If you’re an Intel Mac user and run Boot Camp with Windows on your Apple Computer than you may be interested in being able to quickly restart your computer into the other OS on your system.

Of course, you can always use the long way, navigate to System Preferences, click Startup Disk, then select the Windows partition, click restart, and then restart again.

Or you can create a quick automator task that will let you restart into your Windows partition simply by running the script or launching the application you saved in automator.

To create a Quick Switch Startup Disk script or app add the following step to an Automator Workflow: Run Apple Script.

Remove any text in the Run Apple Script action and copy in the follow text:

do shell script “bless -mount /Volumes/yourWindowsVolume/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges
do shell script “shutdown -r now” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges

Replace the text “yourWindowsVolume” with the volume name of your Windows partition and save the workflow as either a script menu plugin or an application.

From here, restarting into Windows is as easy as launching the app or selecting the script from Script Menu in the menu bar.

**Note: you can add the Script Menu to the Menu bar by:

1. Open AppleScript Utility from your Applications folder
2. Check “Show Script Menu in Menu Bar”

If you’ve ever wanted to quickly browse your iPhoto library to drag and drop photos to another application but wanted to do so with out opening iPhoto itself… than this Automator tip is for you.

To create an iPhoto Library browser that can be accessed system wide:

1. Open Automator
2. Select Photos from your Action Library
3. Drag Action - Ask for Photos to your workflow

Now that you’ve created your automator workflow you need to setup your system so that you can quickly access the iPhoto Library Browser throughout OS X.

1. Save your workflow as plug-in (Save As Plugin-in) as a plugin for Script Menu
2. Open AppleScript Utility from your Applications folder
3. Check “Show Script Menu in Menu Bar” - This will add a Script icon to your menu bar that you can access saved scripts from

Now that you’ve created the iPhoto Library Browser script and added the Script Menu to your menu bar you can quickly and easily open your iPhoto library any time you need to access pictures but without having to open iPhoto itself.

From here you can find your pictures and drag and drop them to the location or application of your choice.

*Note - Selecting the pictures and clicking the Choose button will do nothing - you must drag and drop the photos to the location or Application of your choice. *

- Tip found @ macosxhints.com

If you’re looking for a way to add additional outside content to your iWeb pages than using Google Gadgets may just be what you’re looking for.

We’ve described previously how you can combine Google Docs with Sprout to create registration and comment forms on your iWeb sites and Now we’d like to build on those same principles to quickly show you how to Add Google Gadgets to your iWeb site.

Google Gadgets are filled with informative, fun, and unique pieces of information that you may find useful to your site and to your users.

For example, this Countdown Gadget allows you to set specific details about an event that you’re counting down to. Adding this to your site will allow individuals to see exactly how long it is until the next family reunion, the Hulk Movie, or any other event that you want your users to take note of.

Adding Gadgets

To add these types of Gadgets to your iWeb site navigate to iGoogle. Click the “Add Stuff” button and search for the gadget you’d like to show on your iWeb site.

Once you’ve found the perfect gadget, click to view more information about the gadget and then find the “Embed this Gadget” link to the right under Webmasters.

Now you should be able to customize the gadget to fit with your iWeb site. Click the “Get the Code” button and copy the code provided.

Next, open your iWeb site and find the page you’d like to add the gadget to. Add html snippet and past the code into the html field. Your Google Gadget should now appear on your iWeb site and be ready for your use when you publish your site.

What gadgets have you added to your iWeb site?

iCal is a wonderful calendar application that allows you to create and manage multiple calendars at a time. One of its strongest features is its capabilities to both share calendars over the internet and subscribe to calendars in a similar fashion.

The latter feature also allows you to add Holidays to our calendars. To do this, navigate in Safari or the web browser of your choice to http://www.google.com/calendar/.

Create an account if needed and enter into the Search field ‘US Holidays’ or any group of national holidays that apply to you and click the Search Public Calendars button.

Now, add one of the calendars. Once the calendar has appeared under “My Calendars” and on your Google Calendars, click on the drop down arrow next to the calendar and select Calendar Settings.

Find the iCal button on the Calendar Address row and click it to find a link that iCal knows how to handle. Clicking the link will launch iCal and ask you which Calendar you’d like to include it in.

I personally created a new Holidays calendar but it should work seamlessly with any of the calendars you’ve already added. Congrats! Your newly added Holidays should now appear in iCal.

More and more often content distributors are choosing to stream content over the internet instead of allowing users to download the files locally to their machine. This allows the distributors a bit more control over their content.

Unfortunately, it makes it difficult for you to grab that one portion of a song that you want to include in your podcast, or the funny audio clip that would fit perfectly into your class presentation. I know I’ve often wondered how I could still get a decent quality recording of the streaming audio shared on the internet.

Thankfully, the developers over at rogueamoeba.com developed Audio Hijack Pro. Audio Hijack Pro is a share ware application that allows you to record any sound that comes through your system. It allows you to pick specific applications to record sound from like Safari and create recordings in mp3, acc, and aiff format.

Using Audio Hijack Pro

While Audio Hijack Pro is not free ($32 for the complete version) it does allow anyone to run a fully functional demo that only adds noise to recordings over 10 minutes. So essentially, its free until you start making really long recordings.

To start recording streaming audio:

1. Open Audio Hijack Pro, click Quick Record
2. You can select an input device, System Audio will record anything coming through your sound card, while selecting Application and then the specific app you’re trying to record from will limit the recording to just sounds coming from the selected application.

3. Click Hijack and then Record


4. Start the streaming audio

From here your system will record the streaming audio and save it to the location you selected. As long as your audio recording is under 10 minutes you should receive decent quality recordings that you can use as you feel fit.