You could add other actions to the Workflow, but you don’t have to. It was demonstrated on an episode of MacBreak Weekly with a second action to open the selected photos in Preview if you clicked Choose instead of Cancel.

You can open the browser a number of ways. To make it highly accessible you might want to assign a function key to it. You can do that with Xkeys, a freeware application Murphy uses in the screencast.

While playing with Automator you might notice an iPhoto action for reviewing photos. It facilitates simply accepting or rejecting photos, and passing them on to another action. You could dump all the rejects to an album for example. Sure, you could do this in iPhoto with other tools. But this action keeps you on task if you’re easily distracted! Maybe we’ll screencast that another day.

Send a Page, Not a Link

How do you send links? Command+L to highlight the URL? Command+C to copy the link? Go to Mail, create a message, paste in the link…

You don’t have to do all that! If you’re loyal to the natives like Safari and Mail you can take advantage of Command+I when you need to send a page. Yes, Command+I. Safari and Mail will tag-team the rest.

This is so easy, we almost didn’t make the screencast. But maybe you’re at work and you want to see it right now. Go ahead and watch, it’s short.
Take a look at this entry on Hawkwings if you want some more information on other browsers and similar capabilities.

Murphy doesn’t even use Mail in a conventional way. But it’s often open for things like quickly sending attachments, and having the Mac respond to emails demanding action.

This little trick isn’t a bad reason to keep Mail open either.

The Hosts File

One of the biggest headaches for network administrators, especially in a Windows environment, is name resolution. What’s name resolution? It’s pretty simple in concept, and quite complicated in some implementations.

Computers on the Internet and on any IP network have IP addresses, like 66.94.234.13. Those numbers are hard to remember, so we use names instead. Like yahoo.com. The same is true in your house. You have an iMac in the kitchen, maybe its name is clara and its IP is 192.168.0.2. You should be able to access it across the network from another machine using its name, clara. Mechanisms built into Windows and OS X turn the name clara into an IP address and you connect.

Name resolution is pretty complicated, and sometimes it plain just doesn’t work. You could try to troubleshoot it, but that can be very time consuming. The main tool for turning computer names into IP addresses is DNS (Domain Name System), which acts something like a phone book. When you type apple.com into Safari a DNS server is contacted and it returns the IP of apple.com to your computer. Then your computer connects to apple.com using the IP address. All that, and a lot more, happens every time you access a site. And you think it’s slow!

When you can’t access a computer or site by name, the logical next step is to use the IP address. That eliminates name resolution as the source of the problem. Instead of taking that big step you could implement a hosts file. Hosts is a simple listing of IP addresses and corresponding names. Because it’s so simple, it’s unlikely to malfunction.

In the early days of the Internet a hosts file was shared amongst the users. The rapid growth of computers (hosts) on the Internet made hosts inadequate as a name resolver. DNS distributed the load across many computers and still serves us today.

On your home network your computers rely on a system of announcing themselves periodically to let other computers know they’re there and what their names are. This is more complicated when you have a mix of Windows and Mac computers living together, and when computers are frequently powered on and off.

If you want to be proactive, you can configure a hosts file on each computer, listing the names and ip addresses of the other computers on your network. Once you’ve done this your name problems should be greatly reduced. You can access other computers by name instead of typing the awkward IP addresses.

It’s important to note that computers have multiple ways to resolve names. Their own cache of resolved names, the hosts file, DNS, and other databases. When troubleshooting it helps to know what order OS X tries to resolve names. Tiger uses hosts before consulting DNS. If the name is found in hosts there won’t be a DNS lookup. You can use the lookupd command to see how your computer resolves host names.

In Terminal type “lookupd -configuration” and press enter. Look for output like the following:

LookupOrder: Cache FF DNS NI DS
_config_name: Host Configuration

FF means flat file and is in fact the hosts file. Tiger looks at hosts first. Your version of OS X might not.

You might think the hosts file would be a good way to simplify your browsing - by adding the names (or nick names) of sites you access frequently and their IP addresses. Nick names? The name you enter in hosts doesn’t have to be the actual name of the computer or site you’re accessing. It’s the name you want to type.

Regardless, that could be a lot to manage and might lead to unexpected results. The screencast shows how to use a keyword in Firefox that lets you use an alias, called a keyword. Murphy suggests you try it out. If you want to get crafty with hosts, take a look at using it to block pop-up ad domains. Personally, ads don’t really bother Murphy. And they help to support some great sites!

The hosts file history is pretty interesting, for geeks. It was the way to resolve names on the Internet for about ten years, with users downloading a copy every night. You don’t know how good you have it!

Creating Mac Shares

This post covers a few different things - the title doesn’t do it justice. We’ve got a network theme working this week and we’re going to keep it rolling with shares.

If you’re coming from Windows you’re probably a little surprised at how your Mac handles sharing compared to Windows. If you’re familiar with UNIX and Linux it probably all makes perfect sense.

Here’s what the screencast covers:

• Gain access to an external drive, that isn’t shared, connected to a different machine
• Share a USB drive on the local machine
• Copy contacts (.vcf) from a Windows machine directly to a Mac-formatted iPod.

Sounds like a lot, but we’ll use some simple tools to make it really easy.

In Windows you may have right-clicked folders and drives and found menu items for sharing the resources on the network. You don’t see those on the Mac, do you? Your Mac figures you keep everything in your home folder, which you can easily share in System Preferences. But when you add a second internal drive to your G5 or plug in a USB drive, you have no way to share them.

We have two techniques and a different tool for each. First, we’ll connect to a remote computer and create a symbolic link using the ln command (Terminal). The link will make an external drive, an iPod in the screencast, appear as a subfolder in the Public folder on the remote machine.

When we connect to the remote computer we can see the iPod contents via the Public folder.

Read more about ln and symbolic links here. In the Windows world you might have used Server Manager or the MMC to create a remote share. We’re not really creating a remote share, we’re linking additional resources into an existing share.

Next we’ll use Hornware’s SharePoints, a donation-ware tool that makes sharing folders and drives connected to your Mac a cakewalk.

Here’s the cool part: We’ll access the shared iPod from a Windows machine. If you keep all your contacts on a PC laptop this is a good way to copy them to your Mac-paired iPod.

The ln part of the screencast was inspired by this post on MacOSXHints.

Note: This screencast assumes some familiarity with Terminal. If you’re confused by the screencast, see Murphy Mac’s Terminal category in the Sidebar to the right. You might want to watch this first. Be careful with the Terminal! Its power can be dangerous!