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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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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Do you dislike leaving your display(s) on when you leave your machine for an extended length of time? To turn them off, there are a number of options.

Utilizing the Energy Saver System Preferences panel, you can set a short sleep timeout; but, that gets annoying if you pause while working. You can also use Keychain Access (via its Preferences) to add a menu bar item that includes a Lock Screen function. Lastly, using the Exposé & Spaces System Preferences panel—in 10.4 and 10.5—you can set a corner of your screen to Sleep Display. Drag the mouse to that corner, wait a second, and your displays will sleep.

In 10.5, though, there’s a hidden method—one that’s easier than all the others, I think, and requires no use of the mouse or menus. Just press Shift-Control-Eject, and all attached displays will instantly go to sleep. Move your mouse or press a key on the keyboard, and the displays will awake. It doesn’t get much simpler than that!

Note that this is not a secure display sleep mode—if you’ve set your system to require a password on wake from sleep or screen saver, it will not be triggered if you’ve slept your displays in this manner. You can make it secure by first starting the screen saver (probably by using a hot corner defined in the Exposé & Spaces System Preferences panel), then pressing Shift-Control-Eject. The password dialog will appear when you press the hot key combo, but if you then click Cancel, the displays should then go to sleep (they did here in my testing, at any rate).

Again, this will only work in 10.5, and if you’re not using an Apple-provided keyboard, it may or may not work. Also (somewhat logically), if you’re using some type of program to prevent your Mac from sleeping, this trick won’t work—the screens will go black, but then instantly awaken.