Whitson Gordon

Lots of applications--including Microsoft Office, Final Cut Express, and Steam--like to create their own User Data folders in your Documents folder. If you like to keep your Documents folder relatively neat, these application folders can quickly clutter it up. Mac OS X Hints reader michelcolman shows us how to hide or move them so they don't get in your way:

To hide the application data folder, you can use the SetFile command. That command is only available as part of Xcode, though, so you'll first need to register as an Apple Developer and then download Xcode. (Registration is free.) That done, fire up Terminal and type:

File this hint from NaOH-Lye under "it seems so obvious, but did you know?":

As you probably do know, Spotlight can serve as a calculator. If, for example, you enter 100+4 in the Spotlight query box and hit Return, you'll get the usual list of Spotlight results. At the top: A result from Calculator, 100+4 = 104.

Reading PDFs in your browser, instead of downloading them and reading them in an app like Preview, is a nice convenience. But Safari is the only major Mac browser that has a read-PDFs-in-the-browser option turned on by default. Mac OS X Hints reader Typhoon14 notes that Chrome has the same feature, but it's disabled by default; he also knows how easy it is to enable it:

Type about:plugins in the Chrome omnibox. Looking through the list of plugins, you should see a disabled one called Chrome PDF Viewer; click Enable under it.

Now that FaceTime has been released for the Mac, you can video chat with friends to and from your desktop or laptop as well as your iPhone. If you regularly chat with someone, Mac OS X Hints reader jcrossley has a way to create desktop shortcuts that will call that person on FaceTime:

In Safari's address bar, type in one of the following URLs:

While Wi-Fi is great for connecting to the Internet on a laptop, keeping AirPort on all the time can drain your battery. If you have access to the Internet through a wired Ethernet connection, there may be no reason to keep AirPort on. If you don't need it, and if you want to conserve your battery, Mac OS X Hints reader Trenneren wrote the following script, which turns AirPort off whenever an Ethernet cable is connected.

To set it up, copy the following script into your favorite text editor and save the file as toggleAirport.sh in /Library/Scripts/; be sure it is formatted as plain text.

Renaming a batch of files in the Finder can be hassle, if the new names change their position in the folder's alphabetical order. After you rename the first one, the Finder will follow it to its new location in the list, leaving the others behind. Mac OS X Hints reader HairyPotter explains a way to avoid this:

Let's say you have three sequential files--ray01.jpg, ray02.jpg and ray03.jpg, for example--and you want to rename them array01.jpg, array02.jpg and array03.jpg, respectively. You select the first file, press Return to enter renaming mode, and type in a new name. As soon as you press Return again to confirm that new name, the other files will disappear: Because the renamed file now begins with a and the others still start with r, the Finder will move the focus of the window to the first file's new position, and you will have to go down the list again to find the other two.

Snow Leopard does something funny with disk images: It always defaults to showing their contents in Icons view, no matter what Finder view you prefer. A group of Mac OS X Hints readers discovered a workaround to fix this problem:

Let's say you create a new disk image on your desktop (encrypted or not, with read and write privileges) and put some files in it. If you mount that image and double-click on it on the desktop, those files will appear in Icons view. (If you open it from the Finder sidebar, it'll open in whatever view you're currently using.) You can select another view from the View menu (List, Columns, or Cover Flow). But if you close then reopen the window, the view will revert to Icons. This appears to happen in all versions of Snow Leopard through 10.6.4.

In iTunes 10.0, most songs have a newly-added Ping drop-down button instead of the iTunes Store arrow links. Mac OS X Hints reader gid shares a Terminal command to keep that button from showing up:

First, quit iTunes if it's open. Then, start Terminal.app and enter: defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown 1. When iTunes is restarted, the Ping buttons should have disappeared. To reverse, just repeat, using 0 rather than 1.

Sometimes--especially when you have a lot of tabs open and a lot of pages running Flash--Safari can hang to the point where it needs a restart. Unfortunately, restarting Safari can be inconvenient. Thankfully, Mac OS X Hints readers glenbo and dogboi shared a way to restart the Flash plug-in instead:

You will need to use the Terminal to quit the WebKitPluginHost process. When Safari sees that this process has died, it automatically restarts it. Refreshing a page that was using the Flash plug-in will then reload it.

By removing ads and other distractions, Safari 5's Reader tool is a great way to make articles more printer- and reader-friendly. The problem is, it doesn't work on every page-just those that it recognizes as articles. If it doesn't think a page is an article, Safari won't show the Reader option in the address box. But Mac OS X Hints reader solitario found a way to clean up pages that Reader won't:

For this hint to work, you first need to go to the Advanced settings tab in Safari's Preferences and select Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar.

In iTunes 10, the icons in the sidebar have gone from colorful to drab light-gray; to some eyes, that change makes the icons harder to distinguish. If you're one of them, you might be interested in a tip from an anonymous Mac OS X Hints reader that implements an alternative color scheme:

If you are struggling with the new low-contrast icons in iTunes 10, here is a hint to change their appearance. After quitting iTunes, open Terminal and enter:

Spaces is a great way to keep your screen from getting too cluttered. But if you like to keep applications in specific window positions, it can be a hassle to move them from one space to another, because those window positions can be lost. Mac OS X Hints reader rab777hp found a fix--a way to move a window from a specific spot in one space to the same spot in another:

All you have to do is enter Exposé from the Spaces overview, and then move the window from one space to the other. Once you exit Exposé, you'll find the window occupying in the same location on the new screen that it had in the previous one.