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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When Apple moved along in its progression of operating systems, from Systems 6, 7, 8, & 9 to System 10 (OS X), there was one major improvement: On the occasion that an application would crash, it wouldn’t take down the entire system with it, causing a reboot!

In OS X, when an application “crashes”, it simply stops responding and usually “closes” or quits. You can then restart that application and continue where you left off. Sometimes, though, an application will stop responding, but will fail to “quit”. You may even get what is called the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, the rotating rainbow colored ball. This icon shows up when the computer is really busy or an application is locked-up. This is where a “force-quit” comes in handy.

There are several ways of dealing with stuck and hanging applications.

Use the “Force Quit…” menu item from the Apple menu.

• This brings up a dialog box, listing all active applications (Or, in this case, the in-active ones too). Just scroll through the list and select the one that is being stubborn, then click the “Force Quit” button. The troublesome application SHOULD close/quit. It sometimes takes a couple of tries to get it to work using this method.

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