Again, full credit for this tip must go to the great folks at Maclife.com This simple tip allows you to pull a widget out of dashboard and place it on your desktop, which is really kind of cool.

To make it happen, open a Terminal window and enter this command

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

You will have to logout and log back in or restart your Mac to make the change active.  Then activate Dashboard and click/drag the widget you want, and then exit Dashboard without releasing the click on the widget.  The default key is F12, but you’ll want to make sure you know what it is on your system.  On mine with the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard and Logitech’s Control Center to make the Performance Mouse MX work properly it is Command-F12, so again check your system settings in System Preferences just to be sure.  You can also send the widget back by selecting it and then invoking dashboard.  To disable this feature use the same command replacing YES with NO.  Logout and back in as before to make the state change effective.

Dashboard widgets moved to the desk work the same as they did in the Dashboard.  The only caveat is that if you use Spaces, the widgets you have dragged out of Dashboard will appear on every space.

FUN

Full credit for this tip goes to the team at maclife.com who published it in their August issue.  If you don’t subscribe, you want to think about it.

To enable xray view in Quicklook open a Terminal window and enter the following command;

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders -boolean YES

Now when you Quicklook a folder you’ll representations of the icons of what is in the folder.  It’s a little thing and definitely geeky but kinda cool.  If you get tired of it, turn it off using the same command, just replacing YES with NO

Recommended

I’m a big user of Spaces in OS X.  I’ve set certain apps to open on certain spaces and because I use dual monitors even set where I want the windows to appear.  Surprisingly I use Spaces more where I have more screen real estate than on a smaller display.

But there were things that were just a pain.  On one of the MacHeist promos, I got as part of the bundle a little app called Hyperspaces and to my own failure, didn’t take a good look at it until a month ago.  Hyperspaces simply gives you richer control over OS X spaces without breaking anything.

I wanted to use different HDR photos for each space.  I also wanted to be able to see at a glance which space name I was on.  Hyperspaces does this simply and without a ton of system overhead.  The only time I’ve ever had a gotcha is when the Drobo with my Aperture library failed to come up after a long system shutdown and I ended up with plain colours.  Once the Drobo was back up, a relaunch of Hyperspaces and all was well.

You can download a trial of Hyperspaces from the CocoaBots and customize up to three spaces for free.  If you like Hyperspaces and you probably will, and want more Spaces and you probably will, you can buy a license at the site for $12.95 USD which to my mind is a good deal for the power and simplicity these folks deliver.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

GarageBand has a built in function to help you build ringtones for your iPhone from music in your library. Since GB comes with every new Mac and is part of iLife, free is a good price. However, folks who haven’t experience with audio recording apps or who want to make a specific ringtone for everyone of their friends, as does my daughter, (perhaps not THAT many), often find that while GarageBand works, it doesn’t “just work”. Pocket Mac, who gained notoriety building software to sync Macs to a variety of smartphones, build a utility called Ringtone Studio that makes the process of making your own ringtones incredibly simple.

The UI is user friendly and super easy. Just drag the sound file, video file or iTunes file onto the “iPhone” and then using the sliders select the portion of the clip you want for your ringtone. Ringtones should be kept short, about 8 seconds before it starts looping is a good place to start.

The only real downside to the app that I have found is the price. Frankly $20 USD is a lot to pay for what this thing does, but I see other apps in similar price ranges that do much less. One that remains unnamed inserts ringtones onto your phone. That’s it. So I suppose Ringtone Studio isn’t completely out of line, but I think that these folks would sell a lot more copies if they brought the price below $10.

The net of things is that it works. You drag your file on, you select the region for the ringtone, save it (goes to iTunes directly – or at least it did for me) then sync your iPhone, adding the ringtones you’ve created via the Ringtone tab on the sync page in iTunes. I’m not sure it could get much easier.

There are people who just burn up when your phone sounds like anything but a phone, but if you want it to sound like “you” this can work pretty darn well. Of course tastes vary so just because the ringtone was easy to make, doesn’t make it “good”.

RECOMMENDED

It may have happened to you that over time you have run out of space on your Time Machine volume, but did not want to lost the older backups it contained.  Or you’ve received one of the Time Machine errors that it can no longer back up to your Time Machine volume and all the fixes focus on you erasing the volume and starting over, and this option doesn’t fill you with joy.  With full credit to the staff at MacWorld, here’s a great tip.

Connect your older Time Machine volume to your Mac by whichever connectivity suits the volume and your Mac.  Then without disconnecting your current Time Machine, Option Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.  If the icon isn’t there, you can make it visible in the Time Machine pane in System Preferences.  When you option click, you’ll get the option you see in the graphic above, to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.  Select it and point to the older volume.  Now you’ll be able to go even further back in time to retrieve that critical file.

There are a lot of these option click options in Snow Leopard for menu bar icons, this one happens to be really useful.

While when buying Blu Ray movies I always look for packages containing digital downloads, they don’t always exist and this makes things tougher to get my purchased content onto my iPad and AppleTV.  Blu Ray rip tools have been on the PC for a while and I’ve had opportunity to test out three different ones for the Mac.  MakeMKV also rated highly but the current price was more than I was willing to pay for a tool I will use very rarely.  Rarely because I will only rip movies I have paid for and I don’t buy a lot of movies as I use renting as my crap screen.  Unfortunately, the crap screen needs a lot of cleaning.

So when I decided to buy software after evaluating, I bought MacBluray Ripper Pro.  It sells for $19.95 USD through the Avangate secure web store.

As you can see from the screen grab, the interface is simple.  Insert disc in drive.  Once recognized set in Preferences where you want the rip stored and click RIP.  Eject when done.  The little app is very fast and so far (six rips – told you I don’t buy a lot of movies) has performed flawlessly.   Transferring to iTunes has been more problematic as I wanted to use my Turbo 264 HD but it depends on the paid version of Flip4Mac and as I use Windows media pretty much never, this ticked me off, so I went back to the old faithful Handbrake.

Hasn’t let me down yet, although it would be cool if it used the coprocessor in the Turbo 264 HD stick.

Like they say, there’s always a catch.  You need a Blu Ray drive and Apple doesn’t offer this as an option.  I bought a LaCIE external Blu Ray recorder about a year ago so I could dump my video and audio working files onto 50GB rewritable disks.  I leave a disk mounted pretty much all the time and it’s worked out pretty well.  The LaCIE drive is overpriced and I have shied away from their products after losing several of their external drives well before MTBF, but this one has, knock wood, been reliable.

You’ll also need drivers for the drives and to make the media available.  As I have been a Roxio Toast Titanium customer for a long while, I bought V10 with the added Blu Ray support and the drive works great with media appearing on the desktop nice and quick.

MacBluray Ripper Pro comes from blumac software – more info at http://www.macblurayripperpro.com/ It’s a good product and worth the $20 if making digital copies of movies you’ve bought is important to you.  I have to admit, I’m not nuts about their use case to timeshift rented movies as this opens the door for potential theft, but to each their own.  Don’t steal movies or music.  Please.

RECOMMENDED

Don’t steal movies and / or music.  There.  Now that that’s done I can get to the point of the post.

Lately, on the odd occasion that I actually buy a movie, I look for Blu Ray versions with the digital content option to make it very easy to get the movie that I am paying for onto my AppleTV and iPad.  Unfortunately there are movies I have bought and movies that are being reissued that I want that don’t have this option.

Lots of people, including myself have written about how to get your movies off your legally purchased media into digital format that you can reuse for your personal use.  That’s not the point of this post.

When I look at my digital content, I like the metadata to be complete and the artwork to be clean.  In the past I would hunt this stuff down manually, then for audio, let iTunes do the Gracenote update.  But movies were always a pain.  I tried MetaTag X and while it could work, I more than often enough had corruption of the file occur and I found the write changes process to be really slow.  So I gave up.

This past week I discovered an amazing little tool called Subler.  It uses data from Tagchimp and makes updating metadata and artwork incredibly easy.  Open the movie file in Subler.  Type the title into the search box.  Select which of the returned options you prefer.  Save the file.  Done.

Subler has a very basic UI and does this one thing only.  But it does it extremely well.  Subler is written by Damiano Galassi.  At the time of this post, it is at version 0.97 and available for download at http://code.google.com/p/subler/ It is a Mac app requiring OS X 10.5 or later and works fine under Snow Leopard.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Every now and again I run across a little tool that is just killer. Thanks to the nice folks at the Mac Attack I learned about Secondbar by Andreas Hegenberg.

I have had dual monitors on my Mac Pro since the upgrade from the old PowerMac and I am very used to the side by side displays. On the left is a Dell 24″ and on the right is an Apple 23″ Cinema Display. But when you deal with this much screen real estate, mousing over to one monitor to get to the menu bar while hardly traumatic is very mouse intensive. Hence Secondbar.

Secondbar is a very simple tool that creates a menubar at the top of the second display. That’s it. No rockets to Mars or quantum mechanics, just a second menu bar. I love focused answers to problems. Since any Mac Pro or Macintosh laptop can be connected to a second display via cable, and since you don’t have to mirror the displays, this is just incredibly useful.

Download Secondbar at http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79 The author and version number says that this is early code but you get used to it pretty quick and it’s such a timesaver that you cannot complain about free and working. Very cool.

While I frequently like Logitech’s hardware, their support of the Macintosh platform waxes and wanes. As of this writing all the Mac specific kit is gone from the website. This week Logitech released LCC 3.2 If you, like me, use a Logitech windows keyboard with your Mac, you probably don’t want to install this update since it breaks the key mapping standard for Macs, swapping the Command and Option keys and once active prevents your Keyboard System Preference from doing any key mapping. I got quite attached to the Illuminated keyboard despite its Windows centricity, but switched back to the diNovo Mac when LCC 3.2 screwed up my settings. Logitech doesn’t offer old versions on their website of their driver software so before updating make sure you keep a copy of the old version in case you need to revert. I had done a cleanup and needed to resort to a web hunt to find the 3.1 release to reinstall.

I’m a big fan of security as well as of screen savers, but not necessarily together. In fact I find entering the password every time the screen saver kicks in to be a major pain, but I do want to be able to lock the screen, preferably with a click.

Well today I learned you can, courtesy of an older post at Macworld. Here’s how to make it easy.

1. Open the Utilities folder, usually found in your Applications folder.

2. Launch Keychain Access

3. Open Keychain Access | Preferences

4. Click the box to show Keychain Access in the menu bar

5. Verify you see the little black unlocked padlock in the menu bar, then close the Preferences panel and exit Keychain Access.

Now to lock your screen with a click, just click the padlock and select Lock Screen. It’s that simple. This is going to be a huge time saver for me. Hope it is for you as well.