After a pause brought on by server troubles, Secrets, the clever system preference pane for system tweaks, is back.

Developed by Alcor, who is also the brains behind Quicksilver , Secrets makes entering arcane text strings in Terminal a thing of the past.

It lists available tweaks by app. Here is the pane for Mail.app:

Once, in order to work around the minute font size in messages from email clients like Outlook Express, you had to open Terminal and type:

Now, it’s as simple as entering the point size you prefer into the text box of Secret’s “Minimum HTML Font size” option, restarting Mail and enjoying readable text.

The Mail section also lets you set a preferred text encoding for Mail, enable plugin bundles and more.

The Top Secrets pane lists the most popular tweaks:

Here you can (among many other things) set a nice Desktop picture for your login screen, show or hide hidden files in Finder, tweak the Dock and unlock dragging widgets out of the Dashboard.

Of course, this kind of power comes with a hint of danger. As Alcor warns, “Secrets is in Beta and many of these options can harm your system if used improperly.” Nothing very terrible has happened to me though.

Behind the scenes, Secrets allows clever users to create their own tweaks which are stored on the Secrets server and can be downloaded by normal people like you and me with the pane’s “Update Secrets” button, so the list of options is always growing and improving.

Get the latest version (1.0.4, Leopard-only) from Secret’s Google Code page .

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I had an email from a Hawk Wings reader today, asking how to do something that I am surprised to discover I’ve not posted about on Hawk Wings before.

Mail.app offers an optional field in the Compose window for specifying a different Reply-to email address:

This is fine if you only need to do it now and again. But it’s a pain if you want to do this regularly, because you need to enter the email address each time you compose an email.

(Now former?) Mail Team Developer Cricket has created an applescript which will add a form of this header to every email by default. It also lets you add a default bcc: address (useful for quietly copying your emails to Gmail perhaps).

Running the script presents you with a list of options:

Select the Reply-to one and a dialog appears into which you can enter your desired Reply-to address:

Cricket provides another script to undo the change later on if you want to.

The scripts are freeware, unsupported by Apple and available from Cricket’s web site .

A poster on macOSXHints provides some Terminal commands to add a Reply-to or Bcc: email address if you prefer to do things that way.

[Thanks for the prompt, John!]

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Rubin emails to ask:

I was reading your new post on Address Book syncing and backup, and I noticed on the screen capture that you had a little Yojimbo icon on your Finder windows. I’m a Yojimbo user and a big fan too. How did you get this little icon and what does it do?

Fair question.

While the Finder Toolbar can be expanded with many useful pre-defined extras (Control-Click on Finder’s Toolbar and select “Customize Toolbar…”), you can also add your own favourite items:

I dragged some of the apps that I use a lot (TextMate, Terminal, Yojimbo) from the Applications folder onto the Toolbar. That creates a shortcut on the Toolbar. Now I can quickly launch the apps by clicking on these icons and, more importantly, I can drag files onto the icons to open them.

I’ve also added on the right some of the folders into which I often need to file things. When tidying up, I drag the files onto those folders and they’re filed.

Of course, there are other ways to do these things, not least Quicksilver, but another option is always welcome.

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If you have some spare time on your hands and are curious about Mail.app’s inner workings, a poster on macOSXHints has provided a list of Mail’s extra logging options and instructions on how to enable and disable them in Terminal.

Using these features and examining the output in the Console, you can discover how long it takes Mail to find a matching email address or to send an email, how long it takes to sort a mailbox or retrieve your POP mail or get some extra information on Mail’s Junk Filter.

Fascinating stuff.

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Tools to help Mac users with Getting Things Done (or “GTD”), David Allen’s work-smart philosophy, fall into three camps:

1. Email clients, where most of the stuff that needs to get done arrives in the first place, tweaked to do the job.
2. Dedicated GTD apps like kGTD or Easy Task Manager provide more focussed collection and processing buckets.
3. Web-based solutions offer platform-independent tools for getting things done, especially good if you use a Mac at home and a PC at work.

After the jump, you will find some of the best options in each category.

(more…)

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A recent tip and the comments on it on macOSXHints provide a handy summary of the options for finding and removing duplicate entries in your Address Book.

There are at least three options:

A. Address Book’s built-in ‘Look for Duplicate Entries’ Option

Select the ‘Look for Duplicate Entries…” option from the Card menu. This is less than helpful because it doesn’t give you any information about the cards it will merge. It only offers to do it, without telling you what it’s doing:

B. List duplicates with a Terminal command

The macOSXHints tip contains the text of a useful terminal command:

Type this text at the Terminal prompt (or cut and paste it, making sure that any ‘curly’ quotes are staight), and you are rewarded with a list of the offending cards (I had two) which you can resolve yourself:

C. Run a ‘Find Duplicates’ AppleScript

In the comments to the tip you will find an AppleScript for removing duplicates. You may wish to adjust the spelling before using it.

It will trawl through your cards and add any duplicates to a new group called “Duplicate Entries” (or possible “Dupelicate Entries”).

Needless to say, you would of course make a backup of Address Book first, using the “Back up Address Book…” option in the File menu.

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