Learning OS X

I’ve mentioned my favorite password manager 1Password on Learning OS X a few times before. It’s a great tool to help you keep your online identity secure. The downside to using a password manager is all of your passwords are kept in one place. Well, with the help of another great application Dropbox, that is no longer an issue.

Dropbox is a tool that allows you to easily create shared folders across computers and across the internet. The service comes in free and paid varieties. I use it to keep my office and home Macs in sync. With it, I never have to worry about leaving files in the office, it’s always available for me wherever I go.

You might be able to see where I’m going with this. Dropbox will synchronize files between multiple computers. If I store my 1Password keychain there, it will sync between each of my computers. Follow the directions below and you too will be syncing your keychain between multiple computers in no time.

Install Dropbox

It’s quick and easy, go to the Dropbox website, create an account, install the client and you’re off and running

Move your 1 Password Keychain to your Dropbox

Make sure your 1Password keychain is setup as an agile keychain. Start 1Password, click the 1Password > Preferences menu to open the Preferences window. Click the Keychain tab and click the Switch to Agile Keychain Format button, shown here:

Then, move your keychain by clicking 1Password->Preferences->General and selecting the Move button. Browse to a folder inside your Dropbox directory and select “Move to Selected Folder.”

That’s pretty much it. When you click the Move button, Dropbox in the background will move the file out to the Internet. After a few seconds, the file should appear on your second Mac in its Dropbox. Click it and it will open inside 1Password. This will then tell 1Password to start using this file for the keychain.

Pretty simple way to connect two great tools. If you have any other creative uses for Dropbox, please tell us.

Files deleted on OS X aren’t gone forever (at least not initially). They get put into a special place on the system until you are really sure you want to get rid of it. This special place is called, imaginatively enough, the Trash. The video below walks you through how the Trash can works

Files end up in the Trash a number of different ways, you can select delete from the Finder menu, you can drag files into the Trash. Also, some Mac programs support the Trash so for example, when you delete files from iTunes, they first go into the Trash.

The beauty of having a Trash Can is that if you inadvertently delete a file, you can easily recover the file. In order to do this, you just click the Trash can, choose the file from the Finder window and pull it out of the Trash.

Eventually, however, you may want to actually take the trash out. The main reason for this is that you are eventually going to want to reclaim the space needed by the files in the Trash.

There are a few ways to delete files from the Trash. The easiest is to select the Finder menu and click the Empty Trash menu item. You can also do this with the Cmd+Shift+Delete key combination. Finally, you can right click on the Trash icon on the dock and choose Empty Trash. If you don’t have a two button mouse press the Ctrl key while clicking the Trash.

Doing any of this will remove the files from the Trash can. For all intents and purposes, these files are deleted from your system. However, a clever person could figure out a way to retrieve these files. If you have anything that is particularly sensitives and have a laptop, you may want to use the secure delete feature. Think of secure delete a a document shredder. When you secure delete a file a hacker wouldn’t be able to retrieve the contents of the files. To secure delete your files, select the Finder menu and click the Secure Empty Trash menu item.

If you wish, you can enable Secure delete by default, doing so will ensure that your documents are shredded everytime you empty the Trash. The downside to doing this is it takes longer to delete the Trash.

Enabling Secure Delete by default is easy. Click the Finder menu and select the Preferences menu item. Select the Advanced icon and check the Empty Trash Securely checkbox.

Common Problems

You can place an item in the Trash that you are currently using. This is fine until you go and empty the Trash. If that happens, OS X will display a dialog box explaining that the file is in use. You can solved this problem by closing whatever program happens to be using the file and try emptying the Trash again.

This installment of Learning OS X shows you how you can turn on and off the various media icons on your desktop. These icons include network shares, hard disk icons, removable disks, CDs, DVDs and iPods.

If you prefer reading over the video then follow these steps.

1. Open the Finder Preferences
   1. Click the Finder menu click Preferences.
2. Then on the Finder preferences dialog, click the General tab.
3. Then, check or un-check the icons you want to appear on the desktop.

As you toggle the checkboxes you will see the icons appear and disappear.

LaunchBar is a kick ass OS X application. How’s that for a lead-in?

So now that I have your attention, I have to tell you about my new favorite OS X application. LaunchBar is a swiss army knife application launcher. If you have used Quicksilver to quickly launch applications on your Mac, you should know that the original author of Quicksilver now recommends LaunchBar.

LaunchBar gives you instant access to files, applications, bookmarks, address book entries, basically anything you might need quick access to throughout your day, all without lifting your hands from the keyboard.

Rather than spend time reinventing the wheel. This post shows some tutorials from the a German blogger which should give you some sense of the power of LaunchBar.

This first video gives you an overview of LaunchBar, compares it to Quicksilver and explores some of it’s main features.

For the rest of the series, check out his blog.

Address Book is an address book for Apple’s Mac OS X. It features various syncing features and integrations into the rest of the OS.

Address Book has two viewing modes: View Card and Column, and View Card Only. The user can switch between modes with a control in the upper-left portion of the window under the close box.

In View Card and Column, the Address Book window is divided into three panes. The first pane has the title Group. This pane lists All, Directories, and each user-made group. Users can add new groups by pulling the File menu down to New Group, or typing Command-Shift-N.

When selecting All or a user-made group, the second column has the title Name. It lists the names of the people with cards in that group, or all the names if the selected group is All, in alphabetical order by first or last name, depending on user preference.

The third pane has the card corresponding to the selected name. The card can include information, some of which the user can classify into customizable categories like Home and Work. Many of the fields can have duplicate entries, for example, if the person the card describes has several email addresses. The user can edit the fields by pressing the edit button below the bottom-left of the third pane. Default fields include:

• Picture
• Name pronunciation
• First name
• Last name
• Job title
• Company
• Phone number
• Email address
• Home page
• Birthday
• Instant messaging username
• Address
• Related Names
• Note

Address Book can search LDAP (network) directories. Users customize these in the LDAP tab of the preferences. Users search these by selecting Directories in the first pane, selecting a directory or All in the second pane, and typing their search in the search box above the top-left of the third pane. Results appear in the third pane.