Want to make your iPhone browsing experience even more awesome? Bring it closer to some of the functions of your desktop browser? Similar to Pastebud’s solution, iPuhelin has introduced a bunch of bookmarklets that allow your mobile Safari to do a lot more things that it could, without any jailbreak. 

The biggest feature in my opinion is the Find function. You can search for a word, and it tells you how many matches along with highlight all those words in your web page. They also have bookmarklets for ‘scroll to bottom’, ‘find similar sites’, ‘display all images’ and a bunch of translation options. I’ve tried most of these bookmarlets and they work just as advertised. Highly recommended for all iPhone or iPod Touch users. 

To add them all you need to do is visit Safari+, bookmark the pages, and then remove some text as specified by the instructions. I’d highly suggest you do this on the desktop and then let MobileMe sync them over, as it will be much quicker that way.

Apple Mail can be a very simple application to get you started, but once you get comfortable using it, you need to bring in the power. I’ve discussed a lot of Mail related tips and plugins here on SA (take a look at the related posts in the post footer), and here’s my latest addition to Mail tips. Add a spiffy HTML/CSS signature to your outgoing emails that will definitely cause some sort of unrest on the receiving end. 

Before I go further, I would like to give full credit to All Forces.com, from where this is based off. Continue Reading »

In my ongoing quest to find the best possible Mail experience, I’m always looking out for interesting plugins, hacks and tips to extend this amazing email client. Here I’m going to feature two great plugins for Mail, that simply flush it with power and features while still keeping it simple and elegant.

MailTags

Almost every piece of software out there is going the tag way. Tags are a great way to sort and organise your data in a non-linear way. Unfortunately, Mail comes with the old fashioned way of organising emails using folders. Nothing wrong with them, until you find that you have too many emails coming in, and sorting them is really a pain.

MailTags integrates with Mail, by adding a sidebar which can be shown or hidden at any time. This sidebar is really powerful with which you can add so many organisational functions that it is hard to believe that it’s just a plugin. Using the sidebar you can add tags in their simplest forms, assign ‘projects’ to emails, set reminders or ‘ticklers’, change the message colour, create a todo or event from Mail directly into iCal, or add a note. Continue Reading »

So far we’ve talked about adding a conversations view in Mail, using WideMail to make Mail more suited for our increasingly wide displays, and then cleaning up the IMAP folders that Gmail brings in. This post is all about adding little enhancements to Mail to give yourself a better organised Mail experience. 

Colour Labels

Mail lets you organise by folders, but sometimes you need a more apparent visual representation of your different types of Mail. Using a combination of rules, scripts and a good ol’ keyboard shortcut, we can tag colour labels to our emails and at a glance know what the email is about. 

To set a rule, simply go to your Mail Preferences » Rules, and after specifying the conditions, set the action as “Set Color” “of background” and then select a colour from the drop down list. In my case, I’ve set our private SA group mail which has a standard “XYZ” in the subject line, to get a light grey label so I instantly know that I have to ignore it and run for cover. Continue Reading »

If your closest Apple store is several hours away, I feel for you, but you have a few other places you can get one. If you have a local Best Buy, you can pick one up there, for the same price as at an Apple store.

I was looking through the Sunday ads today, and noticed a Mac Optimization package on the Mac page. For $40, you can get your new Mac optimized by Best Buy’s Geek Squad. Now I’ve been using Macs all my life, and unlike PCs, I’ve never had to “optimize” it right out of the box. I’ve done other things, like remove printer drivers and unneeded languages, but that’s about it. 

Besides, when you first get your Mac, you’ll want to enjoy the great opening Welcome movie. If you let Best Buy “optimize” it, you won’t get to enjoy that. But to top it off, unless something has significantly changed, the Geek Squad knows nothing about Macs [Ed: A little research shows that they don’t know much about PCs as well]. I had a roommate in college that worked at a Geek Squad, and still does, and he couldn’t do anything with my iMac, much less optimize it.

If you are about to purchase your first Mac, and happen to do it at Best Buy, please do not purchase their optimization. If you are having any problems or need any help setting up your new Mac, I can point to you many places to help, Smoking Apples being one of them. Oh, and if you need anything, our number is genius@ourdomain.com.

A lot of people complain that their Gmail box doesn’t stay in sync across their devices, and the reason behind this is that Apple Mail, unlike the iPhone, uses POP3 by default instead of IMAP. It is very easy to get fooled, as Mail automatically configures your account for you, without entering any settings other than your username and password. So how do we get it to IMAP syncing then?

First things first, enable IMAP in your Gmail preferences. To do that, open Gmail in your browser, navigate to Settings » Forwarding and POP » Enable IMAP.

Once you are done there, open Apple Mail, and get to the Preferences. In the Accounts tab, click the + button at the bottom to add a new account. 

In the following screen, add your email and password, but uncheck Automatically set up account. 

In the Incoming Mail Server screen that follows, change the Account Type to IMAP, and the incoming mail server to imap.gmail.com. Enter your full Gmail address and password. Click Next.

In the Outgoing Mail Server screen, enter smtp.gmail.com in the outgoing mail server, and enter your full email ID into the username field. 

Accept all the following screens and take your account online. Mail will then take a while to sync your emails. Now any changes your make in Mail will reflect online, on the iPhone and any other email client set up with IMAP. Once the sync is complete, go to your Preferences » Accounts and delete the POP account from there. 

Additional Tip: You will notice that IMAP with Gmail adds a bunch of folders inside a [Gmail] folder in your sidebar. Inside this folder reside your Gmail folders like Sent Mail and Labels. Here’s an easy fix to put them in their respective places in the sidebar. Select the “Sent Mail” folder inside your [Gmail] folder, and from the menubar, select MailBox » Use This Mailbox For » Sent. You can’t set sync folders for your Labels or the All Mail folder, but this should help you get things better organised.

Any more tips you can share for Gmail Mail users, do let us know.

I love receiving email. I created my first email account on Rediffmail about eight years ago. For about five years after that, email remained a novelty for me. I made ridiculous accounts with childish IDs and changed them as frequently as I did clothes. Instant messaging was the big deal at that time and, since I had been a student of an all boys schools all my life, getting to waste half an hour with a girl on IM used to be the high point of my day (yeah, lame, I know). Right from that time, all those years ago, I’ve had a deep seated love for those notifications that I had received a new email message.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that when I first read Joe Kissell’s suggestion over at Macworld that you should “empty your inbox”, I wasn’t exactly enthused by the idea of reading the entire article, which itself would only be the first one in a multi-part series. Despite my preconceived misgivings, however, I ploughed on and read the first article, and then the next one, and eventually the entire series. At the end of the day, Mr. Kissell had me convinced. Continue Reading »

For a while now, Transmission has included the “Clutch” web interface, which essentially allows you to control your torrents from anywhere in the world. However, with limited ‘newbie’ guides around, most of us are left to admiring the Web Interface from a distance.

However, I promised one of our commenters on the µTorrent for Mac post that I would get to the bottom of this. And with the release of Transmission 1.4, the WebUI finally went from beta to full version with a special iPhone optimised theme. So without delaying any further, here’s the Smoking Apples guide to managing your torrents from distant lands. Continue Reading »

A few days back I noticed I was getting the spinning beach ball for over a minute every time I launched iPhoto. This is a clear sign that something isn’t right in your library, and that you need to rebuild the library from scratch.

Now don’t worry, you don’t have to reimport and sort your pictures all over again. Instead, while launching iPhoto, just hold down the Command+Option keys down, and it will present you with a dialog box to rebuild you iPhoto library. Select all the options and click rebuild. It will take a while depending on the size of your library, but once it’s done, iPhoto will show a noticeable improvement in speed. 

If you want more control over your iPhoto library, or want to have multiple libraries, check out iPhoto Library Manager ($20) from Fat Cat Software.

Everyone has a love/hate relationship with Spaces. Most of the time it works flawlessly, but there are times when it makes you rip your mac apart (okay, never do that!). Now I don’t proclaim to bring you respite from all of the Spaces-woes, but here’s something that will make it a little better to work with. To understand the core functionality of Spaces, visit Apple’s Spaces page.

Make the Finder appear in all Spaces

While you can add applications to all Spaces, the Finder is nowhere to be found in the Applications folder. So you generally assign it to appear in Space 1, and then move the windows around later on. However, the Finder.app resides in your Macintosh HD » System » Library » CoreServices folder. Just drag the Finder app to your Spaces preferences window, and then assign it to appear in ‘All Spaces’.

Exploiting the Spaces view

We all know that the Spaces view can be invoked by pressing the F8 key, or any other hotkey set in your preferences. However, once in the Spaces view, if you press F9 (or your Exposé All-Windows key), all your windows in all Spaces will fly out. You can then drag and drop those windows among spaces as you will.

And to build upon this tip, if you press C while in Spaces view, all your windows will gather up in Space 1! Next, if you Cmd+drag any application window from one space to another, it will move all the windows from the current Space to the new Space. 

Change the delay for dragging windows between spaces.

This will change the delay time to switch a space after you drag a window to the edge of a screen (you can do that by the way). The default is set to .75 seconds. Luckily, changing it involves a simple terminal command. 

“defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-edge-delay -float 0.5”

The last number (in this case 0.5) is the amount of delay in seconds. To revert the change, enter 0.75 as the value. After hitting return, restart the Dock by entering into the terminal:

“killall Dock”

There are of course a bunch of extenders for Spaces, all of which will be featured in a tasty article right here on SA, but for now we hope these little tips will help you organise your Spaces better.