Apple keyboards are now safe for calibrated Apple LCD monitors

If you’ve carefully calibrated your monitor and you use the white Apple keyboard that came with the iMacs and Mac Pros, you may have encountered that nasty surprise when accidentally pressing the F14 and F15 keys: They change the monitor brightness.

Changing the monitor brightness is obviously a big no-no if you’re maintaining a color-managed environment, because the monitor no longer represents the conditions under which it was profiled. Even worse, you may not notice that you’ve hit the key, or you may not know how far off you changed the brightness. All you can do is re-profile the monitor. The constant risk of accidentally hitting F14 or F15 and invalidating your monitor profile is an unusual misstep for Apple, which promotes color management as a Mac platform advantage.

There used to be no way to disable or remap the F14 and F15 keys on the Apple keyboard, but thanks to newer hardware, it looks like this problem can now slowly fade into history. If you use the new slim aluminum Apple keyboard, you can require that the Fn key has to also be pressed to set brightness with F1 or F1. If you have the older white Apple keyboard, you can take advantage of new keyboard shortcut editing options in Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later.

Changing keyboard brightness control with the slim aluminum Apple keyboard

The slim aluminum Apple keyboard introduced in 2007 puts the brightness keys on the function row along with the Exposé, Dashboard, and media keys. Why is this good? Because now you can bury the brightness function. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard tab.
4. Click to enable the box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features.”
5. Close System Preferences.

After enabling the “Use the F1-F12 keys…” option, you must press the Fn key (to the right of the Delete key) to use F1-F12 to use the alternate labels on the F1-F12 keys, such as brightness and the media keys. That means if you accidentally hit F1, you won’t throw your system out of its calibrated state.

If you still want single-key access to Dashboard and others, just redefine their shortcuts. You can do this in the System Preferences pane for each feature (such as Dashboard & Exposé), or in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preferences pane.

Changing or disabling keyboard brightness control with the white Apple keyboard

It turns out that Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later adds a keyboard shortcut option to disable or change keyboard brightness control for the older white Apple keyboard. To do this:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Scroll all the way down to where it says Displays.
5. Disable the check box for “Display” Or, if you just want to change the shortcuts, click in the Shortcut column and press the new shortcut. For example, if you change Increase Display Brightness to Shift+F15, you prevent unintended brightness changes due to accidental key presses, but by adding Shift you can still control brightness with the keyboard when you really intend to.

OS X keyboard shortcuts after Keyboard Update 1.1

6. Close System Preferences.

Note: You won’t see the Display section if you’re using the slim Aluminum keyboard, only if you are using the older white Apple keyboard.

Mac OS X: Keyboard shortcuts to launch any application

The Spotlight feature in OS X can start any application from the keyboard, and you don’t even have to program it. But if you want to assign a specific keyboard shortcut to an application, that capability is not built into OS X so you’ll need to use additional software for that (see the comments at the bottom for a discussion).

And if you came here looking for an Activity Monitor keyboard shortcut (as my blog stats suggest), read all the way to the bottom to learn why you might not even need one.

(Update: If you really want to assign a keyboard shortcut to a file like you can in the Properties dialog in Windows, conroy in the Adobe User Forums suggests an OS X tip involving Automator and Services.)

The secret weapon is Spotlight

With Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you don’t need to create or even learn shortcuts for applications. They’re already there, but not in the form you may be expecting.

The key is Spotlight, the search utility built into OS X, which is a decent application launcher. Just hit the Spotlight keyboard shortcut (Command+spacebar unless you changed it), type the first few letters of the application’s name, and if the application’s name is the Top Hit, press Return to launch it. (In OS X 10.4, you need to press Command+Return; In 10.5, Apple simplified it to just Return.) If it isn’t the Top Hit, use the usual Spotlight shortcuts to get to it in the list: Use the up and down arrow keys either alone, or with the Command key to jump categories.

So for example, if I want to use Activity Monitor, I press Command+spacebar, then type “act” and boom, there it is. Depending on which files and applications are on your computer, Activity Monitor may appear before you get to the third letter.

If you’re annoyed because you have to type a few letters before Spotlight narrows it down to the application you want to launch, have patience. If you keep picking the same item from the search results, OS X will eventually turn it into the Top Hit, and over time you’ll need to type fewer and fewer characters to get your preferred result. (You can accelerate searching for multiple words through abbreviation; read about it here.)

By now I’ve got my Mac trained so that after pressing the Spotlight shortcut, Photoshop becomes the Top Hit as soon as I type “p”, and Mail is selected as soon as I type just “m”. Yeah, it’s more than a single keystroke, but on the other hand, to get this feature I didn’t have to modify my system, spend an hour configuring shortcuts, or add a utility such as LaunchBar. Spotlight is already capable of launching any application on your system without any further setup.

Spotlight launching Photoshop by typing one letter

There’s a second benefit to leaning on Spotlight for this purpose: You never have to dig down to open an application or utility that isn’t already in the Dock. You don’t even need to know where it is on your hard drive! Using Spotlight as an application launcher can also let you reduce the number of application alias icons littering your desktop or Dock. Since I usually launch via the keyboard, I actually have my Dock hidden by default.

I took it one step further and used the Keyboard Shortcuts customizer in the Keyboard system preference to change the Spotlight shortcut to F12 on my notebook and F13 on my desktop so that I could get to Spotlight by pressing just one key.

Before OS X 10.4 brought us Spotlight, I used to be a devotee of LaunchBar, and I tried Quicksilver. The problem is that even if a launcher app is free, the second indexing engine drags on the system and adds complexity, another database to store and manage, and removes another set of keyboard shortcuts from the pool. When Spotlight came out, I realized that it does most of what I need, and well enough. The things Spotlight can’t do that the other utilities can do I’ve mostly covered by having Spotlight trigger AppleScripts…but that’s a subject for another entry.

You don’t really need to launch Activity Monitor

Update: There are so many Web searches that come here looking for an Activity Monitor shortcut that I have to add this: If you frequently want to monitor Mac system status information, you should download iStat Menus (used to be free, I decided to pay) atMonitor, or MenuMeters (those last two are both free). They put all of that CPU, RAM, drive, network, etc. information right up there in your menu bar. Ultimately, iStat Menus is why I don’t need to open Activity Monitor, because what I want to see is already visible or accessible in one click, and without blocking what I’m working on.

In the picture above, you can see part of my iStat Menus setup in the menu bar: current network throughput, hard drive activity and free space, RAM usage, and multi-core CPU meter. Clicking any of those items drops a menu with much more detailed information.

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac: Free a stuck Help window

The Microsoft Office Help window’s title bar can sometimes get stuck under the menu bar. When that happens, you can’t move the Help window, and you can’t close it because the close button is part of the title bar. Because the Help window is more like a palette than a window, it doesn’t respond to any Close Window keyboard shortcut or the arrangement commands under the Window menu, and it floats above all other windows. It basically blocks your document window until you restart the application.

Short answer

Throw out the file com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist, or if you want to be more precise, instead of throwing out that file, open it and increase the value for Help/Help_Top so that it clears the menu bar.

Long answer

Or, how I figured this out:

The usual suggestion for a problem like this is to delete an application’s Preferences file. I didn’t want to throw out the Preferences file because I’ve heavily customized my Office installation (toolbars, etc.) and I didn’t want to reconfigure everything from scratch. Mostly because I can’t even remember everything I’ve customized and now rely on (can you?). I suspected that there must be a setting in a preferences file somewhere that controls the position of the Help window, and if I could change that one thing I wouldn’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so I went looking for that setting.

First I tried AppleScript. I used the Script Editor to open the AppleScript dictionary for Excel, where I was having the problem, but I couldn’t find any commands that controlled the Help window.

I then started looking in the Preferences folder, in my Home/Library folder. You can read these files in TextEdit, but it’s nicer to use the free utility Pref Setter, which lets you view and edit the contents of a preferences file in a clean, easy, point-and-click way. I guess you could also use your favorite XML utility.

Now to find that window preference:

I looked in the file com.microsoft.excel.plist, but found nothing that looked right. While many Microsoft and Adobe applications have a preference (.plist) file at the top level of the Preferences folder, it turns out that these usually contain only information for the Open and Save dialog boxes. The real preferences files are usually buried deeper. But how was I going to find it? I typed “excel” into the Find field in Pref Setter’s Open Domain Quickly window, and it revealed a list of files inside the Preferences folder with Excel in the title.

Unfortunately, I still didn’t find what I was looking for. I thought to myself, maybe it isn’t specific to Excel…if it’s about the Help file, could it be an Office-wide preference? To test that, I typed “microsoft” into Pref Setter’s Find field and it turned up many more files, including some in a Microsoft sub-folder.

I opened com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist. It’s a long list of preferences, and I wasn’t sure I could find the one I wanted. But there’s a Find field in the com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist window, so I typed “help” into it to try and narrow down the list.

Aha! That revealed several preference settings:
Assistant\AsstWithHelp
Help\Help_Bottom
Help\Help_Left
Help\Help_LeftPaneWidth
Help\Help_Right
Help\Help_Top
Help\Help_ZoomedOut

Bingo.

Help\Help_Top was set to 22. I was pretty sure that was a vertical offset from the top of the screen, and guessed that if I set that to a much higher number, the window would move down. I changed the number to 100, saved the document, started Excel, and opened Excel Help.

Fixed!!!

I hope this serves as an example of how to locate application preference settings with the help of a utility like Pref Setter.

InDesign: Paragraph rules don’t show up

If you’re applying paragraph rules in Adobe InDesign but they aren’t visible, check the following in the Paragraph Rules dialog box (or the Paragraph Rules pane of the Paragraph Style Options dialog box if you’re editing a style):

  • Make sure Rule On is enabled.
  • If Weight is set to 0, increase the stroke weight.
  • If Color is set to None, give it an actual color.
  • Check the Width, Offset, Left Indent, and Right Indent. If any of these values is too high, it can push the rule outside the text frame where you can’t see it.

Last time this happened to me, it was because I had built a style on top of another style that had a large rule indent. I set the indent to 0 and the rule became visible inside the text frame.

Photoshop: Preview checkbox shortcut in dialog boxes

One of my favorite new features in Adobe Photoshop CS3 is the new keyboard shortcut for clicking the Preview checkbox in dialog boxes. Just press the P key!

Adobe wisely brought in this shortcut from Adobe Camera Raw, and it saves a lot of repetitive mousing when you’re doing before/after comparisons. It’s one of those enhancements that’s so small nobody notices, yet has a large actual effect on productivity.