Moon Phase Widget

Ever wanted to find out which moon cycle we are in? There's not very many resources online for finding out about the Lunar Calendar, but now there's a nice and simple Dashboard Widget called Moon Phase which shows the current moon cycle and how many days and hours until the next cycle.





It is available for download here. It requires Mac OS 10.4 or later.

Weather Radar Widget

You can use this little Dashboard Widget called Radar In Motion which actively pulls the latest Radar information from Weather.com or the NOAA, and displays the Radar images in various ways every time you look in your Dashboard. The Widget inclues a fair amount of options for displaying the latest Radar information.









You have the option of viewing the latest images by city or zip code, along with National Radar and National Satellite images. This latest version allows for the ability to search maps by 3-letter Airport codes. You also have the ability to adjust the size of the window by double-clicking on the window itself.

This Widget is available for download at the Official Website. It requires Mac OS 10.4 or later.

Free SMS Dashboard Widget

You can send free text messages to any provider in the US or Canada by using this very simple little Dashboard Widget from txtDrop.com. No more looking up your carrier's website to send text messages if you don't have your cell phone handy. Just quickly bring up this little Widget and send your SMS instantly.






There's a Universal Binary available for download at their website. It requires Mac OS 10.4 or later.

Monitor Your Mac Widget

You can monitor many different statistics on your system using the iStat Pro Dashboard Widget. This handy all-in-one Widget seems to cover just about every statistic you would want to know on your Mac or Macs currently running and using different resources.




It features detailed information on CPU, Hard Drives, CPU and Hard Drive Temperature, Bandwidth, IP Addresses, Detailed Memory Usage (including Available RAM), Fans, Battery, etc. You can also filter specific disks and network interfaces.




The display of the Widget is very flexible, allowing you to shift around different panels of data. You can view in Graphs or Bars, change the panel length and style, display degrees in Celsius, Fahrenheit or Kelvin. The Widget can also be displayed in a variety of 9 different colors. It requires Mac OS 10.4 or later.

Show Random Desktop Picture After Restart

Those of you might already be aware that you can choose a folder of pictures to display in random order in the Desktop & Screen Saver section of System Preferences. But, sometimes when you reboot the mac, it reverts back to the default Desktop Image for the machine.



There's a handy way to get around this. You can go to the Desktop & Screen Saver section in System Preferences and choose Random Order for the Desktop Image. Then, create an Applescript file containing the following:

tell application "System Events"
  tell current desktop
    set random order to false
    set random order to true
  end tell
end tell

Now, go to System Preferences, choose Accounts, and then choose Login Items. Locate this new Applescript file on your mac and select it. Make sure that it is checked. Now when you shut down, power up or restart your system, your images should randomly display as they should.

Album Art For Dashboard Widget

Quickly displays the artwork of any currently playing song in iTunes. It also has the ability to fetch artwork from Amazon if no artwork is provided by iTunes.

It also includes a star rating for different songs. You can pause/play/skip songs in the same window or go directly to the iTunes Music Store.

Album Art Widget Version 2.9.2 can be downloaded here.

Instant Spell Check in any Application

You can instantly check the spelling or grammar of anything you write in Safari, Mail, TextEdit, or any Application which has a space to write text.

You can simply type the text out as you like, and then highlight the word or set of words and right-click, or type Control + left-click to bring up a window with a selection that says "Spelling and Grammar", then clicking the sub-selection "Show Spelling and Grammar" will bring up a window (without loading any external Applications) with possible corrections, if any need be, for your text.

You can also check the spelling and grammar of an entire document without having to select text by typing "Command + Shift + ;".

Save or Backup iPhone Notes

Want to have an easy way of backing up your notes from your iPhone 2.0 or 2.2.1 or any firmware prior to 3.0? Unfortunately, iTunes does not allow you to backup any of your notes you have saved to your iPhone unless you upgrade to the new 3.0 firmware. If you do not want to upgrade your firmware, but still want to have your notes saved, rather than transcribing potentially many many sticky notes, you can use this simple application instead.


It's a little app called iPhoneNotes. All you have to do is download the file, launch the installer, copy the application to your Applications folder. Now whenever you want to backup your notes from your iPhone, just launch the application first, and then connect your iPhone via USB and the iPhoneNotes will instantly recognize all of your notes.

The application will allow you to choose where you want to save your note files. You can also restore previously saved notes and put them back on your iPhone.

*Note, this application requires OpenSSH installed on a jailbroken iPhone.

Add and Remove Safari Buttons

You can remove the plus sign button for adding bookmarks, or remove the forward and backward buttons for page navigation. The layout in Safari is very flexible this way, you can even add buttons you perhaps were not aware of before, like a Downloads button or an Autofill button.



All you have to do is go to the View menu, and select "Customize Toolbar...". From there you can select and then drag and drop what you want or what you would like to remove from the Safari button layout.

Disable Safari PDF Viewing

You can use a simple Terminal edit to disable Safari from natively browsing PDF files, so that you can use Acrobat or any other PDF viewer that you might have available.

Quit Safari

Run Terminal, and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES

Restart Safari

If you want to revert this process, you can quit Safari, run Terminal and type the same command with the value "NO" instead of "YES".

Recall Windows When Restarting Safari

Want Safari to remember which web pages you had open so they will all appear when you restart the browser? If you do not have Private Browsing enabled, and you do not empty your Cache and History, you can easily recall all of your previously opened windows.

When browsing with several web page windows open, and/or tabs open, choose to quit Safari by right-clicking on the icon in the Dock or typing the shortcut
Command + Q.

Now, restart Safari. Go to the History menu, and choose Reopen All Windows From Last Session.

How To Always "Open With" One App

There are several kinds of file formats which you might prefer to always open in a specific Application. There's a way to natively set a file or set of files or all files to "Open With" one application. This seems to work uniformly on all formats, except when certain Applications override OS X associations.


To set one file to always open with one specific Application:

Select the desired file in Finder, and type Command + I. Under "Open With", choose the Application you want from the list, or choose "Other..." to browse for the file name.

To make a set of files always open with one specific Application:

Use the Spotlight search to find the files you would like to associate with one Application. Move them all to one folder, or go to the folder containing them all and select all of them together with your cursor. Type Command + I, and choose the Application you want under "Open With".

To make all files under one format open with one specific Application:

Select any file with the extension you would like to change to associate with one Application. Type Command + I, and choose the Application you want under "Open with", and this time, be sure to press the "Change All..." button.

How to Convert DOC to PDF

You might be wondering if you can easily turn your Microsoft Document files into PDFs on the Mac. But, it turns out that there's an easy way of converting your microsoft .doc files to the PDF format natively in OS X.

1: Open your Microsoft Document file with TextEdit.



2: Type Command + P, or go to File and select Print.

3: Look to the lower left of the Print pane and you will see a "PDF" button. Click on it to see a drop-down menu.



4: Choose "Save as PDF...".

5: Choose where you would like to save your new PDF file.

Hotmail Account and Gmail in Mail

As you probably already know, Hotmail accounts, for some unknown reasons, are not compatible with OS X Mail. I posted previously about a decent Hotmail plug-in for the Mac. But, I have been exploring another good alternative to accessing your Hotmail account with OS X Mail.


One way is to create a Gmail account (which has seamless integration with Mail), and use the Gmail Mail Fetcher. Once you have this feature active in your Gmail account, you will automatically receive any new mail from your Hotmail account. You will also benefit from Gmail's much better spam filter. And you can use IMAP in addition to POP3. And you will have several other nifty Gmail features missing from Hotmail.

A simple compromise to have the best of both worlds.

*Note: There are currently problems getting Hotmail servers to work with Mail in Snow Leopard.