Show Notes for GreerMUG February 2007

Tim's Power Tips

Tim updated us on his voice - he's still looking at surgery, but his voice is sounding better. Some tips have a wow factor, some dwell in the realm of the mundane, Tim says. Tonight's tips are more on the practical, mundane side.


Power Tip #1
Tabbed Browsing
How many of us use tabbed browsing? Oh, not many of us. Instead of opening many browser windows, Tim likes to link to other pages that are tabs within the same browser window. You can Command + Click on a link. And, holding down the Command key and choosing one of your bookmarks opens a new tab as well.

How do we turn this on? Go to Safari's preferences, enable tab browsing (Tabs, Enable). You can also create a new tab and type a new url.

Power Tip #2
Summarize
Here's a tip inspired by Dick Palmer of iPlace! How many of us use a browser to read news? A bunch of us! Tim doesn't have as much time as he used to to read news, so here's a way he keeps up with volumes of news. Wouldn't it be nice if you could summarize a news story? Maybe even get it down to one key sentence? First, select the text you want summarized. Pull down the Services menu and choose Summarize (the Services menu is always under the application menu for whatever software you are running, like the Safari menu). Tim summarizes a Britney Spears story for us. Fascinating. Summarize can also save its summary as a file. There is an Apple employee who does nothing but programs the algorithms for Summarize.

Power Tip #3
iTunes
Tim loves iTunes, but he wouldn't marry it. That's good since he is already married. Tim begins talking about screen real estate. "Oh my gosh" cries out Matt! He sees Tim's laptop in his (Matt's) iTunes. In fact, Matt can play a song from Tim's library - it streams over to Matt's machine and Tim's machine hardly even knows it. Tim has 9.7 days of no-repeat music stored on his computer. Computers that find each other and share music. Must be a Mac. Now, back to Tim's Tip on screen real estate. Ever want to play tunes and still have more screen real estate to do other stuff, AND still have the iTunes interface so you can control it? You can! (Sweet.) Tim shows us how by clicking on the mini-mode button. It's iTunes' version of Mini-Me!

Last thing: when you have a selected tune and you click on the category arrow, it takes you to the iTunes store. iTunes accuses Tim of having explicit songs on his computer. Tim disagrees. Tim can't remember all the music he has. But what if you use the Option key to Option-Click on those guys? Tim option-clicks on an artist, and it takes him to everthing he has on HIS computer by that artist!! Click-searching is so smooth.

Tim waxes down memory lane over the group Spyro Gyra. Option-click works on song titles, too. Very cool, thanks, Tim!

Oh, wait, Tim has one more! It's a dashboard widget that works with iTunes that Tim really loves (but we suspect he wouldn't want to marry it.)

Have you ever gotten tired of a widget and wanted to eliminate it? How do you do that safely? Tim shows us. Of course, it involves the Option key. He's just turning it off - he's not really uninstalling it.