Macking 140

A Replacement for Timeslips
For years, graphic design businesses relied on Timeslips, a job-tracking and billing program that ran under OS9. The publisher decided they had enough money and abandoned their Mac clients, never updating for OSX. They continued making a Microsoft version, which is odd considering most designers use Macs.
Finally, a company called Clickable Bliss released Billable, a program that did the same kind of work: individual job tracking, built-in timer, hourly rate defaults, full invoicing and a bunch of other services. Adam C. Engst wrote in a recent TidBITS, "Billable 1.0 was initially released in September 2006, and the new Billable 1.1 makes it possible to add taxes, generates invoice numbers according to your scheme, increases the customization options for invoices, and automatically saves and backs up data. You can export the data to XML, making possible communication with other applications, such as your accounting package. Billable is worth a look for any Mac user earning a living billing by the hour; be sure to check out Clickable Bliss's well-done screencasts explaining Billable's operation and features."

Cut Your Cable Bill? Just Ask
Now that there is competition in the cable/DSL/voice market, you can negotiate a better price, according to a recent Consumer Reports. Desperate to keep customers abandoning them for satellite TV, Concast is hustling their three-package service at a deep discount for the first year. I would never get their phone service, because if anything goes wrong with your cable or your power, you lose your phone as well. Although people are abandoning land lines in favor of cel, you might find that plain old telephone service is the only thing still working when power goes out. After all, those cell towers need power too, but the telephone network has its own power. Just make sure you keep an old-fashioned wired phone around because your wireless won't work without AC either.
The magazine pointed out that the Customer Retention operators have more authority than plain old customer service, so if you are being handed a big bill or a price increase, call up the provider and see if they will give you a special deal. Could be anything: more channels at no extra charge, faster connection, continuation of your discounted sign-on rate. First decide who you will switch to if they don't offer any hope, then give them a call.
My biggest pet peeve with both satellite and cable TV is they won't bundle all the sports channels in a single package. They are the most expensive to carry, yet I never watch a single one. I would drop them all immediately and should be able to save at least $10/month as a result. But I do want all the odd digital channels including FX, BBCA, History, etc. but those are ad supported and should not cost the carriers much to offer. They should pay me $5 cash per month just to allow Fox News into my house!
The companies won't do a thing if they don't hear from you. Also make sure that whoever you use for internet connection knows you use a Mac. They need to know that their income depends on keeping knowledgeable Mac support techs on staff.

More on Preferences
I have looked at options and preferences in previous columns, but there so many it is always a worthy topic. Here are a few suggestions:
VLC (Video LAN Client): This is the program you use to view downloaded AVI files. There are so many options in the Preferences section it's scary. I never changed any of them. The only one I set is under the Video menu, where I choose Video Device, Screen 2 which throws the image onto my TV in Full Screen mode. No other player makes it this simple.
Word, Entourage: All versions for OSX and some for OS9 have a Tools menu. Look for AutoCorrect, and uncheck the boxes for Capitalize first letter of sentences (or it will never let you start a sentence with iPod); then click on the AutoFormat button and uncheck the boxes for Automatic Bulleted lists, Automatic numbered lists, "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes," Symbol characters with symbols, *Bold* and _italic_ with real formatting and Replace *** with horizontal line.
All these options replace standard ASCII characters with Microsoft-only high-ASCII and are the single cause of all those oddities you see in your email messages, such as commas where there should be apostrophes, accented Ü characters and dollars-and-cents symbols where there should be dashes or quotes. Those automatic features will also make it impossible to ever type feet and inches because they will be replaced by close-single-quotes and close-double-quotes. Oh, and this will also put an end to the backwards apostrophes about which I have ranted in this space many times.
iPhoto: Open Preferences and click on General. Here you can eliminate the albums for "Show last 12 months", change it to a different number, "Show last 4 rolls", choose where and how to edit photos, including steering iPhoto to Photoshop for all your editing. You can choose the default direction for the Rotate button, depending on whether you tend to rotate your camera right or left when shooting Tall mode. Finally, you can decide which email program iPhoto will send pictures to when you click the Email button.
The Appearance option lets you use a border or drop shadow in its windows, and make the background fade anywhere between black and white. Other options here are obvious and worth experimenting with.
On a network? You can share your photos with other Macs, picking which Albums you want to make public, and even password-protect the shared albums.
Don't ask me about Photocasts. I have never done them. Read the Help for that. Keywords will let you define how you search for pictures in the library, and most of the Advanced features are best left alone unless you make extensive use of the RAW photo format.
Safari: For some odd reason, Apple ships this crippled. First thing to do is go to the Safari menu and select Block Popup Windows. You can always switch this off on those rare instances when a site demands them. Then go to the View menu and select Show Status Bar. That's the bar at the bottom of every browser window that tells you where you are in the page download, and what the URL you are hovering over is, before you click it. Then go to the Customize Address Bar and when the options drop down, drag the Home and Text Size buttons to the button bar. Sure there are keyboard options for them (Command-shift-H for Home, Command + or Command - for Make Text Larger and Smaller) but sometimes it's nice to have them there when you have your hand on the mouse already.
Then open Preferences. Click on General, and set your Default Web Browser to Safari, or if you prefer Firefox or another browser, choose it from the popup menu. Next, set New Windows open with to Empty Page, unless you like Safari to automatically go to your home page every time you create a new window. A useful option here for some people is to select Bookmarks and so every new page will display your bookmark collection.
Choose a place for your downloads to be saved. The default is Desktop, but maybe you have an Attachments or Incoming folder on your desktop. Choose that here. Next set Remove download list items to Manually. Sometimes it can be useful to have a record of past downloads in the Downloads window, and they can be removed by clicking on the Clear button.
Next, uncheck the Open "Safe" files after downloading box. This is a security risk; a deliberately malformed Quicktime movie or disguised installer could auto-launch and do something inappropriate. Make sure you never expand, launch or open any download unless you expressly decide to. Last, go to Open links from applications to in a new window. This is better than New Tab, simply for convenience's sake.
Under the Appearance option you can choose which standard and which fixed-width font is preferred. If you have them, use New York 12 for the first and Monaco 10 for the second. Make them larger if you need to for readability's sake. Times 16 is not much larger than New York 12 anyway and Times is designed for printing, not screen viewing. Same for Courier vs. Monaco.
Bookmarks no change. Tabs is where you go to Enable Tabbed Browsing. Why this isn't on by default is an Apple mystery. If you never use RSS feeds, you can go to the RSS option and choose Check for Updates Never and uncheck the Automatically Update Articles checkboxes. If you do use RSS, you can tell Safari when to remove articles.
Autofill: It can be a security risk to check the box that lets Safari save User names and passwords, but it is also a major convenience. Banks and other secure sites usually override this option and do not save that info unless a checkbox is provided for Automatic Login ("Remember Me") right on the web page.
Security option: check all for Web Content unless you are paranoid about Java and Javascript. (I'm not.) You can also check Block popup windows here. Accept Cookies should always be set to the third option, and I unchecked the Ask before sending a non-secure form to a secure website. I know where I am sending forms when I fill them out; I don't need reminding. Enable parental controls in my copy of Safari is dimmed out and can't be checked. Maybe my Mac knows I'm childfree.
Advanced gives two useful options: Never use font sizes smaller than xx and lets you choose the minimum size for text. Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage gives you more keyboard control over clickable and text fields. Uncheck this and Tab moves you just between text fields and Option-Tab moves you between all fields. The Proxies button invokes the Network preference pane of System Preferences, where you can enter proxy settings, if you use them.
Finally, if you have installed the ad blocker program PithHelmet, you can set its preferences here. I love PithHelmet. It clears out 80% of those annoying banner and animated ads on web pages. It's worth every nickel of the $10 shareware fee.
AppleMail and Eudora: To cover the preference options here would require an entire book. A couple of important ones I should mention include Display Remote Images in HTML Messages (Mail) and Automatically download HTML graphics (Eudora). Turn this feature off. Embedded HTML images take extra time to download when on dialup, and can be a security risk in spam messages, because although most spam is served by compromised Microsoft computers (which is why you get odd bounce messages from time to time) the images are supplied by a separate server somewhere and when a message automatically downloads the graphics, your IP address is sent to that spam image server where they can make use of it. When you get a message with embedded images (not attachments) that you want to see, just click the Show Images button (Mail) or the broken-icon button to the right of the message subject in Eudora. Do check the Display graphics in messages checkbox (Eudora) so attached pictures display correctly.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)