Q: How can I use the Omni Group's OmniDazzle screen effects program in conjunction with playing Apple Keynote presentations?
A: By default, Keynote doesn't play well with other applications, as it intercepts all the keyboard commands. You can, however, convince it to play nicely very easily.
It is very easy to get Keynote to play nicely with other applications. Here's what you need to do:
Open the Keynote preferences. This is in the program menu (or Apple/Cmd ,).
Go to the "Slideshow" tab.
Ensure that "Allow Exposé, Dashboard and others to use screen" is enabled with a checkmark beside it.
That's it! Now you can use OmniDazzle in your Keynote presentations.
Q: I'm using Apple's iWeb from iLife '06 to create web pages. Can I publish the web pages to my own web site or must I publish to .Mac?
A: Yes. You can use iWeb to publish your content to a folder and then transfer the content to your own web site using regular file transfer mechanisms.
Discussion:
Apple is definitely pushing the simple one-button publish mechanism of iWeb integrated with their .Mac hosting/e-mail service. However, according an Apple iWeb Technical Support article, it is possible to have the content placed into a folder on your local computer. To do that, the article suggests the following:
- Choose File > Publish to a Folder.
- Choose a location to store your site, and then click Choose.
They also warn that doing so means you can't have password protection, the hit counter, or a slideshow with viewing controls. Depending on your web host, however, you may be able to add these things manually yourself.
Once you get the content into a local folder, you can upload it to your web host using the same mechanism you normally would. For most people, this is either via FTP or SFTP, although some people may use WebDAV (like for iDisks, for example).
The following programs allow you to use either FTP/SFTP to upload files to a remote host:
For any SFTP/FTP transfer, you will need know the following things from your web host:
Remember:
The folder you choose to create your iWeb site shouldn't itself be uploaded, just the stuff inside it.
Most web sites use index.html or index.htm as the default starting point for a web site, but not all do. If that doesn't work, try renaming the index.html page to index.htm, default.htm, or default.html, or ask your web host what the default starting page is.
Q: When Microsoft Office products and Acrobat Professional are installed, Acrobat adds a PDF toolbar to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. How do I remove this unwanted Acrobat toolbar?
A: You should be able to permanently turn it off by customizing which toolbars are displayed. However, the Acrobat toolbar seems to happily ignore that. Instead, you need to remove some troublesome configuration files.
Locate Microsoft Office folder on your computer. It's probably in the Applications folder. If you don't have the full Office, just find either Excel or Word's folder.
Use the find facility inside that folder to locate PDFMaker.dot and PDFMaker.xla files. These are the troublesome files.
Delete the .dot and .xla files from the previous step.
When Adobe Acrobat asks you to repair PDFMaker, Just say "No" to repairing it.
I think I first saw this on MacFixIt, but it's briefly described in a MacWorld article as well.
Update November 15, 2005: If you're having trouble in Tiger locating the troublesome files, in my copy of Office, they're in Office/Startup/Excel and Office/Startup/Word. "Office" is a folder in the main Microsoft Office folder in your Applications directory, i.e. in the same folder where you see the icons for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, if you have a full Microsoft Office installation. Note that applying Microsoft Office software patches often "fixes" the PDF toolbar and brings it back.
Q: After weeks of working flawlessly, I have this problem where the Party Shuffle option in iTunes 4.6 won't show any songs other than my entire library, no matter what I choose as the source.
A: While this is very frustrating, for most people there's a quick and easy fix, which doesn't even require trashing any preference files. All you need to is is go into the Party Shuffle list, select all of the songs in the list, and delete them. Click "Refresh" and your list should work fine after that.
Q: I use Eudora Lite for e-mail, and sometimes it crashes when opening e-mail with images (typically spam). I'd like Eudora to only show me text, so that spam with images would look like HTML and I'd have to click deliberately before I'd actually see the images. Is there a preference I could toggle to get that as my default view?
A: Yes, there is. You'll need to do some delving into the innards of two categories of Eudora settings, but your wish can be granted.
Eudora has problems with some HTML mail. I've never bothered figuring out if it's because there's something actually wrong with the HTML or if Eudora just has a poor HTML parser. Anyway...
To turn off displaying HTML and images rendered in Eudora, you need to adjust two sets of settings:
Open Eudora's Settings. Scroll through the list of setting icons until you see "Fonts & Display". Uncheck the following: "Automatically download HTML graphics", "Animate animated GIF images", and possibly "Display graphics in messages". Try out the first two and see if that's enough to solve your problem. The last one is for graphics actually attached to the message itself rather than referred to on a remote web site. Most spam e-mail accesses graphics remotely so you can be tracked and doesn't attach graphics to the actual message. If you're still not happy, continue on.
Find the Styled Text settings. Under the section "When receiving styled mail, pay attention to", uncheck everything you'd like to get rid of. This isn't an all or none kind of thing, so feel free to play a bit.
Click "OK" when done to update your settings. I think they take effect immediately.