Did you know that iChat and iCal work very well together? If you’re having a conversation in iChat and you or anyone else mentions a date or a day, you can hover over that mentioned date/day and add an iCal event directly from iChat without ever launching iCal! Try it out yourself with any iChat conversation, just throw in a day and see how well it works, it’s quite impressive.

OS X Daily editor Ryan pointed this out to me via Twitter a couple weeks ago, and I was surprised to learn just how well it worked. It’s now part of my daily workflow, it is very handy. Thanks Ryan!

If you have a large iTunes library it’s really easy to inadvertently gather duplicate songs, thankfully cleaning up and removing the duplicates from the iTunes song library is really easy.

Both iTunes for Mac and iTunes for Windows support an ability to easily remove duplicate songs, here’s how to do it:

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Grave, tilde, acute, circumflex, umlaut… all the fun accent codes that you might need to use. So if you need to type an accented letter in Mac OS X, we’ll show you how to quickly type them using the special option key based keystroke modifiers.

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This works in many versions of Mac OS X I’m pretty sure this only works in Snow Leopard, you can right-click/control-click on many App icons in the Dock to do things like:

* Create a New Window in Safari
* Create a New TextEdit Document
* Launch a New Remote Connection in Terminal
* Shuffle iTunes Songs
* Open a new Chat in iChat
* Set your Away Message in iChat

and so much more, right from the Dock! This is a very handy feature that I find myself using more and more, try it out with other apps and see what you get. Some of this may work in Leopard but I no longer have a Leopard machine to test this on, perhaps one of our other writers or readers can double check. Thank you readers for confirming this works in many versions of Mac OS X!

If you have the Terminal application stored in your Dock on Mac OS X, you can quickly execute any new command by right-clicking (or control clicking) on the Dock icon and navigating up to “New Command” in the popup menu.

This will prompt you for a command to run, which then launches into a terminal window specifically for that command. This is particularly nice for monitoring and analysis commands, like top, htop, dtrace, wireshark, etc.

Note that this will only execute the command you specified and will not leave you with a command line prompt afterwards by default, though you can check the box to run in a shell if you want to.

If you’re looking to continue to use the Terminal, just select ‘New Window’ instead.

Note that you must have the Terminal app already running to get these menu items available, thank you Michael for pointing this out!

Deleting cookies on the Mac depends on the specific web browser in use, thus if you want to delete all cookies, you’ll want to accomplish this for every browser app. Considering the web browsers most commonly used in Mac OS X are Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, we will show how to delete cookies in each of these browsers.

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Mac OS X 10.6.2 has been released, for most Mac users this is great news because it fixes over 40 problems and bugs, including the rare but very problematic user account deletion bug. If you have an official Apple Mac then go right ahead and update to Mac OS X 10.6.2, but if you have a Hackintosh Mac Netbook… well you will want to hold off. It has been confirmed that the final release of 10.6.2 kills Intel Atom support officially. Hackintosh Guru StellaRolla reports:

The netbook forums are now blowing up with problems of 10.6.2 instant rebooting their Atom based netbooks.

A quick glance at the Hackintosh forums on MyDellMini.com confirms this:

So, I can tell you 10.6.2 DOES NOT WORK with the Mini10v.

OSX tries to start, but it hangs before you can see the apple and system ist trying to boot again … you are in a loop…

StellaRola goes on to note that the OSx86 community is pretty crafty and a modded kernel will likely surface in the near future. In any event, if you have a Hackintosh, hold off on the official 10.6.2 until more information is available.

You can read more about the Mac OS X 10.6.2 Update from Apple.com

[ Sources: Gizmodo: 10.6.2 bug fixes and StellaRola: Official: Atom Not Supported in 10.6.2 and MyDellMini.com Forums ]

You can securely delete files from Mac OS X right from the Finder. This is by far the simplest method to securely delete something on the Mac, and the process is pretty straight forward, very similar to the normal procedure of deleting a file except that you will access a separate option to enable the ‘secure’ layer:

• Place files, folders, or whatever contents you want securely deleted into the Trash as usual
• Next, pull down the “Finder” menu and select “Secure Empty Trash” from the options (also accessible by command+right-clicking the Trash icon)

The process begins instantly, but unlike the normal approach to emptying Trash, you will find the process takes a bit longer.
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¥ – You can enter the Japanese Yen symbol in Mac OS X by hitting Option+Y

Rendering the ¥ Yen symbol is fine in most simpler Mac system fonts, but some of the more fancy and crazy fonts will not be able to display Japanese Yen symbol properly. You’ll know this because it will display a small square glyph in it’s place. Now you know how to type the Yen symbol on your Mac!

When you’re viewing an image on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) you can tap and hold the image to prevent it from rotating, regardless of the devices orientation. Handy for showing off photos to friends!

[ JustAnotheriPhoneBlog via Lifehacker ]

£ – Typing the symbol for the British Pound is done by hitting Option+3 in Mac OS X.

The keystrokes for typing the pound symbol (or quid symbol) are standard on all Mac keyboards from the USA, though in another nation with another keyboard layout the keyboard shortcut may differ slightly, or the pound symbol may even appear on the keyboard like the dollar sign does in the USA with a US keyboard layout for OS X.

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Not to sound like a flip-flopping broken record or anything, but it is now confirmed that the latest 10.6.2 build 10C540 does not support the Intel Atom chip, the processor that is so common in Hackintosh Netbooks. Popular Hackintosher StellaRola has confirmed this with his sources, and he even includes a video of a MSI Wind U100 trying to boot 10.6.2 but it is stuck in a continuous reboot (shown below). With how fast things are changing (supported, unsupported), it’s a mystery as to whether the final release will include support for the Atom chip, but as we said before, if you’re a Hackintosh user you should probably avoid the update until it has been confirmed one way or another.

StellaRolla via 10.6.2 kills support for Atom processor

€ – If you want to reference the Euro symbol on your Mac, you’ve probably noticed that many keyboards don’t really make it obvious with the euro sign. But typing the Euro symbol in Mac OS X is actually really easy if you know the proper keystrokes.

Let’s review how to type the Euro sign on Mac OS X (€) with nearly any Apple keyboard.

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Ever wanted to watch a movie in ASCII art? What’s that? You haven’t even thought about it before? In what might be the single most useless feature to ever grace a video player, VLC allows you to output any video playback as… ASCII art. Yes, the kind of ASCII art that was quite fancy on BBS’s in 1988.

Other than the humor and prank value, or perhaps to create your own variation of the Star Wars ASCII art thing, I don’t see much point to this, but it is very entertaining and pretty funny. So, let’s cover how you can watch movies rendered entirely in ASCII art with VLC player.

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¢ is the symbol for the Cent, and typing it on your Mac may not be as obvious as it should be. But like most of the other special characters, it is actually really easy to type out:

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Free is the best price. MacHeist knows this and has managed to give away six very fine Mac OS X apps completely for free in their latest bundle. It’s a limited offer, as of today November 6, there are only 6 days left, so get in and download while you can.

Apps included are worth $154 combined, but are free for the next 6 days:

ShoveBox – shove information, URLs, notes, whatever, into a drawer to access later

WriteRoom – awesome writing app we have covered before, the best distraction free writing app I’ve ever seen

Twitterific – probably the best Mac Twitter client, sits in your menubar and makes tweeting and following tweets beyond easy.

TinyGrab – uploads screenshots to the web immediately for sharing with the anyone, very handy

Hordes of Orcs – desktop tower defense featuring Orc’s in beautiful 3d, a great game and fun way to waste time.

Mariner Write – (not free as of writing but will be soon) – a very powerful professional Mac word processor, with all the features you’d expect from Microsoft Office but a fraction of the price, or in this case, FREE!

Do yourself a favor and go on over to MacHeist to pickup this totally sweet Mac app bundle. All that’s required is a simple registration, if you never want to hear a peep out of them just set the email preferences to receive no email after signup.

MacHeist Nano Bundle

Want to type the Apple Logo with your Mac keyboard? The Apple logo  is actually a special character available to type rather easily from a keyboard in OS X.

This is a fun little typing trick that looks pretty cool too, here’s what it looks like typed out: 

Shown larger, it’s the exact Apple logo as seen here:



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The next time you need to quickly reboot, shut down, log out, or sleep a Mac, all you need to do is hit the right keyboard shortcut. When we say quick we mean it here too, because these keyboard shortcuts will not prompt you to confirm, they are quite literally instantaneous in their results, and that means if you’ve got unsaved documents open you may lose them if you don’t have auto-save in the newest versions of OS X.

Here are the six keyboard shortcuts for all the power functions of a Mac, like quickly rebooting, shutting down, logging out, or sleeping. Again, these are pretty much instant, for example if you hit the reboot keystrokes below your Mac will instantly reboot without warning, so you probably won’t want to test these out unless you know you want to perform that action.
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