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Springy Dock Tricks

If you drag a file and hover over Dock icons, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. If it's a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock. If it's a stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens. If it's the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn't exist already. But the coolest (and most hidden) springing trick is if you hover over an application and press the Space bar, the application comes to the foreground. This is great for things like grabbing a file from somewhere to drop into a Mail composition window that's otherwise hidden. Grab the file you want, hover over the Mail icon, press the Space bar, and Mail comes to the front for you to drop the file into the compose window. Be sure that Spring-Loaded Folders and Windows is enabled in the Finder Preferences window.

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TiVo Series2 Wishes and Getting Our Bears Straight

Sometimes we wish we could rewind life as easily as rewinding television programs recorded by TiVo. In last week's issue, Alex Hoffman's article "TiVo Series2 Improves on Original" discussed how the digital video recorder could organize recorded programs in groups when perusing the Now Playing list. In the article, this is mentioned as a wishlist item, when in fact the Series2 does include the feature. Chalk up the error to a TidBITS editor who wishes his original TiVo could support that excellent way to browse shows: Jeff's punishment will be to categorize and alphabetize all his DVDs and VHS tapes.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07366>
<http://www.tivo.com/>

While we're acknowledging our errors (which we're told is good for the soul, even if it makes us feel the fools), Adam biffed his analogy of the 15-inch PowerBook G4 to Mama Bear in the children's story The Three Little Bears. Although there's some thought that alternate tellings may exist, most sources seem to agree that the porridge, chair, and bed that were "just right" belonged to Baby Bear. Adam's punishment will be to read The Three Little Bears at bedtime until Tristan makes him stop.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07363>
<http://w8r.com/kidsbook/bears.html>

Finally, in our hurried testing of StuffIt Deluxe 8.0 in the hours before publishing last week, Adam said that Mac OS X would prompt you about changing filename extensions when using StuffIt Deluxe's Archive Via Rename feature. However, it turns out that if you turn off "Always show file extensions" in the Finder preferences (which is necessary for Archive Via Rename to work), Mac OS X doesn't in fact prompt for each rename action. It makes sense; if you can't see filename extensions, you might not realize you're changing something, whereas if you can see them, it's reasonable to assume you know what you're doing. For this mistake, Adam's penance will be give all the cryptically named PDFs on his Desktop better names.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07365>

 

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