Hello, and welcome to this month's edition of A Spider Speaks. This column is dedicated to tips, tricks, and other information for use by every type of Mac user. Some of these tips and tricks may apply only to users of Mac OS 8.x, but I'll try to incorporate work-arounds for System 7.x users whenever possible. Starting this month, I'll be including one ResEdit tip each month. Comments or questions can be sent to my email address at erik@applewizards.net . Note: Picture captions are available by clicking on the pictures. Click everywhere!
 
Spiderism #1 — Desktop Printing
Desktop Printing. It's been around for quite some time, yet Mac users still don't utilize all of its power. Desktop Printing can accomplish so many things that it really is a useful tool. I will discuss a few of the less commonly known facets of Desktop Printing below.
Multiple Printers
There is no rule that says you can only have one desktop printer. I am on a local area network (LAN), and I have 8 desktop printers. One is my personal Color StyleWriter 2400 and the other 7 are laser printers in various AppleTalk zones. I've even set one printer to create PostScript files that can later be distilled into PDF files. This is an example of how each printer can have their own configuration — the same printer can even be created twice on your desktop with different settings.
Name It
Just like your Mac, your printer(s) can be renamed. Squiddy is the name of my inkjet printer (get it?). I've called the PostScript file printer PDFrigger, and all of the laser printers have their own name as well. Just click on the desktop printer's name and change it to whatever you'd like, just as you would normally change a file name.
Drag and Drop
One of the most basic yet "cool" things regarding Desktop Printing is that you can drag and drop files onto printers. If I have a SimpleText file that needs to be printed, there's no need to double-click it, choose print from the menu, print the file, and quit SimpleText. Instead, dragging and dropping the file onto the printer's icon launches SimpleText for me and brings up the print dialog. After the file spools to the printer, SimpleText automatically quits itself.
Queue Tricks
  Another neat thing is queuing. To play with this, select your printer
on the desktop (ie click on it). From the "Printing" menu, choose to
stop the print queue. Your printer should have an icon similar to the one at left. Note that you can also stop/start print queues from Mac OS 8.x's contextual menu — just control-click on the printer to change the queue as well as some other options. Stopping the print queue does not disable printing. Files are still sent to the printer, and as you can see in the graphic below, you can still print them at a later time.
 
Print Timing
Closely related to queuing is print timing. As you can see in the graphic above, I've stopped the print queue. At some point, I sent two files to the printer. The next time I start the print queue, they will print. However, what if I don't want them to print immediately? What if I'd rather schedule these to print while I'm in my 2 o'clock meeting? This too is easily done. I simply click on the file(s) I wish to print at a given time and click the clock button shown above. I then set the print time using the simple dialog box depicted below. Note that you must start the print queue before any "timed" printing will occur.
 
Aliases
It's possible to make aliases of desktop printers everywhere! I often put aliases in commonly-used folders for quick access to drag and drop printing.
C'est la fin
As Porky would say, that's all, folks! No, not really. There are some Desktop Printing tips I haven't discussed. Play around with your desktop printers and see if you can find some other cool tricks.
 
Spiderism #2 — Proofread out Loud
  Text to Speech is one of the coolest things about the Mac, and it's
been around for quite some time. Yet, like Desktop Printing and in
fact many of the wonderful Mac OS tools, it is hardly ever used as well and often as it could be.
How many times do you type something like "I needed milk so I went to the the store?" Did you find anything wrong with that sentence? Well, perhaps you noticed the pair of "the"s in that sentence. Oftentimes, you may miss small mistakes such as this while proofreading. To illustrate another example, you may also miss something like "He bought and apple and a green pear." You know what it's supposed to say, so when you proofread it you may miss little mistakes like these. I chose these mistakes on purpose as spell-catchers would not notice these "boo boos" for you.
Text to Speech (TTS) can function in many applications, including SimpleText and ClarisWorks. If your word-processing (or email, or whatever) application does not support TTS, simply paste the text into SimpleText. Then choose to listen to your text ("Speak All" from the SimpleText "Sound" menu or command-J) and listen for mistakes. Chances are you'll catch some you would have otherwise missed!
You can grab TTS software for free and explore the world of PlainTalk at http://speech.apple.com/ptk/ .
 
Spiderism #3 — Empty the Trash with Command-T
  This month I will begin incorporating a Wicked Clown-like "hack"
of the month, a ResEdit tip, a call-it-what-you-will. First off: adding a
command-T shortcut to the Special menu's "Empty Trash." This is useful if you're too lazy to move your mouse to the trash can (to use the contextual menu) or to the menu bar (to choose "Empty Trash" from the menu). I use it quite extensively in my daily work, and you may as well.
Warning — This is a Mac OS 8.x hack only. It can be done in 7.x systems, though the resource and ID # are different. I advise extreme caution when attempting this hack on your own.
Step 1
Copy the Finder to a separate location on your hard drive. You will work with this copy, not the original Finder. Open the Finder copy in ResEdit.
Step 2
Open the "fmn2" resource. Then find and open ID number 524.
Step 3
Look in the column to the right. You should see "Empty Trash" amongst some gobbledygook. Look at the text before "Empty Trash" and you should see four rectangle-like characters. Change the second of these four characters to a capital letter "T" as shown in the graphic below. Save your changes and quit ResEdit.
 
Step 4
Move your original Finder to a safe location — you will need it in case anything goes wrong with this hack. Place the hacked Finder into the System folder and make sure that it is called "Finder." Restart the computer to check your work. You should now be able to press command-T to execute the "Empty Trash" command.
Problems
If you run into problems, simply replace your original Finder and restart your computer. You may have to boot from a Mac OS CD-ROM to do so.
Note: ResEdit can be very useful, but it can also be very harmful. Always use a back-up copy of the file you are hacking. Apple Wizards isn't to blame for any problems caused by hacking into files.
 
Fact of the Month:
There are more than 8,000 PC viruses in existence, with two or three new ones appearing every day. In contrast, there are only 47 known viruses specific to the Mac OS.
From http://www2.apple.com/whymac/advantage/power56.html
