Author: Josh Sunshine

Every one of us makes a trip to the Apple menu almost every day, be it to shut down, restart or sleep our Macs. Even though it probably doesn’t seem like much of a chore, learning a few shortcuts can’t hurt and will save precious seconds every time you use this menu. Let’s start with how to make using the Apple menu with the mouse a bit quicker.

Bypass the Dialog Box

Something annoying about shutting down or restarting a Mac is the way that you have to go to the  menu, click Shut Down or Restart then click another button in a dialog box asking, “Are you sure you want to do that?” However, there is a simple way to bypass this dialog box, using a single modifier key on the keyboard. Holding Option and clicking on the command you want gets right down to business and does what you want straight away. You’ll be able to tell because the ellipsis (…) will disappear from the Restart, Shut Down and Log Out commands in the menu. And don’t worry; your unsaved documents are still safe — you’ll still see the “Do you want to save changes?” dialog come up. There’s no way to bypass that.

Bypass the Menu

OK, so that saved a few seconds by eliminating the move from the menu command to the dialog box, but what about saving even more time by using the keyboard instead? There are four key shortcuts for the main commands: Shut Down, Restart, Sleep and Log Out. There’s also one extra that isn’t in the menu: Sleep Display.

The first, which has been labeled in the Apple menu since OS 10.6, is Sleep. The keyboard command is Option + Command + Eject (⌥⌘⏏). This puts the computer straight to sleep without asking you anything. Very handy if you want to dash off somewhere in a hurry.

Next is the shortcut for Log Out, which is also labeled in the menu. However, to bypass the confirmation dialog, you have to add in the Option key, making the shortcut Option + Shift + Command + Q (⌥⇧⌘Q).

To put the displays of your Mac to sleep (I do this in order to let my Mac run a process overnight but still saving power), it’s Control + Shift + Eject (⌃⇧⏏).

Restarting is a simple case of pressing Control + Command + Eject (⌃⌘⏏). Dialogs for unsaved changes will still appear.

Finally, to shut down your Mac using the keyboard, press Control + Option + Command + Eject (⌃⌥⌘⏏).

That’s a lot of key combinations to remember, but even if you use just one of them every day, the amount of time you’ll save will soon add up.

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Welcome to the first installment of ‘Tips and Tricks.” These articles will aim to teach you some handy things you didn’t know about common things on your Apple stuff. Of course there is a chance that you’ll already know some of the things I’m going to run through, but hopefully there will be at least one you haven’t heard before. So, let’s start our series with Safari.

Folders in the Bookmarks Bar

While it may be simple to add single bookmarks to the Bookmarks Bar, it may not be obvious that it can handle folders of bookmarks as well. Right-clicking on the bar brings up a tiny context menu containing only one item, New Folder. Choosing this option brings up the same box you get when you add a new bookmark to the bar — with the text box for naming the folder.

Once you’ve typed in the name for your folder, what looks like a regular bookmark is added to the bar, with the addition of a downward-pointing arrow to the right. At the moment, clicking on it brings up a menu with just the word ‘empty’. To add new bookmarks to the folder, all you have to do is drag existing bookmarks on top of the folder name and they’ll automatically be added to the folder. You can also add new bookmarks when you create them by choosing the folder under the dropdown menu.

Bookmark folders aren’t just handy for organizing your web addresses; they can also be used as a convenience tool. Once you have some bookmarks added to your folder, clicking on the folder name opens a menu with the bookmark names listed. At the bottom of this list is the option ‘Open in Tabs’. Clicking this automatically opens up a new tab for each of the bookmarks in the folder and navigates to them for you. This could be useful if you have a list of resources you use regularly for something you’re writing, for example. You can also access this tabs feature by simply ⌘-clicking on the folder name.

The Activity Window

For most, the Activity window (⌥⌘A) will be useless for day to day browsing, but it can be convenient to have at times. For instance, if a page is failing to load, opening up the Activity window will show you a list of resources on the page and highlight the ones which are throwing up errors.

You can also use it for opening up parts of webpages (JavaScript, CSS, QuickTime files, etc.) in their own window. If you were a budding web developer, for example, and you wanted some example of CSS from existing websites, you can use the Activity window to open up the CSS of a page. Just open up the window, and click the fly-out triangle for the site you’re browsing. Scroll through the list until you find the .css file, then double-click to open it up in its own Safari window for inspection. This works for any file on a webpage.

Another way the window comes in handy is as a quick and dirty way to download YouTube videos. While you can get specialized applications for this, the Activity window lets you do it right from Safari. Navigate to a YouTube video page, then open the window. The file you’re looking for contains ‘videoplayback’ in the URL, and is most likely the largest file on the page. You can download the video by selecting this file and ⌥-double-clicking. This proceeds to download the file. It’ll come down as a .flv, but it’s fine to play in QuickTime as long as you have Perian installed. You can then use QuickTime 7 Pro or QuickTime X to export the video in a more suitable format such as MP4.

Dragging in Files

Safari, like many Mac applications, supports dragging in files from the Finder or other applications such as iPhoto. If you just drag a file into a regular browser window, however, all it will do is display the file in a Safari window. The useful part comes when a website is asking for you to upload a file. Instead of clicking ‘Choose File’, you can drag the file you want to use and drop it directly on the button. A small green plus sign will appear next to your cursor, and the file is selected, no matter how deeply nested it is on your hard drive. This is a small thing, but it can save a lot of time if you have a file open in the Finder already before you upload it to a website.

Dragging Tabs and Favicons

While we’re on the subject of drag and drop, let me explain what you can do by dragging a tab or favicon (the small graphic to the left of the URL in the address bar). If you drag a tab by its name and move it to the left or right on the tab bar, the bar is reorganized. Not very exciting. But drag the tab away from the bar, and it changes into a tiny preview of the page it’s currently showing. When you let go, the image expands into a whole new window and removes the page from the tabs of the previous one. You can also do this the opposite way; drag a tab into the tab bar of a different window and it will be added to the second window and removed from the first.

You can do all of this when dragging the favicon of a page, except for creating a new window. If you drop the favicon onto an open tab, the page is replaced with the one you dragged over. You can create a new tab with the page by dropping its favicon on the tab bar, to the right of the already open tabs.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve learned something from this, and if you know of something handy, post it below in the comments!

Sometimes, the cellular data network just doesn’t want to play ball with your iPhone. It may not be immediately apparent, but you’ll find out when you try to load a page in Safari, for instance, and the progress bar will get stuck in one place, never moving.

To sort this out, you need to try the old ‘turn it off and turn it back on again’ cliché. Navigate to the Settings app on your phone and turn on Airplane mode (the orange switch at the top of the first settings page). This deactivates everything; the data network, Wi-Fi, GPS, etc. Leave Airplane mode on for around 15-30 seconds and then turn it back off again. This should fix the problem, and get your iPhone back on the Internet again.

If not — you know exactly what I’m going to say now — turn off the iPhone entirely and turn it on again. If, even after doing that, your phone still won’t connect to the Internet, I’d recommend contacting your network provider and asking them if they know what the problem might be.

As a side note, this works just as well with unresponsive Wi-Fi networks. If it’s happening with Wi-Fi, however, you can turn Wi-Fi off by itself by going to Settings > Wi-Fi and turning the switch to off. If it doesn’t work you can try turning the router off and on (if it’s yours), or telling your iPhone to forget the network by tapping the blue arrow-in-a-circle next to the network name and tapping ‘Forget this network.’

Many people have been asking for a unified email inbox on their iPhone, rather than having to switch between accounts. While there isn’t an official Apple way to do this, you can fake it yourself using Gmail and its ability to check email from other accounts.

The Setup

1. First off, you’re going to need a Gmail account. You can either use an existing one or set up a new one. If you want an existing Gmail account to be part of your new universal inbox, I’d suggest using that one instead of setting up new one and having to fetch mail from there as well. If you need to set up a new account, you can do it by going to the Gmail homepage and clicking ‘Create an account’.
2. Once you’ve logged into your account, locate the Settings page, the link to which can be found in the top right corner, next to your email address. When it has loaded, open up the Accounts and Import tab.
3. Set up your first email account for Gmail to check for you by clicking ‘Add POP3 email account’, which is the third white button from the top. This opens a new window for you to input the details of the email account you want to be checked.

Getting Gmail to Check Other Accounts

1. The first thing you need to enter is the email address for the account you want to be checked. Then click ‘Next Step’.
   
2. Another screen will appear asking for specific details such as username, password and server settings. If you are unsure about any of these options, your service provider will most likely have a help page. It will most likely be a page explaining how to access your emails from a desktop client, however you can use this information as well. Once you have added your information, click ‘Add account’.
   
3. You’ll be taken to another screen asking if you want to send mail from the account you’ve just set up. Whether you want to or not is up to you (you can always change this later). If you decide not to do this, any emails you send from your iPhone will have a From line as your Gmail account.
   
4. If you do decide to do it, you’ll be prompted to enter a few more details about your email account. This is not crucial to this technique, however, so I won’t be going through this.

Your Gmail account will now check your email account and pull in any emails that come through. You can add up to five accounts for Gmail to check, so this will accommodate almost everyone’s needs.

Access on Your iPhone

Now that you’ve got Gmail putting emails from other accounts in its inbox, you’re mostly there. All you need to do now is set up Gmail on your iPhone so that you can check it from there.

1. Go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars under the Settings app.
2. Tap ‘Add account’ to add the Gmail account.
3. Tap the Gmail logo to have your iPhone automatically set up the server settings that always stay the same for Gmail accounts.
   
4. Enter your details and tap Save.

Your Gmail account is now all ready to go on your iPhone and you can access it through the Mail app. If you check your emails then Gmail should have imported some of your recent emails from the other accounts, and any new emails you receive will be in the same inbox.

Conclusion

Obviously this isn’t the same as a proper unified inbox — Gmail only checks other email accounts for new mail every hour. This is the next best thing though, and it’ll get you by until Apple announces the official feature in the next iPhone OS. The upside is it doesn’t cost anything and you can get it now.