You may have noticed a menu item in many of your applications called Services. This is OSX’s way of letting you know how you can make applications interact with each other. One feature of Services that I find both interesting and useful in Safari is the Speech option.

START READING

I often find myself reading news articles from multiple news sources online that are covering the same article. I like to see how they’re different and see if one media source is applying any additional information that another may be missing. Safari and Mac OSX Speech option is perfect to allow me to essentially read two articles at once. Safari reads out loud the first article while I continue on to the next one.To get Safari to start reading for you:

1. Find a website you’d like Safari to read back to you
2. Select the text you’d like to read
3. Click Safari on the menu bar
4. Highlight Services, Speech, and then click “Start Speaking Text”

Thats all it takes and your mac will quickly start reading back to you the contents of the website. This is a great way to get multiple things done at once. I personally enjoy having Safari read back recipes to me while I’m cooking, or reading back blog articles on my google reader page. How would you use this feature? Don’t forget, you can create a keyboard shortcut to Start Speaking Text with just a few clicks on the keyboard.

A few days ago my brother-in-law asked me if there was a keyboard shortcut for fast user switching. He and his wife share their iMac and he wondered if there is a way to do it without the extra mouse clicks. Being ever the optimist, I told him I was sure there was and I would look into it.

If that was all there was to it, it wouldn’t be worth blogging about. Turns out, there isn’t a built in keyboard shortcut for Fast User Switching (FUS). Keyboard shortcuts are generally available for accessing menu items of the current window. In addition, there are keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight, Exposé, Dashboard, and other Operating System-ish commands. Although I think there could be room in the OS shortcuts for FUS, it’s not and that’s not as much fun. A little Google-ing brought me to a macoshints.com article where they wrote a little applescript app to do FUS from the Terminal application. Now my brother-in-law is an OK Mac user, but asking him to open Terminal and type in commands would be a big step backwards (not to mention take longer). So I borrowed the code from macosxhints.com site and produced my own User Switcher app.

The app is pretty simple, it opens a small window and prompts you to type in the account name you want to switch to. If you type in a recognized account name, then the login window appears, you type in the password and presto, you’re FUS’d. If the account can’t be found, the app quits. So instead of a keyboard shortcut for FUS, all you need is a keyboard shortcut for the User Switcher app.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut for launching applications, at least not one for that specific purpose. But Apple does have Spotlight, which is a generic keyboard shortcut that can launch any application. All you have to do is drop the User Switcher app into your Applications (or Documents) folder and Spotlight will do the rest. Once Spotlight “learns” where it is, FUS can be as easy as cmd + space + u. Enjoy (User Switcher is provided as is; enjoy at your own risk). User Switcher.app

The past few years I’ve always done my taxes on my PC. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the Apple computers to be able to do them correctly it was more of just my lack of knowing that Macs did Taxes too. That changed for my 2007 taxes.

WORKS WITH OS X 10.5 LEOPARD

We recently received the last of our tax related documents, so I set out with my wife to the store to pick up our tax software. With out much thought I picked up Taxcut for this year and assumed I would just take the software home and use Bootcamp to launch Windows Vista on my iMac. While standing in line I glanced across the system requirements for this years Taxcut and noticed that it included Mac OS X (10.3.9 or newer) under the Operating System section. I quickly decided that I would try the software out on my Mac when I got home.

I was a bit worried that the system wouldn’t work correctly in OS X 10.5 Leopard but also understood that I could always boot into Windows via Bootcamp or parallels if I needed to do so. But worry not, because Taxcut software runs quick and easy with Leopard.

INSTALLING TAXCUT

Much like all other applications, installing Taxcut was as simple as dragging the icon from the CD to the Application folder. I launched up the system and was honestly surprised at how quickly the application pulled up. Taxcut always seemed a bit slow to me in Windows and wasn’t as clean and easy looking as what I was experiencing in OS X 10.5 Leopard. This difference between Taxcut in Windows and Taxcut in OS X may be the simple enhancements in software from last years Taxcut release but the process was almost effortless.

FILING AND CONCLUSION

In total it took me 20 minutes to complete my Federal and State Tax return. I easily transmitted the filing electronically and received acknowledgment shortly afterwards that the return was accepted by the Federal Government.

Overall the process was painless and worked flawlessly. While I’ve had fine experiences with running the software on a Windows machine, I’ll be using the Mac version in the future.

Also, TurboTax has a Mac version of its yearly tax software.

Thanks to the follows over at lifehacker.com for pointing out how simple it is to customize your own keyboard shortcuts for the various applications you work with in Mac OS X.

1. Navigate to System Preferences for Keyboard and Mouse

2. Select the Keyboard shortcuts tab

3. Click the (+) and then add the application, the menu bar item, and then assign the keyboard shortcut you’d like to apply to that command.

Its that simple! You can head over to lifehacker.com to view additional comments on the process of creating a keyboard shortcut for any menu action in any program.

I know that one of the frustrating things about switching from one computer to another is the process of moving things like your address book may gets lost in the shuffle. Moving from a PC to a Mac could complicate the issue even further. For me this was a major reason why I went to web based email as I knew that I could keep my contacts forever and never have to worry about moving them. But despite the ease of web based email, its just not as powerful as system based email applications. Thankfully to Google and Apple I can now have the best of both worlds!

QUICK AND EASY EXPORT

While in the past there have been a number of methods to get your Gmail contacts into your Mac Address Book, most required a third party application and for some reason something always complicated the process. Thanks to the ever increasing friendship between Apple and Google it seems that with the latest updates to Gmail, exporting contacts in to an Address Book Format is quick and easy.

After logging into a Gmail account navigate to your contact list. From there you can export all your contacts or create a contact group that includes the addresses you want included into your Address Book on your Mac. After creating a group simply click export and then select the group from the export drop down menu. Be sure to pick vCard format as the export format and save the download to your desktop.

IMPORT IN TWO EASY CLICKS

Open Address Book and select File >> Import >> vCards. Select the downloaded .vcf file and confirm the import and your Gmail/Google contacts will now be included in your Address Book and accessible from all your other Mac Applications. You can repeat the process if you update your Gmail contacts often. Address Book will only import the new contacts and/or update edited information.

The shared contact list and the new IMAP feature of Gmail makes it a great tool to use with Mail on your computer and on your iPod/iPhone.

Read this to Import Address Book Contacts to Gmail.

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