A Twitter user recently expressed a wish to be able to search through Mail.app on the Mac without having to see all the RSS articles that they’d deleted. This can be done with a couple of simple Smart Mailboxes.
First of all, set up a Smart Mailbox with the following rules:
Then, setup a second Smart Mailbox like this:
This second Mailbox will show you all mail in your trash that isn’t an RSS article.
That’s it!
I’m not going to write about the iPad here. Enough has been written about that already. No, I want to talk about the iPad case. Now, I have an iPad 1 with the Apple case, so I cannot comment on the iPad 2 and it’s smart covers.
During my Internet wanderings I often see examples of beautiful workspaces with large Cinema Displays, iMacs, MacBooks Pro and Air, and of course the ubiquitous iPad. Fantastic slices of aluminium and black.
“Why does my iPad look so dull?” I thought to myself. Of course, the case! I removed the case and took the opportunity to clean both it and the iPad. Boy, the iPad looks so much better out of its case. Naked, if you will. However, and here’s the rub, it was much more difficult to hold and use. It took more effort to grip the device and it had no built in way of supporting it at an angle such as the Apple case offers.
I couldn’t wait to get it back in its black cover. Once I did I realised how the cover enabled me to hold it. Mostly, I fold the cover back and hang it over my left index finger, with my thumb just holding it in place over the top left corner. I cannot hold it like this without the case. Naked, the ipad is slippery, hence more effort to grip it. The cover has just enough texture to help with gripping. Secondly of course, the cover has the support at an angle option. This is great, but also I often balance the iPad at a higher angle when I’m sat at a table by simply balancing it on the cover’s edge.
Do you use yours without a case?
Excellent article about Apple’s new iCloud service. After watching the Apple Keynote myself I thought “this is like IMAP, but for files and data rather than just email. Our IMAP email accounts sync to all our devices. Why not calendars, contacts, documents etc? It seems so obvious!”.
This is a handy tip. To size your Finder columns, just option drag them to your desired width.
A commenter on the post beat me to the punch when he added that you can also auto-resize the columns to the length of the longest file by double clicking the column sizing handle, the little ‘||’ symbol at the bottom right of each column.
Sticking with the theme of recent posts, here is a neat video screencast from Don McCallister of ScreenCastsOnline designed to help new mac users. Don has been making screencasts for some years now and his presentation and delivery are excellent. Check out his archive of screencasts, many of them are free, while some are for “extra” members only. You can subscribe via iTunes and download the free ones automatically.
Lifehacker provides a great resource for folks switching to a Mac from a PC. There are some great tips here to help make that transition go a little more smoothly.
Excellent collection of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts, multi-touch gestures, tips and tricks, and recommended apps. Very handy if you’re switching from a PC.
Check out Dan’s iPhone/iPod page too.
Nice little post on text selection in Mac OS X. Particularly useful, and something I didn’t know beforehand, is tip 5:
“Another method that beats dragging your mouse across text to highlight is to hold down the Shift key, click where you want to start highlighting text, then click where you want to stop highlighting text (while shift is still held down). Voila, your text is highlighted right where you wanted without trying to hold down the mouse button and scroll at the same time.”
