Sharing Contacts with vCards

Electronic versions of old-fashioned Rolodex cards, vCards provide the fastest way to import contacts into your own Address Book or to share your Address Book contacts with friends, family, or colleagues.

Much like their physical predecessors, vCards contain basic contact information (such as name, address, phone, and email). But you can easily add information to enhance their value, including URLs, photos, or logos. And since the vCard format works cross-platform with many contacts programs, including Microsoft Outlook, you can exchange contacts with people who don’t use Address Book in Mac OS X Leopard.

To export a vCard from Address Book on your Mac, just highlight the contact and drag it to your desktop or directly into an email. (The file icon even looks like a Rolodex card.) To import a vCard into Address Book, drag the card-shaped icon into your open Address Book application or onto the Address Book icon in your Dock or Applications folder. Address Book opens (if not already open) and asks you to verify the import. Click Import to have Mac OS X store the vCard’s contact information in Address Book.

Share contacts by dragging vCards to and from Address Book.

Want to export more than one contact from Address Book? Just Command-click to select multiple contacts, and drag them to the desktop or into an email. This method collects all the highlighted contacts in a single vCard file. (Note that although Address Book allows you to export multiple contacts in a single file, Microsoft Outlook only lets you import a single contact per file.)

When you drag this combined vCard into Address Book, all the contacts are added at once as separate Address Book contacts. So with vCards and Address Book, it’s as easy to share a large group of names as it is to share a single contact.

Lock Your Data with Disk Images

Chances are you’ve encountered disk image files (indicated by the extension .dmg) when installing software on your Mac. When you double-click on this type of file, your computer mounts it as though it were a DVD or hard drive. In fact, you can think of mounted disk images as virtual drives.

The Disk Utility program in Mac OS X Leopard allows you to create your own disk images. Used to format, verify, repair, and partition disks and volumes, Disk Utility also lets you make safety copies of important CDs and DVDs, back up your hard drive, or create a virtual copy of a physical CD. (For example, you can make a disk image of the CD that authorizes your favorite computer game, so you don’t have to insert the physical disc each time you play.)

Best of all, you can add password protection to disk images when you create them. Without the correct password it’s nearly impossible to read the contents of an encrypted disk image, so it’s a great way to transfer data securely via email, FTP, flash drive, CD-ROM, or DVD-ROM. This format is especially useful if you need to send sensitive information to a colleague, or travel with files you want to keep confidential.

To create a disk image from a folder on your Mac, first open Disk Utility. (You’ll find it in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.) In the File menu, select New, then New Disk Image from Folder (or type Command-shift-N). Navigate to the desired folder, then click Image.

A pop-up menu prompts you to choose a name and save location for your disk image. It also includes two pull-down options: Image Format and Encryption. If you’re going to transfer your disk image (for example, as an email attachment), select Compressed under the Image Format pull-down. If you want to add password protection, select 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption under the Encryption pull-down. (128-bit encryption is extremely secure; it would probably take a password-guessing computer many lifetimes to crack it. The second option is even more secure, but takes longer to create.)

Click Save, and Disk Utility begins to create the new disk image with the name and preferences you’ve specified. If you chose to add encryption, a password pop-up appears. Enter and verify the password of your choice. (As always, the best passwords are at least eight characters long, mix letters and numbers, and avoid dictionary words.) Disk Utility evaluates the password’s strength and gives you the option of remembering the password in your Mac’s keychain.

Now you can transfer the disk image easily and securely via email or other means. The only way to access the data inside the disk image is by entering the correct password.

Disk Utility can make disk images from folders, but not from individual files. If you want to create a disk image for a single file, just create and name a new folder, place your file inside, and make a new disk image from that folder using the steps above.

Please note: Don’t lose that password! If you do, you’ll probably never be able to open your disk image.

Really Empty the Trash

It’s simple to delete unwanted files using Mac OS X Leopard: Just drag the files onto the Trash icon in the Dock (or select them and type Command-Delete), then choose Empty Trash in the Finder menu (or type Command-Shift-Delete). Alternately, you can double-click on the Trash icon to open it, then click on the Empty button.

Emptying the Trash in this manner clears room on your Mac for other files. But the data hasn’t actually been removed from your computer — the space occupied by these files is simply available to be overwritten by new information. Until this happens, it may be possible for someone to use data recovery software to restore your “deleted” files. And if this information is sensitive or confidential, it could potentially end up in the wrong hands.

That’s why Mac OS X Leopard provides another option for deleting data: the Secure Empty Trash command. Meant for those occasions when you want to permanently and immediately delete files, Secure Empty Trash overwrites your data with digital gibberish, ensuring that your deleted data is gone for good. It may take a few moments longer, but it’s a good choice for deleting data you’re sure you don’t need — and don’t want anyone else to see.

To delete your Trash securely, go to the Finder menu and select Secure Empty Trash. A pop-up will ask you to confirm that you want to permanently erase the items in the Trash. Click OK, and these files will be gone forever.

Set Search Priorities in Spotlight

With Spotlight, the powerful search function built into Mac OS X Leopard, you can quickly find anything on your computer: files, folders, emails, applications, even calendar events. And to help speed your searches even more, you can specify which types of data Spotlight should list first when you type in a search term. This is useful if you tend to search for certain items, such as documents or Address Book contacts, more frequently than you search for things like applications or system preferences.

To customize the order of your search results in Spotlight, open the System Preferences menu under the Apple icon, then click on Spotlight. A list of search result categories appears. You can rearrange the order in which Spotlight lists these types of data by simply dragging the category names up or down in the list. If you’d prefer Spotlight to ignore any of these categories during searches, just uncheck the box beside that item.

Figure one: The default order of search items in Spotlight.

Figure two: A customized list of search result categories in Spotlight.

Happy Holidays!!

Wishing everyone a wonderful Holiday time & a fantastic Year to come from L.E.E. Design!!

Super-Clean Screenshots

In Mac OS X Leopard, you can capture an image of your entire screen by typing Command-Shift-3. Typing Command-Shift-4 lets you choose a specific part of your screen to save as a screenshot: Click and hold to place the small cross-hair cursor at one edge of the area you want to capture, then drag horizontally and/or vertically to select. When you release the cursor, the screenshot is saved to your desktop.


But creating screenshots this way often means you need to crop or clean up the edges of the image later. That’s especially true if you’re planning to use it as a graphic element in a document or presentation. Fortunately, Mac OS X Leopard offers a way to save clean screenshots of individual elements on your desktop — such as Finder windows, menus, icons, or the visible portion of an open document — without capturing anything else in the background.

Hold down the Command, Shift, and 4 keys, then press the Spacebar. Instead of a cross-hair cursor, a small camera icon appears. When you move this camera icon over the element you’d like to capture, that element is highlighted. Click your mouse or trackpad, and you’ve captured a screenshot of just that element — no further cleanup required.

All About Audio Chats

iChat is a great way to communicate and share files in real time with friends and colleagues, whether they’re across the hall or around the globe. With iChat, you can conduct text chats with anyone who has a MobileMe, AIM, Jabber, or Google Talk account. And if your Mac is equipped with a built-in iSight camera (or an external iSight or other FireWire camera) you can conduct video chats with up to three buddies at once.

But there’s another way to chat: via audio. You can invite as many as nine buddies to an audio chat, which makes it great for group communication. As with video chats, you can record audio chats with permission from the participants. Audio chats are especially useful for interviews, long-distance business meetings, family conferences, and other situations when you’d like to communicate verbally with more than a few people at once, or save an audio record of your conversation.

Audio chats require a built-in microphone or an external mic connected to the audio input port of your computer. If a telephone or camera icon appears beside a name in your buddy list, it means they too have the software and hardware needed for an audio chat. (A “stacked” telephone or camera icon indicates that your buddy’s computer has enough power to participate in a multiple-person chat.)

To start an audio chat, open iChat and select the buddy or buddies you want to chat with. To choose multiple buddies, hold down the Command key as you click on their names. Then click on the telephone icon at the bottom of your buddy list, or select Invite to Audio Chat under the Buddies menu.

When they receive your invitation, your buddies simply click the Accept button to join the audio chat. All audio chat participants are listed in the chat window along with their buddy pictures. Each participant also has an individual sound level meter, which makes it easier to tell who is talking.

To enable recording in an audio iChat, select Record Chat under the Video menu. A message is sent to all participants asking for their permission to record the chat. To grant audio recording rights for this chat, your buddies click on the Allow button. When participants want to leave the chat, they just close the chat window. Recording stops when the person who initiated the recording exits the chat.

Recorded audio chats are saved by default in the iChats folder in your user’s Documents folder. You can change this default location under the General tab of iChat Preferences, and search for saved chats by date or title using Spotlight. You can also play your saved audio (and video) iChats in iTunes.