Skimming Demo - Click to watch

One of the ways the iPhoto organizes your photos is by Events. When you import photos, iPhoto takes all the photos from a single day and creates an Event for them. The thinking here is that most events are one day long so iPhoto is grouping like photos together. See below if you have multiple day Events or more than one Event per day.

You can see all of your Events by selecting Events under the LIBRARY section at the top left of the iPhoto window.

Here are some things you can do with Events:

• Open them. Double click on an Event to see the photos inside as. From there you can edit, rotate, email, etc. There are arrows on the top tool bar to move from Event to Event and a back button to return to All Events.
• Reorder them. Select an Event and drag it around the Events list. Other Events will move out of the way to let you put it where you want.
• Name them. When created, Events are named with the date of the Event. Click on the date to get a text field where you can type in a name.
• Merge them. If you have two Events that really should be just one, (like a two-day trip) drag one Event onto an other one. Or select multiple Events and click the Merge button in the bottom toolbar.
• Split them. If you had two events on the same day, (a wedding and a baseball game, for example) iPhoto imported them into the same Event. To split them into two separate Events, open the Event by double-clicking it. Select the first photo that belongs in the second Event and click the Split button on the bottom toolbar.
• Skim them. Skimming is a new technique in iPhoto that lets you quickly preview the contents of an Event without opening it. To Skim, move the cursor from left to right across the event. Watch the demo video to see how skimming works.
• Set the preview image on them. By default, an Event shows the first photo in the Event as the preview. You can change the preview to any photo in the Event by Skimming and when you find the photo you want as a preview, hitting the space bar.

Related Items: iPhoto | Events

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Turn on Spell Check Click to see a larger image

Most applications have Spell Checking turned on by default, but or some reason, Safari does not. Even though Safari is not a word processor or text editor, I still run into times when I type long bits of text into a text field.

Here's how to turn on spell checking in Safari:

1. Click in a text field.
2. On the menu bar, go to Edit / Spelling and Grammar / Check Spelling While Typing.

As with Spell Checking in the rest of Mac OS X, misspelled words have a red dashed underline. Right click the misspelled word and choose a replacement word in the popup menu.

Spell Checking Click to see a larger image

Related Items: Safari

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Flagged Mail Click to see a larger image

This tip takes a little bit of setup, but once you complete it, you can mark email messages as "Flagged." It can be a way to mark a message as a To Do item or to remind you that you need to respond to the message later. Here's how to set it up:

1. In Mail, click on the View menu item and then Columns and choose Flags. This will create a new column in your messages list that looks like a small flag.
2. Click on the View menu item again and this time choose Customize Toolbar… A sheet will drop down that shows buttons that you can add to your toolbar .
3. Locate the button that looks like a flag and drag it up to the toolbar. You will notice that the other buttons move out of the way as you drag the flag button around. I placed my flag button on the far left but you can put yours wherever you want.

Now you can select a message or messages and hit the flag button in your toolbar. The selected messages will display a small flag in the flag column.

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I just received an email that the good folks over at Take Control books are having a 50% off sale now through July 7, 2009

Take Control books are instructional ebooks on a wide variety of Mac topics. Because you read the content on your computer rather than on paper, there are no printing and distribution costs associated with Take Control books. This allows the publishers to offer high quality materials for a low price. Most Take Control books are around $US10 to $US15 and most books are well over 100 pages long.

Take Control Books are in .pdf format and will open with Preview on your computer. They are formatted to be easy to read on screen. To toggle back and forth between the book and the application you are studying, all you need to do is hit a quick Command-Tab.

If you want to learn more about your Mac, check out the Take Control catalog at this link. You will be taken to the Take Control website and the coupon code for the 50% off will be automatically loaded for you at checkout.

Note: I get no referral fees for any Take Control books that you buy. I just believe in this series of books and the Take Control folks are a great resource in the Mac community,

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History in Cover Flow

Cover Flow is a concept that first appeared in iTunes to let you browse your iTunes Library by album cover. In Leopard, the Finder got Cover Flow for scanning through file contents. Now Cover Flow comes to Safari 4 for viewing thumbnails of your History items.

Often when I am doing research and using Google a lot, I quickly visit many web pages. Being a visual person, I am more likely to remember what a page looked like than what is was called. History Cover Flow works well for me.

To get to History Cover Flow, you first need to go to Top Sites. There is a Search History text field on the bottom right of the Top Sites Page. (It seems like there should be a more direct way to get to History Cover Flow, like from the History menu, but if there is, I can't find it.)

If you just click in the Search History text field without typing anything, you will see all of your History in Clove Flow. Once you type a search term, the results will be restricted to pages that contain that search term. Unlike previous versions of Safari where you could only search the page titles, Safari 4's Search History searches the entire text of web pages.

Some pages will only show a black box with the Safari logo and a padlock in it. These pages were secure pages such as an order entry page that would show private information like addresses and credit card numbers. This is a good thing.

To leave History Cover Flow, click on the thumbnail of the page you want to visit or select another page to go to by either selecting a Bookmark or typing in a web address.

Related Items: Safari | Cover Flow | History

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