Use your custom icon in the Dock

Maybe you've added a distinctive icon to a folder, but when dragged into the Dock all you see is the plain folder icon? Or sometimes, oddly, the icon for an item inside the folder? To see your nice new icon in the Dock, make an alias to the folder and add a custom icon to the alias. Then drag the alias into the dock, and there's your attractive special icon. Click on it and it takes you to the contents of the folder.

List view folders in Dock

If you put a folder in the Dock for easy reference, are you annoyed by the default Stack view? If there are more than a handful of files in the folder this is impractical. Who do they design these operating systems for?

Here's the answer: right click on a folder that's in the Dock and you get options for viewing it, including Folder and List view.

Change default screenshot format

Mac screenshots by default save in .png format. Would you prefer the default format to be JPG, or something else? Here's the simple way to change it.

From Finder, launch Terminal:

top menu  Go > Utilities > Terminal

Copy and past in the following line, it's a single line with no break:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg;killall SystemUIServer

Want a different format? In this line of code, replace jpg with one of the following:

gif

PDF

png

tiff

Properly resize Excel windows for laptop screen

I work with the same Excel spreadsheets on my iMac and my Mac laptops. When Yosemite came along suddenly the spreadsheet was too large to fit the laptop screen and the tabs at the bottom were not visible.

There are various complicated workarounds but finally here is a simple answer:

Just click Window in the top menu bar and select Zoom window. A real moment of triumph, that.

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How to revert to iTunes 11 if you don't like iTunes 12

Some reviewers think iTunes 12 is "Apple's worst software ever" because of the visually incoherent way it presents information on your media collection - in particular, the complete lack of the sidebar, where media were listed by category.

I agree - but luckily, if you have accepted the iTunes 12 "upgrade" you can fairly easily go back to iTunes 11. Here are very clear instructions, from MacWorld repeated on the LifeHacker blog.

First off, download copies of AppZapper and Pacifist , backup your computer, then create an installer with Pacifist. (Pacifist allows you to unpack .dmg installation packages and extract individual files and folders. Not something one needs to do every day! but in this case it's just the job.)

1. Quit iTunes 12 and launch AppZapper
2. Open AppZapper's preferences and uncheck"Keep Apple Applications Safe"
3. Drag the iTunes 12 icon from the Application folder to AppZapper and click the "Zap!" button
4. Download iTunes 11 - from the Apple support site
5. Open up Pacifist and drag the iTunes 11 DMG file into it. 
6. Select "Contents of Install iTunes" and then click "Install"
7. Navigate to your iTunes folder. Within that find the iTunes library and then find the iTunes LIbrary.itl file. Drag it to your desktop or to the trash.
8. Launch iTunes 11.

Done.
- Actually, not quite! Where is my iTunes music and media? Apple support gives the following instructions for retrieving it:

Re-creating the iTunes Library file

Note: After re-creating your library, any devices that you sync with iTunes (Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, iPad) will see your iTunes library as a new library and will completely resync. The next sync with such a device will take longer and may reset some options since your rebuilt library isn't familiar to the device.

1. Quit iTunes.
2. Locate your iTunes folder (this is the folder that contains the iTunes Library and iTunes Library.xml files).

Operating System	Default location of iTunes Folder
Mac OS X	/Users/[your username]/Music
Microsoft Windows XP	\Documents and Settings\[your username]\My Documents\My Music\
Microsoft Windows Vista	\Users\[your username]\Music\
Microsoft Windows 7	\Users\[your username]\My Music\

3. Open your iTunes folder.
4. Drag the "iTunes Library.xml" or "iTunes Music Library.xml" file to the Desktop. If neither is available, learn how to add files back to the Library (because the XML file is not available, playlists and other information will not be available).
5. Drag the following file from your iTunes folder to the Trash:

Mac OS X	"iTunes Library" or "iTunes Library.itl"
Microsoft Windows	"iTunes Library.itl"

6. Open iTunes.
Important: Do not add any content into iTunes at this point (such as by purchasing something from the iTunes Store).
7. Choose File > Library > Import Playlist.
8. Navigate to the "iTunes Library.xml" file on the Desktop.

• Mac users: Click Choose.
• Windows users: Click Open.

If your Podcasts list in iTunes is empty after following these steps, learn how to add them back into iTunes.

Hooray, it's all back.

Doubtless Apple will try to "upgrade" you to iTunes 12 with every software update. Click Details instead of automatically accepting and you'll be able to avoid the horrid thing.

Replace standard icons with custom ones

I like to waste time ornamenting my desktop and other icons - don't you?

First just to note that CandyBar is available free of charge for now, it seems they've given up the struggle to keep up with evolving Mac Os's. CandyBar is a convenient way to replace Mac icons.

As I'm sure you know, to replace an individual icon you do the following:

• Click to highlight a folder or a file or an app.
• Get Info about it - cmd-i, or right click and select
• Highlight and Copy (cmd-c) the icon you want to use
• Highlight the folder icon, top left in the Info panel, and Paste (cmd-v) your new one.

That's it! If you want to revert to the original standard Mac one, just call up Info again, and click and delete (cmd-x) the icon you pasted in.

Show the new icon in the Dock

Now, let's drag the pretty new icon into the dock ... Oh! there's just the boring old plain one in the Dock! To have the new one show, here's a workaround.

See in the screenshot above two icons for Downloads (click the image to enlarge it)? The second one is an alias.

• Click to highlight the original
• Right click and do Make Alias
• To tidy up the folder name, you can just delete the word Alias and leave a space at the end of the folder name.
• Then, you can drag your alias into the dock and there's the nice new icon.

An additional advantage is that when you click that dock icon you get just your preferred view of that folder, List for example.