In the last few weeks I’ve been in a situation twice where only one person had Internet access (me) and needed to share it with other people or devices. The first time we were at a convention center and only had wired internet access at the booth. We had several iPhones we needed to use to display a website (we were demoing a new mobile website). The second time our wireless router went out in the office and only a handful of computers are running on a hard-wired ethernet connection.

In both cases, we needed to access the Internet and having a Mac saved the day. It was extremely simple and quick to share my internet connection on my MacBook Pro using built-in features in Mac OS X.

To share an internet connection over Airport, you will need to be connected to the internet by either a wired ethernet connection or by a cellular card. I used a Verizon V740 card to share the internet connection at the convention and hard-wired ethernet connection at the office when our router went out.

So how do you share your Internet connection using Mac OS X? See the tutorial below, or take a look at the video.

Open the preferences pane and click “Sharing”:

Click on the name “Internet Sharing” which will bring up the internet sharing information to the right of the preference pane:

Choose the type of internet you want to share (I have “Built-in Ethernet” selected to share):

in the “To computers using:” section check the box labeled “Airport”:

If you want to name the network, set encryption or a password, click “Airport Options…”:

Once you have configured the settings, check the box next to “Internet Sharing” on the left and you will be prompted with a warning: “Are you sure you want to turn on Internet sharing?” Click Start.

Now your internet connection should be shared. In place of your normal WiFi signal strength indicator you should see the icon on the right.

Also check out the video:

Internet Connection Sharing

When I first switched from Windows to OSX one thing that I initially didn’t really understand was how to install/uninstall applications. Obviously it is second nature now, but hopefully the information below will help a new switcher.

Installation

On Windows when you download an application it is generally a .exe file. It is sometimes compressed in to a .zip file.

On OS X, a large majority of applications that you download will be in .dmg format. .dmg stands for “disk image” and it basically functions like a hard drive. DMG files can be mounted and ejected just like a regular hard drive. The purpose of the .dmg file is for compression. It can greatly reduce the size of the file you are downloading.

When you download this DMG file you simply double-click on it to mount/open it. Generally you will just see the application that you’d like to install. You then drag the application to your Applications folder.

After you’ve moved the application file to your Applications folder you then eject the “drive” the DMG created from your desktop to the trash can in the dock. This does not delete the DMG file, it just un-mounts it. Since you have installed the application, you no longer need the DMG file. Drag the DMG file to the trash to delete the DMG file itself.

And that’s it! It’s really less complicated that it may seem and after you’ve done it a couple of times you won’t even think twice about it. To launch the application you installed, just go to your Application folder and double-click on it.

Uninstall

So that snazzy application that you installed a few days ago has lost its luster and you realized you just don’t need it.

Uninstalling an application on OS X is even easier than installing it.

Simply go to your Applications folder, find the application you no longer need and drag it to your trash can in the dock. And that’s it!

Advanced Uninstall

Some purists here will argue that isn’t really “it” when it comes to uninstall an application and to an extent, they are correct. The majority of applications install small preference and configuration files elsewhere on your Mac. The files are so small that they don’t really have an impact on computer performance or your storage space, but should you want to keep your computer as clean as possible there are applications you can use to completely rid your computer of all traces of an application.

Here are a couple worth checking out:

• AppZapper – $12.95
• AppCleaner – Free

Screencast

Checkout the screencast below that covers the basics of installing and uninstalling an application.

There are many different ways to organize files. From the classic folder structure to the more “experimental” metadata/tagging format. There’s no right or wrong way to do it…just what works best for you.

As a new Mac users it’s easy to get caught up in the “old” way of doing things (ie. how you organized items in Windows). I encourage you to step outside that box for a bit to give something else a try.

The OS X Finder has a “Label” feature where you can color code your files with 7 different colors. Color coding your files and folders does not change anything about them. It’s simply a tool for organization.

One step further

Using the color labeling feature of Finder works fine as is. It helps you visually separate a folder full of files with a simple glance.

But we can take things one step further and use the labels as an actual organizational tool.

By using the OS X Smart Folder feature, we can group files by the color of the label you chose. So for example, say you decided to mark all of your documents that revolved around insurance (car, health, life, etc etc), you can then create a Smart Folder to automatically group all of those documents in one place. It then automatically updates whenever you label a new file with that color.

In our original label example above, I’ve marked financial documents with the green label. Now we’ll create a Smart Folder to group all of files labeled with green into one folder.

1. Go to the Finder. In the menu bar at the very top of your screen, select File > New Smart Folder. A new Finder window will popup with no files inside.
2. Next we’ll be creating the “rule” that finds all the green-labeled files. In the upper-right corner of the new Finder window you will see a plus sign. Click on the plus sign to create a new rule.
3. You’ll see a couple of new drop-down items. Click on the first one that says “Kind” and select “Other…” from the bottom of the menu. You’ll be presented with numerous additional attributes you can use. We want to find the attribute called “File label” and select it. The select Okay.
4. The rule has now changed to let you pick the color label of your choice. In our example, we’ll select the green label. After selecting your label, your Mac will search all the files on your computer for any labeled with green and will then show you the results.
5. If you’d like, you can now save this Smart Folder by clicking on the Save button.

If all goes as planned, you should see something similar to this.

Homework

You now know the basics of organizing and labeling your files with color labels. Your homework is to develop a basic system of organization on just your documents. Don’t worry about trying to do this to all your files. Just use this as a way to organize documents spread across different folders.

Be sure to check out the video below that walks through this entire lesson.

By default, OS X has full keyboard access disabled allowing you to only tab through a limited number of items in various dialog boxes.

In this Quick Tip I cover how to enable full keyboard access to help save you a few mouse clicks throughout your day.

Enabling full keyboard access (.mov – 2.6mb)

Be sure to subscribe to our TAB Screencasts via RSS feed or via iTunes.

Yeah, sorry, I don’t really know how to title this little trick. Let me see if I can set this up so it’s clear what you’ll be looking at, before you actually look. (Or you can skip me stumbling over myself and just watch it anyway…)

When you’ve got a window open – be it Firefox, TextMate, etc, etc – there’s a title to that window at the top, and if it’s a file, there’s an icon positioned to the left of it. A nice trick in OS X is that you can drag that icon to the Finder to create an alias, or by holding down the OPTION key, you can make a copy of that file someplace as well.

Also, if you hold the COMMAND key (Apple key if you’re new ’round here) when clicking on that icon (or any part of the title in that bar) it’ll show you the path in which that file resides. So for instance, lately I’ve been going through some Ruby tutorials. The folder structures are many and a few levels deep. As I’m a relative n00b to this, the folder structures lose me quickly, so being able to CMD click on the title/icon at the top of the window and quickly see where I’m at is a huge help.

Ok so you’ve basically got it now. Below is a quickie screencast I recorded so you visual folks can get the idea. There’s no sound – it’s not broken, I just didn’t record any.

CMD Windowbar Trick (no sound!) – 5mb

If you’ve heard about Quicksilver but have been too timid to familiarize yourself with it, or to peek under the hood a bit, this screencast is for you!

Perhaps too often, we (as in the collective web) focus our attention on the cutting edge features of Quicksilver. Unfortunately that can make for a steep barrier to entry into this amazingly powerful program. So I wanted to take a step back and show a simple trick or two that makes Quicksilver valuable to the new user (either of Quicksilver, or the Apple platform in general).

To those veterans of our favorite launcher, this screencast may not be much for you, and I do apologize for that. I’ll do my best to expose something new and exciting with Quicksilver in the coming week or two. But for those who really don’t know Quicksilver from a hole in the ground, this aims to serve as a useful [visual] primer on getting started with a life-altering application. (I’m serious about the ‘life-altering’ thing.)

Following a simple but useful function of Quicksilver, I’ll cover the Preferences and various sections within that can help enhance your Quicksilver experience. For those who have followed along with my past screencasts, this isn’t another ‘Setup’ – instead this is aimed at explaining the various functions in Preferences, like Rescanning catalogs, finding information about plugins, and things of that nature.

You can grab this screencast in .mov format directly (below), or you can subscribe to our new TAB Screencasts feed here, or via iTunes.

Quicksilver – The Beginner’s Walkthrough (mov)
20 mins / 138 mb

This is a long one (apologies if it gets repetitive, but I wanted to cater to the new-to-Quicksilver crowd). Please feel free to leave questions below in the comments section, and we’ll do our best to answer them promptly.

Since Tiger was released it has seemed to me that Automator was one of the unsung heroes that shipped with the operating system. I’m guessing more people use it than we hear about, but just in case, I wanted to show off the use of Automator when saving workflows as plugins, rather than Automator Workflow Apps.

Automating Free Music (mov)
10 mins / 102mb

The ‘Free Music’ part has to do with the fun weekly mixes found at OutOf5.com, nothing shady, so don’t fear the reaper…

Oh, and if the audio is a wee bit quiet, my apologies – I had to use a different mic last night, in a different space than I normally record these things. Hopefully it’s not too bad, but it was a one time circumstance. But as always, feedback is welcome regardless.

UPDATE
Ali’s getting pushy ;) and wanted the Automator Workflows I’ve already created. And here they are….Do your worst!

Services are a part of OS X that many users either don’t even know about, or forget to use. They are a powerful bunch of actions that you can apply to your workflow – mostly in cases where you’re working with text.

In this Screencast, I’ll show you firstly, how to trim that over-grown hedge of a listing that makes up most peoples’ Services Menu. The easiest way I’ve found – as you’ll hear in the Screencast – is using a terrific piece of donationware called Service Scrubber. (Brought to you by Peter Maurer, the same developer of TextPander, yFlicks, and Witch.)

Once that mess is cleaned-up a bit, I’ll run through a few quick examples using Quicksilver with Services. At the very end, I use my favorite (which I forgot the name of temporarily – doh! It’s late, ok?!) service which is called, Shrink URL, and uses the terrific TinyURL web service. You can get the Shrink Service here.

Services with Quicksilver (mov)
11mins / 98mb

The CMD + ESC Trigger is used gratuitously in this screencast. Inevitably, someone watching will not be familiar with this technique – for the details on setting it up yourself, see my explanation here.

I’d love to hear your feedback about screencasts you’d like to see in the future. I have an ever shortening list of things that I plan on screencasting, but want to give you what you’re hoping to see as well. So if you have anything specific – even non-Quicksilver-based! – please let me know in the comments.

Quicksilver does an awful lot of things from the keyboard, but accessing windows that have been minimized isn’t typically in the cards. While some of you may choose to hide your application windows when not using them, I’m still of the camp that minimizes them – call it a Windows hold-over practice.

Anyhow, the screencast you’re about to view will demonstrate just how to restore minimized windows using Quicksilver and your keyboard. You’ll need a plugin, but it’s not available in the plugins section of the preferences…This plugin is a very experimental Objective-C offering over at quicksilver.infogami.com. There’s some great stuff here, but it is experimental for the most part, so play at your own risk!

The Deminimizer – Quicktime .mov file
43mb / 4:21 mins

I’ve written at great length about using Metadata to keep track of your files, even going so far as an alternative to folder hierarchies. But amongst the barriers to entry is the difficulty in actually tagging those files and subsequently keeping track of those tags that are being used.

While there are a number of pieces of software that work toward this functionality, I tend to be picky and have only suggested a small handful. Amongst those is a relatively new offering from Big Robot, called TagBot (which just got a bump to a 1.1 release). Today’s screencast covers the simplicity this app offers to fulfill all your tagging needs.

A TagBot Walkthrough (mov)
6mins / 24mb

An item I forgot to mention in the screencast, is TagBot’s ability to tag Address Book entries as well as Safari Bookmarks. Tagging’s not just for files anymore!

So almost a year ago to the day (ok, off by a week), I posted an early screencast which showed the setup I use for Quicksilver. The intent then – as it is now – was to show all of you exactly which items are check-marked and how everything’s set, so in cast you want to play along at home, you can try to mimic these settings on your own.

The [Updated] Setup
10mins / 70mb

To avoid confusion of any kind – this screencast is not a walkthrough of all the ins and outs of the Quicksilver Preferences window. This is strictly how I roll with Quicksilver. So if you want to be like me….or at least use Quicksilver in a similar manner, this should get you there a bit quicker.

As I’ve been known to do, I take requests, and this screencast is an example of that practice. The question has been asked several times in the past about the look of my Quicksilver interface. There’s no special Quicksilver Foo that I’ve applied, as always, it’s just knowing where to look. So as the saying goes, ‘Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime’ so shall I…Because teaching you how to Pimp Your Quicksilver is just as noble as teaching you how to feed yourself, right?

Get Krunk with Quicksilver
7 mins / 36mbs

Oh, and the Fumo plugin is here.

I know, it must be shocking to see that I’m doing a screencast on something other than Quicksilver. For me to not be covering Quicksilver is generally a big deal – well that’s just the case today. I’m proud to bring you a screencast preview of Skitch, which is a fantastic new screen grab and image editing app from Plasq – and it most definitely is a big deal!

I honestly haven’t been this giddy about a piece of software in recent memory. Back at MacWorld I remember hearing about this great new product from Plasq and thinking, “So what, it’s a screen capture utility.” Well Skitch is one of the most well thought-out pieces of software I’ve used in quite sometime, and I’m pleased to be able to show you some of its finer points today.

A Skitch Demo
8mins/46mb

Skitch is unfortunately still in private beta, so you can’t get crazy with it just yet. But if you head over to plasq.com you can sign up for email updates as they’re available. I highly recommend staying posted because you WILL want to get your hands on this as soon as it’s available.

In an effort to quell the weekly requests for how my CMD + ESC trigger works to load a selected item (or multiple selected items) into Quicksilver, I’ve done an impromptu screencast on the setup. Call it Bonus Wednesday.

Anyway, I’m at work, so there’s no audio, but you should be able to follow the visual cues and roll your own at home. Setting up the CMD ESC Trigger in Quicksilver.

All further screencasts will probably link to this one as well, so future readers don’t have to ask the question again. :)

EDIT: Richard points out that this is indeed a trigger that Quicksilver [now] ships with. See the screenshot below. It may just be a matter of assigning a keystroke to this trigger.

UPDATE: Sorry, screencast URL is fixed now.

I’ve been stockpiling ideas of the gems I’d still like to show you in Quicksilver, and among them is the Image Manipulation plugin. However, a quick search shows that I [sort of] covered it about a year ago. I say sort of, because it was just the dawn of this Quicksilver screencast idea and it was poorly executed at best. So today I’ll actually show you the finer points of this useful plugin.

Quicksilver You Manipulative Little…
5mins/19mb

As a quick reference, I’m providing the Image Manipulation info examples (which are shown in the screencast) here, for quick copy/paste if you so choose to use it that way for learning purposes. Enjoy.

“fit 640×480 as jpg high progressive” – creates an image that will fit within a 640×480 rectangle
“50% as interlaced png” – creates a png with dimensions half of the original”
“x72 as gif” – makes a gif 72 pixels tall, with width to maintain the proportions

Oh, and something I failed to demonstrate in the screencast, is that you can load several images into Quicksilver at once and it will scale all of them with one command. This can be a HUGE time saver!

If you’re wondering about the CMD ESC Trigger for loading selected items into Quicksilver, check out the quick screencast setup demo here.

Last week I pointed to LifeHacker’s great rundown of Geektool. It’s one of those tools that just blends in and you sort of forget about it. This is just what I’d done, and thus had never really covered it here on The Apple Blog.

But following my pointer last week I had a request to show how it ultimately looks on the desktop. So I whipped up a little Screencast this morning covering the Geektool interface and how it looks when implemented.

Geektool ShowMe (5mins/49mb)

If you’re looking for some quick scripts to plug into Geektool to get up and running, you might check out this post at Mac Geekery.

I’ve had a crazy couple weeks and the time to do screencasts has really not been available to me. I apologize to all 1 of you who may have felt that awful void in your life because of it. But I’m back baby.

So today I’m going to show you one of my favorite uses for Quicksilver. Sending emails was once lazy way of writing a letter. Now email is so common, how do we send an email with even less effort? Enter Quicksilver. With the proper know-how, you don’t even need to open a new mail window, or a browser to send someone a note or a file.

Check it out.
Quick Emails with Quicksilver (8 minutes/36mb)

Leave your questions or comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Apologies for a rather quick and dirty screencast this week. I’m headed out of town and wanted to make sure to get something out. So today’s is a quickie, but something you can easily build on to become more efficient with Quicksilver.

Watch the screencast, and you’ll get a feel for using the right (and left) arrow keys to drill down into applications for quicker access to data. In the demo you’ll see that I only used iTunes as an example. I tried running the screencast by demoing the likes of Address Book, Transmit, and so on, but found that more information was made visible than I cared to show – and I don’t have the time to fuzz it all out. So that just means you get to play on your own with this little gem of a tip.

The Arrow Screencast is 14mb

In upcoming weeks, I’ll be addressing the email functions of Quicksilver, as well as redoing the Setup screencast. The last time I did The Setup, it was the older interface, and enough has since changed that I feel it’ll be of use to many of the new Quicksilver users out there. So keep the dials tuned here for those in the near future.

A dead drive created a minor slow-down in getting this out, but an extra drive and a quickly restored backup and I’m back in action. (Along these lines, an answer to a question: The tags – Spotlight Comments – do in fact survive backups and such. Everything’s in perfect order post-backup/restore.) So today marks Part 3 of our Metadata Series. This is the screencast that shows the apps I’m using (Default Folder X, Quicksilver with the Tagging Plugin, and TagBag), how to set them up (this is really just Quicksilver), and just how I’m using them for maximum potential.

I’d like to make a note before you watch the screencast:
To coin a phrase I used to hear from my father, “Do as I say, Not as I do.” You’re about to see my dirty laundry – that is, the mess that is my collection of tags. One would probably assume a utopia of perfect tagging principles…While I do follow what I preach, I’ve also been tinkering with this project for over a year. In that time I’ve tried many different approaches (apps, workflows, and so on) that inevitably created a bigger mess than it cleaned-up. But I found that keeping some of this stuff helped me test various workflows more thoroughly, thus, I left it. I just wanted to cover this point before you watched the following and said, “Ummmmm…”

So here goes!

The Metadata Screencast clocks in at about 12 minutes.

Enjoy the show.

A couple things I forgot to mention in the screencast:
- To get the Spotlight Comments entry on Save Dialogs, you’ll go to Default Folder X in the System Preferences, Settings, Open & Save. Be sure to check the box, “Ask for Spotlight Comments in Save dialogs.”
- Also, you can bring many items at once into Quicksilver and tag them all identically. So the workflow you see me perform can help you easily tag tons of files at once – provided they are all getting the same tags.

Questions will be answered in the comments section below.

This week I’m covering the Abracadabra plugin for Quicksilver. It brings you the ability to create Triggers in Quicksilver, which can be activated by mouse gestures, rather than the stale, last century keystroke. Ok, so there’s nothing really wrong with Keystrokes, just sensationalizing…

So go ahead and check out the screencast. It should hold all the answers you’re in need of. If now, please leave questions in the comments below.

Quicksilver with Abracadabra Triggers Screencast
It’s about 4 minutes long and 19mb in size.

And when you’re through with the screencast, you may be interested in checking out this cool (read: nerdy) hack…which I of course have tried. Basically it details how to take a Gyro mouse and pair it with Quicksilver and Abracadabra to create a magic wand. Nerderific!