The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Ever lost track of where your cursor is on a cluttered screen? This has sure happened to me, especially with higher screen resolutions. Well, I just read about a program called Mouse Locator (www.2point5fish.com ) that solves this problem.

After a certain period of time of not moving your cursor, you get a big green bulls-eye graphic around the cursor the next time it’s moved. The application is free, so I decided to give it a shot. And it works! You’ll want to set the amount of time of not moving the mouse before the bullseye appears. To change the settings, go to System Preferences. Pretty handy for those of us with less than perfect vision.

Lose those space-hogging labels in your Sidebar.

To get to the space-saving icon view, click on the gray divider bar that separates the Sidebar from the folder’s contents and s-l-o-w-l-y drag it to the left until it sort of snaps to the icons. The trick is dragging slowly. Drag too fast and you’ll collapse the entire column. If you miss labels, just roll your mouse over an icon and the label appears.

If you ever wanted to add extra character spaces in Dreamweaver just like you do in Word (by pressing the spacebar), you can by changing a preference setting.

Go to Dreamweaver > Preferences (Command U). In the General section, go to Editing Options, select Allow Multiple Consecutive Spaces and click OK. That’s it. Now whenever you want an extra space, just press the spacebar. And you got ‘em.

Check “Allow multiple consecutive spaces”

A quick way to organize your music files right on your iPod is to rate them. Find out how.

While a song is playing, simply press the select button (the big white one in the middle of the scroll wheel) twice. Use the scroll wheel to change the settings (1-5 stars) and press the select button once. The songs are automatically added to My Top Rated playlist.

Made a mess in Flash? Use the Eraser tool.

You can change the settings to erase just lines, just fills, just the background or selected areas. Want to start over with a blank page? Just double-click on the Eraser tool icon and poof! You’ve got yourself a blank canvas.

Pop quiz, hotshot. You’ve got to create a product catalog in InDesign. The product name has to be bold and small caps. The product code uses a smaller font and is in color. What do you do?If you’re thinking character styles, you’re getting warm. Character styles let you apply all kinds of formatting to selected text in a paragraph with just a click. Best of all, you can save and change the formatting. It’s a nice timesaver. But before you can apply your styles you still have to manually select the text to be formatted, which is a pain. A better answer is InDesign’s nested styles. This powerful feature, when used properly, can save you hours and hours and hours of work. What’s that? You say you haven’t used them? Well what are you waiting for?

You copy and paste a block of text from one Microsoft Word document into another.

But the style of the pasted text doesn’t match what you’ve already typed. You could solve the problem by selecting the text and clicking Clear Formatting from the Styles palette. But if you’re into keyboard shortcuts (and if you aren’t really should be), you can take care of the problem without messing with Styles palette. Start by selecting all of the text (Command A). Press Command Shift N to remove paragraph styles. Press Control Spacebar to remove any manual character formatting. All the formatting, except for Normal, is gone. I’m loving it.

Sometimes all those palettes in Photoshop take up too much screen space, especially if you’re working on a larger image.

Temporarily hide all those pesky palettes by pressing Shift Tab. Press the same combination of keys to show the palettes.

Too many palettes!

And the palettes are gone.

Bookmarks are a great way to access your favorite websites (like this one). Get there even faster by adding a bookmark to your Dock.

The next time you visit the site, select the icon that appears next to the URL field in Safari and drag it down to the Dock. A new icon with a shield on a spring appears. Double-click the icon to launch Safari (if it isn’t already running) and you’re on your way.

1. Open iChat
2. Go to the pull down menu titled iChat
3. Select Preferences
4. Select the Accounts icon
5. Select the Security tab (the middle one, between Account Information and Server Settings)
6. Click the Enable button next to the message about encryption status
7. You’re set! Be sure the people with whom you’re IMing also have setup their security.

Note that these instructions assume you’re using .Mac.