User Library in OSX 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.9 Mavericks, 10.10 Yosemite

If you wonder why you can no longer see your user Library folder in any version of OSX after Snow Leopard, it's because Apple in their wisdom thought it better to hide sensitive files and folders from the user, in case their tampering upset things.

To have your user Library permanently showing again as in Snow Leopard:

Open Terminal from the Applications > Utilities folder
Paste in this command:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

and then press Return. After quitting Terminal, you will see that the folder has become visible again.

OSX and Swedish Campgrounds: the origin of the Command Key

From Folklore.org, a fascinating resource for insights into the history of the original Apple Macintosh

“We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu command. We displayed a little Apple logo on the right side of every menu item with a keyboard command, to associate the key with the command.


One day, late in the afternoon, Steve Jobs burst into the software fishbowl area in Bandley III, upset about something....”


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Tip on downloading MP3 and Quicktime movies in Safari

Safari tip: when MP3 files play in your browser window and you want to download the source file, and the link you have is directly to the MP3 file itself, you can't use the normal procedure of right-clicking on the MP3 link on a webpage.

Open the Downloads window from the Window menu, and drag the URL from the address bar into it, which will then download the MP3.

The Divine Perspective

The man was taking it easy, lying on the grass and looking up at the clouds. He was identifying shapes when he decided to talk to God.

“God," he said, "how long is a million years?”

God answered, “In my frame of reference, it's about a minute.”

The man asked, “God, how much is a million dollars?”

God answered, “To me, it's a penny.”

The man then asked, “God, can I have a penny?”

God answered, “Sure, in a minute.”

Writing an iPhoto album to CD, keeping pictures in order

When you burn a CD of photos from an album in iPhoto, it may not keep the order you intended. This video shows how to burn them to a CD so that they stay in order as in the album. Click to play the video.

OS X Text editing tips

If you do a lot of text entry in OSX these tips should be handy:

Deletion

• Alt-backspace to delete the word to the left of the cursor
• Alt-delete to delete the word to the right of the cursor
• Command-backspace to delete back to the beginning of the current line

Selection

• Shift with arrow keys selects by character
• Alt-Shift with arrow keys selects by word
• Shift-Down arrow at the beginning of a line to select the line
• Command-Shift-Down arrow at beginning to select a whole paragraph
• Command-Shift-Right arrow to select to the end of the line

In Microsoft Word (and also in TextEdit from the Applications folder), you can select text discontiguously by pressing Alt and then dragging to marquee with the mouse, great for bolding hanging text.

 

Select text in PDF files with the same technique (pressing Alt and dragging) to copy the text for pasting elsewhere.

No forward delete on your MacBook or MacBook Pro or Apple Wireless keyboard? Press FN and backspace to delete forwards.

iPhone tip: rapidly return to the top of the page

To get quickly to the top of a long page after scrolling down, just tap the area where the time shows, and the display will whizz back to the top instantly.