A tip on macOSXHints points out a short-cut for text entry in Address Book.

Pressing Option-Escape in a text field, opens an autocomplete dialogue with options from previously entered cards.

Like all these tips, it makes perfect sense when you think about, but who ever thinks about it?

For example, type the first two or three letters of the name, hit Option-Escape and then just choose from the options that appear:

This is especially useful with spouses or large numbers of employees from one company or those English Fotherington-Smythe cousins.

Unfortunately, Address Book Quick Entry (now my preferred faster way of entering contacts) isn’t as smart about this. Hitting Option-Escape here brings up a general autocomplete list rather than previous values from Address Book itself.

Related posts

• Yojimbo: Bare Bones’ new information manager
• Two tips to manage your email better
• Two Tips for Leopard’s Address Book
• Two steps forward, one step back: A switcher’s tale
• TextExpander: 20% Discount for Hawk Wings readers

Quicksilver, LaunchBar and Butler users will benefit from a tip on macOSXHints which provides search strings that they can use to quickly launch searches of their Gmail messages.

The tip includes the string for LaunchBar but the comments from Rob Griffiths and others provide the same information for Quicksilver and Butler users.

Lantrix’s comment lower down also offers a quick tutorial on how to set the string up as a web search in Quicksilver. Quick. Nifty.

Related posts

• Quicksilver and Gmail, Thunderbird
• Microsoft reacts to the Gmail Factor
• Google Desktop for Mac: Gmail, MailTags
• Adding a default Reply-to address in Mail.app
• Zoodo: Mouseless iCal Todos

macOSXHints posts a useful iCal tip that was news to me.

If you hold down the Option key while scrolling your mouse wheel up and down, it “zooms” your iCal screen in and out, adjusting the number of visible hours in the current view on the fly.

No more time-consuming trips to iCal’s Preferences for me. No more getting ambushed by some evening commitment I can’t see and have forgotten about.

Related posts

• YAI (Outlook meeting plugin) updated for Leopard
• What’s wrong with Apple’s Enterprise Strategy
• Two Tips for Leopard’s Address Book
• Two steps forward, one step back: A switcher’s tale
• To Do X: The Rolls Royce of To Do apps

An anonymous poster on macOSXHints offers a convoluted tip on how to make your .Mac IMAP account more POP-like.

I can’t conceive why one would want to do this, except perhaps to create a more secure environment for MailTags metadata.

But if you do want POP access for your .Mac account, then just follow the Apple technote which describes how to change .Mac Mail from IMAP to POP.

Related posts

• Switching a .Mac account from POP to IMAP
• Webmailer: Easily set webmail services as your default mailer
• Using Gmail with an IMAP account
• Update: Plugin and addon list, links
• The virtues of IMAP

On the Apple Discussion Forums, Sturmdrang provides an oddly effective and very seasonal Thanksgiving troubleshooting tip:

“Wait one day and try it again.”

Have a good and thankful day!

Related posts

• UNO 1.5: Mail.app’s good looks for every app
• Troubleshooting Address Book sync problems
• The complete Mail-like makeover
• Search Gmail with Launcher apps
• Reclaiming disk space from Apple Mail

A tip on macOSXHints describes how to reclaim some hard disk space by deleting email attachments in Mail.app.

If you are doing a thorough spring clean and want to reclaim as much space as possible, there are two additional things you can do:

1. If you were using Mail when you upgraded to Tiger, there may be useless files in your Mail folder that you can can safely remove.

   I cut down the size of my Mail folder by 25% doing this. The Apple technote referred to in this tip explains how to do that.

2. In Tiger Apple Mail saves a copy of some attachments in a folder called Mail Downloads in the Library folder of your Home directory. (~/Library/Mail Downloads).

   Depending on your settings (see the fifth and sixth drop-down options in Mail > Preferences > General), Mail.app may store things in there forever.

   You can reclaim a lot of space by deleting unneeded attachments in this folder as well as in the messages themselves.

Related posts

• What’s in your Mail folder?
• UNO 1.5: Mail.app’s good looks for every app
• The final solution: Deleting Mail.app entirely
• Technote on syncing Mail.app rules and accounts
• Making your .Mac account more POP-like