The iPhone & iPod Touch have a bunch of built-in preset equalizer settings, which are nice and all but they don’t work for everyone. The preset EQ settings are particularly weak when you compare them to the control you have with the iTunes Equalizer.

So what’s an iPhone or iPod touch user to do? Well, you can actually override the iPhone’s preset EQ settings by hard coding the settings into songs within iTunes.

* Set and save your custom iTunes Equalizer settings as a preset
* Select all the songs within iTunes that you want these EQ settings applied to
* Right-Click on a song title, click “Get Info”
* Click the “Options” tab
* Click on the pull-down menu next to “Equalizer Preset” and select the iTunes Equalizer preset value you saved earlier
* Click “OK” and wait, this will take a while as all the songs are now having the custom EQ settings applied to them
* When these songs are synced with your iPhone/iPod Touch, they will now have the custom equalizer settings

So if the default iPhone and iPod Touch equalizer presets aren’t enough for you, try this out, it works! Try out these best iTunes equalizer settings too.

[ screenshot via Jim Cloudman ]

What is known as “Print Screen” in the Windows world is called screen captures or screenshots in Mac OS X. You’ve probably noticed there is no ‘Print Screen’ button on a Mac keyboard, this is to both simplify the keyboard and also because it’s unnecessary. Instead of hitting a “Print Screen” button, you’ll hit one of several keyboard combination shortcuts, depending on the exact screen capture action you want taken.

How to Print Screen to a file on the desktop in Mac OS X

The basic functionality of taking a screen capture of a window or desktop in Mac OS X takes an image and dumps it to a file on the Mac desktop. Each uses the pressing of Command and Shift keys concurrently as the basis for execution, followed by a number:

• Command+Shift+3: takes a screenshot of the full screen (or screens if multiple monitors), and save it as a file to the desktop
• Command+Shift+4: brings up a selection box so you can specify an area to take a screenshot of, then save it as a file to the desktop
• Command+Shift+4, then spacebar, then click a window: takes a screenshot of a window only and saves it as a file to the desktop

How to Print Screen to the Clipboard on a Mac

This functions a lot more like Print Screen in the Windows world. If you want to do the equivalent of Print Screen to the clipboard so that you can paste it into another app, these are the commands you’d want to use:

• Command+Control+Shift+3: take a screenshot of the entire screen (screens if multiple monitors), and saves it to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere
• Command+Control+Shift+4, then select an area: takes a screenshot of selection and saves it to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere
• Command+Control+Shift+4, then space, then click a window: takes a screenshot of a window and saves it to the clipboard for pasting

Remember that the Command key on some older Mac keyboards has an Apple logo on it like this , but newer Mac keyboards will say ‘command’ on them. The command key is located next to the spacebar.

I was inspired to write this post because a colleague just posed this question to me: “Why is there no Print Screen button for Mac?”. I always cringe a little when I hear people talking about printing the screen in Mac OS because it’s a phrase straight from the world of Windows PC’s. With so many people switching to new Mac’s its no wonder the terminology is still prevalent. Once you show someone how to perform the screen capture with a keystroke they understand why there isn’t a need to over complicate the keyboard with unnecessary buttons.

Some other helpful tips for recent Mac switchers regard Internet Explorer for Mac and understanding the Mac Task Manager.

It’s official: Steam for Mac is now available to download and there’s a lot of games available through the client, check the list at the bottom of this post for all of them.

To have an even greater incentive to download Steam, Portal is free to download until May 24th. Portal is a unique puzzle game where you teleport yourself around with a portal gun to solve puzzles, it’s kind of hard to explain and it’s best played to understand. So make sure your Mac fits the Steam system requirements and check it out, it’s free, why not?

Update: here’s the full list of games available right now for Mac Steam, courtesy of Brian D:
Read more »

I’ve always preferred the way the original MacBook and MacBook Pro’s handled the function keys, in particularly the way F9, F10, and F11 are used to enter into Expose. For a while now the function keys have changed, they default to playing music, adjusting keyboard backlighting, and adjusting volume levels, I like these features but I would rather press the ‘fn’ key to access those since I have grown used to the older way of hitting F10 to enter Expose. Thankfully this is easily adjustable in Mac OS X.

Switch all function keys with System Preferences

If you want to switch the functionality of your Mac’s function keys so that you have to hold down the ‘fn’ function key to use the special features printed on each key, and retain the original Expose functionality of the F9 through F11 keys, do the following:

* Launch System Preferences
* Click on the “Keyboard” icon
* Click on the checkbox next to “Use all F1, F2, etc, keys as standard function keys”

While this enables things like Expose and Dashboard to launch as they did on the older keyboards, it disables all the other function keys unless you hold down the ‘fn’ key.

Switch only some function keys with FunctionFlip

If you want to just disable or switch the functionality of certain Function keys, you can use a utility called FunctionFlip.

* Download FunctionFlip from here
* Install FunctionFlip, it is a preference pane and will appear in System Preferences
* Enter System Preferences
* Click on “Universal Access”
* Click on “Enable access for assistive devices”
* Now enter the FunctionFlip control panel
* Select which Function keys you want to ‘flip’ the functionality of. In my case I set F9/F10/F11/F12
* Close System Preferences

Now the keys you selected will work as normal function keys and you will have to hold down the function key to do what is specified on the keyboard. Functionflip seems to work great but there’s a strange bug that causes the system beep notification to sound when you use the flipped keys, it’s nothing to be worried about just know that’s what the system beeps are caused by when you hit a function key.

Property List files, or more commonly known as plist files, are basically Mac application specific preference files. They contain information and settings for various applications and are usually in the easily identifiable format of com.developer.Application.plist and located within the /Library/Preferences/ directories.

You can edit these directly and very easily with Apple’s Property List Editor application. Property List Editor comes as part of Apple’s Developer Tools X Code package and is well worth downloading.

If for whatever reason you don’t want to download Apple’s XCode and Property List Editor app, you can try Pref Setter, which is another free plist editor solution.

You can make save a lot of clutter from the Dock by making applications minimize into their own Dock icon. Here’s how to enable this:

* Launch System Preferences
* Click on the “Dock” icon
* Select the checkbox next to “Minimize windows into application icon”
* Close System Preferences

Changes take effect immediately, all apps are now minimized into their Dock icon and can be retrieved by either clicking on the app icon within the Dock or right-clicking the Dock app icon and selecting the window directly. Yes, we have covered this tip before but it was by changing the minimize behavior via the command line, I find it much more simple to do this tricks through the GUI whenever possible.

Note this is a Snow Leopard (10.6) only feature.

NameChanger is a free solution to quickly and easily batch rename files in Mac OS X, using it is very easy and it has all the features you’d expect in a batch renaming app. You can replace occurrences of text in filenames, use wildcards, append, add dates, make files sequential, and remove characters, just select your options and you’ll see a live preview as to what the new names will be, when you’re satisfied click “Rename” and away you go.

It’s fast, free, and incredibly easy to use, which makes it my preferred choice for renaming a ton of files in Mac OS. If you’re happy with NameChanger, throw the developer a couple bucks, it’s donationware.

Developer home
Download NameChanger now

And yes, we did a prior post on software to batch rename files in Mac OS X but the developer decided to turn the once donationware software into a paid solution. For now though, NameChanger is still free.

You can create a folder that is hidden from the default Finder GUI view by taking advantage of Mac OS X’s unix underpinnings, here’s how:

Create the secret folder

* Launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities)
* At the command line, type:
mkdir .hiddenfolder
Feel free to replace the name hiddenfolder with anything else, leaving spaces and special characters out of the name will make it easier to deal with in the future.

Access the secret folder

* Now click back to the Finder, and hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the ‘Go to Folder’ dialog box
* Type in the full path to the folder you just created, replacing ‘username’ and ‘hiddenfolder’ with your username and folder name, respectively:
/users/username/.hiddenfolder/

* Your hidden folder will now be opened in the Finder, you can drag and drop whatever you want into the directory

Making existing folders hidden and making hidden folders visible again

You can actually make any folder invisible from the Finder (and most apps) just by adding a period to the front of the name, you can do this with existing folders via the command line:
mv Folder .Folder
And you can make any invisible or hidden folder visible again by reversing this and removing the period from the front:
mv .Folder Folder

Note that you can’t enter a period in front of a folder or file name in the Mac OS X Finder, if you try you will be presented with this dialogue box telling you the dot “.” is reserved for the Mac OS X system software:

Setting Mac OS X to display hidden folders

You can actually set Mac OS X to show hidden files by issuing a command in the Terminal. This will expose your hidden folder completely within the Finder, but you’ll also see tons of other important system files and folders. This is generally not recommended to keep activated as it is both confusing to many users and it makes it easy to accidentally delete important files.

Notes on hidden folders

Remember that these folders are not hidden completely, they are just not visible from the Mac OS X Finder. Many applications won’t see the folder either, but various FTP programs like Transmit have the option to show invisible files and the folder would be visible to those applications. Likewise, the folder would always be visible via the command line to anyone who typed the ls command and added the -a flag, signifying to display all files, like so: ls -a

If you have Apple’s Developer Tools installed you can use a utility called ‘setfile’ which allows you to set any directory or file as invisible, you can read more about hiding files and folders with setfile in Mac OS X, but the limitations on visibility are practically identical to the above technique: file is invisible from the Finder but visible with ls -a or certain applications.

If you want to discover the last time a specific command was used without actually executing it, follow this format at the command line:

!sudo:p

The above example will print back the last usage of the ‘sudo’ command without actually executing it, which is very useful in some situations (like the situation below, where the last time the sudo command was used was deleting everything recursively!). You will see the last used command printed directly below:

$ !sudo:p
sudo rm -rf /var/logs/*

This works with anything, even incomplete commands. Can’t remember that obscure command you used last week, but you know it started with a t? No problem!

!t:p
might print something like this:
time grep -c and rewin.sh

It’s important to note the :p modifier at the end of the command is what is responsible for printing out the command rather than executing it, which is the default behavior for the bash history command ! so if you had just typed !p it would execute the last time a command beginning with ‘p’ was executed, but !p:p will print out the command minus the execution.

I know what you’re thinking, you’re asking yourself “What would Steve Jobs head look like if it was carved out of mozzarella cheese?” Well, here is your answer, from The Cooks Den