poweruser

Metadata In The Finder

By: Jon Gales

To submit a trick/topic for PowerUser Monday just email it to Jon Gales. Jon
welcomes feedback, don’t be shy.

Power users are all about making things quicker. Here’s how to display useful
metadata right in the finder:

  1. While on the Desktop, press Command-j to bring up “View Options”. Once
    in the dialog check the Show Item Info box. Don’t close the box yet
  2. Open a new Finder window and click on the info window that you opened in
    the last step. It should update with a few more options. Check both the Show
    Item Info box and the “All Windows” radio button. It should look something
    like this.
  3. Now you’ll notice that when you’re browsing around in icon view, you’ll
    see handy nuggets of metadata. For instance, dimensions of photos, times
    of movies and songs, number of items in folders, and remaining disk space
    for drives. Here’s a screen shot:

    window Metadata In The Finder

    Nifty eh? As an added trick you can check the right radio button under the
    “Label Position” header and you’ll see the information show up on the side.
    Some people like it icon smile Metadata In The Finder .

Speed up your computing with easy metadata!. Check back
next Monday!

Services In the Contextual Menu

By: Jon Gales

PowerUser Monday showcases a specific technique/program that helps you
get more done with your Mac. If you’ve got an article suggestion, or comment
on what you read, please contact Jon directly.

The last time I touched up on services, I got a lot of email. I usually gauge
how good an article is by how much email I get, so I was pretty happy. Several
readers noted that they would love to have the services menu right on the contextual
menu in OS X. I couldn’t agree more. Incidentlly I left this out of the article
because that whiny “Apple doesn’t do X” stuff is more MacNet2 than I’d like.

I have finally found a way to do it–check out the screen cap from a conversation
I recently had with my best friend:

im services Services In the Contextual Menu

So how’s this trickery done? By your new favorite freeware–ICeCoffEE.
It’s a free little utility that was written by Nocholas Riley. He’s a genius…
And on the top of my favorites list for writing this sucker. It was really
made for opening URL’s easily (command click them), but in one of the recent
releases the services menu
was
added
into
the contextual
menu.

Like most cool hacks, it only works in Cocoa apps. However, not even
all Cocoa apps… I’m not a Cocoa programmer, so I can’t figure out the pattern,
but it works in Text Edit which is really handy… iChat (as you see), Mail.app
and most of the other Apple made OS X apps (Safari is a notable exception).
If
you figure out why it works with some and not others, let
me know
.