Apple Newbie

If you were a power user on Windows, you’re probably used to using the keyboard to the maximum so that you’ll get things done faster without having to move your hands to the mouse all the time.

If you’re like me, you probably use the TAB key alot when filling in web forms. Type in a field, use the keyboard to focus on the next field, and type again.

But once I switched to a Mac, filling in forms using the keyboard only on Mozilla Firefox became frustrating. It seems that pressing the TAB key switches between text fields fine, but it refuses to focus on drop down boxes, check boxes, and other types of fields.

Here’s how to fix that behaviour and make the keyboard focus selection behave the way you expect it to behave.

1. Click the Apple icon on the top left of your screen and click System Preferences to open your System Preferences.
2. Click on the Keyboard and Mouse icon.
3. Make sure you are on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Choose the option “All controls” at the bottom of the preferences pane, under “Full keyboard access”.

Pressing the TAB key should now focus on all types of form fields instead of just text fields. Happy filling in forms!

Apple’s iBook and iMac ranges do not support screen spanning by default although it comes with a graphics chipset (ATI Radeon Mobility) that supports the feature. What’s screen spanning? It’s something like an extended desktop where your desktop area stretches across two monitors instead of both monitors displaying the same thing. They say once you’re used to dual displays you won’t go back. iBook and iMac users can actually experience this, with a tool called the Screen Spanning Doctor.

It involves hacking the Open Firmware to enable screen spanning support, a feature available on PowerMacs and PowerBooks.

BTW please don’t try this on notebooks that run other chipsets like the older ATI Rage, as it will screw up your hardware! The list of officially supported machines and machines that are not supported are available here.

Download the Screen Spanning Doctor by Rute Moeller

I use SSH tunnels frequently as part of my system administration job to ‘forward ports on demand’ without punching forwarding ports into a firewall and get into internal PCs at remote sites.

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One of the problems that irritated me as a new Apple user after using Windows for so long is Apple’s different window switching system.

Here’s what’s different. When you open multiple windows belonging to the same program in Windows, for example a few Firefox windows, each window will appear in your ALT-TAB windows switcher list. This means you can switch between Firefox windows easily.

But in Mac OS X, if you have 10 Firefox windows open, only one Firefox window appears in the windows switcher list when I press ⌘+TAB. To switch between child windows of a same program, I have to use ⌘+~, and Shift+⌘+~ for the opposite direction. Didn’t really like this much.

My solution was to change the way I switch windows altogether.

I set the top left area of the screen as a hot corner for Exposé. Much better than ALT-TAB or using keyboard shortcuts to activate Exposé. Each time I want to switch windows, I move my mouse to the top left most, then click the window I want from Exposé.

It doesn’t make sense to move your hand to the keyboard to press the Exposé shortcut, then move your hand back to the mouse to click the window you want. It’s a much faster and smoother process if Exposé is activated with your mouse going to the top left area of the screen, then you move your mouse to click the window you want, in a swift movement.

Do you have any other ways to make switching between windows as fast and as efficient as possible for a heavy multi-tasker? Is there any other way that’s faster or better? I’m a beginner, there might be a much better way that has been totally oblivious to me so far.

Share your tips!

Google released Google Secure Access, which is basically a VPN service aimed at Wi-Fi users that allows the encryption of over-the-air data to protect it from sniffers. Your data is encrypted between your system and Google’s VPN server, where Google will route your data to the original destination.

However, Google has not released a client for Mac OS X yet. No worries. The Google Secure Access VPN is actually a 128bit PPTP connection. Instead of logging in with your Google userid and password (Gmail?), the username and password is randomly generated and returned to the client via an XML file.

Once you know how it works, you can easily write an Applescript to connect to it as Mac OS X already has all the necessary software to connect to Google Secure Access’s VPN. Basically you need to download the auto-generated XML file containing the username and password to use, parse the file, then tell Internet Connect to dial a PPTP VPN connection to vpn.google.com with that username and password.

Kevin Stock has already written such an Applescript.

Update: Kevin’s site seems to be down, so here’s the AppleScript.

Google caps your speed to about 512kbps when you are connected to their VPN server, but if you need the extra security, I’d recommend you connect to it! I’ve just tried HTTP browsing, POP3 and IMAP access and they all work. SMTP seems to be blocked. I suppose Google does not want spammers to take advantage of masking their own IP through the Google Secure Access VPN which translates the source IP to Google’s own block of IPs.

For more information on how to run your Applescripts, read on Apple’s Script Menu. All you have to do is put the script into your Scripts folder and run it from the Script Menu in Finder.

Google has recently released a Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X. It requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above. This means Panther onwards.

One nifty feature about the Gmail Notifier is it has full support for Applescript and Cocoa Bundles in Objective-C, which means you can write plugins for it.

What’s great is someone has released a plugin that makes the GMail Notifier work with Growl.

In case you don’t know what Growl is, do you remember the grey overlay icons which appear on your screen whenever you adjust your volume or monitor brightness? Growl is a tool that allows any program to display such notifications. Of course it isn’t just limited to that kind of look. It can be customised too.

Check them out today!

Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X
Gmail+Growl 1.0
Growl