Adding folders to the right side of your dock can be a real timesaver, and two of the most popular folders to add to the dock are your home folder and your Applications folder.

Another thing you might consider, rather than putting your entire Applications folder on your dock, is to create a new folder and put in aliases of just the applications and system add-ons (such as the Calculator, etc.) that you really use. Then you can access these by Control/clicking on the folder in the dock and a pop-up menu will appear that looks a lot like the Apple menu from OS 9.

Most versions of iTunes for Macintosh and Windows have some sort of ‘Export’ function, allowing you to export a list of songs into several formats, including plain text, Unicode and XML. Although these formats may be fine for importing into databases, they are rather clumsy to deal with if you just want a simple reference list of your songs.

Fortunately, there is a really easy way to create a listing of all your songs (or a part thereof, if you wish), either to print out, or to create a neat and orderly PDF reference.

In iTunes (FREE download), there is a command that allows you to create a formatted list of the songs or albums in your iTunes library. To begin, make sure you have selected ALL of your music by clicking ‘Music’ in the left navigation pane. Also, make sure don’t have any search terms enabled by clicking on the ‘x’ in the search field at the upper right corner. Now, you should have all your songs available for creation of your listing; you can look at the bottom of the iTunes window to see just how many songs are in your library.

With ‘Music’ selected in the left pane, and no searches active, select ‘Print’ from the File menu (or press command-P). Feel free to explore the various options in this dialog box: With the Song Listing option, you can choose to print the list according to song title, by the date last played or by the one- to five-star rating that iTunes lets you assign to songs in your library; You can also print jewel case inserts to your liking. For our purpose, however, we will be printing a list sorted by albums; so, select ‘Album listing’ from the print options. From the drop-down menu, select ‘Songs by album’. This format also displays album-cover artwork you have imported into iTunes.

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Occasionally, I find that I have duplicate entries in my Address Book. Well, they’re not really duplicates — they just have the same name. One may have work information, while the other might have personal details. Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily combine those two cards into one? Fortunately, there’s an easy way to do just that in Address Book.

How did I get two cards for the same person, anyway? Most likely, I imported a vCard attachment from an email, forgetting that I already had an existing entry for that person in my Address Book. Or maybe I just added another entry by accident, manually.

Regardless of how it got duplicated, here’s how to merge the two into one:

1. In Address Book, locate the two “duplicate” cards you’d like to merge. Select them both by clicking one one, then command-clicking the other. They both should be highlighted.
2. In the Card menu, select “Merge Selected cards”.



3. Voila! The two cards have been combined into one, with information from both cards!

Here is a really neat method to gain access to the photos in your iPhoto Library, without having to open iPhoto.

With this simple one step Automator action, you can search for photos right from the Finder. You can even drag-n-drop a full-size photo directly to your desktop.

View the instructional video.

Here’s how to get it set up.

Create an Automator Action

Open Automator, found in your Applications folder. If the “Select a starting point…” windows shows up, just select “Custom” and click the Open button.

Now, in the far left column of items, select “Photos”. Then in the next column, select “Ask for photos”, and drag it to the blank area on the right. The window should now look like this:

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